HBM-001: St. Google Prayer Candles (available exclusively at Change the Mood, Aug 17th @ Glasslands NYC)


HBM-002: Dubious Prey Tanks (available now at the DA webshop)

Hello Bad Mind is a new object oriented project studio I opened to bring physical manifestations of my work into the world.

I’m sick of the screen. We all are. Bruce Sterling’s latest forecast imagines 2031 when, “No one can afford to track the ageing data, archive it or save it. There is little desire to try. New schemes have disrupted the Internet; they are vaster, faster, friendlier, more interesting.” The attention economy simply doesn’t give a fuck about your content. On to the next one is the rallying cry of a consumptive vortex.

Your movie, your music, your collection of hentai kitten videos. It’s all the same, and soon to be outdated and inaccessible thanks to changing protocols, proprietary systems and creeping forced incompatibility. I like the intimacy of digital space, but my experience with physical phenomenon and organic decay holds faster in my mind. Hello Bad Mind is my next step towards creating the economies I want to support and engaging new networks of production and distribution.

For more info on both… (more…)

you’s got to be slick…–> CHANGE THE MOOD! Friday August 17th @ Glasslands BKLYN.

Dutty Artz presents CHANGE THE MOOD! a fundraiser party for Beyond The Block.
Fri. August 17th at Glasslands, 289 Kent Ave., Brooklyn. 11pm. $10

Hosted by Pupa Bajah and Jasmin Cruz
NYC debut of Chants (live from Madison, WI)

DJ Ushka vs. a Rhino
Chief Boima vs. a Robot
DJ Rupture vs. an Elephant
Taliesin vs. a Vampire
Geko Jones vs. a Chicken-Stealing Fox
Atropolis vs. the Euro

visuals by Rainstick | Rupture’s birthday | silent auction fundraiser

RSVP here on Facebook

[co-written with DJ Ripley]

It should be no surprise to anyone reading this blog that for those like the two of us (Ripley & bent) the “personal is political” mantra saturates our lives on and off the dancefloor. We are constantly thinking, talking, grinding, mixing and dubbing our way through the politics of music and dance in the 21st century. From the infamous “boobahton” Facebook debate of 2010 to exciting workshops we did at the Allied Media Conference this year, we question our own approaches and those of others to beats and booty-bouncing. It’s not about tearing anyone down or harshing a mellow, but quite simply about having the best parties and music culture possible.

We stand firmly in the camp of those who can both think critically and throw slamming dance parties at the same time (to quote Ripley). Or, in other words, we are those seeking, building, imagining “a utopia where everyone in the world considers the politics of their booty shaking” as Emynd so succinctly put it in this recent twitter mishmash convo. Consider it a snippet from a continuous discussion played out backward and forward through time online, in person, on the dancefloor and via mixtapes — one which defies easy conclusions. [i couldn’t get the whole thing to embed, so click the link!]

 

[View the story “Politics of booty shaking #1” on Storify]

Ripley ended the story with Emynd’s response because it summed up one of the motivating factors behind our and many folks’ involvement in music, but that’s only one way the conversation could have gone. Some of the points raised early on by Uncle Jesse connect to later arguments in the thread — he talks about “us” and “them” in the music, and suggest there are specific concerns about representation and race that matter, even painfully, to him as well as others. Jubilee is suspicious of the whole process of publicly engaging with these tricky questions in a medium like Twitter. This should remind us that many times these conversations may happen face to face — just because we don’t see them in the media doesn’t mean folks aren’t talking.

But we think there are good reasons to speak up as well and continue the discussion. On Twitter or other public (or privately-owned but sorta-public-acting) sites like Facebook, there are a lot more readers than there are speakers. And for a lot of people learning about scenes, or choosing where to get involved, the kinds of conversations that are visible are what shape who chooses to get involved. So alongside the possibility of sharing with the people in the debate or discussion, there is everything you communicate to the lurkers, to the readers, to the new faces, or those who have been silent up until now.

Since bent and Ripley, like so many others are “committed to resisting negative forces such as racism, misogyny, and homophobia in social spaces like dances, clubs, and bars” one way of doing that is to enter into the public debate and try to change its terms, to carve out a space for clearer language about what we’re really interested in — so many people get hung up on fake conflicts like thinking vs. dancing, or smart vs. fun/raw/sexy. But the existence of so many slamming parties and djs and producers and rappers who do it ALL (props to iBomba, Azucar, Maracuyeah!, Anthology of Booty, Cupcake Collective, Hey Queen, Precolumbian, Rizzla, D’hana, Le1f, Venus X, Chief Boima, and other Dutty Artz folks to name just a few) proves them wrong.

And another side effect of speaking out is that then people who are onto the same stuff can see you — for every grumpy naysayer in public on Twitter or YouTube comments there are ten emails, txts, DMs, or even just silent nods plus a bit more inspiration to carry on in the beautiful struggle!

Yesterday NPR’s flagship news program, All Things Considered, aired a piece on my Sufi Plug Ins project! One minute it’s drivel from Mitt Romney’s camp, the next my crew is talking about weird synthesizers and love song maqams.

Here’s the audio & accompanying article: Sufi Plug Ins on All Things Considered.

People keep asking me if I plan to sell SPIs. The answer is no. They’re free, always will be, and we’re gonna build more – VST versions are the next priority. In order to make the Sufi Plug Ins exactly as they needed to be, the whole thing was self-funded (I can always eat less) & the entire team – Bill & I here in New York, Rosten in LA, and Maggie & Juan in Madrid – volunteered their formidable skills.

If you’d like to support, there is a donation page, there are nice t-shirts, and artist prints in an edition of 6. VST wizards wanted, too. Get in touch with any questions.

If this is a bit confusing, check the demonstration video or read my original post.

SUFI PLUG INS: demo video from Beyond Digital on Vimeo.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGm9o37BNjM[/youtube]

Right now a lot of people are throwing the word ‘trap’ around to describe the hiphop coming out of Atlanta and the south. The dark bass heavy music pioneered by producers like Lex Luger, Southside and Sunny Digital has been dominant in the hiphop world for a while but has been catching on among the people who are fleeing Dubstep’s sinking ship of un-coolness. In the midst of this it’s worth thinking about where the term came from: drug dealing. I just watched “Snow On The Bluff” last night on Netflix streaming and it does for drug dealing and robbing dealers what Blair Witch did for hunting for witches in the woods. Gritty, low fi handheld camera work follows around anti-hero Curtis Snow as he robs dealers, goes in and out of jail and tries to take care of his toddler son. It’s a crazy look at daily life in the streets of Atlanta and at times is really hard to watch. There are a lot of moments where you are left thinking that what you are watching is real or thinly veiled reality. These people are not actors and the star is a self proclaimed stick up kid and drug dealer. That’s his real son in the movie.  Unlike some of these gangster movies where they spend 80 minutes glamorizing that life and then 10 minutes moralizing at the end when the hero gets killed this is pretty much raw from start to finish.  There’s not a lot of happy shit in this movie and for that it seems like a more realistic portrayal of this life than we usually see.  If you’re interested in a look at the dark side of the trap mythology that everyone is selling you should check this out.

snow on the bluff poster