Taliesin isn’t quite this angular and shadowed in real life, but how awesome it is to see him all up in the Huffington Gas?! Underneath the headline of his piece are eight gray boxes, labeled, respectively: Amazing, Inspiring, Funny, Scary, Hot, Crazy, Important, and Weird. The website is horrible.
But if you can ignore the screaming FB-friendly/SEO-desperate/clicktrail-slutty/headache-inducing clutter around Tally’s words, they’re nice. An excerpt:
So, you graduate from a small liberal arts school with five-figure debt and want to work in the arts? Start drafting those coffee-shop and restaurant resumes to keep you afloat while you put in long thankless, underutilized hours as an unpaid intern.
I graduated from Bard College last May and the only people I know from my graduating class with full-time paid jobs in the arts are the wealthy few whose parents bankrolled summers of full time unpaid work for them while we were still in school. Let’s not even get into the fact that most internships are technically illegal. The point is that the largess of the late ’90s that gave my generation our fantasies of success and airs of entitlement is long gone, and we are collectively struggling to face the reality of down-scaling our dreams in the midst of a sour economy.
But it doesn’t have to be like this. . . [read more]
We’re halfway through the WFMU Fundraising Marathon! Two weeks out of the year when the commercial-free, fully-independent, listener-funded radio station interrupts its irregular schedule to reach out for support.
There are many ways to contribute, but the best is to donate during my show tonite, 7-8pm EST, when I’ll be giving out great muddy CD/book prizes to some of the lucky donors. For a gift of $75 you help out the best FM radio station in the world and receive a copy of my Mudd Up! ‘DJ Premium’, a data CD compilation with 320mp3s + cover artwork scans called After Tropical Comes Arid: “3 hours of high-quality Maghrebi songraft, with an emphasis on Morocco, shared between club-thump and mindbogglingly deep listening tunes. All non-interneted material, rips from DJ/Rupture’s cd/cassette/offline-gathered personal collection.” (I know this happens to be similar to one of the Kickstarter prizes, but there will be no overlap in tuneage so no worries for the altruistic. More Arabic music in the world is a good thing.)
The WFMU blog hosts an excerpted track from my DJ Premium.
And on next week’s show, Monday March 14th, get ready for special guests NGUZUNGUZU! Daniel and Asma are my favorite anthropomorphic canoe prow figureheads, and they’re coming straight from L.A. to discuss life, coyotes, DJing for MIA, building microutopias, bodies playing drum machines, and more, while sharing songs which are guaranteed to melt our brains, gently, with lots of love.
Over on Alt1040, Geraldine Juárez asks me smart questions about the ideas behind Beyond Digital: Morocco. I do my best to answer. En espanol para que los güeros aprendan!
ALT1040 – ¿Es el espacio post-digital el extremo fÃsico del internet? ¿Como defines post-digital?
DJ Rupture: Es importante pensar en tiempo post-digital o post-internet. Y para mi este tiempo es lento lento… todo lo opuesto a un meme (#sheen, #egypt etc… ) El tiempo y/o la velocidad del internet, creo que es una velocidad/tiempo muy rápida, muy capitalista; no solamente es hoy sino ahora mismo, fast-food al máximo. Y yo estoy bien metido en el matrix, ya sabes…
Quizás lo post-digital tiene que ver con mirar al internet y el mundo digital desde una perspectiva de escasez y precariedad, donde no tienes el lujo de no pensar en su infraestructura.
I’m going into the wormhole. At least 120 of you are coming with me.
On Monday night at around 3AM, I received an email from our Barcelona point-man Carlos: I finally found out exactly who the guy is that sings that awesome Amazigh song that you played on Mudd Up! last night and is also on the Beyond Digital trailer thingy. It’s Cheb Adil El Miloudi (he says his name/big ups himself at the beginning of the song). I like his Dad-sweater!
Excited, I went over to the video, as nearly 1.5 million people had done before me:
Beyond Digital yielded its first fruits — my friend IDed an unknown singer on a semi-legit CD I purchased in Paris (containing no tracklist), and our favorite jam turned out to be that of a massively popular Amazigh vocalist – عادل الميلودي – with millions of Youtube pageviews and zero English-language biographical info online. CONTEXT! NAMING NAMES!
Even better: as I listened to his song, I learned that our Kickstarter project had just reached its funding goal! Which is a wonderful affirmation of not only Beyond Digital but the collaborative aspect of it that “crowdsourcing” (but we’re not a crowd, it’s more of an open community; the distinction is key) brings to the forefront. More generally, I feel like we’re all exploring this stuff together…via discussions on blogs and face-to-face recording sessions, via giving musicians props and excavating useful info, by being careful listeners and enthusiastic newcomers (like me) and in countless others ways — supporting this particular project among them.
As of this evening, more than a hundred people have contributed, ranging from $1 donations to some wise kids near Philly who pitched in $1500, a sum that secures them a DJ Rupture party there next month…
And it’s not too late to help out.
We’ve got 6 days left on the Kickstarter, so act fast if you would like to get mailed 3 extra-awesome CDs from Marrakesh ($25) or want Maga Bo and I to make a mixtape whose theme/topic/angle you pick ($750), or desire any of the other rewards — from an original photographic print by John Francis Peters to the have-Rupture-play-yr-party #swag #afrosheen option.
As we mention, the Kickstarter goal covers just a portion of our budget. We’re being super-efficient & frugal with our expenses, gearing up to do the maximum on a shoestring budget. Grant applications and other fundraising options are in process, as is the move to become a proper non-profit organization so we can continue Beyond Digital well beyond our June time in Marrakesh.
What I’m saying is: we can still use your support, we’ll put it to good use, and we would like to offer a huge thanks to everyone who has donated or helped spread the word thus far.
To close, here’s another Abil El Miloudi video. This one is more like the song from our Kickstarter video: Abil El Miloudi’s auto-tune vocals shimmer above bird songs (Amazigh pop loves rural signifiers and so do I) and the lovely, root-like (in appearance) acoustic guitar-type instrument called an ‘utar’ (my extremely limited Arabic/Tamazigh vocabulary gets transliterated into Spanish phonetic spelling, that’s how I learned from Abdel and Khalid in Barcelona, sorry!).
March tour, various projects, a lot of exciting sounds to soak up. Rupture is me, Nettle is five of us. The Ex is four people who perform with one brain-body and when it hits, as it always does, it’s incredible – a truly astonishing band to experience live. Malian singer Khaira Arby is Ali Farka Toure’s cousin but breathtaking in her own right. Nguzunguzu are so nice you’ll want to move to L.A. to hang out with them and Total Freedom and work on some of the practical implications of utopia. Morocco is where I go instead of SXSW.
Everybody come sweat with us, that’s the way we like it.
New York City is about cultural compression (in a good way) and super expensive everything else (in a bad way). So in efforts to raise our collective quality of life, the Dutty Artz Brooklyn party stays FREE (this is how we say we love you, in NY-speak) and Matt Shadetek, Chief Boima, & I will be joined by always-inspiring guests from nicer cities: Nguzunguzu will be here from L.A. and Maga Bo will be in from Rio. So yeah, party will ram up, get there early, buy or rapidshare our last compilation album which has music by everyone playing, tell a friend to start a revolution, etc.
I am listening to this song which Lamin shared, some friends remixing another. It is filled with dusk-tones, close and fading, sunset a challenge to both darkness and light and at the same time I learn that a poet I’d read and knew in passing, has passed away. A friend who knew Akilah better sent some of us an excerpt of her speaking about grief.
And once again, we’re left with beautiful words and tones that linger but can never stay. In a sense, this is why we share it.
Akilah Oliver:
Grief is a complicated emotion but also an inadequate word in many ways. Maybe it isn’t so much that the term fails to encompass a range of emotional states, but I think also death itself, as an event, as a limit, as a field of investigation, is too many things at once.It’s solid and it’s slippery. For me what I’m doing in A Toast is using language to walk through that field to find out about love, the collapsible body, what it means to be human, all of that. Also, I think that I am trying to transcribe rapture. I mean that in the ecstatic sense of the word. . . . I am in a state of seeking. Grief is a part of that seeking, but so is redemption and anger, the forgivable and the unforgivable, this ecstasy of being in a kind of light, the simple astonishment of the impermanence of absence. This book is dedicated to my brother who died when I was very young, and he was very young, 28 years younger than I am now, so in some ways he has passed into myth for me, which is another kind of symbolic being-ness. It’s also dedicated to my son who died when he was 20, so there is that grappling with the loss of the body who has come through my body, a kind of intimacy that is almost indescribable. And it is also dedicated to my mother, who is still alive and kicking at 74, and the recognition of myself as the beloved body too, who has passed through another beloved. So there is this elegiac intent here as well. I am trying to trace the mystery of the bodylife, a term I’m borrowing from CherrÃe Moraga. So there’s hope in these poems of course.
Holiday PATH train times aggravated an already-late start this Monday, so I missed the first few minutes of my radio show. Benjamen played a few rock tunes then I showed up, breathless, clutching a 99-cent Kassav LP and the mudd began. Hausa music, new Anne-James Chaton & Andy Moor, Illum Sphere, Jamie xx in various capacities, Palestinian ambient dabka, and the line that threads through it all. (Shouts to listener Shane, who wrote “Thanks to technology I know I’ve listened to “Time 2 Get Paid” by Beniton 18 times since I heard it on Mudd Up! 24 hrs ago.”)
I now turn things over to Columbia PhD student Amy, who has been thinking very hard about What It All Might Mean:
MUDD UP! LISTENER SURVEY
Dear listeners of Mudd Up! and all fans of DJ /Rupture, my name is Amy Zhang and I’m a PhD student at Columbia University doing research on DJ practices and their musical communities. I’ve been especially following DJ /Rupture’s work with Mudd Up! on WFMU.
Though geared specifically towards listeners of the show, fans and general supporters of DJ /Rupture can feel free to share their thoughts as well—fill out whatever is relevant to you on the survey, or email me at muddup.survey@gmail.com.
On Saturday March 5th, Nettle will perform at the Bell House in Brooklyn. Info. Nettle, flexible and growing, is currently a 5-piece. We’ve even started using words and a guitar – although not too much of either.
Malian singer Khaira Arby will headline. The event is a benefit for ASSOCIATION OF THE SAHEL TO AIDE DECENTRALIZED DEVELOPMENT (ASSADDEC), a collection of 71 women’s groups in north Mali, supporting women’s small business enterprises, HIV/AIDS awareness and more. Which is awesome. Also performing: The Sway Machinery and DJ Israel Soulico.
Here’s a nice clip of Khaira and her band performing on KEXP — note, at least three of her musicians are rocking WFMU stickers! A wise band with excellent taste.
I’ve listened to some of Filastine’s upcoming album and it’s his best work yet! Grey is one of those people who believe that “log” is a better word for online journal than “blog.” Here is his log.
You can catch him live in Brooklyn at the Cove, tonight Feb 17th. Boosted shopping cart, wub-bass, rhythmic archival footage of riots & money, Accolades From The People of France, grit, etc.
where: The Cove, 106 N 6th St, Brooklyn, NY
when: Thursday Feb 17, Filastine live set @ 1am
how much: $5
Last night’s radio show felt its way through hearts and fog which is what we all do, really.
tracklist:
Yussef Sheta Ya Helu Ya Asmar Egypt
Bayta Aicha Music From Saharan Cellphones, v. 2 SahelSounds
Forest Swords Glory Gongs Dagger Paths EP
James Blake Sparing The Horse Diplo Presents Blow Your Head Mad Decent
Stagga & Doshy Hornets unreleased unreleased
Ø Heijastuva Heijastuva Sähkö Recordings
Sepalcure Fleur Fleur EP Hot Flush
Deaf Center Time Spent Owl Splinters Type
Shaykh Ahmad Barrayan Layali Egypt Virgin France
Deaf Center Animal Sacrifice Owl Splinters Type
Seefeel Airless Seefeel Warp
Natural Snow Buildings Drift The Water Soul Waves Of The Random Sea Blackest Rainbow
Abdu Dagher Al Nil Al-Qadim Egypt Virgin France
you can subscribe to the Mudd Up! podcast for downloadable versions, issued a week after FM broadcast: , Mudd Up!RSS. Also useful: WFMU’s free iPhone app. We also have a version for Android (search for “WFMU” in the marketplace).
OR, ITS 2011, CAN’T WE JUST KEEP SAMPLING THE NATIVES??
THOSE SAMPLES GOT CAUGHT IN THE INTERNET BECAUSE THEIR FARMS AND TREEHOUSES ROTTED AWAY AND FRUITY LOOPS AND COWBELLS ARE ALL THAT’S LEFT, SO THE PEOPLE THAT MAKE THEIR LIVING THAT WAY PRETEND THEY WERE IMPORTANT. THEY MATED WITH TREES AND DROWNED THEIR CHILDREN TO HONOR THEIR RIVERS. THAT WAS WHAT WAS IMPORTANT. MAYBE ITS OK IF WE REPLAY THEIR DRUM PATTERNS? ITS IMPORTANT TO REMEMBER THAT THEY’RE NOT DEAD, WE ARE. ACCESS TO POWER IS A PATTERN WE REPEAT.
Mudd Up! 
.
