19-year old Culoe de Song hails from South Africa and was recently discovered while attending the acclaimed Red Bull Music Academy. Like his debut 12" for Innervisions, this live mix from Sonar is relevatory, spiritual, deep afro-house - the tribe is alive, all swirling hand percussion and resonant thumb piano thonk, stripped and relentless. He even drops the "makossa" vocal from Manu Dibango, made famous by MJ in 'Wanna Be Startin' Somethin.' Easily one of the year's breakthrough acts. And speaking of South Africa, miss soph hipped me to the works of the Ndebele tribe - see the VC blog for more..you could pull some Harry Smith shit here and work between the pulsing beats of Culoe de Song and the Ndebele's penchant for psychedelic geometries..when Harry met folk legend June Carter he started asking her how her quilting patterns related to the musical structures of the Carter Family's tunes..
featured in recent Beats In Space sets by both Maurice Fulton and Black Meteoric Star, this is some intense deep, long-form afro-disco by multi-kulti German act supermax, who's also responsible for "love machine," maybe one of the top AC weirdo-disco tunes ever made.
ra wants to make love in this club: nerds rejoice.
seriously though, if only more dance music was this hip-shaking but gloriously eccentric at the same time. wonky, out of tune horn loops, frog-voiced guttural mutterisms. I like tracks that sound like the Tattoine bar scene in "Star Wars."
so deep. unfortunately there's no one singing "space is the place!!! outttter spaaacce..." and no upside-down laser organ solos. don't let that dissuade you from riding the smoothed-out afro-groove submarine all the way to the deep-house ocean floor.
If AC were a seminar, which it is, we would devote an entire week just to this record. Actually if there was any justice in this world, which there isn't, this record would be either the alpha or the omega of AC blog posts. But just like the world, which more often than not is a confused jumble of events lacking in both inaugurations and consummations, this record appears instead in media res.
Brian Jones was invited by Brion Gysin in 1968 to go to Jajouka, a small village in Morocco. There he made tapes of the local musicians, who have a highly localized musical tradition, going back thousands of years. Then he went back to England and studio manipulized them, adding serious dub effects, accidentally inventing the remix (not Puff Daddy). History is like that, very chancy. Like Manuel Goettsching, who helped to accidentally invent techno by recording E2-E4 in a single afternoon.
Pipes of Pan is an extremely psychedelized field recording of deep moroccan bug-outs, and a mind-blower regardless of your musical attunement and/or general blown-mind skill level.
When I studied in Prague my friend Mike and I were obsessed with this record, in the way that young minds can ascribe certain things with talismanic intensity, and hold them close like blessed weapons in foreign lands. At some point it became clear to us that with our fairly light course-loads we could fly to Morocco and spend a week there, with little academic consequence. Why my parents ever consented to this is still a mystery to me. Knowing the various fine messes and fool-headed quests that I myself have gotten into in my so-far short stay on this earth, I am going to lock up my children in a closet until they are eighteen.
Mike and I flew to Morocco because we wanted to go to Jajouka. We never found anyone who recognized the name, which we were probably not pronouncing right. But like most griftorial adventures, it was the experiences along the way, while searching for the eternal Mecca of free noise-nerds, which remain eternal stars of my own soul's innermost constellation. Morocco is sensually overwhelming, a dreamworld in the desert, enveloped in hallucinations and secret symbols. Brion Gysin's "The Process" is the best book on the matter.
We road a midnight bus from Casablanca to Marrakesh. In the back of the bus we gave two upper-snorting bootleg-hat wearing grifters a tape to play on their boombox, everyone head-nodding to "Shimmy Shimmy Yaw" in the desert darkness. We drank the freshest orange juice in the world. We brought tape recorders and recorded numerous street bands. At night the food stalls in Marrakesh would set up and we would sit and devour kebab, while steam from the grill rose in the hot air across a field of hanging lanterns. We explored Fez's labyrinthine medina. We rented bikes and rode them aimlessly. We both got the shits after the first and only time we ever ate in the French Quarter instead of the medina, although in hindsight it could have been because of the room-temperature yogurt we had earlier on the train. We took a taxi from the Meknes train station to Volubilis, a site of Roman ruins, the Westernmost tip of the Roman Empire, columns still standing in the African hills. Scorcese filmed "The Last Temptation of Christ" there, and George C. Scott walked on the stones as Patton, dreaming aloud of his past lives. We met Aziz, a young goatherd, while traversing a small hill behind the Fez medina, near a crashed car. We recorded all three of us throwing rocks at the car, then Aziz got inside and found some shoe polish and a bit of newspaper, and painted his goat-bone cane brown. Then we drum-circled on some car parts, Aziz having to tone things down for his two whitey bandmates. We gave him some stickers with fish on them. We stayed up all night in Rabat while waiting for the train back to Casablanca, drinking tea with a highly articulate, professorial grifter in a djellaba, who pontificated and seemed to have no place to go. Everywhere we asked for Jajouka.
one of the most solid ridin' high podcasts yet, a heady soundscape of deep ethno-tribal weirdness. but who is adrath bey? what does he want? what is his real name? why does his heavily dubbed-out mix of out-jazz, ethno-tinged indie jams, minimal house and extreme beardness come scrawled with the phrase "ceremony of minerval?"
"This podcast contains a doctrine of substantial occult significance. The listener before admission is bound by an obligation in which he recognizes the DJ as the Supreme Authority. This represents the free choice of a free will to submit itself to the magical formula represented by the DJ. The listener is seized, blindfolded and bound head and foot. This represents the first operation of this formula. The soul is drawn within the planetary current and its sight and freedom of action are immediately taken from it. the carla blay jam is courtesy of an acquaintance I made while home in Austin over Christmas; Ryan allowed me to pick through a box of used LPs he'd gained for free during some donut socializing - bley's jazz opera "escalator over the hill" was the yield. starlight is another jean-pierre massiera concoction, extremely bugged. coconot is el guincho's band, equally sun-dazed and tropicalistic. money is the root of all evil. don't put the lion in a coma. petro loa comes from a possible hoax compilation called "extreme music from africa" and sounds like an animal collective song being beamed across a secret satellite. "Tusk" is Fleetwood going native, together with the USC Trojan marching band. Vetiver remixed himself. The last ten minutes of this mix are so bearded, they're methusalahean. Anambra is a Mancuso-era classic, its magical flutes giving a misty incantatory ending to another night at the loft. Also it always reminds me of Joe Versus the Volcano for some reason."
Like gang gang dance, mi ami are children of liquid liquid: all part of the same family tree of gritty urban drum circles. Tribed-out dub punk featuring some guys who used to be on Dischord, their out-of-print 12" African Rhythms has had new favorite jam status at AC for months now. It sounds like Fugazi jamming in King Tubby's basement. I have to say that the trend towards heavy percussion in general is a healthy one and that it should be kept up. Can you imagine ever saying about a band "they used to be good but then they started adding more percussion." "now that they have a second drummer they suck"? "I prefer their sucky gay jams to their awesome beat-heavy grooves?"
The attentive reader will note that both RH podcasts to date have featured a Mi Ami jam. Their mix for anthem is a de facto testament to the schizo-diverse rhythmic interests played out obsessively on these very pages: hardcore from Bad Brains, voyage disco from Patrick Cowley, some DJ Screw, AND ron hardy's edit of "Peaches and Prunes," which opened my Rooftop Special mix six months ago, and which remains an incomparable learning tool for explaining the joys of deep disco to the uninitiated. They have an intriguingly titled 12", Echononecho, out in January and a full-length in Feb.
The Ridin' High podcast. 20-30 minutes a week. Because new shit has come to light, man. Indie, electronic, psychotropic. Accessible to the public every monday night/tuesday morning.
2. They're playing the Social Registry CJM showcase on Friday with Growing and Psychic Ills.
3. You will hear alot of talk about this record and this show, because the record is good and the show will be.
4. "Afoot" is dope. Gang Gang Dance sounds like Brooklyn through Africa in the 22nd century, dirty lysergic afrobeat, future-primitive space jams and sci-fi booty beats. "Afoot" is particularly "My God, it's full of stars" type of dubby galactic trip-out. If you raised your kids so that every night they went to bed listening to "My Life in the Bush of Ghosts" they might make something like this. NYC should be proud it has this band, and Animal Collective and Black Dice. put them all next to each other, and you get an object lesson in politics. Being in a band is always political, and musical improvisation is a beautiful model for how politics can work, how mutual trust and freedom can be integrated in group activity. It's more like jazz, these days: you know what the song is, but it will be different every time. This is why these bands pretty much make pop/rock stuff on the radio more or less totally historically irrelevant.
5. Over on 20 Jazz Funk Greats, the band put up some songs they liked, which included an Idjut Boys re-edit of Phil Collins. So bearded.
Recently we took a look at the problem of artistic aftermath, of trying to navigate, to reorient oneself after reaching a point of no return. Think Nico going from the breezy tambourine blonde who sang Jackson Browne-penned songs on "Chelsea Girls" to the nihilistic proto-goth cemetery dweller of "The Marble Index". Radiohead post-OK Computer is probably the most compelling contemporary example of a group trying to find its way exactly when there's no way anymore, trying to cut some kind of path across a signless desert of unexplored possibilities.
The Japanese psych-noise trio Boris, having found itself in the eye of a storm of praise following its album Pink, has recently gone through a similar process. The new album Smile has all kinds of marks on it of a highly talented band going through all kinds of untried tricks in order to work itself out of the corner it has found itself in.
Now here is the track that opens the Japanese version of Smile, "Message" and which does not appear on the US release, except in a wildly de-balled version (renamed "Statement"). The track has a markedly similar electro-triphammer rhythmic punch to "Machine Gun", the new single by Portishead, and it sounds like some kind of unholy punk Konono 1 hybrid: Hawkwind doing the soundtrack for Mad Max in Africa. It's the best thing on either version of the record. While it's a mystery to me what it's doing absent from the US version, the fact of this absence sums up the disoriented state that Boris must kind of have been in: making out-there stuff they've never done before, but then not having the confidence, or not giving enough of a shit, to take it all the way, to follow the line of flight across the desert. Portishead, in contrast, are heroes of the aftermath problem, they managed to throw off their accumulated stylistic baggage and strike deep in the vein at point zero.
But that's the aftermath for you, it's also after-math, it comes after math, after a way of calculating, of adding up, of accounting or taking score, has failed or is no longer available. It's math after math, and while it's not always as aesthetically satisfying as the high-point that an artist is trying to work out from under, it's still a highly compelling story.
(post status: high priority) (effect of following clip on your face: melting)
Adriano Celentano - "Prisencolinesunaciusol"
WE, reader, are only a blog. We cannot make you read us, we cannot make you add us to your RSS feed. We cannot make you check us out intermittently on your iPhone. WE cannot tap almost imperceptibly at your window every night for several hours, in order to send the disturbing signal to your unconscious mind that we know where you sleep.
WE can only do so much. But, reader, if you choose on your own to step within the bounds of the line-drawn sand that marks what we can do, then that is another story entirely.
WE cannot make you watch this clip, or enjoy it. This bothers us. It bothers us that you reader are still allowed to decide for yourself. Because, were it up to us, not only would you have no choice in the matter, a lack of enjoyment of this clip would as well be officially recognized as a symptom of a mild personality disorder.
Celentano, an Italian, sings, as do his back-up vocalists, in a language wholly of his own devising. In an interview, he said that making a song that reckoned with incommunicability was a result of 'modern life, where no one understands each other anymore'. You don't need to be a graduate student to pick up on a whole other kind of understanding and communication that's going on in this song, so invigorating is it that sea urchins and lichen are responsive to it - remember in Ghostbusters 2, when they play that song that makes the ooze dance in the toaster? Same thing. Oh and Prisencolinwhatever is supposed to mean "universal love".
It would not be any kind of exaggeration to say that a decent line of critical inquiry can always be opened up by asking a stupid question, a question any fifth grader would know. Critical thinking is, to invoke Jeff Foxworthy's popular show, not smarter than a fifth grader. For example, it doesn't know the difference between an old thing and a new thing. So it asks again, and when it asks, it's possible for it to find there another understanding than the one commonly shared. There's at least one another way that historical time, marked by a difference between old and new, can be understood. In a way, we can say that historical time is born in a moment that is not just one moment. This kind is actually several moments at once, it's actually past, present and future, occurring alongside each other in a densely compacted burst. In the history of music, it's an old song that sounds new and fresh now, and in a such a way that it seems to open up new artistic possibilities - that it seems to point towards a particular new space for exploration.
For example, I will say that 'Udu Wudu' by Magma is a great new old song.
Magma definitely counts as a band so weird that there's a good chance a lot of its work hasn't really arrived yet, as they say, a lot of it remains like a destinal arrow that has been arc'ed for a long one into the future. Masterminded by drummer Christian Vander, Magma's music centers around a complex sci-fi narrative about colonizing another planet, and is sung in an alien argot of Vander's devising.
One work by Magma whose arrow has yet to land is clearly present in this clip, from TV 1978. Not joking, you should probably not watch this whole thing. It's just too bugged. Watch like, two minutes of it. You will get the idea and will avoid the chance of getting sucked into a furious French prog vortex. Such is the nature of the future - you shouldn't look headlong into it any longer than you should stare at the sun, no matter that lingering urge you have, deriving from that nerve twitch you have in the back of your skull, where neck meets spine, which would love nothing more than to one day look right at the solar orb until your pupils melt.
Magma "Hhai"
As a clip, it's bugged-out enough that the kind of disorienting or confusing effect it has induces a reflection on those categories that one unconsciously deploys all the time in order to make sense of some strange new thing. One starts to reflect because these categories have stopped working. Because reflection is spawned in the breakdown.
Reflection hides when things run smoothly. That's not reflection's job, to dissect a working organism, anymore than an autopsy is designed to take someone apart in order to figure out why they're still alive. Reflection is the guy on the outside, the outcast, the wallflower, the doctor, the analyst, the researcher, the jilted lover.
Now a song by Magma whose time is now, in the sense that W. Benjamin would say now, whose time has come to heard for the first time, is Udu Wudu, the title track from their 1976 album. Ricardo Villalobos' track Enfants is the first insight into what I want to call Saturnalia, in other words, outer-space tropicalia, and it's accomplished by sampling Magma. Not only is it a totally weird French 70s prog group, the record in particular is a 25th anniversary concert for the band where all the songs are sung by children. The track is infectiously, naively joyous, but also in a curiously rhythmic and so-lightly otherworldly way.
Enfants was recorded the day before R. Villalobos' son was born. So a track for a newborn son with kids singing marks at the same time a being-born anew of the original composition. So Udu Wudu follows very much in the wake of what RV calls attention to by singling out this track. When a DJ revisits the catalog of an older artist in such a way, the effect is often that of saying "look, go back through the discography, now only listen to the tracks that sound like this one". He awakens a curatorial urge in the sleepless nerds that hold infinite vigil in the digital commons. The strongest effect of singing in an alien tongue is that it keeps the listener permanently at bay, permanently on some level always hearing an inner echo of 'what the hell am I listening to?', but such an echo that's been filtered in such a way that it doesn't interfere with the frequencies of pleasure and jouissance.
AC Radio April Edition:Notes on Saturnalia 1. Ricardo Villalobos "Enfants" 2. Magma "Udu Wudu" 3. Roberto di Simone "Secondo Coro Delle Lavandale" 4. Lula Cortes e Ze Ramalho "Trilha de Sume" 5. Brian Eno and David Byrne - "New Feet" 6. Babla - "Kabhi Hota Nahin" 7. Mogallar - "Katip Arzvhalim Yaz Yare Boyle"
Most of the rhetoric surrounding the reissue of Paebiru centers around the trope of the 'lost classic', of which this album is a shining example. The attendant myth involves almost all the original copies being lost in a warehouse fire. A lot of the pleasure of being an obscure music obsessive involves the joy of strange proximity: bringing what has been far, what has been distant and forgotten, once again into the light, to pull something from oblivion and hold it to one's ears. Then one hears not only the sound of the record, but as well the colorless ruins of the past, something almost like the crackle of old vinyl. An album that sounds something like a tropacalian mutation of Amon Duul, aka some deep acid-rainforest shit, and also it was supposed to be destroyed in a warehouse fire, is a stellar candidate for such an obsessive pleasure.
In this way, the context risks overshadowing the content. From Stylus Magazine's review: "With all the murk surrounding the album, it’s easy to overlook the frankly silly nature of what we’re dealing with. Say the following out loud: Paêbirú is an obscure Brazilian psych concept album about the four elements (earth, air, fire, water)... age and scarcity lend this record a legitimacy—and audience—it might otherwise be unable to muster."
Not to say the record doesn't have its transcendental bursts. The opening track, presented here, is evidence enough to the contrary.
The sounds of this 60-70s style of loose, improvised psychedelic music, with its genre-bleeding and unbounded vibe, are often a sonic shorthand for a historical contemporaneous understanding of freedom. It's one bound up with the 'passion for the real' mentioned in the previous post, as Alain Badiou has characterized it. Badiou has said that from a philosophical point of view, the twentieth-century is marked by a 'passion for the real'. That underlying the diverse artistic, intellectual and political movements of the last hundred years is a fundamental reckoning with a drive towards the 'real', in the sense of the visceral, the immediate, the raw, all what supposedly lies beyond the mediated, illusory, ideological facades that distract us in modern life.
It's not hard to connect how bugged-out rainforest jams might participate in this passion, which in the lives of educated urban white persons can often manifest itself as a fascination for raw-dog style, for the sounds and images associated with the concrete, the immediate, the intuitive, the pre-critical, the ecstatic. Psych record collecting = passion for the real.
It should be noted that in The Century, Badiou formulates an alternate passion for the real, but one that doesn't look for the real among any kind of 'thing', any kind of 'identity' - not even a rare record. This passion is associated by Badiou with Malevich's White on White - which is about uncovering the real as the gap between place and taking-place.
In other words, to continue the short circuit between Badiou's philosophy and music, the central claim about The Century is about the passage from psych jams to minimal beats.
The inaugural March edition of AC radio is curated by me.
1. Thief at your Window - Endless Grift Recorded last April at Explosion Robinson, a basement studio on Grand Street in Brooklyn whose name was adopted by the urban clothing store which had previously occupied the space. Engineering and guitars: Darian Zahedi. 2. You May Be Blue (Neighbors Remix) - Vetiver Topanga folkie Vetiver refits his own track from the album 'To Find Me Gone', turning the dark folk-rock number into a very Superpitcher/Kompakt-like brooding minimal-techno stomper. 3. Space Disco - Universal Robot Band Eleven minute epic track that is a very strong blueprint for the now-resurgent 'space disco' style: short on chic/village people/bee gees disco decorations, long on hairy tribal weirdness. Sounds a bit like that 'Cloud One' record if it achieved lysergic velocity. 4. Train (Ewan Pearson Remix) - Goldfrapp 5. Once Upon a Time - The Heliocentrics Belongs in consideration with the DJ-Shadow playing high school band and the Hypnotic Music Ensemble. It seems that live bands have figured out how to play like Entroducing and are ready to start killing shit. 6. Idle Hands - Harlem River Drive Jonathan sent us this, a burning latin funk album lead by Eddie Palmieri. This is the deepest, most muscular track. The kind of intense music that will temporarily erase your memory and make you forget you have other songs you could be listening to. 7. Track 5 - Ulaan Khol Stephen R. Smith's new solo record, very recommended if you are pleasantly susceptible to soaring guitar squalls and other types of mesmerizing sonic excess. 8. National Anthem to the Moon - Bruce Haack From 'Electric Lucifer'. Deeply eccentric outsider-art moogness from the same camp as White Noise, American Metaphysical Circus, etc. 9. Snakedriver - Jesus and Mary Chain From the Crow soundtrack! You know what, as a matter of fact, I want you to go listen to that whole record right now. 10. Anambra - Ozo Renowned for being one of the close-out tracks at NY disco impresario David Mancuso's legendary loft parties. Not even really a disco track at all, just deep spiritual beats from no country. 11. Effective Placebo Effect - In Flagranti 12. Hung from the Moon - Earth 13. Super Inuit - Holy Fuck
1. There is a video downloadable online of a high school after-school band performing songs from DJ Shadow's landmark Entroducing album. This is a really good idea for a number of reasons, the deduction of which will be left to the reader.
Entroducing
2. You should really read the Music Thing blog, which is where I found out about this, and which has numerous interesting/unusual/far-out posts on electronic music gadgets in general, presented in a way that you don't have to be a massive synth nerd to glean pleasure from it.
3. If you go to Music Thing, you can download the clip mentioned in (1).
4. Seriously go here and download it and watch it.
A while back someone sent me a Youtube clip of some puppets playing a wild psychedelic Afro beat song. Yes puppets. The song is amazing and speaks for itself. It is full of loud yelps and lo-fi wickedness.
Orchestre Poly-RythmodeContonou Dahomey turn out to be from Benin (formally called Dahomey), a small country on the West coast of Africa. According to the WFMU blog, Beware of the Blog, Orchetre Poly-Rythmo have put out 50 LPs and 100s of EPs. Two amazing ones come from the blog Analog Africa, which is putting out what should be an amazing comp on the travels and research of the author. The blog has some free samples that are worth checking out.
Here are 2 tracks from O.P.R that are from a lost master tape found in some recording studio in Benin recently. They are completely distorted and fuzzed out...making them sound like an African White Light/White Heat. AhouliVouYelli has this John Cale organ solo that will melt your brain.
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