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[The poster uses 3 alphabet character sets: Arabic, Tifinagh, Latin]

This Friday we’re presenting Beyond Digital Morocco at the Cinematheque de Tanger, then moving outdoors for a free concert featuring Nettle (here in Morocco Nettle is a trio: myself, Lindsay Cuff, and Brent Arnold) and Hassan Wargui (Imanaren). All happening in Tangiers’ incredible medina.

Nettle is from NYC, and Hassan’s from Souss Berber country in Morocco’s south — we’re using these days to develop and record new songs together. It’s not that music ‘transcends’ language, it’s that music is language, and our motley crew is enjoying its communicative glow. Lindsay’s learning the words (in the Berber language of Tashelhit) to an Archach song we’ll cover; Hassan’s Amazigh banjo lines help us extend ‘Mole in the Ground’ even further; Abdellah’s joining in on rebab and bendir… and things are just getting started.

Here’s a quick video of our first practice together:

 

RSVP on the Facebook event page if you’d like to let the C.I.A. know you support us. Offline, we’re making event posters at a truly special letterpress studio that’s been open for over half a century.

bonus: late-night afterparty at Morocco Palace (located on a street called ‘the Devil’s Alley’, one block over from Tangiers’ synagogue, which had a congregation of around 200,000 during its heyday) with Adil El Miloudi!!

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[audio:http://nyc.duttyartz.com/mp3s/LV_Joshua_Idehen-Melt.mp3]
LV & Joshua Idehen – “Melt”
from LV & Joshua Idehen‘s album Routes, an album which came out on Keysound Recordings a few months ago. I’ve listened to the album countless times, played some tracks on the radio, and at parties prior to the unrest in London. I highly recommend it. It’s an impressive, imaginative, muscular, and fun album.  On “Melt” Idehen, a Londoner of Nigerian heritage talks about growing up in London on top of a ridiculously good kwaito-informed funky jam provided by LV (very impressive vocal cut ‘n past & repeat action.) So much is said in such little time (youth, class, perseverance,…) & so much understood even when the words aren’t clear!

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Palaceer Lazaro of Shabazz Palaces, better known as Ishmael “Butterfly” Butler of Digable Planets
Portrait by Kyle Johnson

[audio:http://nyc.duttyartz.com/mp3s/Shabazz_Palaces-anechofromthehoststhatprofessinfinitum.mp3]
Shabazz Palaces “An Echo from the Hosts That Profess Infinitum” from the upcoming album Black Up on Sub Pop Records. Considering how heavy we’ve been listening to the first two EPs, and how hungry we are for new Shabazz, this is obviously some some great news! A glimpse of things to come “An Echo from the Hosts That Profess Infinitum,” densely textured poems and verses delivered with that signature measured cadence, swirling and chewed up synths and samples, ridiculous beats and more mbira solos!  Looking forward to seeing Shabazz Palaces at SXSW this week. It will be very interesting, even if they’re only giving abbreviated performances!


Tendai , Dougie, and Ishmael

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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

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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!