Activated by the Geko Jones-led call for a December 15th day of #YoutubeDivas, here’s a selection of incredibly talented vocalists who stretch & confuse the boundaries of voice, body, song.
If a “diva” is someone who uses the inherent performativity of gender to radiate brilliance, then here are some stars in my galaxy. These five women are particularly important to me for their brave, exquisitely articulated visions of what music itself can be.
And if this post has a reading list, it’s:
Pamela Zoline – The Heat Death of the Universe
Joanna Russ – The Female Man
James Tiptree Jr./Alice Sheldon – The Girl Who Was Plugged In
now for the #Youtubedivas:
MAJA RATKE — I have a Maja Ratke dublate, for real! Got it cut in Bristol. At some level, being a ‘good’ singer is easy — you play the game by external rules, you sing on-key, you behave the way good singers behave. Creating outside of the drab-but-heavy gravity of normalcy ain’t easy. Maja, like Meredith before her, makes the difficult look at once difficult and effortlessly elemental.
CAROLINE BERGVALL — Caroline and I have worked together, she is one of the great poet/voices of our time! Brilliant, hypnotic, smart, visceral. The 1st video is Caroline reading — so rhythmic, her flow. If this video doesn’t have more than 75 plays by the end of today, something is very wrong. The 2nd is me in Knoxville. I was opening for the Dirty Projectors in this beautiful old theater and decided to begin my set with a piece-in-progress by Caroline.
CHRISTINE SEHNAOUI is my favorite saxophone player. Not into the jazz dudes. Love Christine sounding like anything but a horn. Have you ever heard brass speak like this? Three years back I profiled her for The National:
During the last few weeks, my friends and family have mistaken the work of Christine Abdelnour Sehnaoui for both a broken air conditioner and a car dying outside my window. I can’t say that I blame them. Her recordings call to mind unoiled hinges, deflating balloons, asthma attacks. This Parisian alto-saxophonist, born 31 years ago to Lebanese émigré parents, plays like music does not exist.
Lastly, here’s a diva in the traditional sense — Violinist/vocalist Daoudia, a massive chaabi star from Casablanca. If you’ve spent time in Morocco, then you’ve heard her. Friends in Casa who’ve dealt with Daoudia report that the chaabi matriarch is humble and down-to-earth, too.
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.
Not really a lot of commentary about this besides the fact that I just listened to it like 19 times in a row. This is, how you say, my shit. Sweet and low rnb en espanol by World Hood out of Sacramento with Peligrosa crew’s own Sonora coming in hard body on the remix. Big tune, and it’s downloadable via the soundcloud page, so get to it.
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Last week, Portland, Oregon based musician Liz Harris, better known as Grouper released two separate incredible albums, Alien Observer & Dream Loss, wrapped together as A I A. Preview the striking Wurlitzer pulses and sweet drones title track from Alien Observer above. A I A is beautiful, strange, and unsettling; harsh, heavy drones & dark, delicate tones; songs about aliens and ghosts & loves lost and love yet to happen. Liz Harris also made a series of rare east coast live appearances, one of which was at Brklyn’s Glasslands last Saturday. Harris gave such a mesmerizing performance, the crowd was pin drop silent and so attentive you could hear the sound from the venue two doors down bleeding into Glasslands.
Harris describing her new albums: “Dream Loss is a collection of older songs, mostly written before a hard time. Alien Observer, for the most part, is made of songs recorded after that time. Each has a song that belongs thematically on the other, a seam stitching them together. Both albums… explore otherness. Being an other to one’s own self, to other humans; ghosts and aliens, both literal and metaphorical; and other worlds to escape to (beneath the water, in the sky). Thinking about people who have died…
The process of making these albums reacquainted me with what I want to explore in music: friction, exploration of something large and outside of me, describing and traveling to intangible objects and places, unseen movements and connections between people and spaces. Songs that move on their own, that have an autonomous monstrous quality, songs from another world.”
Let’s talk about letting the weird back out. Let’s talk about the Eternals.
[from their literally genre-defining album Rawar Style]
Their new album Approaching the Energy Field is very much an Album Experience of the sort which appeals to my ever-nostalgic cracker cerebellum (strangely, it is the same part of me that loves noise). Most reviews of their work highlight the genre-hyphening aspects of their sound, which is understandable; dub, arkestry, punk and various other styles resonate in harmony within their mix. What I hear, though, is a personality that is at once singular, communal and universal. You can stream a lot of the tracks off the album at the link above, but I feel like the deep listening that is best enjoyed far away from your computer is really the way to enjoy this stuff.
Don’t get me wrong, though. The music here isn’t really about nostalgia as much as it is about saudade, for after the sugar-rush when we’re each weirder for having met one another.
Palaceer Lazaro of Shabazz Palaces, better known as Ishmael “Butterfly” Butler of Digable Planets
Portrait by Kyle Johnson
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Shabazz Palaces “An Echo from the Hosts That Profess Infinitum” from the upcoming album Black Up on Sub Pop Records. Considering how heavy we’ve been listening to the first two EPs, and how hungry we are for new Shabazz, this is obviously some some great news! A glimpse of things to come “An Echo from the Hosts That Profess Infinitum,” densely textured poems and verses delivered with that signature measured cadence, swirling and chewed up synths and samples, ridiculous beats and more mbira solos! Looking forward to seeing Shabazz Palaces at SXSW this week. It will be very interesting, even if they’re only giving abbreviated performances!
“My girl yuh no… boring / gwan wine bend over touch your toe ring” – Busy Signal
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File this one under things that make me happy. Busy Signal is in top form and Washroom deliver a gorgeous reggae flavored dancehall riddim entitled Bad Suh. I’ve been starting my sets with this one recently and also playing a few other cuts on the riddim including the Tifa and Voicemail. People in my Prospect Heights neighborhood may have been confused to see a tall red bearded man gesticulating and shuffling his way through the black grimy snow on his way to the subway to the sound of hot dancehall in his headphones. Anti-winter music.
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I never got around to posting “Everything Is Working,” the first track I heard from Games earlier this year/in late-Spring if I can clearly recall. If you were at a party where I played/”DJ” or listened to Rupture’s Mudd Up radio show on WFMU over the Summer – specifically episodes I guest-hosted/filled-in for Jace, you probably heard that track and me going on about how effortless, charming, and amazing it sounds. Needless to say, I was looking forward to hearing more. During the wait for their mini-album That We Can Play, which is out now on Hippos In Tanks, Games (Daniel Lopatin of Oneohtrix Point Never and Joel Ford of Tiger City – two producers currently based in Brooklyn – one of whom we’ve been listening to all year!) released a series of fantastic screwed-retro mixes/mix tapes, steeped in 80s synth-pop-mystic and nostalgia (taking forgotten, obscure songs from the 80s, slowing them down, and in that process transforming them into murky, cinematic, dreamscapes). You can grab those mix tapes over at their Tumblr WAY SLOWER. Some of the characteristics (dreamy, woozy, etc.) are found on those mix tapes bleed into the five tracks on That We Can Play, especially on the opening track “Strawberry Skies,” with excellent vocal contribution from Laurel Halo, whose “Something I Never Had” we’ve played out/and on Mudd Up too, .
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CIAfrica is a heavy crew. They have their own thing going on in Babi, Cote d’ivoire and run the sort of international basss weight productions that we live for- along with spitfire lyrics that jump between local concerns and international awareness. Basically they are dope as fuck. It is a huge honor and pleasure to finally see their DA debut up at all the usual spots and getting love from some serious heavyweight DJs, producers and friends.
Various tracks are being loaded to blogs of varying readership- but if you want a little somethin’ somethin’ straight from the elephants mouth….
Head over to bandcamp to DL a copy of the perfectly titled “Epikstar Riddim” from Babylon Residence. This is our first shot with bandcamp- and once we have your email address we’ll hit you with more free music and the occasional update.
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I have to say this is one of my favorite jams at the moment. Hard Mix is 19 year-old Noah Smith, a producer from Greenville, South Carolina. Look out for his album Weirdly Different, coming out later this year.
A friend of mine and fellow Dubspot instructor DJ Shiftee just did this video for Native Instruments. It’s him chopping the fuck out of Dead Prez’s ‘Bigger Than Hiphop’ and a dubstep tune by Caspa called ‘Dub Warz’ (which by the way sounds like a blatant ripoff of Mondie’s ‘Straight Riddim’ grime tune, to me).
The performance is crazy. He’s using Traktor and Maschine from NI to chop and re-trigger the audio using cue-points. He did this to a tune of mine ‘Manhattan Timeslip’ from my album Flowers in the mix he did for the Dubspot Podcast, below, and it absolutely blew my mind. Listen to the original, and then check it out on his mix, it’s near the beginning. Listen to what he did re-triggering the tones from the intro. Mad.
The second episode of Dutty Artz Radio is up! Me (Matt Shadetek), DJ Rupture, Mosholu Park aka Lamin and Taliesin all got together in the basement of Dubspot to all DJ some short 20 minute sets and do the first episode of our new book club!
The book we talked about is Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower.
I chopped the audio into separate parts for your mp3 player pleasure. We streamed it on UStream although somehow the video got lost. The full chat transcript is after the jump though so you can read back if you want. We’ll be doing this weekly on Thursday nights at 7PM NYC time (EST) at http://www.ustream.tv/duttyartznyc
This coming Monday we’ll have a special edition after Dubspot Radio which is at 8 (and I also run) with special guests NGUZU NGUZU! YAAAAA! We’re very excited
the Dutty Artz digital familia grows! Sisters and brothers let’s welcome Carlos! Like Cauto, Carlos is based in Barcelona, a city he calls home alongside Houston, TX. Carlos and I first vibed out over chopped & screwed Houston rap gems like S.L.A.B. but we quickly discovered shared affinities for drone/noise, flamenco, and I’m happy to say I introduced Carlos to the wonder of Bcn’s Moroccan music shops… He starts off in style with a post about flamenco. – /rupture
Flamenco is a famously conservative style of music. The voice, the guitar, clapping, stamping and jaleo (literally ‘ruckus’) are the key ingredients, and new additions to the mix are often met with some skepticism. This is less true now than it was before 1979, when Camaron de la Isla‘s album La Leyenda del Tiempo pulled sitars, rumba, jazz, and electric guitar into the music, but to this day, most flamenco acts willing to open their palettes to new colors do so tentatively, ultimately sounding like polite, virtuosic jazz fusion music.
This makes Enrique Morente‘s artistic path all the more remarkable. A veteran and patriarch (see: daughter Estrella Morente) of the flamenco game, he’s brought out the duende in its traditional form:
But in recent years, he’s been more interested in seeing what other shapes the duende can take, often through collaborations with surprising artists. Take this duet, with Rebel of Rai Cheb Khaled, where he gives proponents of the Flamenco is the Arabian Blues Declaration a reason to salivate, in appropriately regal settings (the Alhambra, which I used to live right next to). What I like most about this tune is how relaxed it sounds, when a meeting of two giants so often tends to be an overblown affar:
But for freaky noiseniks like me, perhaps the most mind-blowing project(and definitely the riskiest, in terms of flamenco cred) was his collaboration with Sonic Youth. They played several concerts together, but to me the gem is the performance below with just Lee Ranaldo, Steve Shelley and Morente’s “family”. Here Morente takes a more subdued role, clapping and wailing and staying in the background and Lee Ranaldo does his thing (the video’s out of sync with the audio and you can’t see Morente, but it’s the only uncut video of the whole thing):
