by on

Did today happen? Does adulthood exist? All I know is that it’s snowing, again — or maybe it never stopped. The last time I was this tired I was walking through a forest after a show and before the airport. Mudd. Deliciously low visibility. A river. Nature has so many things without off switches. We passed a homeless guy pushing a cart.

Last night’s radio show, now streaming, featured a very informative Benjamin Lebrave from Akwaaba Music.

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).

by on

539w

Seems to me like a nice route through tonight is to begin by catching Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts reading from her new book at the New School [UPDATE: THE NEW SCHOOL IS CLOSED TODAY DUE TO SNOW, READING POSTPONED] and then make our collective way over to Made in Africa — whose special guest DJ, Akwaaba’s BBrave, will stop by next Monday‘s radio show.

Harlem Is Nowhere (the book: excerpt) is out now, two weeks after my Domus mixtape appeared. The New York Times reviewer read her work & couldn’t help but hear music (Auto-Tune no less!):

It reads, in fact, as if Ms. Rhodes-Pitts had taken W. E. B. Du Bois’s “Souls of Black Folk” and Maya Angelou’s “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” and spliced them together and remixed them, adding bass, Auto-Tuned vocals, acoustic breaks, samples (street sounds, newsreel snippets, her own whispered confessions) and had rapped over the whole flickering collage. It makes a startling and alive sound, one you cock your head at an angle to hear.

Here’s a breakout jam from my Harlem Is Nowhere mixtape. The beat is an exclusive from Timeblind, low-slung, spacious, holding momenum in one hand and stillness in the other. Sharifa and I read excerpts from the 1941 edition of Rajah Rabo’s 5-Star Mutuel Dream book.

rajah-rabos-5-dream-book

This incredible publication listed pages and pages of things you might see, with accompanying 3-digit lottery numbers to bet on if you saw them. The lottery dream book simultaneously quantifies the mundane and wires it into a complex system of hope and mysticism, all with an eye on the money. Money the only thing that moves around a city faster or more completely than its number runners. Illegal uptown gambling created this fantastic by-product, these lean little snapshots of life on the street. This was Rajah Rabo’s landscape of possibilities. And so we receive a strange vision of what one might have seen, seventy years back. In many ways the quotidian is the rarest of all. The thing that gets lost first. So we read it. So we say it.

[audio:http://negrophonic.com/mp3/Harlem-Is-Nowhere-mix_excerpt.mp3]

DJ Rupture, Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, Timeblind – Rajah Rabo’s 5-Star Mutuel Dream Book

+

Last but not least: if you are reading this and own or have access to a yacht, please let me know. We’ll only need to borrow it for a month or two. Thanks!

by on

It is a good thing, we discovered last night, to begin and end with mister Arthur Russell. Hard to go wrong in a a loose and loving space. Along the way: Ghanian hiplife in preparation for next week’s guest, Chicagoan footwork sold to Americans by the Brits, the Bronx’s own Colombian low-end king Jorge Meza, Caroline Bergvall reading Dante, and and (aka always more).

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).

tracklist: (more…)

by on

Nettle is a band I started in Barcelona which knows nothing if not change. This spring we will release an album — a soundtrack to a remake of The Shining, set in Dubai — on a label I’ve admired for awhile. (details soon…)

This Thursday we’re playing a free show at Zebulon in Williamsburg. It’s an intimate space where you can come get close to our strange music. There will be a little bit of singing and 100% no guitars. We use old instruments made from trees (Lindsay’s violin, Brent’s cello, Bill’s bendir frames), and homebrew digital tools (Sufi plug-ins, #mudd) and if you like to listen then this is your night. Icing on the cake: Lamin Fofana will DJ throughout the evening.

And remember: after Tropical comes Arid.

by on

A laptop hemorrhage left me flustered and spectacularly unprepared for last night’s radio show, but these things have a way of working themselves out. We are all listeners.

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).

tracklist: (more…)

by on

cross-posted to Mudd Up!

I just finished a new hour-long mixtape, made with writer Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts and inspired by the sounds of Harlem. The project is the second edition of the Cities Mixtape series by Milan-based DOMUS, a magazine focusing on design, architecture and urbanism. This mix is titled “Harlem Is Nowhere”, after Sharifa’s new book which, in turn, borrows the phrase from a 1948 essay by Ralph Ellison. You can stream or download the mix here, and read our write-up, which begins:

Once, a group of tourists were asked what came to mind when they heard the word “Harlem”: some said “music” and the others said “riots.” The connection between the two is a story for another time. This Harlem mixtape is born of our own free associations: For Rupture, Francophone songs sold by scowling Africans along 116th, or old soul and R&B memories being hawked alongside the now-thing bootlegs across 125th; for Sharifa, church sounds tumbling onto the streets and distorted strains of jazz heard from a boombox carted around by a wandering neighbor.

by on

I’m in Washington D.C., here to give a keynote talk at World’s Fair Use Day. Participants include Das Racist, Larisa Mann, the Can I Haz Cheezburger dude, and the woman who runs the U.S. government’s Copyright Office. Assuming this isn’t a RIAA sting, it should be a solid event!

Right before D.C. I finished a new mixtape, made with Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, as part of Domus magazine’s City Mix series. This mix is titled “Harlem Is Nowhere”, after Sharifa’s new book which, in turn, borrows the phrase from a 1948 essay by Ralph Ellison.

She’s presenting the book (and mix!) at the Studio Museum in Harlem tonight. Event info. Sharifa’s a great reader. Domus will make the mix available soon & I’ll write more about it and the book then. HINT: Both Sharifa’s Harlem Is Nowhere and Daniel Hernandez‘ Down and Delirious in Mexico City are REQUIRED READING in 2011. Both books will be out soon and they’re both awesome.

by on

NOTE: Lamin Fofana will be joining L.A.’s notoriously good live act Very Be Careful and I at Coco66 in Brooklyn this Saturday. So come get yr Afro- Latino- post-identitarian noir noir crunk dosage, we goin’ in deep. Like Garvey, except instead of black nationalism it’s accordions. Or 808 kicks. Probably both.

by on

Last night’s radio show was, as listener Marmalade Kitten commented, “cool and out.” And Ike noted: “Is it just me or is this show awesomely slower and creepier and glitchier lately?” So it goes. Emotional radio. Skip straight to the Quixotic track for sublime slow & creepy…

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).

tracklist: (more…)

by on

verybecareful

Very Be Careful are from L.A. and play a rowdy rootsy version of Colombian Vallenato & Cumbia. VBC have released a number of albums over the years but it’s their live shows — legendary, high-proof fun — which have won them a kind of cult following. Accordion cultists, it turns out, are the best kind.

Catch em in Brooklyn’s Coco 66 this Saturday Jan. 8th, along with yrs truly, DJ Rupture & Lamin Fofana. Not to be missed! I’ll give away some tix on my radio show tonite, 7-8pm WFMU.

For a bit more on VBC, try this post: “The cat pours the dog a stiff drink. The dog longs for opposable thumbs so he can reload the shotgun.”