SOLAR LIFE RAFT – NOW AFLOAT

solarliferaft

yes! my new mix album, Solar Life Raft, made with Matt Shadetek, is out this week as digitals, in stores next as little boxes of plastic (with cool short story liner notes & artwork).

currently available at places like iTunes (US), Amazon, Boomkat, eMusic

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plus a world-klass record release party – next week, join myself, Matt Shadetek & Jahdan Blakkamoore, Maluca, and Sonido Martines at the planetarium of The American Museum of Natural History in NYC!!

ONE STEP BEYOND.

The FADER Presents

ONE STEP BEYOND at the American Museum of Natural History

Friday, November 13, 2009

DJ /Rupture
Matt Shadetek Feat. Jahdan Blakkamoore
Maluca
Sonido Martines

9pm – 1am
$25- Price includes admission to the Space Show and a free return visit to the Museum.

Buy tickets in advance here.

1 + 1 = 3

1+1=3

Before Gold Teeth Thief and Minesweeper Suite and Uproot and all of that, there was my 1st mixtape, 1 + 1 = 3.

Made in ‘The Toneburst era’ (late 90s Boston), recorded straight to cassette, and sold at our shows, 1 + 1 = 3 is a nice document of what I was up to about 11 years ago (arabic music, hiphop, dancehall, noise, xerox machines)

Wayne & Wax ups an excerpt and a fun interview with me about it. Check it out. He writes, “Even as 1 + 1 = 3 gives a sense of how much he has grown and morphed as a DJ, it still offers some recognizably rupturey maneuvers and seems to prefigure the strange melange of Gold Teeth Thief. Trad middle-eastern sounds meet modern beat science, from slurred boom-bap to minimal dancehall, rollicking jungle to proto-breakcore noise.”

It is strange for me to hear this mix now, in part because I can no longer ID all the tracks! I usually remember what the record artwork looks like, but sometimes the artist/label/track names have escaped me. And in part because my technical reach and narrative pace has expanded since then.

It also makes me think about how our whole way of finding (& mixing) music has changed in the past 10 years or so. When this mixtape came out, in order to get reggae and dancehall I had to trek across Boston’s segregated cityspace out to Blue Hill ave. in Dorchester. Pre MP3 smorgasbord, we would haunt the record shops & tape the radio. Learning paths through music pre-Google, pre-blogosphere, before Ms Internet + Mr MP3 got married and made us all their children.

When interviewers ask me some variation on ‘why Arabic/north African music?’ I tell them that I’ve been listening to it for as long as I can remember (I can only remember as far back as high school: pathetic, I know), that it’s as familiar to me as the other stuff I DJ. Which this excerpt — 9 minutes from the start of side B — illustrates.

And as for Toneburst, it was a Boston-area production crew, including folks like DJ C and myself. “the Toneburst Collective was a loose-knit crew of DJs, electronic musicians, and video-and installation-artists, who together produced approximately 20 large-scale multi-media events in offbeat locations around New England and New York. More carnival than rave or concert, the crew’s productions mixed experimental beats, video, and performance art in unorthodox spaces.”

ANTICIPATORY MIXING

This month I am spending more time in transit (airplane, bus, taxi, car, subway) or waiting for transit than in my apartment… Nettle @ Brandeis was a blast — a very full schedule too. Bostonist review of live show .

threefifthsofnettle

[three fifths of Nettle @ an impromptu concert, from W&W flickr]

Filastine, who joined us on percussion, plays in Boston tonite. Free!

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thanks to all who ordered K-K-Kumbia. there’s been a bit of a lag, but CDs will be sent off today if they havent already gone out.

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& elsewhere, my dutty associates have been upping mixes nonstop, all in prep for a party we are throwing with weekend. I’ll be in D.F. but the rest of the gang is uniting @ Glasslands in Williamsburg for:

and here are the various mixes, all of these DJs will be @ the Dutty ARtz party this friday:

Matt Shadetek – Get Drunk & Lose Your Phone

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Kingdom – mix 4 Lower End Spasm

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Geko Jones – La Nueva Guaracha

DUTTY DOWNLOADS

weekend heat from the Dutty Artz camp (OUR CAMP):

RCRDLBL offers up: Jahdan Blakkamoore – Go Round Payola (Matt Shadetek’s Bye Haters bassline rmx)

 

and XLR8R’s just unleashed a JD podcast, Full Hundred.

[audio:http://www.xlr8r.com/listen/17595/mp3/Podcast_Mix_2009_03_05.mp3]

Jahdan Blakkamoore- Full Hundred (mixed by Matt Shadetek)

for the DJs/remixers among us, we just released the Jahdan ‘Nice Green’ acappella into the wilderness. Those of you who care about this stuff will know just how difficult it is to find vox at 140bpm…

last but by no means least, Lamin keeps blazing away at the recession rap jams.

J.R. MATASANOS Y SUS MANOS CARTERISTAS

my hour-long cumbia mix for Rob Da Bank’s BBC Radio 1 show went out a couple hours ago and will be streamable for a week. PERFECT THING TO HEAT US UP, mixed in freezing New York. Modesty aside, you’ll be hard pressed to find a hotter hour of free cumbia heat floating around…

andres

Go here then click on ‘Listen to Rob Da Bank & Friends show’ and forward til an hour in.
Or try this direct link to the BBC player. Incidentally, the first tune I play after the intro chat w/ Rob is Pesadilla’s version of La Pava Congona

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Too much sound? Susan Sontag on The Aesthetics of Silence. via Audio Poverty’s blog , AP being a conference-event happening in Berlin Feb 6-8. I will play music one day and chat with Kodwo Eshun (More Brilliant Than the Neologismachine) & Brian (Awesome Tapes from You Know Where) the next.

also: “According to a new study by Will Page, chief economist of the MCPS-PRS Alliance, who is also the guy behind the economic modelling for Radiohead’s In Rainbows album, more than 10 million of the 13 million music tracks available on the internet failed to find a single buyer last year.”