[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4WlXGuDIY1c&feature=related[/youtube]
Today I am renting two cars and we are driving ten+ hours into and over the atlas mountains to a desert filled with palm oasis because Hassan Wargui is a genius.#getfamiliar
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5p0h6jM66U8[/youtube]

So in the last 48 hours: news was finally disseminated about Rupture, Brent Arnold and Shadetek’s collabo EP with Kalup Linzy and James Franco. I’ve had at least 36 cups of sweet Chinese gunpowder and mint tea at cafes across Casablanca. AND according to at least one rubric the Huffington Post has overtaken the New York Time’s in online traffic. BUT THE MORE THINGS CHANGE, THE MORE THEY STAY THE SAME. So tonight we are going in on Sweat Lodge tradition once again at The Cove. The party celebrates the release of our fresh-as-hell new line of gear with Emeka Alams and his killer designed Tee’s and Hats will be waiting for you.

cross-posted at Mudd Up!

beyonddigital1

[M’hamed Tijdity at Le Comptoir Marocain de Distribution de Disques, photo by John Francis Peters for The Fader]

Head over to The Fader to check out the first of my weekly Morocco updates for the month of June, accompanied by photos from John Francis Peters and, of course, music.

excerpt 1:

Forget Bogart. Casablanca is an utterly modern city, North Africa’s largest, with traffic-choked roadways and upscale neighborhoods and swaths of shantytowns whose residents have satellite dishes but no running water. While most tourists skip Casa to spend their dirhams in more scenic towns, the gritty magnet metropolis pulls in folks from all over the country looking for work, and powers Morocco’s music and art scenes. I’m here for a month with FADER photo editor John Francis Peters and an international crew of six others. Music brought us. . .

excerpt 2:

This next tune is a song halfway between traditional Berber songs from rural Morocco—popularized in the 1970s by Le Comptoir’s main artist, Mohammed Rouicha—and our Auto-Tuned, pixelated tomorrow. It’s by Adil El Miloudi. Adil performs across Europe and tells me that this summer he’ll be making appearances in to Florida and Boston, for the first time. His breakthrough song, “Nothing Nothing”, has well over a million YouTube views. Adil lives in Kenitra and performs regularly at a Tangier nightclub called the Morocco Palace (free entrance but they gouge you on shisha and drink prices).

The Palace has a light-up disco dance floor and really good subwoofers. Everything else is covered in intricate Islamic pattern woodcarvings, except the enormous flatscreen TV right above the stage, which is set to a music video channel and is never, ever turned off, even when live bands are performing underneath it. Adil rolls around town with a phalanx of young guys whose primary duty seems to be handing him various cellphones at the appropriate moment. I know this because, after calling several of those phones, I found myself, along with Maga Bo, at Adil’s house at four in the morning a month ago. “This is Tom,” he said, pointing at his manager. “And this is Jerry,” he said, pointing at his cat.

Adil El Miloudi, “Track 2” by The FADER

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Sometimes you have to give a magazine a bunch of your products to give away for them to write about you. And sometimes those products are all the dopest things you didn’t know were missing in your life. Hit up XLR8R to enter for a chance to win gear from our recent collabo with Emeka Alams, a Dubbel Dutch white label 12″ and a copy of Atropolis’ self-titled debut on CD.

If you missed it, I’m in deep Africa with Maggie, Juan, Carolyn and Bo- Jace is reporting forward from somewhere cloudy. Yesterday I went to the most beautiful record store I have ever seen. 2$ 7″s.
Jil Jilala – Malgalbi Dada Mey
[audio: http://nyc.duttyartz.com/mp3s/Jil_Jilala-Malgalbi_dada_mey.mp3]

Radio from last Monday, Memorial Day in the States. Block by block, we make a wall. Take the wall to a hole, push it over, use the wall as a bridge to get to the other side. The other side of what? If you turn it up loud enough, we don’t have to listen.

you can subscribe to the Mudd Up! podcast for downloadable versions, issued a week after FM broadcast: , Mudd Up! RSS. Also useful: WFMU’s free iPhone app. We also have a version for Android (search for “WFMU” in the marketplace).

tracklist:

(more…)

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/22968445[/vimeo]

I’ve been traveling to Colombia at regular intervals to present a new sound fusing folkloric Afro-Colombian rhythms with modern day electronic music production techniques that harmonize into a synthetic club sound rooted in tradition. Via the internet, the birthplace of Cumbia has become a source of inspiration to a number producers worldwide. Recently, we invited some of the top names in the scene to a bandcamp in Colombia and a filmmaker to document it.  We want to provide an insider view of the impact this music is having on the local scene and how a small network of globally minded producers are defying conventional standards of Latin club music.

We have a couple weeks to get this production costs for completing this project funded. To hear more about how you can help please visit http://www.indiegogo.com/Pico-de-Gallos