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
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.
“From radical turntablism (Otomo Yoshihide) to laptop music innovation (Numb), via classical instrument hijacking (Sakamoto Hiromichi), Tokyo’s avant-garde music scene is internationally known for its boldness.
While introducing some of the greatest musicians of this scene, “We Don’t Care About Music Anyway…” offers a kaleidoscopic view of Tokyo, confronting music and noise, sound and image, reality and representation, documentary and fiction. “We don’t care about music anyway”…
In other words, “we make it and that’s all”. Beyond the music and beyond its performance, the future and mode of existence of a city, and society as a whole, are in motion.”
For the lucky BK people this gem shows this coming Friday 16th at 8pm as part of the Rooftop Film Summer Series at the Old American Can Factory 232 3rd Street, Brooklyn, NY (info).
If you didnt read the in-depth Dutty Artz feature in the Economist last month you probably missed the official announcement that we have synergized with http://urmean2computer.tumblr.com/ to bring you a more immersive content experience.
This party is going to be multiple varieties of bananas. serious – cumbia villera pioneers Damas Gratis (for those who don’t know, read up my Fader article on cumbia which involves careening around Buenos Aires w/ Damas Gratis leader Pablo Lescano), Bomba Estereo, Toy Selectah, and me with special guest vocalist Jahdan Blakkamoore, raising temperatures down in Monterrey Mexico. Puro fuego!!!
also on the bill, Instituto Mexicano del Sonido, Sonidero Nacional, etc….. BOOM.
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I haven’t heard that many tracks from Aidonia; he’s one of those mid to late ’00s dancehall artists you hear about all the time, see his name on countless mixtapes, and probably already heard a bunch of his tunes at parties, but you never actually went out of your way and check for his tunes. That’s until I heard the title cut from Stephen “Di Genius” Mcgregor’s incredible Bad People riddim which completely shifted my view on a couple of vocalists — but more on that shortly. “Heart Is Hers” features Aisha Davis and is produced by Equiknoxx producer/artist collective (who are also responsible producing another impressive Aidonia track titled “Negative.”) This is what dancehall sounds like in post-808s & Heartbreak/weird-emotional-electro-pop-hop era? Dancehall is going in so many different, exciting directions at the moment, and as for this particular type of sound which has been bubbling for the last few years I think it’s safe to point to T-Wayne & Yeezy as references. As Aidonia sings – “Song is too dead/it needs more life – Needs a faster melody/more melody/groove your body…”
I actually LOLed at this one, posted by Eddie Stats over at Okayplayer’s new(?) Large Up blog. The last and first of his Toppa Top 10 fake reggae songs are the picks for me. Eddie Murphy taking a polished and very funny dig at Bob Marley (seems pretty clearly aimed, I could be wrong) and then some youtube guys hilariously misinterpreted transcription of Busy Signal (with jpegs!).
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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I really want to go out / I really want to go outside and stop to see your day You really want to hole up / You really want to stay inside and sleep the light away But I know what’s good / Exactly ’cause I have been there before…
Enjoy the sun… today!
Cults 7″ will be released 23 December 2012, but you can download it now here.
Props Pitchfork
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Alright, Spring is here & Miss Badu has blessed us with yet another extremely good album. I’ve returned to it already a few times this week — New Amerykah Part Two (Return of the Ankh). At first, I was unsatisfied (I had that same feeling when I heard Worldwide Underground, as if the project was unfinished/not completely realized) but for New Amerykah Part Two, with each listen, something magnificent is revealed –subtle, satiric undertones buried in samples, live instrumentation, and that voice – raw emotional honesty (+ sometimes turbulence.) I’ve said it before, if you think Erykah Badu’s music is only serious/militant/political/etc. — which it obviously is — you’re missing the point. She’s more playful, more humorous than she’s often credited for, and this album has some of the most amusing moments in R&B you’ll hear this year.
On my radio show tonight: special guest from Oakland – Larisa Mann AKA DJ Ripley! She’ll start by sharing some Jamaican ‘answer tunes’ which flow into a larger discussion of music as a dynamic social practice (and not simply a collection of objects/recordings). As a legal scholar and formidable DJ, we couldn’t ask for a better person to come in and touch on everything from the social implications of intellectual property laws to, as she put it in our email exchange:
“the many ways that physical property, access to and control of material spaces, are still a prerequisite for music to happen – from control of servers that host files, to temporary or permanent control of streets and warehouses, zoning, etc., to the problem of providing bass, which still requires physically bigger systems than other kinds of sounds..”
In other words: expect heavy tunes and insightful talk tonight, 7-8pm EST, WFMU. For warm-up, Larisa offers a selection of mixes on her blog, like this recent live set.
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
Masala got got, then restored, but the whole affair simply served to remind us that we need to communicate – to share sound & ideas – in spaces we control. Places where years of content community-building won’t be deleted by corporate whim.
Think globally, upload locally, tunnel downwards. Rig the submarines. Sink deep. In a post-search mediascape whose senses will we rely on?
YOU. Your content. Your grandma’s chain. Cycling off into the darkness… check it:
“web 3.0: the grand retreat back to our own servers”
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To get in touch, send us tunes, hate mail etc. write: family AT duttyartz.com
