Category: maplessness

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I wish my dreams felt like this piece by Nico Muhly, who, in addition to being famous and composing, edits the wikipedia entry on Tricky Daddy’s “Nann Nigga” and invokes idaafa to close-read him. One of the many fascinating items you’ll learn reading his polymath blog, lovely despite its McSweeney’s-aping design.

Dreams fade quick. Let’s try to hear or remember:

[audio:Nico_Muhly_mothertongue_pt1_archive.mp3]

Nico Muhly – Mother Tongue pt 1. Archive

…even in the midst of data-overload shimmering through oneiric drift, everything seems so resolved .

but instead of sounding/feeling like this, either I don’t remember my dreams (this is what usually happens) or they are documentary-realist dreams about insects, because I live in New York City. Those are the kind of dreams you are allowed to have here.

The other day I kicked a rat the size of a small dog – not because I wanted to! I was walking past a trash can (and models: the Meatpacking district at 7pm) and must have startled the animal – it bolted across my shoe, skidded, then ran to hide in another mound of rubbish.

A SONG ABOUT FLOWERS OF THE VALLEY

paav

Esoteric romantic mysticism and darkness floating over deep-sea-level of the christian mind.

their own words get it right, why bring in more description when what we crave is experience?

[audio:Paavoharju_Italialaisella Laivalla.mp3]

Paavoharju – Italialaisella Laivalla
from the album Laulu Laakson Kukista

…and at another edge of Europe, rembetika, Paavoharju’s inverse, which also touches, even as it slumps forward. The dogma of addiction. Songs in 9.

[audio:A_Kostis_Stin_Ipoga.mp3]

A. Kostis – Stin Ipóga (In the Basement)

from Mourmoúrika: Songs of the Greek Underworld 1930-1955

TU FRUTO ME SABE A CUMBIA

Mexico. Texas.

The reason our borders are so policed is because they don’t exist at all.

thank you, Austin!! big shout to Turntable Records, where I picked up some fine sounds. Clearly one of the great American music stores. On the counter they have Screwed & Chopped DVDs, Mariachi flicks, and Harmony Korine’s Gummo for sale.

the first of these 3 songs is a classic from Colombia. The second two are AV8-style cumbia-booty mixes emerging out of the Dallas/Ft. Worth area of Texamexico.

Armando Hernandez y su Cunjunto – La Zenaida (from Cumbia Cumbia)

cumbiacumbia\

? – Tocando Palmas RMX (from Lucky Kumbias vol. 1)

luckykumbias1-55luckykumbias1-55

Funk E (aka El Buki) – Tussle (from Super Cumbia Bros. vol. 1)

IN MY MIND

these two songs are related. And in a sense, adjacency is everything.

Fruko y Sus Tesos – Improvisando

Dead Prez – F&ck the Law

the first one comes from a lively new Soundway compilation CD/2LP, Colombia! the Golden Age of Discos Fuentes, the Powerhouse of Colombian Music 1960-76. Martines recommended it, “perhaps the most important Colombian label.” (Lemon-Red revs it )

A few years ago I received an invitation to DJ some shows in Colombia. I was burnt out from travel & said no. I’m still kicking myself for missing that chance.

 

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.

+ + +

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

 

– – –

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)

TO KNOW HOW TO DISAPPEAR

The sudden absence surrounding a referent grows weak to strong, its fading echoes feedback, intermodulate new shapes, thoughts & make-up in the mirror, proliferation in the spaces left by someone who made them possible. Or,

dying is pointless, you have to know how to disappear
– Jean Baudrillard

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>> Pushing his argument into even more contemporary issues, Baudrillard urges us to recognize the degree to which the “real” Gulf War, for example, was not actually fought in the Middle East but rather in the trenches of CNN and the global media. The Gulf War (and by implication, almost every other major event of the past two decades) was about images, representations, and impressions at least as much as it was about guns and oil and other “underlying” material conditions. He looks back to the Watergate break-in the same way, stating that “before, the task was to dissimulate scandal,” that is, to lie about it, while today “the task is to conceal the fact that there is none,” that what appears to be a scandal is actually the normal workings of the American government. As always, Baudrillard (hyper) flamboyantly overstates his point to drive home the importance of his overriding argument, that something profoundly different is happening today in the relation between the real and the imagined, creating an epochal change in how we comprehend the world and act within it. However one sees it, reality is no longer what it used to be.

Baudrillard’s persistent and often purposeful exaggeration has angered and frustrated many of his readers. Many, especially on the Left, dismiss his work for its seemingly stultifying political implications, its apparent call to sit back and live with the irresistible world of simulations rather than struggle against it. But underlying his more fanciful flights is a powerful critique of contemporary epistemology (the study of how we know that our knowledge is true and useful) that deserves notice for the new insights it brings to an understanding of the restructured urban imaginary… << - from Edward Soja, Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions

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