There are two kinds of ethics - there are the guidelines and principles that accompany you throughout day, and form the implicit horizon for judging acts of right and wrong: for example, no matter how much you might want to stick a letter opener into the meaty neck of the crowd control manager at the New Jersey hotel casino where you're staying, not because of the tumultuous scene that would ensue, or because of a belief in the absolute sanctity of life, (a principle which is usually easy to uphold but on shaky ground when it comes to New Jersey hotel casino managers), you refrain because it would certainly mean that your friends would be cheated of a long night of slowly losing all their money at organized gambling. The other kind of ethics is the kind that finds its prime 20th-century formulation in Heidegger's Being and Time: the ethics of the call. The injunction which strikes you like lightning, out of nowhere, seemingly sent from no one, but which you have the utmost existential duty to follow. The call has a number of religious/missionary overtones. Sometimes you spend years waiting on the other end of the line, waiting for the phone to ring, to hear the call. Our friends in Religious Knives were recently disturbed to their ethical cores to hear of the near-disastrous lack of face-melting that is currently scourging the West Coast, and have organized a tour in hopes of remedying this. Faces are going around, running errands, hanging around in shopping malls, paying money to see movies starring Gena Davis, and all the while they remain tragically un-melted. See RK on these dates and support their efforts to sonically force flesh to deliquesce from the skull.
3.15.08 - Monstersorri House - Seattle, Washington*
3.16.08 - The Artistery - Portland, Oregon* 3.17.08 - House Show - Arcata, California* 3.18.08 - Luna’s Cafe - Sacramento, California* 3.19.08 - The Hemlock Tavern - San Francisco, California* 3.20.08 - The Terminal - Oakland, California 3.21.08 - The Smell - Los Angeles, California 3.22.08 - Echo Curio - Los Angeles, California
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.
One of the more decisive moments of the closing end of The Wire's fifth season has to be the gunning down of Omar, who over the course of the show had become a beloved, Billy the Kid-type of outlaw, whose murderous actions were governed by a moral code, which forbid him from taking a victim outside of the drug game, and from using profanity. All things considered, this event, in episode 58, cannot have come as a surprise to any viewer familiar with the show's refusal to spare any of its characters, sympathetic or otherwise, from a chance at the wrong end of a street weapon. In a recent interview with The Onion, the show's creator, David Simon, the conversation repeatedly revolves around the dramatic significance of Omar's death, at the hands not belonging to one of his several major nemeses, but a young insolent camp, carried out not in the heat of a desperate struggle, but in the midst of Omar buying Newports.
I have to disagree here with Simon's understanding of the difference between classic Greek tragedy and its modern form. Why? Because although Simon does affirm that what his show is doing involves updating Greek tragedy for contemporary urban America, he doesn't mark what's really at stake in this transformation, which doesn't at all involve adopting wholesale the classic, for example, Sophoclean, framework. Here's Simon:
"We didn't kill Omar because viewers liked Omar. Neither did we let him live because viewers liked Omar. It was beyond petition. We weren't being nasty to viewers, and we weren't being solicitous of viewers. We were serving the story. I don't know what else to say. If people didn't realize after this many seasons of The Wire that they were watching a Greek tragedy, writ across a modern American city… And if they thought that there were going to be redemptions and [awarding] of the Fates, they need to get up with their Medea and Antigone and their Oedipus. I don't know what else to say."
The difference which Simon is eliding here, between the ancient and modern tragic, is most succinctly expressed by the German poet Friedrich Hoelderlin, in an 1801 letter to a close friend. Here is what he writes about the specifically modern form of tragedy:
"For this is the tragic for us: that, packed into some simple box, we very quietly move away from the realm of the living, and not that-consumed in flames-we expiate the flames which we could not tame."
Germany's Friedrich Hölderlin
Being consumed in flames, achieving a Phoenix or Oedipus-like intensity, in which one brings about one's own cataclysmic annihilation, is the Greek tragic. This is not how Omar goes. Gunned down in the convenience store, Omar doesn't go up in flames, he lies down in the street. In theological terms, the Greek tragic hero couples with the gods, and is destroyed in their fire. The modern tragic hero, if he's still a hero at all, operates in the space traced out by the absence of the gods, not, as in ancient Greece, their unbearable overproximity. Lyfe Jennings
In honor of Omar, you'll find links above to Lyfe Jenning's 'Stick-Up Kid' (sent to us by Braja) which is a pretty solid Usher-R. Kelly-type smooth jam, except for chorus, which is 'I be robbin these niggas...I'm a stick-up kid, that's how I live, I admit it..' In other words it's a smooth criminal ballad. The WKNDPRNS mash-up stitches Jenning's jam on top of elements from Ewan Pearson's remix of 'Manila', which has a great goofy-weird vocal about a dance party breaking out during an ominous airplane flight.
Intro: The Wire, episode 59 Pylon – Danger Ebony Bones – We Know All About You Liquid Liquid – Optimo (JD Twitch Edit) The Gossip - Standing in the Way of Control (Playgroup Mix) Ghosttown DJ’s – My Boo Kano – I’m Ready Paradise – In Love With You The Chemical Brothers – The Golden Path (Ewan Pearson Extended Vocal) David Bowie - TVC15 Dondolo – Dragon (Shit Robot Remix) Montell Jordan – Get It On Tonite Gui Boratto – Like You (Supermayer Mix) Supermax – Love Machine Love & Rockets – So Alive Playgroup – Number One Lindstrom – Another Station (Todd Terje Mix) Grinderman – Honey Bee
The Borgata hotel, Atlantic City, NJ
Why f*ck a re-up? Don't we like re-ups, because that's where the goods come from? Aren't re-ups necessary for life? If we diss the re-up, do we still get to listen to Clipse? In episode 59, The Wire's police officials break out from simply catching drug dealers conducting re-ups. Had they remained in the re-up, it would have been like a grey, existential french drama. Re-up after re-up, with no end in sight.
On Friday night at the Borgata hotel in Atlantic City (AC), after having driven down with several close friends of mine for a long night of bro-ing down, I personally had to say f/ck a re-up, and I was all the better for it. Let me say here that if you are to visit the lovely Borgata hotel, and you want to know who there is not on your side, his name is Joe Vanderslice, the manager of crowd control. Mr. Vanderslice, a stocky, stoic man, refused, even after an extended well-argued and even-tempered plea from me, to admit my passport (issued to me abroad, at the US Embassy in Prague) as a valid form of ID, thus allowing me to drink alcohol and to gamble on the premises. While I respect the relatively unpleasant and joyless labor of maintaining order at a busy New Jersey casino, and the attendant lack of human sympathy that I imagine is an invaluable tool in such a career, I remain convinced that I suffered an injustice as a result of Vanderslice's painfully limited knowledge concerning legitimate forms of government-issued identification.
In a casino, while gambling, one's drinks are re-upped periodically gratis by the house. Denied the re-up, I went for re-supply: sympathetic to my situation, my friends agreed to retreat to our hotel room, where room service was entreated to produce a bottle of Absolut, the contents of which were then enjoyed with gusto, the remainder going into a clear plastic water bottle I had procured earlier from an in-hotel Starbucks. I treasured the fact that I would be the only one that night who could get in trouble for drinking, high-school style.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
On scanning the tracklist, the attentive reader will notice that several of the pieces do not make their debut appearances here, but have in fact been utilized in at least one, perhaps more than one, previous mix. It's possible that the reader will greet this observation with a twinge of disappointment. Why this persistent attention to these particular songs? Should today we not look forward, are we not, as it is said, in an era that craves and deserves change?
There is a kind of change associated with upheaval, radical disjunction, and the jolts of sudden difference. And then there is the change of modular repetition, of unfolding, of infinite permutation. The former is what is hungered for by an appetite trained by the rhythms and intensities of industrialized entertainment. In this context, technology is used to deliver the promise of the first change, while a deeper potential lies in its capacity for exploring the second.
The most intense exploration of this capacity in sound is in electronic dance music, and in language, the French postwar nouveau roman, exemplified by the repetitive narrative techniques of Alain Robbe-Grillet (who passed away less than a week ago) and others.
What R-G shares with techno is the engagement with modular repetition as a phenomenological lens on the world. A mental object, be it a condensed literary scene or a four-bar loop, is held, bound, suspended, rotated, its possibilities and potentials unfolded and ignited, again and again, without progress, without tragic arc, without end.
This world is marked everywhere by the permanent tension between possibility and determination. Each object or event carries in itself more possibilities than can ever be realized, all of which make equal claim to the right to be manifested. Modular repetition stages the interruption of the process of determination, holding the object up the light of potentiality and engaging in infinite inspection.
One of the benefits of a blog is that its disposable character, its off-handedness and comparative instantaneity give it a workbench-like atmosphere. The reader is not a tourist in a museum of finished masterpieces, but a casual visitor to a craftsman's studio during work hours. Hence the reworking, the investigations of alternate drafts, discarded revisions, and the compulsive return to old favorites.
final episode 60 of The Wire now available from HBO On Demand. As if you're not so deep in it right now.
In the past week, during my commute, which as of late has finally reached, in spite of the near ten years I have called New York home, the kind of frequency and psychological intensity commonly associated with bustling metropolitan life, I have several times passed the Hypnotic Brass Ensemble in the midst of a performance in, or around, the Union Square subway system. When I saw that they had re-surfaced, I recalled that I had picked up a CD of theirs during their last subway residency, the 2nd of a series of now 3 CDs. The track 'Jupiter' is the title track from their second album Jupiter. Although it is somewhat atypical of their sound, its impassioned, controlled beauty alone is enough to warrant its being shared. There is a tidal swell of horns, whose modular repetition recalls Riley-style big-band minimalism. There is a wild singer, who intones psychedelic-spiritual invocations not dissimilar to those of June Tyson, who sang with the Sun Ra Arkestra. This would seem highly appropriate, given that of the ensemble's nine members, eight are sons of Phil Cohran, who played trumpet with Sun Ra from 1959-1961.
The track resonates in my ears as they are tuned into 60-70s ensemble jazz, not only the Ra, but Eddie Gale as well, another Arkestra adept. Hypnotic Brass in general however seem to steer less towards interstellar expanses than the no-less far-out dark corners and alleys of an urban cosmos -> which is to say that head-nodding, neck-snapping hip-hop funk and soul are their central cause, if still all the while fueled by the beautiful energy of the big-band jazz ensemble that undoubtedly father Cohran had a hand in cultivating.
Here's a youtube clip of a new track, "War", where you get another dose of precise jazz horn figures with bricklayer beats. Other youtube clips of HBE feature cover versions of stuff like, that one Outkast song with the sick-ass horn section, and 'Moments in Love' by Art of Noise. At least, I believe it to be the AON track, as less-than-ideal recording circumstances seem to have compromised the audio quality.
Hypnotic Brass Ensemble's first two CDs are now available on itunes. As far as I know, they are currently maintaining their Union Square live residency. Check their blog for more tour dates. PS the lead image is from an issue of the German music magazine Loop, the cover of which announces Eine musikalische Familienbande! See Hypnotic blog for the full photo spread, which is kind of sick. -------- FROM THE HYPNOTIC BLOG:
"THAT NETHERLANDS FRESHNESS: if you get out there, Amsterdam has some raw barbers, y'all."
In the moment we are born, the spirit that we are before we enter into this world is split. I don't want to say that it is split into two. Because, it's not a matter of the one becoming a two, two symmetric halves, that might one day become again the one. As is spoken, for example, in the famous image from Plato's Symposium. In that scene, the reconciliation spoken of is one of love, and of a relation between two beings of the same kind. Here, instead, I mean that in order for us to take a living form, a form that is alive in this world, there is part of us that is clipped or cut, and sent away. I don't know where it goes to. I don't know if this part is sent to meet with the other parts that have been clipped from all those in the world, and if they know and commune with one another, in some phantom city never seen, erected on an Asian plain, or beneath the ocean's deepest doldrums, where furious currents have gone to die.
I know that there is a way to meet this split spirit again. Or maybe it is not a meeting face-to-face, maybe it is a way only to wear the face of this spirit, the way that one acts on a stage, or wears a festival mask. In the way that there are some things that live in this world as a mask, a disguise, a costume, and when the costume is laid down again on the bed, the spirit is gone.
Often this way involves visiting a foreign country. It can happen that while traveling abroad, this shadow lost before birth can be heard in a silent speech by one's innermost ear. No matter what, you will never see or touch this shadow, at most you will hear its wordless pronouncement: here, in this land, you and I may come to know about each other. And in all that you take in about this land, its foods and languages and music and so on, it is in a kind of mute and private acknowledgment, a recognition, a greeting.
So it is, I think, with Christina and Italy. Who for our all-too-brief trip seemed to be living the life of another, not one which is an escape from one's first life, but which makes the first seem to be an extended exile from the second. In some people, travel is a catharsis, a kind of necessary semi-regular exercise useful in purging built-up energies and tensions. In others, it cleaves the psyche in two for good, such that dynamic energies are sparked for eternity. It is not known whether in this case the soul becomes permanently restless, or turns to face for the first time the restlessness which has always haunted it.
On a trip for five days through Rome, in the ceaseless heat, on the stony earth, each day punctuated by the shot from the noon cannon. Those traveling days where everything bears a faint halo of mythic intensity. We spent three days on the island of Ischia, a volcanic island reachable by ferry from Napoli, and home to several thermal springs, one of which is cava scura, 'secret cave', and that lies at the end of a path one can take from the small beach of Maronti, where we took seafood pasta on the beach for lunch.
Not on purpose is the song structured into three parts. The song is so structured, in three parts which do not repeat in an A-B form, because this form is boring and constraining and I can't do it. Whatever inner daimon it is whose hand moves my creative impulses, it is one that seems to prefer the horizontal flows, tangents, contiguities, unfoldings, and so on, and all those other trappings of nomadic freedom.
(..As much as on the other hand there is another daimon, perhaps one who resents the first, one who craves the brutal cut, the unforgiving amputation, the diabolical reduction....)
EDITORIAL ADDENDUM: If it is the case that the comment posted anonymously below is the result of some kind of mildly beleaguered indignation, as is often so with expressions like 'come on, guys', we would like to point out that the preceding video is not only wholly within the general editorial spirit of this blog, it also directly forms an aesthetic triangle with two videos previously featured here, Wiz Khalifa's 'Say Yeah' and Hot-tub Johnny's 'Let Me Tell You'. With the first it shares an opening up of hip-hop to the rhythmic forms and structures of electronic dance music, which is arguably really going back to re-ignite potentials that were present between electronic music and hip-hop at the latter's historical inception (see our post on the Beat classic compilation), and with the second it shares the reduction of vocals to absurdist, minimal chanting. If hot-tub johnny were a rapper, he would be Ninjasonik. If Wiz Khalifa plays a show in NYC, Ninjasonik should open.
Plus he wears tight white pants, which is very Weekend Prince/Casual Pansy. This is like a summertime Bushwick rooftop Caspan jam.
-William
ADDENDUM POST-SCRIPT
yeah and like, what about 'Watch my Feet' by Dude n' Nem?' that's a good point.
Every few months I go to my favorite passage in Lloyd Bradley's Bass Culture and read Dennis Alcapone's description of King Tubby's soundsystem:
"King Tubby had a sound system that I never hear nothing like it in my whole life. Sound systems, the big ones, was always exciting, but when Tubby came on the scene it was extraordinary. Most of these dances we talking about were outdoor things, where you always have the big speaker boxes, but Tubby had him steel horns for the treble and he put them up in the trees so it's like the sound is coming from all over. When the night was warm, the breeze is blowing and the music's playing, it's truly something to behold. King Tubby's sound system was definitely magic.
"They had reverb on that sound system, no other sound system had reverb at the time--Tubby was the one who introduce it. Listen to his bass speakers and it's pure melody coming through. His bass was so round and fat that every singer sound wonderful, every song sound rich. Even if something hadn't been record so well it would still sound good on King Tubby's system. And the echo was another thing, nobody else had that, either. When U-Roy used to take up the mic to start his session and say, "Now commence up the night...night...night...night..."
I love reading this passage because dub music changed my life and Dennis describes my version of heaven. Dub music changed my whole concept of sound and it changed the way I listen to music.
It is because I feel this deep affinity for space, reverb, and attention to sound that I love Basic Channel so much. This Berlin duo, in the early 90's, took Detroit Techno and mixed it inna dub style. The difference between them and others who claimed they'd been influenced by dub was that you could hear that dub music changed their lives. This is why they started their own mastering studio to produce the highest quality vinyl: because that's what Tubby would do.
Though Basic Channel's output only amounted to a few 12" releases and exactly one CD's worth of material, they continue on in various forms. They have taken it upon themselves to make quality reissues of nearly all of the releases from Bronx-based reggae label Wackie's; their Main Street label puts out many house music releases; and then there are their own recordings as Rhythm & Sound on their Burial Mix label. As Rhythm & Sound they have moved closer to straight roots reggae and dub, coming out with collaborations with various chatters (including legends like Cornell Campbell) on the 10" vinyl format. In 2003, they simultaneously released the A's and B's from these recordings on two different CDs--With the Artists and The Versions. The names are pretty self-explanatory. I've gravitated toward the dubs, naturally. Here is just a taste.
Basically, Birchville Cat Motel is the SHIT!!! BCM is New Zealand native Campbell Kneale, an uber-prolific creator of gorgeously wild drone / noise / music compositions. I'm not sure if listening to his stuff inspires me, excites me, or just plain freaks me out. "Her Anger Is Limitless" is a tour-only CD-R release from Late '06 / Early '07, and a good place to start. Aquarius Records says....
"A single half hour track, created out of what sounds like manipulated samples of voices, is transformed into a massive glistening technicolor shower of sound. You know how when it's crazy hot, kids open up the hydrants and just run around in the street as tons of cool water rains down on them. Imagine a similar situation, except when the hydrant is cracked, out comes thick torrents of billowy fuzz and grinding whir, all sparkling and dense and warm and thick, and you just close your eyes and let the sounds wash over you and fill your ears. It sounds like a million guitars, and guys outside cutting down trees and tossing them in the wood chipper and some sort of futuristic synth battle and thousands of little bells and chimes and a roomful of amps turned on and buzzing with no instruments plugged into them, all smeared into one gorgeous glimmering sonic deluge. "
I wrote Campbell Kneale a Myspace message (have you heard of Myspace?) to tell him how great the record is... Click on the photo below to read our correspondence.
Does anyone want to get together in some dark room and blast this as loud as possible... on weed ;)
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.
.JPG)
.JPG)
