WFMU’s Winter 2012 schedule kicks into effect this week, so tune in tonight to catch my WFMU radio show, Mudd Up!, in its new Wednesday night timeslot. Same hour: 8pm.
The audio from Monday’s live broadcast @ Spectacle Theater was lost to a database glitch, so that show will live on in our hearts and minds — but not as digitized stream of endlessly repeatable sound.
And because the belly of the web is always hungry, here’s a 7-minute excerpt from my 2007 mix, Secret Google Cheat Codes (available on split CD with Filastine, “Shotgun Wedding Volume Six”). Drawing that line from Neko Case to Sister Nancy to Caroline Bergvall to Carolee Schneemann to a little bit of Kat from The Ex singing in Hungarian. Also Yung Joc.
This Thursday at Manhattan’s Housing Works Bookstore Cafe, you can check Jessica Hopper on M.I.A., Jace /Rupture on DJ Screw and slowness, and more. Their work was selected by the New Yorker‘s Alex Ross for inclusion in the yearly De Capo ‘Best Music Writing’ anthology, out now. Event is FREE.
DJ Rupture, Maluca, Total Freedom, Shawn Reynaldo, Oro 11, & Mas Exitos bringing the tropical whomp in San Francisco and Los Angeles this weekend. FELIZ CUMPLEAÑOS CABRONES! Epic.
Join us today, December 5th, at Brooklyn’s Spectacle Theater (124 South 3rd. btwn Bedford + Berry) for a live WFMU radio broadcast followed by a screening of Ahmed El Maanouni’s gripping and poetic Nass El Ghiwane documentary film, TRANSES (1981). Nass El Ghiwane, a group of working class musicians from Casablanca, revolutionized Maghrebi music in the 1970s and remain Morocco’s most important band. TRANSES captures them at the height of their power. The radio show will be built from a YouTube selection of some of my favorite Moroccan tracks and Nass el Ghiwane cover versions.
Here is an oft-compiled Nass El Ghiwane track, Mahmouma. This version comes from Stern’s epic 18-CD “Africa 50 years” box set (“The most comprehensive compilation of African music ever achieved. . . 183 classic recordings by 183 important artists from 38 countries in North, South, East and West Africa.”)
Sterns cut Mahmouma down to half its length, but the mastering is good:
[John Francis Peters – Meryem by the sea in Casablanca]
And last but not least, head to Time Magazine’s Lightbox to see “Insha’Allah”, a photoessay by John Francis Peters, taken in Morocco as part of our Beyond Digital project.
On Sunday December 11, the Mudd Up Book Clubb returns to Manhattan, to discuss Lauren Beukes’ 2010 novel Zoo City. If you wanted to throw genre signifiers at it, you could say that it’s new African urban fantasy sci-fi noir with a strong musical component. There is even an accompanying soundtrack , released on African Dope records:
As I wrote in my August post on Zoo City, “It’s weird noir, set in contemporary Johannesburg, featuring an ex-junkie protagonist named Zinzi December and her magic sloth. The unconventional pair is caught in a web of intrigue involving murder, 419 email scams, and a missing kwaito/afropop teen star. In short, it sounds like a book specifically engineered for my peer group.” Check out the full post for more thoughts on Zoo City, or join us on December 11th in New York City for realtime talk.
in which the ladies of Super Tight get incarcerated for copyright infringement (showing my 90210 clip); face potentially catastrophic replacement by the men of Bronx Juice; receive a curious video message from the M.E.D.E.A Housewives Terrorist Group; learn Jonny Oso’s background in law; and hear a prison guard wax — interruptedly — on generic narrative conventions, among many other developments, plus puppets and some extra meta. “What is a puppet?”
An album release party and free night of celebration in the heart of the heart of the country!
Click on the huge GIF to see the huge GIF in all its huge GIFNESS.
djs mothershiester and bent invite you to:
The 2nd Happy Hour installment of Africa is Not a Country features a special performance by Nettle. Led by DJ /rupture, this inter-continental project blends electronic beats, North African folksongs and percussion with avant garde noise. We’ll be celebrating the release of group’s new record — El Resplandor: The Shining in Dubai / iTunes / Amazon / Boomkat. “For this album, Nettle imagined a remake of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining set in a luxury hotel in Dubai, U.A.E. El Resplandor: The Shining In Dubai is their soundtrack for that nonexistent film.”
Live DJ sets by bent and mothershiester through the night will feature Rock, Ska, and Punk anthems from Mozambique, South Africa, Kenya, and Nigeria. Jazz arrangements from Madagascar and Ghana. Soukous jams and Chaabi gems. Plus a glut of “pirated” Kenyan Pop mp3s that dj bent found while idly cruising the information superhighway.
Friday, December 2
Marrakech Lounge
1817 Columbia Rd. NW
7 to 11 pm
Nettle plays at 9pm!
free!!
enjoy drink specials of $3 beers, $5 wine and rail drinks, and delicious $5 appetizers at this brand new north african spot – Marrakech Lounge.
plus hooka/sheesha for enjoyment on the veranda
Africa is Not a Country is an anti-colonial musical journey, using the dancefloor/barstool to deconstruct the idea of “African music†as we rock out from Jo-burg to Cairo, from Dakar to Nairobi, with a quick lap around the islands.
Whoeover wants to hear David Lynch singing through a vocoder for seven minutes, please raise you hand.
– and then complied with the raised hands I couldn’t see.
This happened after I had played many other songs, all of which you can stream:
Listen out for a debut of Venezuelan indie act Algodón Egipcio’s incredible remix of Cardencheros de Sapioriz / Cantos Cardenches, which I got to witness him create over the course of several amazing days in Monterrey, Mexico, with the Norte Sonoro project. When the Cardenches heard Algodón’s live version, they were visibly moved, saying “nuestra música va a vivir para siempre”! So great when “remixed” and “remixer” can listen together and rock the same stage.
This is the artwork for a small-run tape / cassette-art project initiated by Simone Bertuzzi. One side features his recordings from Tangiers and the Joujouka Festival in Morocco, and the flip side contains a mix that Maga Bo and I arranged while on a train from Casablanca to Tangiers during Beyond Digital. Simone asked us to select tunes, keeping in mind that the tape would be inserted into Moroccan “bootleg” distribution networks, given out for free in Joujouka, as well as being avaible to all you lovely internet creatures via a 10euro paypal order.
For more on The Master Musicians of Jajouka and/versus The Master Musicians of Joujouka, check out my piece for The National, “Past Masters.”
Simone’s project intrigued me however, as he was more or less sidestepping the aura of arty mysticism around Joujouka and working with what you might call distributional aesthetics — something I think about a lot as well.
[artwork from the notorious lost Fesmaatic edition]
Bertuzzi writes: “My main goal was to have a sort of non-official distribution in Morocco, things are quite interesting in terms of bootlegging, cd-r and distribution in general in Morocco. I wanted to let locals listen to both the music of the Master Musicians of Joujouka (very known in the rest of the world, but more or less unknown within Morocco) and the eclectic mix of music by Rupture and Maga Bo. This is also why I didn’t decide to focus specifically on Morocco and moroccan music, but I asked the djs to put as much music as possible from many different countries and epochs.”
This is taken from his long, honest post chronicling the ups & downs of whole process.
Grey Filastine‘s ecologically-minded Indonesia-based Kickstarter project is pretty awesome. Filastine, Nova, and friends are looking to cover post-production costs for their two music videos filmed in sites of massive ecological friction in Indonesia.
I’ve seen a lot of the footage and heard the music and it’s impressive. For example: “Gendjer combines a lost style of clandestine Indonesian soul music with traditional shadow-theater as a ritual of counter-hegemonic brainwashing. Get it? You will when you see the video.”
[Brian Degraw, Untitled John Lee Malvo, 2005, pencil on paper, 36 x 28cm]
As part of our ongoing efforts to keep radio exciting…
Tune in to Mudd Up! on WFMU next Monday, November 14th, for a show with special guest Brian Degraw, visual artist and musician from Gang Gang Dance! It’s gonna be a good one.
And below you can stream this week’s show — a live FM broadcast (& YouTube/film screening) from Spectacle Theater. New formats to help us unfold.
Big thanks to the behind-the-scenes team who made the 100% Arabica night a success: Bill, Dave, Mike, and Liz from WFMU, Spectacle’s Akiva, Tony, and the theater volunteers whose names I didn’t catch. Generosity mob!
Once we were actually broadcasting live and direct, I got overexcited and bumped up the volume without bothering to check the meters — the the 2nd half of the show has a bit of (nice) distortion, and a few minutes of unintentional overlapping audio chaos. Fidelity realism! Can’t be beat.
Adding the element of visuals and a live audience to the usual radio experience was thrilling — so we’ll return to Spectacle at 7:30pm on Monday December 5th for another live Mudd Up! remote broadcast and film screening. Details soon!
The Performa Biennial has descended upon New York, and I’m pleased to announce that I’m writing a new radio play which will debut on Saturday, Nov. 12.
After Performa approached me about the radioplay I went off on long lines of investigation which crescendoed around the incredible, and, yes, tragic life of gay black NYC composer, Julius Eastman.
As Mary Leach writes about trying to gather his scattered work:
“Thus began an almost quixotic seven-year search for the music of Julius Eastman who died in 1990 and whose final years were a life spiraled out of control to the point where he was living in Tompkins Square Park. He’d been evicted from his apartment in the East Village—the sheriff having dumped his possessions onto the street. Julius made no effort to recover any of his music. . . One of the problems of writing about Julius is that it is difficult to state anything with certainty.”
How The Julius Eastman Memorial Dinner fits into all this will (trust me) be a surprise. This I can say: it takes a village to stage a radio play before a live audience, so for The Julius Eastman Memorial Dinner, I’ve brought aboard several pianists and voice-actors, among them Emily Manzo and Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts. Radio was central to my musical upbringing and remains something I’m committed to, so the opportunity to create new work expressly for the medium is fantastic.
In 2005 New World Records released a 3-CD set of Eastman’s music, which was generally associated with downtown minimalism. You can download the liner notes [PDF]. Below is a recording of “Evil Nigger” (1979) here played on four pianos with Eastman himself. One Two Three Four!
Mzien! Next Monday November 7th, live radio & a great, rarely-screened film at a special location in South Williamsburg.
Join me at Brooklyn’s Spectacle Theater for a live broadcast of my WFMU radio show, “Mudd Up!” from 8-9pm, built around a YouTube selection, followed by a screening of the fantastic musical comedy, 100% Arabica. Set in the rough suburbs of Paris, this 1997 film by Algerian director Mahmoud Zemmouri stars raï kings Khaled and Cheb Mami. 100% Arabica uses satire and incredible live music scenes to tell the tale of an up-and-coming raï band that must deal with shady cops, cassette bootlegging kids, a conservative imam, and more.
Released just 2 years after Mathieu Kassovitz’s stark social drama Le Haine (Hate), 100% Arabica joyously offers alternatives to a narrow sociological exploration of urban tension by using the same location and same broad themes to celebrate Arab and African immigrant culture in Paris.
Homemade mint tea and dates will be served ’cause we’re nice like that.
If Super Tight isn’t your favorite ersatz public access TV series yet, then u just wait. Puppets, gender melt, sketches… and, in this new episode, an interview that brings out my dark side.
screenshots followed by SUPER TIGHT: Hollow Weenies.
(What do normal people do in their spare time? I haven’t the slightest idea…)
and here’s a handy breakout video of the interview.
[Image: From “Animal Superpowers” by Chris Woebken and Kenichi Okada; Woebken will be speaking at Thrilling Wonder Stories 3 at Studio-X NYC]
This Friday afternoon, Lindsay Cuff & I will be speaking at Thrilling Wonder Stories, a free 2-day event exploring the interdepedence between architecture and narrative from a variety of perspectives (architecture, cinema, sound design, comics, etc) as well as examining science and science fiction’s spatial impact on design. Emphasis on stories, emphasis on wonder. It happens simultaneously in London and New York.
Lindsay & I will discuss our experience in Nettle, creating a speculative soundtrack for an unmade remake of The Shining, set in a luxury hotel in Dubai…
