You’ve got three days left to support the BEST MUSIC WRITING book series as it makes the leap into independent publishing – via a smart Kickstarter project. As much as I love tweeting and torrenting and blogs and “post-scarcity” blahblah and the tumblr-sprawl, I also really love seeing readers and writers and music lovers come together to build something substantial, which is what series editor Daphne Carr has done time & time again with BMW.
For me, one of the real pleasures of BMW lies in experiencing the sheer variety of people’s takes on music contained in each one; reading BMW always expands the way I think about musical worlds and reacting to them with language. (Full disclosure, I’ve been included twice – EVEN MORE REASON TO GIVE THESE FINE PEOPLE MONEY). So. Let’s keep those books burning!
Last night’s radio show provided a particularly serpentine path through the fields of decentertainment, although sometimes things feel stranger than they actually are. Maybe always. End of show went elegy for Greek director Theo Angeloupolos, airing several selections from his long-time collaborator, Eleni Karaindrou. Streaming now:
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Brian DeGraw generously took the time to listen back and reconstruct his set list from the January 18th show. GGD’s BGD was really working with the mixer and FX (I brought my Pioneer DJM-800 for the occasion); here are the raw ingredients:
the KLF- Dream Time in Lake Jackson
Luciano- Los Ninos de Fuera
Lift Boys- Anarchy Village
Ku-Bo- Dingo Riddim
Joker- U Been Beta(demo version)
D Double E- Streetfighter Riddim
Javier Estrada- Crazy Indian
Nyamwezi (tribe)- Manyanga 2
Sonny Sharrock- Black Woman
Drumline Soundtrack
Paper Route Gangstaz- Woodgrain
Zomby- Digital Fauna
Debruit- Nigeria What?
Onipa Nua- I Feel Alright
Eski Instrumental
the KLF- Dream Time in Lake Jackson
We are kicking off (B)Lack History Month in style:
On Wednesday February 1st, at 7pm, DJ Rupture and Lamin Fofana will host a special 2-hour live radio show from south Williambsburg’s Spectacle Theater, with Chief Boima (new jams on the way!), Old Money, and a our favorite African video shopowner.
Following the live WFMU broadcast — built primarily from African music videos purchased in the cornerstores of NYC — we will screen God’s Own Country by director Femi Agbayewa. GOC presents the story of a young Nigeria lawyer who immigrates to NYC to discover that life in America is not like he hoped… As Boima explains, “It’s firmly in the Nollywood tradition. The story line is a New York story, and I think it’s the perfect context for the non-Nollywood initiated to get introduced to the industry. . . it is also referencing the tradition of the American hood gangster flick like Belly. Almost an amalgamation of the two.”
Palm wine and kola nuts are included with the $5 admission. Space is limited, so come early!
This Wednesday, Gang Gang Dance’s Brian DeGraw stopped by my WFMU show to drop a deep hourlong DJ set. Brian does electronics in GGD and is deadly on the decks, too. Open ears will be rewarded. Now only that, but during the interview we learn that lately Brian has been feeling the tribal guarachero from Mexico! The radio show is now streaming:
Be sure to check out Brian’s visual art as well; he thinks across stylistic & formal boundaries, with consistently fresh results.
I started the Mudd Up Book Clubb as a celebration of books, readers, libraries, IRL meetups, and all the hot people who love slow media. But the biggest thanks of all goes to the writers themselves. Keep us burning! We see you and salute your work. Furthering that end, here is a gift straight from my muddy heart –
Hand-drawn portraits of all the authors we’ve read so far by artist Rocio Rodriguez Salceda, fitted into digitals for maximum spreadability. Each drawing measures 600 x 800 pixels — formatted for Kindle screensavers, but they work well in a variety of situations: say, an iPhone background, a regular screensaver, or a razor & octopus ink tattoo.
I was orbiting in a space station above Las Vegas a few days ago, so I was unable to get on the mic during last Wednesday’s radio show. But fire is fire. And no voice means more music, which speaks for itself. You can stream it here. Highlights include an exclusive debut of the new Los Rakas single, ‘Pimpin Smokin Dro featuring E-40’. Cue airhorn:
& for next week’s show, January 18th 8-9pm, I’ll have Brian DeGraw from Gang Gang Dance on-air! We’ve successfully rescheduled and got him all the gear needed to do a DJ set live in-studio. Muddy gifts never stop.
A trio of visionary DJ/producers from Chicago graced Mudd Up radio on WFMU last night: we had DJ Rashad, DJ Manny, and OG Traxman. They did back-to-back mixing, everyone playing unreleased original productions — a true glimpse of what’s to come!
Footwork spread in 2011, speeding up and weirding out dancefloors in NYC and beyond, so it was a real treat to have these guys come through to share the new.
OK, it’s not quite screw, since here pitch is independent from playback speed… I interviewed the Romanian programmer who wrote the software used above and in the Justin Bieber ‘U Smile 800% Slower’ for this Frieze essay, now available in the 2011 Best Music Writing De Capo book, guest editor Alex Ross of the New Yorker (whose The Rest Is Noise is essential reading even if “classical” ain’t your “thing.”)
As we grind our collective teeth. On peanuts. The dark humor of reconfigured comics aside, I’m pretty excited for 2012, our ability to chorus up collective people-oriented infrastructures both large and small.
El Narco – Ioan Grillo. Lucid overview of “Mexico’s criminal insurgency,” putting the complex mayhem into historical perspective while avoiding the sensationalistic.
“If the East India Company was the first drug cartel, then the Royal Navy was the first band of violent cartel enforcers. After the two Opium Wars, the company won the right to traffic in 1860. The Chinese kept smoking and took the poppy with them in their diaspora round the planet.”
&
“I ask Mathilde [a poppy farmer in the Sinaloan mountains] to describe the effect of these flowers. What is the magic property they have? What is it that makes them so valuable? She looks at me blankly for a moment, then answers in a slow, thoughtful tone.
‘It is a medicine. And it cures pain. All pain. It cures the pain you have in your body and the pain in your heart. You feel like your body is mud. All mud. You feel like you could melt away and disappear. And it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters. You are happy. But you are not laughing. This is a medicine, you understand?’
I’m burnt out on the NYC 70s & 80s glorification/nostalgia/histories, a genre that seems to metastasize each year, but Will Hermes’ Love Goes To Buildings On Fireis exemplary for its wide-eyed span: a five-year history of musical innovation in New York City that takes on rock guitars, salsa, rap, jazz, minimalism. Rare that these contiguous/adjacent scenes get examined together. There’s a paragraph in here about how session musicians formed a kind of connective tissue across scenes & studios — so many ways to think about how music circulates and histories congeal. Here’s to more thought-provoking anticoagulants in 2012.
Radio last night was lively, with large exclusives from Traxman and DJ Matabaya, upcoming soca power from Poirier, the overlooked Luciano remix of a Salif Keita & Cesaria Evora song, and an overall energized future lean like Jay Electronica’s crushingly expansive Eternal Sunshine (The Pledge). Lets’s get open! Here’s lookin’ at you, two thousand one two! Streaming:
Low Income Tomorrowland, a project studio run by artist & musician Jace Clayton (DJ /rupture) seeks a bright and resourceful studio assistant to work closely with Clayton on a number of installation, performance, and software-based art projects for 2012.
For more info, check out the New York Foundation for the Arts listing.
In our world, “art project” is a code name for “crazy shit.” 2012 gonna be fun.
For the January edition of Mudd Up Book Clubb, we will be reading an epic and incandescent piece of contemporary Russian fiction: Vladimir Sorokin’s Ice Trilogy. It’s ambitious, totally nuts, capable of generating new emotions, perhaps the first “21st Ct” novel I’ve read.
Ice Trilogy is like a joke without the relief of a punchline. I regret recommending it to friends because suddenly I need to explain what it’s about, and end up sounding crazy… The book opens as a 19th century Russian novel. Then comes a trip to Siberia and an encounter with the Ice. It’s best if you read it. Let’s just say that the traditional arc of 20th century history is left intact but superimposed with a much more urgent momentum: the Brothers and Sisters of Light’s search for blond, blue-eyed people to smash in the chest with an Ice hammer, in hopes that the heart inside will awaken, and speak the language of the heart.
Pulpy, “literary”, and unrepentantly other, Ice Trilogy is a book you read with and against, a work that lingers.
The NYRB translation collects Sorokin’s three books — Bro, Ice, and 23,000 — into a single volume. 700 pages long, and entrancing.
The Mudd Up Book Clubb will meet at 5pm on Sunday January 22nd (TBC) in Manhattan for lively discussion followed by popsicles.
Activated by the Geko Jones-led call for a December 15th day of #YoutubeDivas, here’s a selection of incredibly talented vocalists who stretch & confuse the boundaries of voice, body, song.
If a “diva” is someone who uses the inherent performativity of gender to radiate brilliance, then here are some stars in my galaxy. These five women are particularly important to me for their brave, exquisitely articulated visions of what music itself can be.
And if this post has a reading list, it’s:
Pamela Zoline – The Heat Death of the Universe
Joanna Russ – The Female Man
James Tiptree Jr./Alice Sheldon – The Girl Who Was Plugged In
now for the #Youtubedivas:
MAJA RATKE — I have a Maja Ratke dublate, for real! Got it cut in Bristol. At some level, being a ‘good’ singer is easy — you play the game by external rules, you sing on-key, you behave the way good singers behave. Creating outside of the drab-but-heavy gravity of normalcy ain’t easy. Maja, like Meredith before her, makes the difficult look at once difficult and effortlessly elemental.
CAROLINE BERGVALL — Caroline and I have worked together, she is one of the great poet/voices of our time! Brilliant, hypnotic, smart, visceral. The 1st video is Caroline reading — so rhythmic, her flow. If this video doesn’t have more than 75 plays by the end of today, something is very wrong. The 2nd is me in Knoxville. I was opening for the Dirty Projectors in this beautiful old theater and decided to begin my set with a piece-in-progress by Caroline.
CHRISTINE SEHNAOUI is my favorite saxophone player. Not into the jazz dudes. Love Christine sounding like anything but a horn. Have you ever heard brass speak like this? Three years back I profiled her for The National:
Lastly, here’s a diva in the traditional sense — Violinist/vocalist Daoudia, a massive chaabi star from Casablanca. If you’ve spent time in Morocco, then you’ve heard her. Friends in Casa who’ve dealt with Daoudia report that the chaabi matriarch is humble and down-to-earth, too.
The first show in Mudd Up Radio’s new Wednesday night time slot is now streaming! SOAP BLEACH SOFTENERS. Gentle beginnings. New music from Cauto, Vladislav Delay, Ghanain gospel, Erothug, and, yes, Lana del Rey:
WFMU’s Winter 2012 schedule shuffle means that, starting this week, Lamin Fofana will host a show right before me on Wednesdays! We’ll do our best to give you good apocalypse in 2012. Our ice cream comes in 5 flavors: regular black, mudd, noir noir, soft bop, and dust bowl.
December 7, 2011, Mudd Up! w/ DJ Rupture on WFMU – tracklist:
