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[graffiti in Hamra, Beirut DJ Rupture]

I’m pleased to announce that the special guest on tomorrow’s radio show is James Bridle, in town from London, full of provocative ideas & playful manifestations of our current digital-IRL moment, where the very definitions of memory, visibility, tangibility, etc are glitching out/fraying together in fascinating ways then physicalizing in fashion, advertising, interface design, architecture…. (When I saw the above piece of pixelated grief-graf in Beirut a few days ago, I instantly thought of James Bridle’s New Aesthetic.)

So. On Wednesday October 17th from 8-9pm EST we’ll be talking about the role of sound in all that with James sharing an ear-opening audio selection.

[from Paul Hagon’s Flickr]

In case you don’t know, James’ work made the internet explode last April when Bruce Sterling wrote a WIRED essay on The New Aesthetic as a kind of new art movement/weltanscshauung with James as “the master of the salon… the guru there.” Because of how the internet works, within days Sterling’s article had sparked roughly 1,000 other articles debating and reflecting on ‘The New Aesthetic’ — most of them written by people who didn’t really have an idea what was going on but felt excited to meme-dive and bend the discussion to whatever they were already thinking about. So, noise aside, Bridle is zeitgeisty in a good, contagious way, and this show is not to be missed.

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[Photo by Josh Rogosin]

Over the weekend, NPR (national public radio here in the US) aired a profile of me on their Studio 360 arts & culture show. Very exciting to get beamed into the ears of a million or so Americans… Host Kurt Andersen came out to my studio for a few hours of talk & filming. You can listen to the audio below or download from their site. There’s also a nice writeup includes a video of me showing Kurt the DJ basics.

To accompany the radio piece, we are staging a “DJ /rupture Remix Challenge.” They explain:

We want you to take the stems to “L’Avion,” by Nettle (DJ /rupture’s band project), and create your own remix — he’ll choose the winning remix and we’ll play it on the show.

The deadline to be considered for our contest is Sunday, September 2, 2012 at 11:59 EDT.

You can stream the song below and download a ZIP of the stems. Hint: the tempo is 86bpm and the time signature is 6/8 (kinda). I’m really looking forward to hearing how people reinterpret this material. The separated audio stems include voice, banjo, cello, percussion, electronics. Have fun with it! – risks will be rewarded. Or to put it more bluntly: THIS IS A GOOD CHANCE TO GET YOUR WEIRD MUSICAL IDEAS ONTO NATIONAL RADIO, FRIEND.

Here’s a video of an early version the song, “L’Avion,” which we wrote + first performed in Tangiers Morocco.

And last but not least — walking Kurt Andersen through the basics of DJing with a little help from Kelly Rowland:

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Last week’s radio show, my first back in-studio in a few weeks, was fun. Began with ‘Moroccan grime’ aka the standout track from Fnaire’s (not very good) new album which sounds like it was produced by Wiley in 2005. Check it, and lots more new heat:

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[DJ Total Freedom, Paper Mag]

And this Wednesday, July 18th, we’ll have special guest artist Ashland Mines aka DJ Total Freedom in from Los Angeles!

Total Freedom was responsible for my favorite club DJ set last year – we played together at the Tormenta Tropical 4-year anniversary in LA and it was one of those rare sets were every song was a gem that I hadn’t heard before, exquisitely mixed and sequenced. Sometimes it can be very hard for non-DJ types to understand why (or how) a certain DJ is good at what they do; but on the flip side sometimes you can catch a tiny piece of a musician’s set and that’s enough to be wowed. Plus, when I DJed Wildness back in 2009 and spent a few days digging around the cumbia stores in downtown LA, everybody was like, “oh, you need to talk to Ashland.”

Ashland’s in town for Blasting Voice, his installation-performance-piece at Suzanne Geiss gallery: “on nine nights throughout the show, this stage will be activated by 27 performances — both linguistic and non-verbal, acoustic and electronic — exploring poetic and formal dimensions of amplification.”

From 8-9pm on WFMU this Wednesday, Total Freedom will play some tunes from his upcoming compilation, and we’ll talk about Blasting Voice, what’s going on in LA, thee olde arte of DJing, Monster Energy Drinks, Discos Barba Azul, and more.

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[old photo of Izenzaren’s lead singer, Igout Abdelhadi]

This week’s radio show was a slowdown stretchout, July 4th, fading flags. It begins with Izenzaren’s Akal, a lovely brand-new banjo jam which I saw them perform just a few days earlier down in Agadir Morocco. We later ran into the lead singer Igout Abdelhadi very randomly, while waiting to meet the king of Berber Auto-Tune… This whole trip was like that, one weird world after the other, bridged by serendipitous glue.

But radio. Most of this episode of Mudd Up is devoted to Gavin Bryar’s moving piece The Sinking of the Titanic; here I play the 1975 version produced & released by Brian Eno in its 30-minute entirety.

Next week I’ll be back in the studio for realtime radio, and week after that I’m very excited to announce that Total Freedom aka Ashland Mines will be the special guest. Details soon.

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Wednesday’s radio show with special guest DJ Javier Estrada is now streaming! El programa de este miercoles con la participación especial de Dj Javier Estrada ahora streaming!

We go in deep, with Javier explaining why he made 430 songs in the last three years & gave them all away for free; an introduction to the legacy of cumbia in his hometown of Monterrey Mexico and how that manifests itself in his remixes, making crowd-pleasing norteno aliens, talk of indigenous gods, and lots more. Bilingual to boot.

Vamos en profundidad, con Javier explicándonos por qué produjo 430 canciones en los últimos tres años y las ofrecio gratis; dándonos una introducción al legado de la cumbia en su ciudad Monterrey México y enlazándolo con sus remixes, norteños que comunican con los aliens, beats que hablan de dioses indígenas y mucho más. Bilingüe hasta la médula.

The evening ended with a fantastic LES rooftop hangout: Rotterdam’s Munchi, Javier, Bass Squad, and myself — incredibly, it was the first time that Munchi and Javier had met IRL! And Munchi and I finally had our breakcore conversation…

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Last week’s radio show, In Praise of the Airhorn, is now streaming:

And I’m pleased to announce that prolific Mexican producer DJ Javier Estrada will be my special guest on tomorrow’s radio show. The young powerhouse from Monterrey is one of the most interesting beatmakers around right now, and I’ve got a coupla thousand of words-in-progress on why… Coming soon.

Until then — tune in tomorrow to catch DJ Javier Estrada live from 8-9pm EST, on WFMU! We’ll be talkin in Spanish with simultaneous translation by Talacha so all you monolingual gorillas can enjoy.

The radio show comes on the eve of Estrada’s NYC debut. We’ll have some tix to giveaway for his Thursday event with A Tribe Called Red.

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[kids & graffiti on Mhmd Mahmoud near Tahrir]

Cairo, Egypt. A few yards down from this graffiti lies the city’s best English language bookstore, and a few yards beyond that, the former British army barracks turned into traffic circle elevated into iconic revolutionary space. Tahrir means Liberation.

With Egyptian presidential elections getting very close, now’s a good time to listen to Cairo, its sounds & music, its clamor and dignity.

Last Wednesday’s radio show with Arabic translator Humphrey Davies, recorded on location in Egypt, is now streaming, and it’s fantastic:

In it he discusses the sounds of Cairo from car-horn honking Morse code obscenities to the changing ways of voicing the divine; nostalgia for the 1940s and brand new sha3by lyrics; Nancy Arjam’s class-bending single and Oum Koulsoum’s ongoing appeal. We also touch upon the world of Egyptian publishing and get insight about Davies work as a translator (I just finished his translation of Alaa Al Aswany’s The Yacoubian Building, and it is excellent. Highly recommended.) including a preview into the amazing 19th ct Lebanese book he’s working on right now (which includes lists of “well known locations in hell” and “17 types of medieval glue”).

Special guest next week: Monterrey Mexico’s DJ Javier Estrada! Info soon.

[Former AUC library, Cairo]

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Tomorrow I’m DJing an *all-ages* party at 285 Kent in Brooklyn with Prince Rama, Eva Aridjis, Weird Magic, and more. FB invite. dance dance explode dance.

I spent today working on a mix, which meant that by the time the radio show rolled around, I was all beat-ed out, so it starts off on a classical/float/peat-bog tip. Now streaming:

Podcast subscribers: We’ve been a bit behind on getting the last month or so out, but things should be back on track shortly. Maybe already? The podcast version gets trimmed a bit, so tune in live or catch the stream for maxximum mudd.

tracklist:

(more…)

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[Georgia Sea Island Singers]

I’ve been remiss in posting up my radio shows, but to get back on track — last night’s show – Throw Me Anywhere, Lord -, started with the powerful acapella spirituals of the Georgia Sea Island singers spread from there. (Anyboy read the new Alan Lomax biography? He recorded the Sea Island singers back in the day).

Now streaming:

And if you are going to Coachella this weekend, friends and I will be DJing an Ace Hotel takeover tomorrow, Friday night. Details.

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Brother Lamin Fofana is down in the former Mexican territory of Texas, which means that we here in Brooklyn can play some unusual games in his absence…

This Wednesday, Mudd Up! was a two-hour special. It’s always nice to stretch out on WFMU’s airwaves. Streaming below. Podcastable (iTunes | XML). FM realtime every week. And be sure to check out next week’s special show with guest: Oneohtrix Point Never!

ungroomed tracklist after the jump: (more…)

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Last week’s radio show with USC professor Josh Kun was a real treat – and it’s now streaming. An hour of real talk on the current state of narcocorridos – Mexican drug ballads – prefaced by two new heaters from Tijuana’s blooming indie scene. Listen close:

WFMU is in the middle of its yearly fundraising marathon! Our independent, advertising-free FM radio station is almost entirely listener supported (which is incredible, in today’s rapidly consolidating and corporatizing mediascape), all on-air DJs are 100% volunteer (aka I don’t get paid), and now’s the time when we asking for your help… For more reasons on what this fundraiser is all about, you can listen back to my show this week with co-host Therese, or simply tune in to WFMU 91.1FM NYC.

Or go straight into altruism mode by donating and telling your peoples what’s what:

As always, thanks for listening. FILE UNDER: Generosity.