Category: flamenco

PARIS EVENEMENT

in a hotel whose eves are lit with neon on the outskirts of a city on the outskirts of Lyon. Women are boxing each other in slo-motion on the television – who put on the sports channel? anyhow
Paris this evening! (Soot family + friends in the house! last of the ___ international playboys)


DJ/RUPTURE / FILASTINE / SIBOT & SPOEK are PLAYDOE / SONIDO MARTINES / KHIASMA. Le Nouveau Casino.

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Cairo Sound City: “…people who are shouting – without realizing that they’re shouting – even while they rail against the all-pervasive noise; with people who are screaming – without realizing that they’re screaming – even while denying that the city has become quite loud; and with one man who, oblivious to the cacophonous sounds around him, turns on his radio – and cranks it all the way up in order to hear it.
The overall effect, then, is that the city now sounds more like a stationary airplane engine, an endless and deafening roar on the deltaic northern fringe of the Sahara Desert.”

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late nite flamenco deflects the chill of reluctant french spring:
Tomás Pavon – Cantes de Tomás Pavon (from Early Cante Flamenco from the 1930s)

THE WINDOW IS OPEN

today’s radio show: special guest Sasha Frere-Jones, pop music critic for The New Yorker. info & google-oracular screenshot here.

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in other news, Dr Auratheft follows up his excellent Doabi Gypsies mix with a new one: The Gypsy Trail Revisited, a nice soundtrack to the whirled music discussion at Wayne’s World.

Auratheft writes: ” I just want to show – in sound – that identity is a problematic and ideological discourse. And it’s dangerous to think there’s something like a Judeo-Christian Foundation of Europe. There are many roots and routes, tracks and trails, narratives and stories, texts and contexts. Let’s make our own atlas, folks. This is what we share. Or expressed in sound and music: listen & learn.”

all this talk of identity makes me think on the following Charles Simic poem, from The World Doesn’t End:

simicpoem

 

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There’s a gorgeous, gentle album which fits into these discussions — apparently I wasn’t the only one who brought it to Auratheft’s attention after hearing Doabi Gypsies. ‘Imagined’ by ney player Kudsi Erguner, the full title is: Flamenco & Musique Soufi Ottoman: L’Orient de l’Occident: Hommage à Ibn Arabi, Sufi de Andalucia.

أبن عربي

L’Orient de l’Occident – El Alba de la Unión

orientliner

(my scanner put in those waves, it must be as heat-fatigued as i am)

INTERREGNUM AL-ANDALUS

They kicked out the Arabs awhile back.

But having once heard it, who can forget the muezzin’s call?

Or maybe the two styles have been traveling across people for centuries trying to find each other, and on southbound boats from Cádiz or Algeciras is where they meet in fascination and embrace.

you call the most elemental style of flamenco palo seco — dry stick to the literalists, with implications of outright, ‘on its own’, the thing-in-itself stripped of usual accompaniment. Ornate simplicity: an unaccompanied solo voice. Or voice alongside a hammer & anvil marking time:

Antonio Núñez, ‘El Chocolate’ – Martinete

not everybody wants el palo seco, not everybody wants their bread with neither water nor ham.

Flamenco legend Camarón from his classic album, Como El Agua

Camarón de La Isla – Tu Amor Para Mí No Es Fantasía

camarontomatito.jpg

in the foto above he appears with Tomatito, father to relative of former teen sensation Las Ketchup, and a brilliant flamenco guitarist.
Tomatito’s performance with Sheikh Ahmad Al Tuni in the opening scenes of Tony Gatlif’s Vengo is, simply, breathtaking. Even under youtube FLV compression!:

GET AWAY FROM THE WINDOW

Estrella Morente has been having a bad day. One of the worst in months. Her country house is filled with scorpions. They have come crawling out of a nearby ravine whose creek now smells metallic. This land isn’t fertile. That’s what yerma means.

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her new album is called Mujeres, and her new audience is called people who saw Almodóvar’s Volver, for in that film she sings the title song while on-screen Penelope Cruz lip-syncs it. Everyone wins!

This song, Zambra, harkens back to the flamenco sound of a hundred years past (note geriatric Grupo de Laúdes del Albaicín in the video)

Quitate de la ventana porque voy a suspirar,
mis suspiros son de fuego y te pueden abrasar,
¿que quieres de mi, que quieres de mi,
si hasta el agua que yo bebo te la tengo que pedir?

Get away from the window, because I’m going to sigh.
My sighs are fire and I could roast you.
What do you want from me, what do you want —
must I even ask you for the water I drink?

Estrella Morente – Zambra

estrella-morente.jpg

DR RODIGAN, or

HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BASS

plus, video version of a flamenco song i posted here. Notable for the old ladies dancing! When even the old people dance anything is possible.

ps. if you want to download and playback the resulting FLV file, the free VLC player is yr best bet.