Pic Flickrd from here.

Before the sun sets and the memories of ’08 fade, before the networks get busy, before you get drunk and loose your phone, here is one for the Eve! From the Best of Africa, Vol. 1 compilation.

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Burundi Ragga Mix

yep, brand new for 2009 we’re starting up a podcast featuring mixes / live set excerpts / etc from the DA familia.

to kick things off, here’s a chunk from my Porque Soy Sonidero Y Voy A Muchos Lugares mixtape. I did this one day last July to sell on tour w/ Jahdan Blakkamoore. folks have been asking so I may burn up more copies… until then:
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here are links for subscribing to the podcast: this one for regular ‘podcatchers’ and this one for iTunes .

We’re new to this, let us know in the comments if something is funny with the podcast…

PORQUE SOY SONIDERO Y VOY A MUCHOS LUGARES

excerpt TRACKLIST

Walk Like An Egyptian – Pytter rmx

Fnaire – Sah Raoui

Shinehead – Jamaican in NY

DJ Lengua – track from DJ Lengua EP

some dubstep track at 45 instead of 33

Kelly Rowland aca

Colombiafrica interlude

Uproot Andy remixing Grupo Naidy

Max Ulis – Kill Anotha Sound

Somewhere in between album sessions, dubplates, a UK tour and winning the 2008 Itunes Reggae Album of the year…. Jahdan also found time to get together a video for the choon “Pon Time”. The video features both versions of the tune the first of which was included on the We Are Raiders EP and is available at all fine UK shops and the Dutty Artz Store and  Stereotyp‘s white hot album version forthcoming on Crunchtime records.  I’m rinsing out the later tonight at BPC for a New Years Party if your inna Nu Yark City.

The days between Xmas and New Year’s are good days, always.  Here in Alexandria, VA, I went to a naming ceremony (Sierra Leonean/Islamic style, culture and religion) for one of my uncle’s children, a beautiful baby girl named Fatima, which is the name of her great grandmother.

Sierra Leoneans are party people (okay, maybe not as much as Jamaicans, but nevertheless Salone people party hard too) so after all the formalities with the imam, the old men and women, the soundsystem was turned on, & the disc in the system Best Of Africa, Vol. 1 – a fantastic party compilation, containing a series of mini-mixes plus a few original songs by one Sierra Leonean artist, whose name is shouted, reverberated, and unclear.  The CD booklet and case are nowhere to be found, but from what I can make out (and I might be completely wrong here), the DJ is Ousmane Sayyid and the singer is Succulent The Bug.  Here’s the opening mix, with the first/title track performed by Succulent.

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Tumba Mix

“And in fact, my love for you is like a water with many fishes…”

The comp is buyable here.

Look below for  Sierra Leone autotune tumba worship music (via youtube)

Dear Santa, thanks for giving me all that stuff, but I regret not getting 16,254 reggae jams from the Trojan Records back-catalog.

or, Happy Boxing day!

umpteen Trojan box sets available here.

A big thanks to everyone who bought and voted for Jahdan’s group Noble Society’s album Take Charge on iTunes this year earning it the iTunes 2008 Best Reggae Album honors. The record is sick and Jah D, Diego Fuego and Delie have been working hard on it for a good long while, very nice to see some recognition coming back to the family. A big shout to Moon and everyone over at the Lustre Kings label, they’ve got a lot more exciting reggae music out and more coming.

Listen to clips from Take Charge here, and buy it here.

Through my travels in the internet I read this article on the NYtimes site. It’s an article about a budding sub-culture of American Islamic punk bands, criticizing both American imperialism and Islamic fundamentalism which arose in response to a novel. The novel is Michael Muhammad Knight’s ‘The Taqwacores’. From the blurb for Knight’s forthcoming memoir, via his Wikipedia page:

“Impossible Man follows a boy’s struggle in coming to terms with his father—a paranoid schizophrenic and white supremacist who had threatened to decapitate Michael when he was a baby—and his father’s place in his own identity. It is also the story of a teenager’s troubled path to maturity and the influences that steady him along the way. Knight’s encounter with Malcolm X’s autobiography transforms him from a disturbed teenager engaged in correspondence with Charles Manson to a zealous Muslim convert who travels to Pakistan and studies in a madrassa. Later disillusioned by radical religion, he again faces the crisis of self-definition. For all its extremes, Impossible Man describes a universal journey: a wounded boy in search of a working model of manhood, going to outrageous lengths to find it.”

Here’s an interview with him where he talks about progressive islam, wrestling and the Five Percenters.

Not quite sure what to say about this more than I think it’s interesting to see that there are people out there rebelling against, wrestling with and writing sincerely about the big questions. That kind of passionate engagement seemed like something my generation had lost in the haze of cynicism, non-position taking coolness and infinite consumer choice. As someone else as well who felt that reading Malcolm X’s autobiography was an important event but felt unsure how to respond to it I thought this guy’s response was interesting if a little extreme (move to Pakistan and attend a Madrassa). As a lover of books in general I also love the idea that a novel could generate this kind of response and create this kind of cultural space.

I don’t know what part of the map you are, and I have no idea what Mohammed Issa Matona (and his backup singers) are singing about on the closing track of Maga Bo‘s Archipelagoes, but I can listen to it for days. It is truly something sublime, something to heat our spirits in this cold, cold wintery blast. Six minutes is really not enough, but it’s all we get & we appreciate it.

Maga Bo – Beni (featuring Mohammed Issa Matona)

Look for Maga Bo dates in Australia and Europe this December and January, one extra special date with his Sonar Calibrado partner Filastine @ Peats  Ridge Festival in New South Wales, Aus.

PS – For those of us lacking knowledge in East African music, Sir Ruptcha recommends this – & a quick historical look at Tanzanian music from Afropop.

Pirates hijacking large shipping vessels on the Somali coast and in the Gulf of Aden is a top news item this year, especially after the takeover of Saudi-owned Sirius Star which was carrying two million barrels of oil bound for the U.S.   Most recently, the news has been about combating and taking steps to “crack down” and “curb” this problem of piracy, which has been going on since the early ’90s, at the start of the country’s civil war.

There is always two or more sides to a story.  From what I understand, the region the Chinese are planning to control is so incredibly vast that military action will, without a doubt, prove ineffective.  Depressing economic situation and a lack of a central government are only two of the forces pushing young men in “cash-strapped, hungry Somalia” to piracy. What happens when life on land becomes unlivable, chaotic, poverty-stricken, when there is no work, no income?  Desperate people look towards the sea…

Check the new video from Mogadishu born, Ontario based emcee, K’naan, who recorded his entire album in Kingston, JA, thanks to his friends Stephen and Damian Marley who granted him access to their late father’s recording studio>>>

Spoek Mathambo, our favorite fashion genius / faith healer / rapper, just sent me some heat from Jo’burg.

“mr jace-o-matic…i am really getting into djing now…playing house from south africa…finding gems…thought i should spread some cheer…”

NYC is covered in snow now which is pretty but will soon be gray sludge, plus 3 friends of mine have all been laid off in the last 4 weeks. Life sucks! Although I expect the party scene will improve as crazed desperation spreads.

so here’s some nu house jams from South Africa, where it is SUMMER, thnx 2 Spoek, aka half of Sweat X and half of Playdoe. We played together in Paris and the Playdoe set was a definite highlight of 2008, it was LIVE.

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track 5 from somewhere

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Weakness in Me

Petrona Martinez, controlling.

Uproot Andy in deep concentration.

Andy has some ill new tracks on the new Bersas Discos 12″ (buyable here)

One of the tracks La Vida Vale La Pena, sampling a classic from Petrona Martinez, is available for download via DiscoBelle. I LOVE this tune and pretty much everything Andy has been coming with lately. He’s one of my favorite producers in NYC right now. When I say “New York Tropical” and you wonder what that is, listen to this dude:

Download La Vida Vale La Pena mp3.

Also, Andy’s mixtape Guacharaca Migrations I know we’ve been plugging it again and again but it’s just that good (especially cuz it’s got two of my tunes on it).

Catch Andy at Geko’s and his party Tuesdays in NYC, Que Bajo @ Rose Live, Williamsburg.

Chris Sattinger, aka Timeblind has made his mix I posted about recently, which is now titled “Flora Mix”, downloadable here. The title makes me think it’s intended as a compliment to his previous Fauna Mix.

He’s also re-designed his home on the web, crucial-systems.com. From our conversations when he was recently in New York I am hoping we can expect a whole raft of new tunes from him soon. Lord knows he has them. Let’s hope his insanely high standards can allow a few to escape from his Berlin studio.

His Ghostification EP may or may not still be available thanks to the friendly folks at Soot Records.

This made my day.

“This is a farewell kiss, you dog!”

Man what I would have paid to see one of those size tens connect… Respect to Muntazer al-Zaidi for his guts, creativity, and accuracy with a thrown shoe. Did he plan it? Was it a spontaneous expression of disgust? Apparently this is one of the most insulting, not to mention hilarious, things you can do in the Arab world.

19. The Spectacle is heir to all the weakness of the project of Western Philosophy… So far from realizing philosophy, the spectacle philosophizes reality, and turns the material life of everyone into a universe of speculation.

A platform is a context, medium or venue for the presentation of people, events, objects or information. An art gallery is a platform, as is a radio show, as is a TV variety show, as is a magazine, as is a certain kind of website (YouTube, Flickr, MySpace). One who invents a platform and works actively with it as a medium for the presentation of others is a “platformist.” The platformist is a kind of artist—an artist at presenting others. This presentation of others—of all the world’s variety, whether it’s people or objects—is the territory of the producer, the impresario and the collector. Platforming as a conscious pursuit is a fairly recent development in our evolution. We look to P. T. Barnum for its roots.

If in the 16th century “printing… helped to fix the vernacular languages and encouraged the development of national literatures”- then is the fear of a homogenizing effect on thought and culture not be feared as a result of the internet?…One fact must not be lost sight of: the printer and the bookseller worked above all and from the beginning for profit.

VII. For the critic, his colleagues are the higher authority. Not the public. Still less, posterity.///The survival of artworks should be represented from the standpoint of their struggle for existence./// ///I sense (false?) that my internet consumption is somehow constituting myself. Maybe this is because the data flow that defines my consumption is so easily tracked and knowable. Meaning there is a specific history and cache that I can look to that says that in the last tracking period, I have visited XYZ and in most cases anyone else with an internet connection could take that list and exactly follow my path. The imperative of societies of control is data accumulation, and manipulation. The dark paradox is that increasingly, users submit this data themselves. When we talk of the ideology of late stage capitalism and its tendency towards reducing people to things, and causing individuals to also perform this reduction, we should look to digital representation as the strongest evidence yet in proving these tendencies. What users often don’t seem to realize is that “submitting data,” making yourself traceable, reducible, a most importantly predictable isn’t just about representation that mirrors offline ways of knowing. Posting photos of yourself, or submitting your interests and sending your friends youtube links is really only the visible aspect of systems of total control and dominance that underpin that vast consumptive possibilities of the internet.///I don’t think the internet reinvents cultural production. More likely it has merely hypertrophied some aspects, while allowing other to wither.

Space + Place Overcome- but if you havn’t gone a/post-spatial yet
and find yourself somewhere around NYC (copy/paste)

Tuesday, December 16th, 6:30 pm EFA Project Space
Jeff Stark leads a conversation with Graffiti Research Lab’s James Powderly, the Mare Liberum collective, Jeanine Oleson, and Cḥen Tamir, exploring the rationale, responsibilities, risks and benefits of forms of artistic expression that occur outside of the boundaries of the conventional art world, and how these creative forms—such as interference, prank, and viral culture—serve to continually redefine those boundaries. -The lecture is called DIY law breaking- but in some sense i wonder if all law breaking is DIY- but maybe not

Binyavanga Wainaina is one of the strongest voices among a new generation African writers.   Here he is (on American Public Media’s Speaking of Faith) offering some personal and critical views on the efforts, approach and  nature of Western aid, the push to end poverty, and the damaging consequences it is having on the Kontinent.