Palaceer Lazaro of Shabazz Palaces, better known as Ishmael “Butterfly” Butler of Digable Planets
Portrait by Kyle Johnson
[audio:http://nyc.duttyartz.com/mp3s/Shabazz_Palaces-anechofromthehoststhatprofessinfinitum.mp3]
Shabazz Palaces “An Echo from the Hosts That Profess Infinitum” from the upcoming album Black Up on Sub Pop Records. Considering how heavy we’ve been listening to the first two EPs, and how hungry we are for new Shabazz, this is obviously some some great news! A glimpse of things to come “An Echo from the Hosts That Profess Infinitum,” densely textured poems and verses delivered with that signature measured cadence, swirling and chewed up synths and samples, ridiculous beats and more mbira solos! Looking forward to seeing Shabazz Palaces at SXSW this week. It will be very interesting, even if they’re only giving abbreviated performances!
After hearing Gabriel Cyr/Teleseen’s name thrown around in a few places the first track of his I actually heard was a dope remix of Kartel’s “Life Sweet.” Jump ahead a few years- he just dropped a new 12″ and digital EP called Mandrake on the Percepts label. Grab the digital from boomkat. He cooked a burner mix up that is the perfect soundtrack to Sunday deep cleaning.
1. afroyou
2. Dance in Yr Blood – Lamin Fofana
3. Ladooma (Version) – Kirkkel Dove
4. Komence Improvisation In Maqam Sega – Sufi Music Ensemble
5. All The Ash That Allowed(Shruti Box Version) – Teleseen
6. Mr Money Man(Dubbyman & Above Smoke Remix) – Pulshar
7. Cattle Herder’s Chant – African Head Charge
8. Kilode(Wajeed Rework) – Tony Allen
9. Duration 2 – Jan Greenward
10. Future Days (Carl Craig Remix) – Can
11. 808 Dubplate – Twilight Circus Dub Sound System
12. The Goldest Coast – Teleseen
13. Backwardation – Timeblind
14. Let’s Decay(Dev79 blend) – Shawty Lo ft DG Yola VS Timeblind
15. The Lie(LV Remix) – Zomby
16. Hold a Meditation(Teleseen Remix) – Chezidek
I usually suggest a healthy dose of classic dub on a sunday morning just to make sure you get put on the right path for the week- but if your getting tired of flipping sides or pulling for the next 7″ check Kevin Nutt’s  Sinner’s Cross Roads on WFMU. He calls it “Scratchy vanity 45s, pilfered field recordings, muddy off-the-radio sounds, homemade congregational tapes and vintage commercial gospel throw-downs; a little preachin’, a little salvation, a little audio tomfoolery.” It’s mostly old Gospel and RnB- and even if your a fervent non-beleiver it’s hard to deny the sheer power of this music.
Open a pop-up player of one oh his most recent shows here.
Storm Saulter is one of Jamaica’s most prominent young film-makers . With the panoptic gaze of interchangeable dancehall djs staring down from Digicell and Lime Tv advertisements, the hype cycle of radio and the frantic rotation of fashion and dance moves you couldn’t be blamed for not realizing that Kingston has a thriving if limited independent arts scene. The best and brightest all seem linked to Edna Manley – but Storm actually finished up film school in the states. After seeing his latest video for Tarrus Riley, and sitting in on a press screening of his full length Better Mus Come I sent over some questions about Jamaican politics, the challenges of independent film making and what drove Storm to leave behind the opportunity and infrastructure of Los Angeles.
T: You were born in Jamaica, but went to film school and worked in Los Angeles, given how limited the Jamaican film industry is, why return to the island to work?
S: It seems better to start a movement and build it from the beginning than to be just another person trying to make a statement in the same space as thousands of others trying to do the same thing.  We are defining new Caribbean cinema with the work we are doing now. Lots of young people (and a few older ones) in Jamaica and the region are seeing filmmaking as a real and exciting possibility for them right now. Better Mus’ Come is the beginning of a real movement.
T: The space you work in is shared by a bunch of other young filmmakers- can you tell me a bit about the space, who is there and how you all came to work together. What is the ethos and purpose of New Caribbean?
S: I share an office with my brother Nile Saulter, Joel Burke, and Michelle Serieux. We are all filmmakers and we collaborate on all our projects together in different capacities. Directing, Producing, Cinematography, Editing, Writing. Our office is at 10a West Kings House Road, Perry Henzell’s home and production office during the creation of “The Harder They Comeâ€. We share the property with a number of Directors and Producers. Ras Kassa, Ras Tingle, Jay Will. It is unquestionably the home of Jamaican filmmaking.
For more on New Caribbean Cinema go to www.newcaribbeancinema.com
T: Both the Tarrus video and Better Mus Come seem to deal with a similar type of historical amnesia- the way that systems of power attempt to limit certain types of information and stories in order to be able to continue propegating themselves. How do you see your work in creating new historical narratives or re-examining power?
S: Better Mus Come has had such an explosive impact in Jamaica because it is telling a story that we all know of, but we never knew the details. We would hear our parents speak of the 1970’s, The Cold War era, when Kissinger came to Jamaica and threatened Michael Manley and Jamaica with annihilation if we didn’t step away from Cuba. The beginning of this gang war tradition. There is a reason we were not taught this in school, so that events like the Tivoli massacre would seem like a new development that needed to be solved using brutal force by the Police and Military. But this is not new, it has only evolved from the same source. I guarantee you that many more of these ‘hidden’ stories will be told by this generation of filmmakers. And to be able to do so is empowering to the artists and the people.
READ THE REST OF THE INTERVIEW AFTER THE JUMP (more…)
While Carl Craig and Derrick May were preparing to headline the show at Manhattan’s very fancy District 36 night club last month – to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Planet E label, their fellow #313 legend/producer Stingray (real name Sherard Ingram) unleashed this monstrosity in the form of a new Urban Tribe mix on Fact Mag! We have been jamming to this for weeks, and it’s only getting fresher with each listen. Indeed this is one of the best in the long-running series (the King Midas Sound was my favorite last year.) In their words: this is serious, serious shit, and we recommend that you listen to it LOUD, ideally while driving round your city at night. Don’t have a car? Get one. Nuff said!
Taliesin isn’t quite this angular and shadowed in real life, but how awesome it is to see him all up in the Huffington Gas?! Underneath the headline of his piece are eight gray boxes, labeled, respectively: Amazing, Inspiring, Funny, Scary, Hot, Crazy, Important, and Weird. The website is horrible.
But if you can ignore the screaming FB-friendly/SEO-desperate/clicktrail-slutty/headache-inducing clutter around Tally’s words, they’re nice. An excerpt:
So, you graduate from a small liberal arts school with five-figure debt and want to work in the arts? Start drafting those coffee-shop and restaurant resumes to keep you afloat while you put in long thankless, underutilized hours as an unpaid intern.
I graduated from Bard College last May and the only people I know from my graduating class with full-time paid jobs in the arts are the wealthy few whose parents bankrolled summers of full time unpaid work for them while we were still in school. Let’s not even get into the fact that most internships are technically illegal. The point is that the largess of the late ’90s that gave my generation our fantasies of success and airs of entitlement is long gone, and we are collectively struggling to face the reality of down-scaling our dreams in the midst of a sour economy.
But it doesn’t have to be like this. . . [read more]
We’re halfway through the WFMU Fundraising Marathon! Two weeks out of the year when the commercial-free, fully-independent, listener-funded radio station interrupts its irregular schedule to reach out for support.
There are many ways to contribute, but the best is to donate during my show tonite, 7-8pm EST, when I’ll be giving out great muddy CD/book prizes to some of the lucky donors. For a gift of $75 you help out the best FM radio station in the world and receive a copy of my Mudd Up! ‘DJ Premium’, a data CD compilation with 320mp3s + cover artwork scans called After Tropical Comes Arid: “3 hours of high-quality Maghrebi songraft, with an emphasis on Morocco, shared between club-thump and mindbogglingly deep listening tunes. All non-interneted material, rips from DJ/Rupture’s cd/cassette/offline-gathered personal collection.” (I know this happens to be similar to one of the Kickstarter prizes, but there will be no overlap in tuneage so no worries for the altruistic. More Arabic music in the world is a good thing.)
The WFMU blog hosts an excerpted track from my DJ Premium.
And on next week’s show, Monday March 14th, get ready for special guests NGUZUNGUZU! Daniel and Asma are my favorite anthropomorphic canoe prow figureheads, and they’re coming straight from L.A. to discuss life, coyotes, DJing for MIA, building microutopias, bodies playing drum machines, and more, while sharing songs which are guaranteed to melt our brains, gently, with lots of love.
It confounds  me when people use the word ‘leak‘ when they really mean ‘release.’ While I like the ideas of studio engineer subterfuge and secret key-logging and usb stick replicating – mostly your media consumption is fairly engineered. ALL YOUR TASTE BELONG TO US/THEM.
We release the first glistening taste of Atropolis to the cloud world this week. His full length drops 4/26. If you missed it the first time- he’s on some next level movement. It’s been a quiet first quarter at DA- but we’re just mining the data and building the killer app.
Over on Alt1040, Geraldine Juárez asks me smart questions about the ideas behind Beyond Digital: Morocco. I do my best to answer. En espanol para que los güeros aprendan!
ALT1040 – ¿Es el espacio post-digital el extremo fÃsico del internet? ¿Como defines post-digital?
DJ Rupture: Es importante pensar en tiempo post-digital o post-internet. Y para mi este tiempo es lento lento… todo lo opuesto a un meme (#sheen, #egypt etc… ) El tiempo y/o la velocidad del internet, creo que es una velocidad/tiempo muy rápida, muy capitalista; no solamente es hoy sino ahora mismo, fast-food al máximo. Y yo estoy bien metido en el matrix, ya sabes…
Quizás lo post-digital tiene que ver con mirar al internet y el mundo digital desde una perspectiva de escasez y precariedad, donde no tienes el lujo de no pensar en su infraestructura.
I’m going into the wormhole. At least 120 of you are coming with me.
On Monday night at around 3AM, I received an email from our Barcelona point-man Carlos: I finally found out exactly who the guy is that sings that awesome Amazigh song that you played on Mudd Up! last night and is also on the Beyond Digital trailer thingy. It’s Cheb Adil El Miloudi (he says his name/big ups himself at the beginning of the song). I like his Dad-sweater!
Excited, I went over to the video, as nearly 1.5 million people had done before me:
Beyond Digital yielded its first fruits — my friend IDed an unknown singer on a semi-legit CD I purchased in Paris (containing no tracklist), and our favorite jam turned out to be that of a massively popular Amazigh vocalist – عادل الميلودي – with millions of Youtube pageviews and zero English-language biographical info online. CONTEXT! NAMING NAMES!
Even better: as I listened to his song, I learned that our Kickstarter project had just reached its funding goal! Which is a wonderful affirmation of not only Beyond Digital but the collaborative aspect of it that “crowdsourcing” (but we’re not a crowd, it’s more of an open community; the distinction is key) brings to the forefront. More generally, I feel like we’re all exploring this stuff together…via discussions on blogs and face-to-face recording sessions, via giving musicians props and excavating useful info, by being careful listeners and enthusiastic newcomers (like me) and in countless others ways — supporting this particular project among them.
As of this evening, more than a hundred people have contributed, ranging from $1 donations to some wise kids near Philly who pitched in $1500, a sum that secures them a DJ Rupture party there next month…
And it’s not too late to help out.
We’ve got 6 days left on the Kickstarter, so act fast if you would like to get mailed 3 extra-awesome CDs from Marrakesh ($25) or want Maga Bo and I to make a mixtape whose theme/topic/angle you pick ($750), or desire any of the other rewards — from an original photographic print by John Francis Peters to the have-Rupture-play-yr-party #swag #afrosheen option.
As we mention, the Kickstarter goal covers just a portion of our budget. We’re being super-efficient & frugal with our expenses, gearing up to do the maximum on a shoestring budget. Grant applications and other fundraising options are in process, as is the move to become a proper non-profit organization so we can continue Beyond Digital well beyond our June time in Marrakesh.
What I’m saying is: we can still use your support, we’ll put it to good use, and we would like to offer a huge thanks to everyone who has donated or helped spread the word thus far.
To close, here’s another Abil El Miloudi video. This one is more like the song from our Kickstarter video: Abil El Miloudi’s auto-tune vocals shimmer above bird songs (Amazigh pop loves rural signifiers and so do I) and the lovely, root-like (in appearance) acoustic guitar-type instrument called an ‘utar’ (my extremely limited Arabic/Tamazigh vocabulary gets transliterated into Spanish phonetic spelling, that’s how I learned from Abdel and Khalid in Barcelona, sorry!).
March tour, various projects, a lot of exciting sounds to soak up. Rupture is me, Nettle is five of us. The Ex is four people who perform with one brain-body and when it hits, as it always does, it’s incredible – a truly astonishing band to experience live. Malian singer Khaira Arby is Ali Farka Toure’s cousin but breathtaking in her own right. Nguzunguzu are so nice you’ll want to move to L.A. to hang out with them and Total Freedom and work on some of the practical implications of utopia. Morocco is where I go instead of SXSW.
