Join us at Vaudeville Park, 26 Bushwick Avenue, Brooklyn, on Saturday January 28th 9pm-late… we’ll play good music and drink delicious drinks. Dutty hombre Taliesin will be there. Long time internet/blog friend Dave Quam, now producing music for Kingdom’s Fade To Mind label as Massacooramaan will also DJ.
I started the Mudd Up Book Clubb as a celebration of books, readers, libraries, IRL meetups, and all the hot people who love slow media. But the biggest thanks of all goes to the writers themselves. Keep us burning! We see you and salute your work. Furthering that end, here is a gift straight from my muddy heart –
Hand-drawn portraits of all the authors we’ve read so far by artist Rocio Rodriguez Salceda, fitted into digitals for maximum spreadability. Each drawing measures 600 x 800 pixels — formatted for Kindle screensavers, but they work well in a variety of situations: say, an iPhone background, a regular screensaver, or a razor & octopus ink tattoo.
The Embassy is the name of my weekly WFMU radio show. We broadcast at 91.1 FM in New York and 90.1 in the Hudson Valley, and of course we on the internets. You can stream last night’s show and check here for the playlist.
My girl Juliana Huxtable LaDosha was one of the first people to hold it down for me when I started DJing on the east coast. Pure Genius. Check the rest of her Bcalla looks cover shoot.
Our friend Daniel Perlin (a.k.a. N-Ron, but you’ll soon know him as Merlin) is throwing a crazy end of year houseparty at a space in downtown Brooklyn – Please join us in celebrating the amazing year that was 2011 and the arrival of 2012! Help us push away the spirit of apocalypse… He’s gone and invited the incredibleRipley, yrs truly, and some special guests. MORE details after Saul Williams, c. the year two thousand:
Saul Williams – Penny For A Thought
2012
APOCALYPSE LATER
DECEMBER 31, 10 PM
170 TILLARY ST. BKLYN
LOADING DOCK
Join Hosts dp, kwonix, Ezio and Danielle in celebrating the time-shift from 2011 to the year 2012
with DJ’s Merlin, Ripley, Lamin Fofana, + Special Guests.
1 night only, we are taking over The Loading Dock at 170 Tillary Street. This is a sacred space, to be treated with a proper party! To scare away the oncoming doom, we have everything, well, almost everything we need:
MUSIC- Be prepared to dance. Sounds from everywhere to make you move. LIGHTS- The most fabulous light system ever. It moves to the beat. It has switches for on and off! FOG- Yes. Fog. Even Kurtz could hide in our fog! DRINK- We have some. Bring more! BUBBLE MACHINE- 2012 in with style. Bubble style. HOT TUB- What more do we have to say. We have a brand spankin new hot tub in the and indoor/outdoor space. Never leave the boat. But you should know how to swim.
What we need: YOU! and a guest.
Please RSVP. We want to make sure we have all the necessary powers in order for an amazing time.
Low Income Tomorrowland, a project studio run by artist & musician Jace Clayton (DJ /rupture) seeks a bright and resourceful studio assistant to work closely with Clayton on a number of installation, performance, and software-based art projects for 2012.
For more info, check out the New York Foundation for the Arts listing.
In our world, “art project” is a code name for “crazy shit.” 2012 gonna be fun.
The first show in Mudd Up Radio’s new Wednesday night time slot is now streaming! SOAP BLEACH SOFTENERS. Gentle beginnings. New music from Cauto, Vladislav Delay, Ghanain gospel, Erothug, and, yes, Lana del Rey:
WFMU’s Winter 2012 schedule shuffle means that, starting this week, Lamin Fofana will host a show right before me on Wednesdays! We’ll do our best to give you good apocalypse in 2012. Our ice cream comes in 5 flavors: regular black, mudd, noir noir, soft bop, and dust bowl.
December 7, 2011, Mudd Up! w/ DJ Rupture on WFMU – tracklist:
[Brian Degraw, Untitled John Lee Malvo, 2005, pencil on paper, 36 x 28cm]
As part of our ongoing efforts to keep radio exciting…
Tune in to Mudd Up! on WFMU next Monday, November 14th, for a show with special guest Brian Degraw, visual artist and musician from Gang Gang Dance! It’s gonna be a good one.
And below you can stream this week’s show — a live FM broadcast (& YouTube/film screening) from Spectacle Theater. New formats to help us unfold.
Big thanks to the behind-the-scenes team who made the 100% Arabica night a success: Bill, Dave, Mike, and Liz from WFMU, Spectacle’s Akiva, Tony, and the theater volunteers whose names I didn’t catch. Generosity mob!
Once we were actually broadcasting live and direct, I got overexcited and bumped up the volume without bothering to check the meters — the the 2nd half of the show has a bit of (nice) distortion, and a few minutes of unintentional overlapping audio chaos. Fidelity realism! Can’t be beat.
Adding the element of visuals and a live audience to the usual radio experience was thrilling — so we’ll return to Spectacle at 7:30pm on Monday December 5th for another live Mudd Up! remote broadcast and film screening. Details soon!
Marvin’s Room (Shlohmo’s thru tha floor remix) – Drake by shlohmoA question I hear frequently asked about Toronto based Hiphop/RnB rapper/singer/child actor Drake in the press is why his new music is so depressing sounding and what does he have to be unhappy about? He’s young, rich and famous! He’s got a seemingly endless supply of adoring fans, pretty women, drugs, alcohol, money and a venue for his artistic expression to talk about his feelings. Hot97 is his psychotherapy couch.
When he sings: ‘Cups of the XO
Bitches in my old phone
I should call one and go home
I’ve been in this club too long
The woman that I would try
Is happy with a good guy
But I’ve been drinking so much That I’ma call her anyway and say “F-ck that nigga that you love so bad I know you still think about the times we had” I say “f-ck that nigga that you think you found And since you picked up I know he’s not around”
(Are you drunk right now?)
I’m just sayin’, you could do better Tell me have you heard that lately? I’m just sayin’ you could do better And I’ll start hatin’, only if you make me’
Drake strikes me as being honest here. Even though he has all of the above material and ego-enhancing things that many of us want, he is still not happy. When artists are honest and speak about what’s really happening with them instead of repeating tropes that seem like the ‘industry standard’ (I’m balling! I’m awesome! I’m getting money!) it adds a richness of meaning, the texture of personal reality. The current vogue for sipping XO (aka sizzurp, purple drank, or cough syrup made with promethazine and codeine) popularized by many rap/rnb artists including recently Drake and The Weeknd seems to support this pretty well. Codeine is an opiate, the same active ingredient found in heroin. It’s a central nervous system depressant that makes you sleepy and dulls pain when used when you’re sick. If consumed when you’re healthy it pushes pleasure buttons in your brain and feels great. Taking codeine also kills you. If you slow your central nervous system down enough you’ll just stop breathing. RIP DJ Screw and Pimp C. My question is: how much must you be suffering to make this glamourous lifestyle choice? Scientific research has pointed to links between the way we experience physical and psychic pain, like the pain of depression, including the fact that depression sufferers seem to have more acute physical pain. As far as I can tell people who are happy and fulfilled don’t need to constantly take large amounts of central nervous system depressants like codeine and alcohol.
I started teaching at Dubspot in August, thanks to Matt Shadetek. Before I began teaching I was a teacher assistant for DJ Kiva for about a month, and it was during this period that Kiva gave our class a sneak peek of his project 1000 Sunrises, which he finally put out last week. It always awesome to hear a project during its earlier stages, and then hearing it completed. Definitely worth checking out.
DJ Kiva will be dropping this freshness November 10th at Le Poisson Roug with Africa Hitech, and he will be rocking Webster Hall with Matt Shadetek November 12th.
The following material was pulled from the Dubspot blog, which Lamin wrote:
Brooklyn-based multi-instrumentalist producer and musician DJ KIVA returns with a superb new solo album 1000 Sunrises out October 18 on his Adios Babylon imprint via Destroy All Concepts.
Navigating beauty and pain with deep, mesmeric, off-centered beats, soulful, dub-wise electronic impressions, twirling synthlines, and reinforced sub-bass, 1000 Sunrises is a perfectly balanced album. The six tracks presented here are meticulously and lovingly put together, and they move with an unhurried, reassuring pace. From the opening “Feel It,” with its extra-bouncy thump and unrelenting, catchy synthline to the meditative “Tayyib,” which maintains a solemn and contemplative mood with eerie voices but holds a propulsive groove, and the staggeringly beautiful, mind-expanding title track “1000 Sunrises,” DJ Kiva remains remarkably self-reliant and uncompromising in aesthetic throughout the entire album. Album closer “City Of The Dawn” is the uplifting, post-future, and soulful electronic music you can only get from an experienced and self-assured electronic music producer, whose style and range go far beyond arbitrary and trendy sub-genres. Electronics, melody, dub, and soul come together – same as it never was.
Diana and Liz are SUPER TIGHT. Public-access heart inside a Youtube pop melt! This is their first episode. The High Maintenance Brides are particularly inspired.
The November issue of WIRE magazine has Rupture on the cover lookin’ all grown and sexy.
Congrats! Go buy that shit! They say: “Peter Shapiro meets prolific producer Jace Clayton to hear about post-colonial Bass music, The Shining remade in Dubai and Sufi Plug-Ins.”
[screenshot from the June Mudd Up Book Clubb's Ustream]
The Mudd Up Book Clubb continues! Every six weeks or so we gather (preferably on a rooftop) to talk about a good muddy book, stream the conversation so The Internet can participate, then eat delicious food. The Clubb is meant to be a realtime feast-for-the-senses thing, but I’ve started a low-activity Mudd Up Book Clubb mailing list, which will mostly be used to remind folks about the dates and give out location info. For the inaugural Casablanca edition we read Maureen McHugh’s Nekropolis, a novel set in 22nd century Morocco. For the second edition, the Clubb will meet in on a Madrid rooftop on August 10th or 11th (date to be confirmed soon), to discuss César Aira’s Cómo Me Hice Monja, a novel translated into English as How I Became A Nun. Este edición del Clubb va a ser bilingüe.
If you’re unfamiliar with the Argentine novelist Cesar Aira, I suggest that you simply read the book. No spoilers! It’s short and deliciously strange. Aira has published over 80 novels in Spanish, often scattered across small presses. The act of simply finding his work has a magical easter-egg hunt quality to it. How I Became A Nun is his most popular book, and a decent entrance. All Aira’s novels are quite brief. I’ve read around fifteen of them. I keep reading him. Some are terrible. But even the bad ones have special moments filled with an uncanny freshness and surprise and moments of aphoristic clarity.
I first learned about Aira from this comment on my blog:
I’m sort of obsessed with Cesar Aira, Argentinian, ridiculously prolific, starts from a premise and then writes forward, throwing up all these absurd obstacles and traps and pitfalls that he has to write himself out of, like some kind of perfromer trapped on stage who has to keep on improvising tricks and art out of nowhere and without knowing why, until for a second you glimpse a pattern in the chaos – and the whole theatre collapses.
There is nobody else writing like Aira, yet his writing isn’t at all “difficult.” Even at their weirdest, Aira’s books are syntactically uncomplicated; the big picture might be bizarre but he doesn’t clutter his prose with a lot of adjectives or challenging vocabulary — so he’s perfect for a non-native Spanish speaker like myself to read in the original. If you’d like to give it a shot, this website appears to have the entire text of Cómo Me Hice Monja.
[the lovely Madrid rooftop where we're gonna meet!]
“Pero no hay situación que se eternice. Siempre pasa algo más.”
