inner soul festival: culoe de song

BodytonicLive 16: Culoe de Song (live at Sonar 2009)

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..

michael edits

simply good music has put together a first-rate compendium of michael jackson edits & remixes.

michael jackson - I can't help it (tangoterje re-edit)

ricardo villalobos y los updates - baile

who else but ricardo can make a song so utterly weird and catchy at the same time? A simple electro 808 rumble, some minimal flicker, and a highly goofy vocal from los updates. You know what? there is no latin sci-fi. Shouldn't there be? There's white sci-fi and a black sci-fi underground, Samuel Delany and Sun-Ra and Newcleus and that. What's the latin sci-fi? "Baile" makes me feel like I'm at a karaoke bar at the 3am on the dark side of the moon, in an Espanol version of the not-too-distant future. Like PKD with a sombrero.

at home she's a hamster

why do you occasionally become a hamster?
Sako Kojima: I spent the summer of 2002 indoors and alone. My life was empty, all I did was go to the nearby supermarket to buy a simple meal and then come back home to sleep. One day I realized that my life was similar to a hamster’s. To me, becoming a hamster is a symbol of how life in today’s standardized society is safe and we’re spared from hunger, but we’re not living.

I have a tear in my eye now.
We don’t suffer from physical pain, but we seem to have lost the pleasure of living. Our pain is mental, like self-injury, wrist-cutting syndrome and anorexia nervosa. They are ways for people to feel alive in this overprotected society. That’s how my mental suffering started.

Is giving into and living out this hamster existence something you do instead of stuffing your face with multicolored antidepressants?
While doing the performance I’m almost mindless, as my head goes empty when I mimic a hamster’s movement. When I move quickly, my heart beats faster and my feeling of shame disappears as the world outside gradually becomes meaningless to me.

Vice Magazine - Interview with Sako Kojima

the king's two bodies

the aim of Ernst Kantorowicz's landmark 1927 book The King's Two Bodies was to explore the relation in the middle ages between the king's physical body and his status as the embodiment of the kingdom. Kantorowicz describes one particularly uncanny historical tradition: when the king died, first he was buried and ceremonies were performed, and then a full-sized wax effigy of the king was created which was laid in bed, treated as alive, and which became "sick", then "died", and then was mourned in a grand public spectacle. It's not hard to draw the connection here with Michael Jackson, the king of pop. Michael too had two bodies: his own body and his spectacular body, his imaginary body - his image, which grew into gargantuan proportions, and which had roamed free from him, living a life of its own. This assumes that Michael Jackson the person only had one body, and not many, not a continuum of bodies, constantly morphing under the surgeon's scalpel. As if it felt traumatic to be one person when his image was already multiple, disseminated.

This distinction might explain why when I learned that MJ had passed away, I felt an uncanny feeling, as if this made total sense, because he was already dead. How can we say that MJ was alive to begin with? His image was omnipresent. In a sense it seems like only his image was alive and he had retreated into a Howard-Hughesian realm of the alienated superwealthy.

But in a counterintuitive way, maybe it's not that the king was already dead from the beginning. Maybe that assumes that all-powerful image MJ is fake and reclusive physical MJ is real. Maybe the opposite is the case. A star from the age of 5 years old, Michael never had a normal childhood, nor anything like a private life. Maybe we can't speak of a private Michael and a public Michael. Maybe only the image Michael is real, because he was always already a star, a celebrity, an image. Maybe Michael cannot die, because he was never really alive. Perhaps the reason his story is so tragic is because in this weird private-public inversion, he was like a person from the future, that the constraints of contemporary life could contain, and he was rent asunder, like a fiery meteor descending through the atmosphere.

we love you michael

RIP Michael Jackson 1958-2009

viva vena cava

sophie and lisa come correct! the vena cava blog. I already got overwhelmed digging through all these finds - the girls clearly live in their own cosmos of elegant arcana, including lists of peculiar brain disorders, the most beautiful burger king in the world, long-haired persian guinea pigs, the paraguan embassy in argentina, early 90s interview magazines, and life-size bill clinton cutouts from the flea market.

imo hafta step my game up!

of all the tracks we worked on for their last runway show, it was eloy's weirdo incantatory new-age disco ritual "horizons" that jazzed them the most - seemed to lock pretty well into their sexy crystal goth trip. enjoy.

eloy - horizons

visit glacial lakes

glacial lakes - the magic cavern

a special bonus glacial gem for you to inaugurate our online refuge - the eminently pauseable "magic cavern", what jonny bocce describes sounding like "balearic Fela." Traipse through dense forests of exotic flora, sunlight passing through the canopy, the clatter of painted insects, until you reach the shadowy and glowing mouth of the cavern.

Now go visit some lakes, hit some tunes, explore new unforeseen dimensions of sound, chill hard.

glacial lakes dot net

mandre - light years (opus iv)

mandre - light years (opus iv)

ridiculously cool late seventies proggy space funk with a soaring riff that sounds like the soundtrack to some lost French rip-off of Star Trek, ie with more skin and cooler boots. one of my favorite jams, recommended if you like floyd, alan parsons, air, bo hansson, wilhelm shatner.

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ordinarily I have a policy against posting the actual cover art to whatever the jam de jour is, because it's boring. It fails to produce any kind of surrealist epiphany or revel in synaesthetic possibility. In this case however, it'd be a shame to not share mandre in his full proto-daft punk glory, that is, emerging like a demigod out of a glowing space vag.

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this song was rather hard to find because it's an instrumental. I heard it several hours ago at Rai Rai Ken, an experience which combined two of my favorite material pleasures: hearing something weird, and eating ramen noodles. It was an "oh shit I know that song..." moment and I had to geek out and ask the waiter what it was. new york city: a bustling shrine to the glories of a chance encounter.

i've always been crazy

waylon jennings - I've always been crazy

I played rock band for the first time last week, after drinks with friends from copywriting class. Our hostess had inherited the apartment nearby from her grandparents, which in the words of her gentleman friend made her "chinatown royalty." True to form, the long and narrow railroad bore finely-tiled ceilings and elegantly dark-wood doors. The chinatown bus departs, literally, from the curb at her doorstep.

I have been reluctant to play rock band or guitar hero, much in the way a tennis player might resist stepping up to the nintendo wii. I found it utterly entertaining, because it's just like playing music only you don't have to try very hard - it's been redesigned for maximum goof-off with your friends satisfaction. You can sing and laugh and screw off or you can put the utmost effort into it - the song plods along all the same. You play for points so there's a bit of an incentive but it doesn't really matter. Personally I find the whole setup very appealling, because I am a big dork. At some level in social situations I occasionally run out of things to say, and I want to start playing with the stereo, because I am specifically a dork about music (surprise). That's in part why I started djing, so I could obsess about records and not have to be burdened with small talk. I don't necessarily want to run out of things to say but sometimes events take their own course. Making the group activity be playing music together in an informal low-pressure setting is thus an ideal way to re-socialize semi-awkward music dorks like myself.

If I were in charge of putting the songs on rock band I would put this song by waylon jennings, because sometimes it's my personal anthem.