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Tomorrow I’ll be DJing at a benefit show along with DJ Small Change for an art project which two of my long time friends, including former collaborator Zack Shadetek have been working on. The show is a benefit to raise money for Swimming Cities trip down the Ganges river in India.
From the press release:
Taking a new waterway each year our projects create a vivid community of artists floating into towns to present an interactive environment which encompasses art, sculpture, music and performance. The uncommon talents of our members interact in an organic design process in a unique form of living art. Our previous projects include THE SWIMMING CITIES OF SWITCHBACK SEA on the Hudson River for Deitch Projects and THE SWIMMING CITIES OF SERENISSIMA across the Adriatic Sea for the Venice Biennale.
Basically they build these crazy ass art-boats and float them down various rivers while living on them and doing performances and freaking people out. There are a bunch of good artists, many who are also friends who will be having a silent auction of donated works to raise funding for the project. And there’s an open bar.
FRIDAY MARCH 05
56 Walker St, Tribeca
7pm-1am, $10 Door, Open Bar
DJs Small Change and Shadetek
Weird new video from Nguzunguzu feat. Leilah Weinraub for the track “Got U” which is off the brilliant free Nguzunguzu EP –still up for grabs, so get it in your life.
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I’m New Here, Gil Scott-Heron’s first album in sixteen yearswas released last week on XL Recordings. The album was recorded between 2007-09 and produced by Richard Russell. On the opening and closing tracks “On Coming From a Broken Home (Part 1 & Part 2) – Scott-Heron offers a tribute to the women of his family, not so much an explanation but a reflections, giving us a portrait of the women who raised him. Producer Richard Russell provided the perfect backdrop, a sampling the intro (just a few seconds on loop) to Kanye West’s “Flashing Light.”
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New video from Erykah Badu featuring Lil Wayne “Jump Up In The Air (Stay There)” from her upcoming album New Amerykah Part II: Return Of The Ankh – You already know this is a great song, but pay close attention to the lyrics and you’ll appreciate it even more; plenty memorable lines – (hip-hop) “church never felt this good before,” “my level, far from the devil/have some manners, and say hello to the angels,” “I am on the ceiling stuck like a fan full of dust, like a fist full of bucks…” etc. As for the video, it has stunning moments; Wayne clearing a cloud of purple smoke to “elevate” with Ms. Badu is one of those.
If you happen to be in the greater Boston- or have a British style pension for traveling great distances to hear electronic music and turn your brain to mush- then next week should be fairly pleasant. Together Boston is a freewheeling many venue, many genre festival whose schedule looks kind of like a regular week in Berlin, but an absolutely exceptional one in any North American city. Check the website for a ton of great lectures, workshops and parties… After the cut is my ideal schedule for the week with venues and times.
For a quick summary- Rupture on Monday, Kingdom on Tuesday, Untold and myself (at different venues unfortunately) on Wednesday, Sinden on Friday, and an all ages showcase that Ill be playing a special noisy turnablist set at on Saturday. Come say hello!
A real American (Brooklyn!) hero has left us. I dated a girl who had a brain crush on Dr. Zinn, so I was exposed to some articles, and People’s History’s significance cannot be understated.
“From the start, my teaching was infused with my own history. I would try to be fair to other points of view, but I wanted more than ‘objectivity’; I wanted students to leave my classes not just better informed, but more prepared to relinquish the safety of silence, more prepared to speak up, to act against injustice wherever they saw it. This, of course, was a recipe for trouble.” – from You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train
& here’s my request to johnnyvoodoo and all America voodoo doll makers, please make a doll of this man, David Brooks of the New York Times –
If you read his Op-Ed column last Thursday, I’m sure you will sympathize with me/my request. For a better understanding, Matt Taibbi clears the thickets by translating excerpts of Brooks’s essay so we can further appreciate his timely insight –
“This is not a natural disaster story. This is a poverty story. It’s a story about poorly constructed buildings, bad infrastructure and terrible public services. On Thursday, President Obama told the people of Haiti: “You will not be forsaken; you will not be forgotten.” If he is going to remain faithful to that vow then he is going to have to use this tragedy as an occasion to rethink our approach to global poverty. He’s going to have to acknowledge a few difficult truths.
The first of those truths is that we don’t know how to use aid to reduce poverty. Over the past few decades, the world has spent trillions of dollars to generate growth in the developing world. The countries that have not received much aid, like China, have seen tremendous growth and tremendous poverty reductions. The countries that have received aid, like Haiti, have not.
In the recent anthology “What Works in Development?,” a group of economists try to sort out what we’ve learned. The picture is grim. There are no policy levers that consistently correlate to increased growth. There is nearly zero correlation between how a developing economy does one decade and how it does the next. There is no consistently proven way to reduce corruption. Even improving governing institutions doesn’t seem to produce the expected results.
The chastened tone of these essays is captured by the economist Abhijit Banerjee: “It is not clear to us that the best way to get growth is to do growth policy of any form. Perhaps making growth happen is ultimately beyond our control.”
TRANSLATION: Don’t bother giving any money, it doesn’t do any good. And feeling guilty about not giving money doesn’t do anyone any good either. In fact, you’re probably helping by not doing anything.
I’m joining DJ Still Life tonight (10pm to midnight) on his weekly radio show Worldwide Smash on East Village Radio. At some point in the first hour of the program, I’ll be selecting new beats and bass from round the globe, might even drop a live set, so tune in - Worldwide Smash - weekly vetting of global bass music, Worldwide Smash delivers a double dose of raw beats: from instrumental hip-hop, dubstep and glitch through emerging forms of electronic music aimed…
After the program, we’re off to Que Bajo?! @ Santos Party House with international playboys Geko Jones & Uproot Andy for some serious bashment!
So. By now we should all know that MLK is beautiful and Auto-Tune is culturally complicated. A lot can be said about this video, from the elemental power of oratory to the ways in which technology can amplify or disperse political potential to the notion that rewiring history is an act aimed at future change.
But what keeps running through my head is a paraphrase from Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. here: I’m trying to tell America about a dream that I had.
Lucky Dragons – Mirror Friends
Mosholu Park – Interlude (At The Fire)
Matt Shadetek – Shield Dub
Vybz Kartel – Yuh Love
Terror Danjah – Splash
Shlohmo – Hot Boxing The Cockpit
Muhsinah – Lose My Fuse
2/5 BZ – Etnik Market, Etnik Paranoia
CIAfrica/Manusa – Dans Mon Pays
Movado – Gyal Bend Ova
Big Boi – Fo Yo Sorrows
Goro Yamaguchi – The Cranes Crashing In Their Nests
Friend – Doki
This guy Beniton is a Brooklyn artist I’m digging at the moment. You might have heard me playing his Recession joint (YouTube below). Here’s a legit free download of his new single ‘Time to Get Paid’, Biggie sampling BK bashment hype. He’s going in hard with the haircuts as well, as you can see.
John Lupo Avanti is the brilliant artist behind the cover for Chief Boima’s African By The Bay EP (and I know folks have been praising and asking about the cover.) He is a painter, illustrator, and creator of the intriguing and grim Monster Myths comics. Check his site, get familiar with his work, and if you’re into spending money, show some class & buy some.
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