I’ve been making music in various underground music scenes for the past ten years now. I’ve enjoyed it a lot. Generally you find great people in underground music scenes, people with a lot of passion and dedication who truly love music. When people are able to strike a balance between their underground aesthetic and being organized, special stuff can happen. But there are many times when people can’t strike that balance. One of the ideas that I’ve run into again and again in this world is the idea of ‘doing it for the scene’. On one level this is a very respectable idea: doing something not out of self interest, but to benefit the larger musical community. The problem I’ve encountered with this is that taken too far this can seriously undermine one’s ability to continue to function.
For example, let’s say hypothetically you are a small record distributor. You do it because you believe in the music, you want to support emerging artists and labels and you don’t care about money. You set up shop, take product on consignment from any unknown player with a willingness to press their material and start doing business. Consignment is when you take product before paying for it, warehouse it and pay when it sells. You continue to operate on this basis but because you have so many unheard of records released by labels with no business model or capability to promote them, sales are slow. Eventually, basic costs start to add up. The rent on your office is due every month. The bill for your shipping provider is rising. Eventually there comes a time when you have backed yourself into a corner. Nothing is selling and while you were hoping for an improvement you passed the point of no return. The shipping company has cut off your access to shipping because your owed bill is so high. Your landlord is initiating eviction proceedings against your office where you warehouse your product.
Finish reading this post at my new blog at mattshadetek.com
Voicemail come first on this Style and Swagga medley.
From Dancehall.Mobi:
‘Oneil Edwards, one-third of the popular dancehall group, Voicemail, was reportedly shot multiple times at the gate to his house in Duhaney Park, Kingston, early this morning, and is now undergoing critical surgery at the Kingston Public Hospital. Unconfirmed reports indicate that robbery was the motive, and that he was shot at least once in the head.’
I’ve been playing a lot of Voicemail tunes lately, especially the Style and Swagga version above and I would like all of them to continue making their great music.
Badmen of Jamaica, I would humbly request that you refrain from shooting any more artists, producers, djs or anyone else. If you need to shoot someone please shoot each other and leave everyone else out of it. Thanks.
Normally I get a lot of stupid shit in the form of press releases but today I actually got one with something cool in it. Publicists, just because I’m blogging about something I got in a release doesn’t mean you should send more! I hate them! What does this say about how we should all be promoting our music? I don’t know.
Anyway, Pursuit Grooves is a female producer/singer/rapper from BK who I’ve never heard of but has a new record out on dubstep label Tectonic although it’s not dubstep. I like what I’ve heard. Also, dubstep labels take note: you need more female energy. You are all turning (have turned) your genre into a big macho dick grabbing testosterone fest and it’s turning me off. As rising dancehall artist Professor says in one of my recent favorite songs:
“Nuff Bwaaaaaay / a gwan like dem nuh wan roll wit de gyal dem… Some bwaaaaay would rather roll out wit one bagga man fren… my yout it no look good.” – Professor, Roll With The Gal Dem
This Friday I will be swimming the Oceans of Blood with former Change Agent homies Orien McNeill and Zack Shadetek on a fundraiser for their crazy boat project. Open bar and a fake blood slip and slide and me djing from 11-1AM What more do you want, really?
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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
BD1982 is at the top of my criminally slept on list. Representing the Seclusiasis camp from Tokyo, where he moved from NYC a few years ago, dudes managed to get in with Goth-Trad and the infamous Back to Chill crew while simultaneously cooking up some of my absolute favorite tracks. He’s got a new 12″ that is dripping Xenon.
A. side is Dutty family 77Klash on the gunman tip over the crushing Water Faucet Riddim. The flip is the skittering Space Boots with remixes from some of the the biggest up and comers on the scene the U.K’s Slugabed and Montreal’s Hovatron. It’s hard to describe what happened in Vancouver last month when I dropped the Slugabed mix (Dev79 call it “hyper color style”) since the combination of howling low end fiends and gorgeous writhing Canadians basically led to sensory overload and total black out. If this is the sort of thing your interested in….cop the rest of the tracks @ BeatportBleepJuno DownloadiTunes
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Tracklist:
Colleen- The Happy Sea
8 Ball and MJG- Relax and Take Notes
Sukh Knight – Diesel Not Petrol
Raffertie – AntiSocial (B. Rich Remix)
Lexie Lee- Warlord’s Daughter (Paceface and Sticky Rmx)
Joker- Purple City
Trina Ft. Lil Wayne- Dont Trip (Lunice Lazer Rmx)
Fused Forces- Cock Back and Blast
Fused Forces- Footsteps
LionDub and Shadetek Ft. Jahdan- General (Marcus Visionary Rmx)
Timbaland- Pony Inst.
Cardopusher- Lacra
Salem – Trapdoor
This is a dubsteppy thing- but keeps things fresh and colorful with plenty of pressure.
I’m back on the blogging horse/elephant- new mixes and an exclusive interview with Lisbon’s Octa Push come soon!
This episode of “Gangland” is a crazy documentary about gangs in the Third Ward of New Orleans which get’s even crazier when Katrina hits. It’s definitely pretty sensational but also a compelling and candid portrait of a place and a group of people on the edges of society in a dark moment. It’s 45 minutes, stream it when you’ve got some time.
For those of us who spent a lot of time in the internets Google (the octopus inside) is an interesting subject. Many of us suspect there are a lot of secrets to be found out.
Terius Nash aka The Dream in the studio. This guy is a BEAST. His past two albums are crazy, pretty much all I’ve been listening to for a while. The fact that he’s making shit this fast should just make everyone else quake in fear. He deserves his hype. Shouts to Kingdom via Twitter for the link. I’m on there too. Tweet tweet tweet.
Large Hangars and Fuel Storage/Tonopah Test Range, NV/Distance ~18 miles/10:44 am by Trevor Paglen
Mark Danner is one of the good journalists. His work navigates nearly impenetrable messes of deceit and deception like the 2000 Florida vote recount, the nefarious path to the American war in Afghanistan and Iraq, U.S. Military intervention in Reagen era El Salvador… the list goes on- but I think when you have Susan Sontag call you “one of our best, most ambitious narrative journalists” you’ve pretty much fulfilled your journalistic duty to the world.
One of my biggest fears during the election was that once/if Obama was elected there would be a psychic closure on the Bush years. In a more utilitarian sense, I am afraid that people are so excited about entering a “new era” that they forget that there is a lot of unfinished business from the last 8 years that needs to be sorted out. Danner’s latest piece, “US Torture: Voices From the Black Sites,” which appeared in the new issue of the New York Review of Books on Monday, is doing some of the heavy lifting. It contains detailed accounts of interrogations of “highvalue detainees” at secret “black site” prisons. An excerpt from the piece – about a tenth of it – appeared on the OpEd page of Sunday’s New York Times. It’s a potent reminder that the clean up process has just begun.
Wayne says PDFs are the new MP3s- so here is a PDF of the whole article as it appeared in the New York Review of Books. This is painful to read, and while for some it might be confirming what they thought they already knew- there’s something deeply moving about reading first hand accounts of the abuse against “our enemies.”
I have been enjoying “Da Game Been Good To Me” instrumental for a little while. The song/single is great, but the instrumental by itself is also a superb, sweet country tune.
Those of you who read these pages no that I am not a fan of Justice’s cock rock techno. This article accompanied by photo evidence (above) catching Justice playing “live” with an un-plugged MIDI controller is just too funny to pass up. As someone who has done real live electronic music back in my Team Shadetek days I know how difficult this is to do and do well, so on one level I’m sympathetic, on the other level, you shouldn’t lie to your fans guys. I stopped doing live electronics when my music took a turn towards hiphop, dancehall and grime and I didn’t think that any of the live improvisation I would do would improve the music. Since then my show has been me DJing tracks from a laptop, sometimes with effects. I play lots of un-released new dubs of mine that no one else has and make up my set list as I go along. I figure that’s worth the price of admission. You get to hear my music, mixed and selected by me and get a peek into my present sound, IE the future since it always takes so long to get records or CDs out. I have a new project (more on that soon) that might be appropriate to a live format and so am I actually considering going into loop djing mode (breaking down the tracks into parts and re-constructing live) for that, probably using ableton live, but we’ll see. However, you will NEVER see me on stage with an un-plugged MIDI controller making faces and pretending to do things that I’m not. Thanks to Dan @ Dubspot for the link.
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