But besides what’s keeping me all polyriddimic on the escalator out into time square every day- there has been some heavy drops in the last couple weeks of dope new free music. I’ve been trying to figure out for a long time just how free music works on the internet. Call yourself a net label and you risk failing b4 you even start. Give away free mp3s of pay to own releases that almost no one buys and suddenly you are a legit record label. Along with his dope fake NY-Times review Tracky Birthday also released a manifesto of sorts about net labels and free music… choice quote “Net Labels are Like Hookers, Only Cheaper.”
Body High just dropped a killer set of free edits which u should grab ASAP I screwed down the Game Over edit at Sweatlodge and it was NEXT.
The other freelease that I’m feeling comes from Austin (h/t to Wayne for the headsup) LOTIC MURDERSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS listen 4 urself
Commandeering the kitchen at Subsuelo/Gnawledge HQ in LA (thanks G-Notes!) ( foto x Farah Sosa)
8 tomatoes
1 Roasted Red Bell Pepper
1 Roasted Green Bell Pepper
15 Kalamato Olives
1 Tsp Italian Herb Tomato Paste
3-4 Sprigs Thyme
3 Garlic Cloves
2 Olive Oil Drizzles
6 Tilapia
Cilantro
Lime
I invited some friends to eat in exchange for a bread-breaking data swap. I’m definitely not on a culinary level with my dude DJ Rajah over at SoulCocina but this is really what meetings should be like. Exchanging in currencies that don’t depend as directly on the dollar really has an intrinsic value in making people connect. It leads to better less guarded conversation and reminds us that if we work together, there’s always more to eat on the table. Here’s my TOP 5 Things I won in the West Coast Data Swap
First up, G-Notes, the guitarist and beatsmith behind the hybrid flamenco act Granada Doaba and all around Gnawledge famalam hit me with a few remixes and edits
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and this touch up of Gotye’s anti-love jam caught me off guard…
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Now my homie, Santero in the Bay Area has been holding me down for a few years now. I was happy to crash at his this time around and spend some time getting to know what he’s been up to. I learned he has been working with our homie Boogat up in Montreal.. Notice how the cover art is Boogat with the fam all around at a BBQ or somn… home cooking how we do !
(Incidentally, since that convo I’ve been rocking Dos Cervesas (prod by Poirier) off the PURA VIDA EP like its my job)
Santero also just put out a brand new mixtape a couple days ago for Los Rakas’ homegirl FAVI called Flor de Azahar (orange blossom – really the best smelling flower in the world for my money)
Santero also put me on to this Goapelle/Los Rakas Remix I had admittedly been sleeping on. It was featured on Fader and Rcrd Lbl months ago. Be sure to check them out on November 19th with me and Dre Skull at SOBs
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Fellow native new yorker (Bronx stand up!) and expert cutter-through-of-smoke-mirrors Noam Chomsky gave this talk in April 2011 while the currently flourishing #occupy movements were just a gnawing sense of horrific injustice in the occupiers bellies.
In it he breaks down such popular topics as:
1) Why economic power = political power
2) How financial regulations were systematically demolished in this country to benefit the 1% ending a ‘golden era’ of egalitarian prosperity
3) How Obama was bought by Wall Street and how he repaid them
He forgot his notes at the hotel and so it’s light on statistics and heaaaavy on truthy goodness. Need to explain to your friends why the Occupy Wall St movement matters at your next cocktail party? Start here.
Big shout out to PDX Justice for filming and posting this on Vimeo, along with The Collins Distinguished Speaker Series and the Department of English of the University of Oregon at Eugene for holding the event. If I get a free hour I’d like to rip the audio for this and encode it as a podcast. If anyone else is motivated to do it first we’ll happily host and promote it here. The fact that this thing is so relevant to the current conversation and only had 636 views when I found it is terrible.
A couple years ago our friend Filastine was in town and I remember not being able to join him on some crazy boat ride on a trash barge that had been re-purposed as an art installation. There was talk of some armada of these vessels. Like minded people are bringing you a really fun event tomorrow.
Last weekend the naval gangs of New York assembled to Battle for Mau Mau Island (See photos here). Come see the fallen soldiers, harvested booty, and glorious victors at a new two-story space in Bed-Stuy.Mau Mau gangs, gladiator raft jousting, cocktail catacombs, clothing optional watergun fight, underground casino & film screenings of eerily beautiful movies set on the water, slide show and videos of the battle, and an awards presentation for the victors. Wet & wild all night long.
Saturday, July 30, 9:30- late80 Vernon Ave, between Marcy & Tompkins
(G train to Myrtle/Willoughby 1 block away; or J,M,Z to Myrtle)
Ice cold beer and watermelon vodka open bar 9:30-10:30
$5 for gangs in matching costumes, Mau Mau vets, or before 11pm, $10 otherwise; 21+
All proceeds go directly to the Swimming Cities India project. www.weareswimmingcities.org
In celebration of that and the amazing couple weeks that I’ve just had playing Central Park Summer Stage with Dutty Artz sistren Rita Indiana and Colombia’s Choquibtown, Lincoln Center’s Midsummer Night’s Swing with Lisandro Mesa and Que Bajo?! with Bogota’s El Freaky Crew I’m feeling like sharing is caring.
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NPR premiered this track a few days ago but here it is for download to the world. Built with my long time homie DJ Reaganomics this is a summer banger you can finish out the year with. I should note that I have been looking for a track ID on the vocalist so anyone that can give me a hard confirmation on any of the leads I have its appreciated.
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
Que Bajo?! returns to NYC after touring Miami, Medellin, Barranquilla, Bogota, Cali, and SXSW… come hear exclusive new remixes from myself, Uproot Andy, DJ Orion, Toy Selectah, Isa GT and more and check out our guest DJ’s Venus X of the Ghe20 Gothik Party who just rocked the shit out of the fader fort at SXSW and Panchitron from the Peligrosa All Stars crew down in Texas. Pancho’s mixtape stayed in heavy rotation last month for Que Bajo?! fans
Thursday March 31
Le Poisson Rouge
158 Bleeker St
11pm -$10
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]
It’s the return of the intergalactic gauchitos better known as Uproot Andy and Geko Jones. After a brief winter recess moon-walking across the globe and cooking up hotter than habanero remixes the Que Bajo?! party is back like a zombie Danny Trejo
On January 27th we welcome the Dutch-Dominican wonderkid DJ Munchi all the way from Rotterdam, Netherlands. Moombahton stylee from one of the scenes top notch DJ’s.
We have a couple of special surprises to announce as we get closer to the date but I wanna go ahead and introduce VJ Miixxy who will be controlling visuals for the evening.
So there’s another entry to add to the post-Screw canon: Expressway Yo-Yo Dietin. And, despite his wildly different sound (which sets him apart from the more accessible witch-house/drag scene and closer to the toxic sound of Houston’s small but sturdy noise scene), the methodology isn’t the wildest departure from DJ Screw’s lazy foray into the avant-garde. I may be wrong here but, advanced digital fuckery and ripped rap vocals aside, the thread that holds Expressway Yo-Yo Dietin’s Bubblethug together seems to be a simple delay. It actually sounds quite a bit like the default setting on Ableton’s Simple Delay effect, a nifty trick that gives rhythmic ‘umph’ to a lot of the weird excursions into various noise and drone territories that you’ll find on the album. So the results end up sounding like a Boredoms, Screw, Vibracathedral Orchestra and Sunroof! fan ingesting something nasty with 12 other people in an empty building of the warehouse district of your nearest industrial graveyard. The following track is my personal favorite, a dark dirge with nearly intelligible vocals that gains power from the track sequencing when listened to as part of the album’s messy whole.
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I’m leaving America next Sunday. There’s nothing left for me here, and I’m not coming back. At least, not for a year. I’m not quite ready to leave, but I’m contractually obliged to- so this Sunday I’ll fly from JFK on a convoluted itinerary to Buenos Aires. I found out in the spring that I had received a Watson Fellowship. Wayne and Jace deserve credit as much as I do- they helped me craft my proposal. And there was some tactical chaos magic that nudged my chances just enough to matter.
So I’ll be gone for twelve months starting this august- attempting a sort of grand tour. Five months in S. America. A month in Jamaica. Six Months in Africa. Or something like that. So far only the first three months are planned. I’ll be in Argentina for a month, then Brazil for two. There’s a project behind all of this- a nebulous (now) attempt of getting a grasp of what it is that we (Dutty Artz) are engaged in from a broader prospective then I’ve previously had access to.
I’m looking for sustainable/scalable business models, new productions techniques, pirate economies, massive sound-systems, broken_links, and a bevy of things that I’m only faintly grasping at right now.
I’m taking a fancy camera and some HD recording devices and there are notions of collecting my documentation outside of the internet- creating a kind of visual/taxtual accompaniment to the Global Ghettotek fascination that I’ve been continually inoculated against but cant seem to quit. The whole project will be as open source as possible. I have no fucking idea what I’m doing, and need a lot of help. But there is powerful positive energy in the universe and I have my stars aligned and my crystals vibrating at 60 HZ just like the man at the botanica told me to do.
My email is TallyBower AAAATTTTTT GGGGMMMAAAAIILLL so if u have any suggestions, any friends anywhere along the way, beef to pick with the colonial underpinnings your reading in my mission, a favor to ask, food to try, places to surf, or anything that I need to know, or that you want to do for me, or that I can do for you. please just let me know.
It’s nearly impossible to leave New York- there’s too many people that I love, and projects that I care about- but nows as good a time as ever to get away.
Check 1:40 for the real moment(s) of clarity here.
Dutty Artz is a book club. You might have thought we were a record label- given that we’re releasing tracks every month and constantly feeding the internet with audio files- but it goes a lot deeper then that. If you want to be part of the club, you should read Octavia Butler’s Parable of The Sower. If you’re not in the Northern Hemisphere- you might want to wait until Summer, caus this one is dark, and if read before bed, almost guaranteed to induce the vivid nightmares that lodge in your psyche for days before revealing themselves as dreams and not memories.
We’re scrambling just like everyone else right now- trying to figure out what it means to be a record label in an era where recorded digital media has no value- and the only people making money are slicing off pounds of flesh to get branded. You’ll see us move in that direction too. It’s inevitable. Hopefully we can do it without losing too much respect. Until then you can find me steady dreaming of new distribution paradigms as we pass each other printed relics.
My new solo instrumental album Flowers is out! YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!
It took me a while to get this out, longer than I’d like considering it’s on my own label but now it’s out and it feels GOOD! I love completing projects. But it’s not done! Now I have to actually sell some copies! If you or your grandma or your friends on the internet would like to support the Dutty Artz movement and contribute to the cause of me buying diapers, catfood and continuing my lavish lifestyle for me and my young family that would be great! There are many places to buy it. Here is a list:
BUY MATT SHADETEK – FLOWERS:
Boomkat:
This is probably a good option if you want FLAC or any of those non-mp3 formats.
If you buy here please write me a lavish review and give me five stars! I deserve it! If you’re browsing the store from your phone or whatever I am featured in front of the Electronic category in the USA store.
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!
