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[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!

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drake smoking in front of planes, looking sad


  Marvin’s Room (Shlohmo’s thru tha floor remix) – Drake by shlohmoA question I hear frequently asked about Toronto based Hiphop/RnB rapper/singer/child actor Drake in the press is why his new music is so depressing sounding and what does he have to be unhappy about? He’s young, rich and famous! He’s got a seemingly endless supply of adoring fans, pretty women, drugs, alcohol, money and a venue for his artistic expression to talk about his feelings. Hot97 is his psychotherapy couch.

When he sings:
‘Cups of the XO
Bitches in my old phone
I should call one and go home
I’ve been in this club too long
The woman that I would try
Is happy with a good guy

But I’ve been drinking so much
That I’ma call her anyway and say
“F-ck that nigga that you love so bad
I know you still think about the times we had”
I say “f-ck that nigga that you think you found
And since you picked up I know he’s not around”

(Are you drunk right now?)

I’m just sayin’, you could do better
Tell me have you heard that lately?
I’m just sayin’ you could do better
And I’ll start hatin’, only if you make me’

Drake strikes me as being honest here. Even though he has all of the above material and ego-enhancing things that many of us want, he is still not happy.  When artists are honest and speak about what’s really happening with them instead of repeating tropes that seem like the ‘industry standard’ (I’m balling! I’m awesome! I’m getting money!) it adds a richness of meaning, the texture of personal reality.  The current vogue for sipping XO (aka sizzurp, purple drank, or cough syrup made with promethazine and codeine) popularized by many rap/rnb artists including recently Drake and The Weeknd seems to support this pretty well. Codeine is an opiate, the same active ingredient found in heroin. It’s a central nervous system depressant that makes you sleepy and dulls pain when used when you’re sick. If consumed when you’re healthy it pushes pleasure buttons in your brain and feels great.   Taking codeine also kills you.  If you slow your central nervous system down enough you’ll just stop breathing. RIP DJ Screw and Pimp C. My question is: how much must you be suffering to make this glamourous lifestyle choice? Scientific research has pointed to links between the way we experience physical and psychic pain, like the pain of depression, including the fact that depression sufferers seem to have more acute physical pain.  As far as I can tell people who are happy and fulfilled don’t need to constantly take large amounts of central nervous system depressants like codeine and alcohol.

(more…)

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Commandeering the kitchen at Subsuelo/Gnawledge HQ in LA (thanks G-Notes!) ( foto x Farah Sosa)

8 tomatoes

1 Roasted Red Bell Pepper

1 Roasted Green Bell Pepper

15 Kalamato Olives

1 Tsp Italian Herb Tomato Paste

3-4 Sprigs Thyme

3 Garlic Cloves

2 Olive Oil Drizzles

6 Tilapia

Cilantro

Lime

I invited some friends to eat in exchange for a bread-breaking data swap. I’m definitely not on a culinary level with my dude DJ Rajah over at SoulCocina but this is really what meetings should be like. Exchanging in currencies that don’t depend as directly on the dollar really has an intrinsic value in making people connect. It leads to better less guarded conversation and reminds us that if we work together, there’s always more to eat on the table. Here’s my TOP 5  Things I won in the West Coast Data Swap

First up, G-Notes, the guitarist and beatsmith behind the hybrid flamenco act Granada Doaba and all around Gnawledge famalam hit me with a few remixes and edits

a sick Mex with Guns – Dame lo [Gnotes Rmx]  hyper dembow bizness

[audio:http://nyc.duttyartz.com/g3kojones/Dame Lo Gnotes Remix.mp3]

and this touch up of Gotye’s anti-love jam caught me off guard…

[audio:http://nyc.duttyartz.com/g3kojones/Somebody That I Used To Know Gnotes Remix.mp3]

Now my homie, Santero in the Bay Area has been holding me down for a few years now. I was happy to crash at his this time around and spend some time getting to know what he’s been up to.  I learned he has been working with our homie Boogat up in Montreal.. Notice how the cover art is Boogat with the fam all around at a BBQ or somn… home cooking how we do !

(Incidentally, since that convo I’ve been rocking Dos Cervesas (prod by Poirier) off the PURA VIDA EP like its my job)

Santero also just put out a brand new mixtape a couple days ago for Los Rakas’ homegirl FAVI called Flor de Azahar (orange blossom – really the best smelling flower in the world for my money)

FLOR DE AZAHAR (#ORANGEBLOSSOM MIXTAPE x DJ SANTERO VOL 1) by FaviSF

Santero also put me on to this Goapelle/Los Rakas Remix I had admittedly been sleeping on. It was featured on Fader and Rcrd Lbl months ago. Be sure to check them out on November 19th with me and Dre Skull at SOBs

[audio:http://nyc.duttyartz.com/g3kojones/PLAY (Los Rakas Remix).mp3]

 

 

 

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Fellow native new yorker (Bronx stand up!) and expert cutter-through-of-smoke-mirrors Noam Chomsky gave this talk in April 2011 while the currently flourishing #occupy movements were just a gnawing sense of horrific injustice in the occupiers bellies.

In it he breaks down such popular topics as:

1) Why economic power = political power

2) How financial regulations were systematically demolished in this country to benefit the 1% ending a ‘golden era’ of egalitarian prosperity

3) How Obama was bought by Wall Street and how he repaid them

He forgot his notes at the hotel and so it’s light on statistics and heaaaavy on truthy goodness.  Need to explain to your friends why the Occupy Wall St movement matters at your next cocktail party?  Start here.

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/22888970[/vimeo]

 

Big shout out to PDX Justice for filming and posting this on Vimeo, along with The Collins Distinguished Speaker Series and the Department of English of the University of Oregon at Eugene for holding the event.  If I get a free hour I’d like to rip the audio for this and encode it as a podcast.  If anyone else is motivated to do it first we’ll happily host and promote it here.  The fact that this thing is so relevant to the current conversation and only had 636 views when I found it is terrible.

 

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[originally posted at Mudd Up!]

Times square red times square blue

The Mudd Up Book Clubb marches to Manhattan with a tender, challenging work by one of the most important authors around: Samuel R. Delany’s Times Square Red, Times Square Blue. The book takes Delany’s 30+ years in the porn theaters and gay bars of Times Sq. on the eve of its mid-1990s Disneyification as a grounding point for an extended examination of public space, interclass contact, polymorphous intimate pleasures, the regulation of bodies and behavior, and lots more. Sex & urbanism in Delany’s hands — you can’t go wrong!

The humanity that animates his intelligence is inspiring, as is the deft ease with which Delany flows from frank, considered anecdotes about former lovers & friends to more sociologically-minded writing. Times Square Red, Times Square Blue is built from two long essays, which are themselves quite different: the longer one more personal, the 2nd one more theoretical — it includes a powerful section on contact vs networking that is more relevant now than ever, and uses a two-column layout to play with marginality in a direct way and further shake things up.

This is the Clubb’s first nonfiction selection (not to mention our first selection by a black author), and it will give you a lot to think about. The New York Public Library stocks a handful of copies, including a nonlending one up at the Schomburg. The Manhattan location for this Clubb edition is secret, but suffice to say it’s awesome and will be familiar to those who’ve seen Delany doc The Polymath. The tentative date is November 15th. If you are interested, please join the mailing list.

dfisheye

If you only know Delany from his sci-fi or fantasy, then you are in for a real treat! If you don’t know Delany at all, then perhaps short story collection Aye, and Gomorrah or its earlier incarnation, Driftglass, is a good place to start – “The Star Pit” is one of those rare stories that haunts me to no end. (I wouldn’t recommend starting with Dhalgren, only because I know a handful of people who couldn’t get into it and then didn’t investigate Delany any further.)

But Samuel R. Delany’s work has many, many entrances…

OK. Let’s keep those pages turning! For more online reading about this selection, Steve Shaviro wrote an excellent review of Times Square Red, Times Square Blue — indeed, all Steve’s Delany writings are great.

Stay muddy.

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IMG 0068

Let’s take things up a level. Let’s get glossy.

The November issue of WIRE magazine has Rupture on the cover lookin’ all grown and sexy.

Congrats! Go buy that shit! They say: “Peter Shapiro meets prolific producer Jace Clayton to hear about post-colonial Bass music, The Shining remade in Dubai and Sufi Plug-Ins.”

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record player

Sound written in stone plastic!

I just shared the memory of my favorite record-hunting find in a piece for MTV Hive, on the occasion of the 4th annual Brooklyn Flea ‘Superstar DJ Record Fair’.

Here’s an excerpt:

…I used my time off in Istanbul to simply wander the streets, ending up in one of those dusty record shops where the entropy is turned up really high. There I rescued a Cymande LP that was being slowly asphyxiated under sleeveless 45s. The Fugees had sampled the Caribbean-British funk band to great effect, now I could, too. But that was a digger find. It’s value was obvious, external; a truly special record is one you create your own value for. Ebay of the heart. I don’t care for mint-condition first-editions (Recording my “Gold Teeth Thief” mix, I accidentally stepped on one of my most valuable records, an original pressing of the Winstons’ single “Amen, Brother”, whose fierce rhythm break has been sampled by precisely nine million drum & bass songs).

——-

I don’t have a rip of the Houssein LP I discuss later in the article, but here’s a 1-2 of Cymande and the Fugees, plus $400,000 copyright lawsuit backstory.

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Next Monday, September 10th, I’ll be hosting a very special guest on my WFMU radio show: Venus X of Ghe20 Goth1k! Tune in from 8-9pm to hear Venus discuss shaking up NYC’s party scene with the groundbreaking Ghe2o Goth1k parties, her unique DJ/production approach, and — if we’re lucky — what it’s like schooling Shakira on dance music. I would embed this crazy edit Venus did last week, fusing old skool drum&bass to Islamic chanting, but Soundcloud isn’t happy at the moment, so here’s A$AP Rocky’s Peso — featuring a cameo by Venus. Harlem’s finest takin’ over:

And this Monday night’s radio is now streaming! I was (and remain) under the weather and the music reflects that — soft, strange, a bit dreamy:

Tracklist:

(more…)

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cartel-concierto-01

[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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Last week I dove in, writing about noir & auto-tune in new sloth-positive South African fiction (author approved), then taking a look at the UK riots via Frederick Douglass and some dubwise reggae, an article which reverberated and sparked a nice Motherboard writeup. Next came many airports. After folding into economy seats (always a screaming baby nearby), the discomfort heightened not mitigated by a string of $15 fruit cups in the Frankfurt or Zurich or Zaghreb airport, I found myself on the breathtakingly beautiful Croatian coast. You land at a town called Split. Then drive 30 minutes further out, to the party on the grounds of a former Yugoslavia military installation! Really cool vibes there. Repurposing. Life is strange. Snails on the walls.

Point is, my friend Binyavanga wrote a book. One Day I Will Write About This Place. A memoir about growing up in & around Kenya and South Africa. And it’s great. “How to write about Africa?” Binyavanga knows. NYT’s review positively glows.

binya

The memoir is even better than his afro-glam / sci-fi (?) author’s photo, although that, too, is inspirational.

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In celebration of that and the amazing couple weeks that I’ve just had playing Central Park Summer Stage with Dutty Artz sistren Rita Indiana and Colombia’s Choquibtown, Lincoln Center’s Midsummer Night’s Swing with Lisandro Mesa and Que Bajo?! with Bogota’s El Freaky Crew I’m feeling like sharing is caring.

[audio:http://nyc.duttyartz.com/g3kojones/Las_cuatro_palomas_remix_master.mp3]

Las Cuatro Palomas Remix by Geko Jones & DJ Reaganomics

 

NPR premiered this track a few days ago but here it is for download to the world. Built with my long time homie DJ Reaganomics this is a summer banger you can finish out the year with. I should note that I have been looking for a track ID on the vocalist so anyone that can give me a hard confirmation on any of the leads I have its appreciated.

 

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[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Elmoaw94Wcg[/youtube]

Last year we dropped Chief Boima’s epic bay-centric refix ep “African By the Bay.” If you never got it- DL it for FREE here. On that release he took some of his favorite African riddims and laced already fire jams with them- my favorite was his 40-water sampling delight “Shake Them Dreads”- and while I was bummed we didn’t get a Boima once over on D-Lo or Sleepy D- I still can’t help but pull from this release nearly everytime I play out.  Since then- Boima has been producing killer tracks for Los Rakas, running rampant with his group Banana Clipz,  all while moving to New York, starting the legendary Made In Africa party with Lamin Fofana AND hitting the books. “African In New York” brings more next level production from B- sorting details now, but looks like we’ll be lacing y’all with vinyl and digital on this one.  If you don’t already know- he  just kicked off a new mix series for Okay Africa. It’s a great intro for the breadth of Boima’s DEEEP knowledge from the continent and ability to go transatlantic like it was nothing.

Chief Boima’s Okayafrica/Ghetto Palms Mixtap by The FADER
 

TWO WORDS: PERCOLATOR DECALE

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[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/22968445[/vimeo]

I’ve been traveling to Colombia at regular intervals to present a new sound fusing folkloric Afro-Colombian rhythms with modern day electronic music production techniques that harmonize into a synthetic club sound rooted in tradition. Via the internet, the birthplace of Cumbia has become a source of inspiration to a number producers worldwide. Recently, we invited some of the top names in the scene to a bandcamp in Colombia and a filmmaker to document it.  We want to provide an insider view of the impact this music is having on the local scene and how a small network of globally minded producers are defying conventional standards of Latin club music.

We have a couple weeks to get this production costs for completing this project funded. To hear more about how you can help please visit http://www.indiegogo.com/Pico-de-Gallos

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Last week I broke you off with a little preview- but the Gold Coast collabo is finally here for you to rock. You can check the whole look book here. Purchase here.

If you want to cop the gear and can’t wait for it to get shipped from Gold Coast- you are in luck. Tonight is the album release party for DA’s latest signing Atropolis – and you can grab the new gear along with any of our old physical releases you might have missed. The Cove 108 N. 6th St. Brooklyn, NY. L train to Bedford Ave. Friday May 13th, FREE PARTY 10-4AM

I’m nasty sick in S. Africa and ran out of hours on my NetJets account last week going falconing in Dubai- so I’ll miss Sweat Lodge. BUT I cooked up a new mix of all DA material to celebrate the Gold Coast release- if you can’t make it – here’s a little taste of what your missing.
Taliesin- “Tropical In System”
[audio: http://nyc.duttyartz.com/ta1ies1in/Taliesin-Tropical_In_System_Mix_DuttyArtzXGoldCoastTrading.mp3]

Tracklist:
01. Knight Magic – El Baile De La Cumbia
02. Matt Shadetek – Beenie Eyes
03. Cauto – Bona Vida
04. Akon- Right Now (Na na na) (Chief Boima Mbalax Decale Remix)
05. DJ Rupture + Matt Shadetek + Chief Boima – Elegy for Mr Peach
(Rupture Remix)
06. Atropolis – NYChero
07. Shake Dem Dreads-Chief Boima
08. Jahdan Blakkamoore- Dem Nuh Like It (feat. 77Klash and Spoek Mathambo)
09. Blak Ryno – Nuh Tek Talk (Matt Shadetek DanceHallZone Remix)
10. Deb Cox- It’s Over (Dubbel Dutch White Label Remix)
11. Nasty-J’reste Une Hard
12. Babylon Residence- Epikstar Riddim (Total Freedom’s Monster Refix)