” Manhattan is full of extra rooms! people scream. There are secret hallways everywhere! People start knocking on walls and rifling through closets, desperately searching for a place of their own. Maybe an undiscovered planetarium in the basement crawlspace.
In any case: we’re now doing it “
Tune in today, no excuses, play it loud, make new neighbors: Dissident Bar-B-Que Special .
– – –
a year or two ago i wrote:
RZA wipes angel dust off the sampler and stares into his computer monitor. Star simulation screensaver. He thinks about sticky rope. What was that that Mingus was playing with? Maybe it was a bundle of cotton that looked like rope. Whatever it was he could rip it so easily. He was strong… but it was sticky, wasn’t it?
White wife and a shotgun in the studio. Life isn’t funny, it’s true, and great people get evicted. Can you clean computer screens with Windex? Can you drink Windex? Where’s my damn cellphone? How old would Mingus be if people didn’t die? Maybe it was rope-looking type wax & age wouldn’t matter so much. He’s gone and we can’t ever ask him anything.
We can only listen around the corners.
– – –
Mingus, the film that inspired this entry, plays at Brooklyn’s BAM this weekend
tonite’s guest is DJ Eddie Stats! A clubb dj’s dj, Eddie has deep crates and pushes the pulse of now as a in-demand NYC selector and contributing editor for The Fader. Dancehall, bhangra, and he might share some TRANCE-y (think: nyabinghi, not goa) specials for us.
(Plus, Eddie DJed the Mavado party in Manhattan a few weeks back, which i’m kicking myself for having slept on, inexcusable.)
as usual, playlists & streamable archives here.
and a new web for the show, not-quite-finished but functional, is: http://ruptureradio.com.
over there is where these weekly radio blurbs will be posted from here on in… if u prefer that Rupert Murdoch owns it, it’s done, he does.
the special guest on Mudd Up! radio tonite will be my DJ mixer. The special guest next week (June 27) will be DJ Eddie Stats! upcoming guests in July & August include Caroline Bergvall, Sasha Frere-Jones, Kalup Linzy (& possibly Taiwan), and Heatwave.
Needless to say, I/we are psyched.
*
here’s a bootlegged official-unofficial CD i picked up in Barcelona this weekend. The artwork lists 6 tracks, but the CD only has 4. What got lost?
The shop didn’t have any Dahmane el Harrachi so they gave me this instead. Presumably lifted off cassette, this is a old recording of classic Algerian chaabi. (Right? I could be wrong — clarifications welcome.)
Algerian chaabi track 3, 9:20
since i couldnt find Dahmane in the shop, i went to youtube. they got him. He strides against the seashore in a wash of nostalgically saturated colors, intimations of l’immigritude heavy in the salty air.
Gulls cry, waves crash, boats and planes keep pulling people out of their homes.
a brief reminder that tomorrow (thurs. 1:30pm) i’ll be speaking at Postopolis, the 5-day event “of near-continuous conversation about architecture, urbanism, landscape, and design,” held @ The Storefront for Art & Architecture in downtown NYC.
a week from today, my WFMU show will start off right with a live live live performance from Drop the Lime.
his myspace says ‘NYC HeavyBass CHAMPION’, and the crazy thing is, it’s true. You can hear it in his increasingly focused production (which has come a loooong way since his slippery breakcore days, mutating into a a sort of grimey electro bass rave) and in the increasingly popular parties he spearheads with the Trouble & Bass crew. 
last but not least, another drum & bass classic – by my book at least. Thunder. This epic atmospheric track clocks in at nearly 10 minutes, suffused with nostalgia even when it was brand new. A powerful restraint is at work here, tensioning the lightness with the heaviness so that the 10 minutes flow like water, tidal, washes up on the listener slowly. the amen break doesnt drop until about 3:30, followed by overweight subs a few bars later.
Bass weight par excellence plus saudade
The Rood Project – Thunder (22 MB, 320kbps)
stay tuned: my radio show, Mudd Up! (one name fits all), will be Wednesdays, 7-8pm, starting in June. ive already got a bunch of INCREDIBLE guests (musical & otherwise) lined up but it’ll take a few days b4 i can sort who’s-on-when…
i think i’m talking at a thing at harvard next saturday on Free Kulture but can’t quite be sure.
i’m definitely talking at Postopolis at NYC’s Storefront for Art & Architecture the week after next (thurs 31st, around 4pm).
in Dubai hence the brevity
Late November Gregory Whitehead visited New York City’s New School to participate in a panel on “Radio Communities: The Other Side of the Electronic Divide.†(i confused the schedule & arrived long after he’d ended… Although i got there in time to see a man praise community radio using powerpointed Smiling African Children tourist snapshots and vague, rosy statistics about the social benefits of FM broadcasts among unspecified half-literate people pioneering their own future in unspecified sunny countries.)
Gregory – I’ve written about him here & here – passed me a PDF of his talk for the evening. MuddUp exclusive! Excerpt below. Or grab the whole thing.
In summary, Gregory’s one of the only people writing about radio’s artistic and political potential with sensitivity to the medium’s uncanny & unique essence. (I’m always hungry to hear more radio art, broadcast activism… so many unexplored possibilities. any good shows/artists to recommend? terrestrial fm, podcasters, whatever)
“After twenty some odd years in and around the world’s cacophonous airwaves, I have been there, many times over, inside that inscrutably ambiguous envelope of the simple dot dot dot … because it turns out that the artist’s dream of radio eros and the dictator’s dream of radio thanatos are one and the same, the first being the finger puppet, the second its dancing shadow, or bouncing echo. Or is it the other way around?
Demagogues may well create radio stations to disseminate their monomania, but radio stations may also create demagogues, possibly even from the ranks of those who used to call themselves radio artists, once upon a time, and it is the pure hypnotic power of the beautiful dream, the dream that communication equals community, the dream that everyone is coming, in all races, and all languages, that sets the stage for the power mad despot to do his thing, in a major key.
Radio eros, and radio thanatos: the two vibrational drives, always present, always in the air, on the loose, saving and sinking, laughter and oblivion, whispers and screams, so humbling in their persistence, and their power. For the broadcast activist and the radio artist, the question is always the same. Can we hear the truth in their seductive and dangerous interplay, and what do we make of it?â€
-Gregory Whitehead, Here Comes Everybody