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

Wizraeli, a blogger from Generation Bass sent me the link to Balkan Beat Box’s new video, Political Fuck, and after watching it I had to post it. As a long time fan of Balkan Beat Box, I am always impressed with their fresh productions and political voice.  I will never forget the first time I saw them at Central Park with Antibalas-Afrobeat about 5 years ago. They absolutely killed it.  Considering all the world wide noise thats going on today, this song is a strong representation of the global movement that needs to occur- putting the power back into the peoples hands.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Also Wills was nice enough to make the audio in the original post (below) downloadable for those of you who requested it for your filez.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Also Traxman who’s in the piece will be playing in NYC this Friday at an underground party at an undisclosed location in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.  Also Total Freedom from LA!  Looks like there will be some footwork dancers there too.  Shout to Azizaman for putting it together, looks dope.  FB event here w/ info.

I am not involved with this but am showing it a bit of promo love because I remember what it was like trying to bring Grime artists to NYC when no one knew what it was but I just loved this new crazy music and wanted to share.  It ain’t easy! If you like this kind of stuff vote with your dancing feet.

 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.

Where does this pain come from?  For many of us who are artists or musicians we, secretly or not, spend a certain amount of time thinking about why so-and-so got their name put above ours on a flier, or got a better review or record deal or  fee for their show or more views on YouTube. Why are they more loved than us? It feels unfair and can be demoralizing. This is because our feeling of self-worth is connected to our rapidly fluctuating ego. One moment we just had a great gig, review, bit of feedback from a fan and are flying. The next moment something goes badly or we notice someone else doing better and suddenly we are dissatisfied with our own success that seemed great a minute ago. I feel that whether they admit it or not many, many people who are perceived as successful suffer from these same feelings. In fact I think that many people who believe that material and ego success will make them happy, then achieve it and realize that they’re still not happy are actually in a tougher spot than those who are still striving.  If you are still trying to get there you can at least believe that once you get rich and famous you’ll leave your current unhappiness behind.  Once you get there and realize you are STILL unhappy and that a change in external factors isn’t going to solve it that must be pretty difficult to deal with. Elvis and Marilyn Monroe come to mind.

I recently read a book by the Dalai Lama called ‘How To Practice’ about ways to a meaningful and happy life.  For those unfamiliar with him here is a person who absolutely radiates satisfaction, kindness and deep happiness. This is in spite of the fact that he is a leader of a nation in exile who have undergone brutal cultural genocide at the hands of the People’s Republic of China including torture, mass murder and attempts to undermine and eradicate the Tibetan Buddhist faith which the Dalai Lama is a senior figure in.  A key distinction he makes which I found to be very helpful in thinking about these issues is the distinction between Pleasure and Happiness.  Pleasure is the result of a state change: from sobriety to drunkenness, hunger to satiety, arousal to orgasm, feeling un-appreciated to feeling admired, and so on.  We experience a momentary burst of pleasure which can be pretty awesome. What tells us that these things are not intrinsic sources of happiness is that we cannot continue to experience them indefinitely. Drink too much and throw up, smoke too much pot and get nervous and paranoid, eat too much and get a stomach ache, receive so much fan adulation that you can’t walk down the street and consequently feel isolated and lonely.  All of these, while resulting in transitional pleasures which feel great when they happen, do not satisfy our inner desires for things like meaning in life, a long term feeling of satisfaction or freedom from the roller coaster of egotism.

The Dalai Lama’s Tibetan Buddhist prescription for these things is instead of constantly looking at ourselves and trying to scratch our own itches for more fame, food, drugs or money to look outward and look at who we can help, how we can be more caring, how we can contribute to others happiness and lessen their suffering. In a word: compassion.  If you’ve ever experimented with compassion you’ll find that it provides a much less fleeting and much longer lasting feeling of happiness, even if sometimes in the immediate moment the act itself is not directly pleasurable. For me the major experience I’ve had in this department is being a father to two young boys. Even though at times it is not easy and can feel like a terrifying and overwhelming vortex of poopy diapers, extreme and prolonged sleep deprivation, yelling, crying and trips to the emergency room there is nothing I have done in my life which has given me more deep and lasting happiness. Counter-intuitive though it may seem the realest happiness I’ve found is in sacrifice, giving freely of myself and serving others. It doesn’t fluctuate, increase or decrease based on external factors or go away when I scratch the itch. In fact, the more I scratch the more it deepens, expands and the richer and more satisfying it becomes.

I am not holding myself up as an example here for admiration. Loving your children is a bare minimum necessary act for any human being. In order to feel like I’m actually doing something that is a net gain for humanity and to deepen my compassionate practice I need, and plan, to do more than that. I’m only speaking from my own, limited direct experience to convey my point.  It’s possible to be happy, but it doesn’t come from consuming anything or from stroking the ego.

cross-posted from my personal blog at mattshadetek.com

Click here to view the embedded video.

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

a sick Mex with Guns – Dame lo [Gnotes Rmx]  hyper dembow bizness

and this touch up of Gotye’s anti-love jam caught me off guard…

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)

FLOR DE AZAHAR (#ORANGEBLOSSOM MIXTAPE x DJ SANTERO VOL 1) by FaviSF

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

[Julius Eastman (left) and Nemo]

The Performa Biennial has descended upon New York, and I’m pleased to announce that I’m writing a new radio play which will debut on Saturday, Nov. 12.

After Performa approached me about the radioplay I went off on long lines of investigation which crescendoed around the incredible, and, yes, tragic life of gay black NYC composer, Julius Eastman.

As Mary Leach writes about trying to gather his scattered work:

“Thus began an almost quixotic seven-year search for the music of Julius Eastman who died in 1990 and whose final years were a life spiraled out of control to the point where he was living in Tompkins Square Park. He’d been evicted from his apartment in the East Village—the sheriff having dumped his possessions onto the street. Julius made no effort to recover any of his music. . . One of the problems of writing about Julius is that it is difficult to state anything with certainty.”

How The Julius Eastman Memorial Dinner fits into all this will (trust me) be a surprise. This I can say: it takes a village to stage a radio play before a live audience, so for The Julius Eastman Memorial Dinner, I’ve brought aboard several pianists and voice-actors, among them Emily Manzo and Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts. Radio was central to my musical upbringing and remains something I’m committed to, so the opportunity to create new work expressly for the medium is fantastic.

Performa Radio goes down at WNYC’s Greene Space. Other participants – radioplaywrights? wireless dramatists? – include Tom McCarthy (“but now I want you to do nothing even slower” ), Marianne Vitale, and Hari Kunzru.

They say: “For Performa 11, Performa Radio explores the literary legacy of the first mass medium, the radio broadcast. Just as early radio and sound recording influenced the modernist literature of Edgar Allan Poe, Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul Valéry, Jules Verne, and Antonin Artaud, what effects will digital radio have for the forms of literature and the development of the narrative play? Leading figures in the fields of literature, art, and music will be commissioned to write short plays, to be performed live at WNYC’s Greene Space and streamed on the Performa website.”

[another night at the laundromat]

In 2005 New World Records released a 3-CD set of Eastman’s music, which was generally associated with downtown minimalism. You can download the liner notes [PDF]. Below is a recording of “Evil Nigger” (1979) here played on four pianos with Eastman himself. One Two Three Four!

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.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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.

The Mudd Up Book Clubb marches to Manhattan with a tender, challenging work by one of the most important authors around: Samuel R. Delany’s Times Square Red, Times Square Blue. The book takes Delany’s 30+ years in the porn theaters and gay bars of Times Sq. on the eve of its mid-1990s Disneyification as a grounding point for an extended examination of public space, interclass contact, polymorphous intimate pleasures, the regulation of bodies and behavior, and lots more. Sex & urbanism in Delany’s hands — you can’t go wrong!

The humanity that animates his intelligence is inspiring, as is the deft ease with which Delany flows from frank, considered anecdotes about former lovers & friends to more sociologically-minded writing. Times Square Red, Times Square Blue is built from two long essays, which are themselves quite different: the longer one more personal, the 2nd one more theoretical — it includes a powerful section on contact vs networking that is more relevant now than ever, and uses a two-column layout to play with marginality in a direct way and further shake things up.

This is the Clubb’s first nonfiction selection (not to mention our first selection by a black author), and it will give you a lot to think about. The New York Public Library stocks a handful of copies, including a nonlending one up at the Schomburg. The Manhattan location for this Clubb edition is secret, but suffice to say it’s awesome and will be familiar to those who’ve seen Delany doc The Polymath. The tentative date is November 15th. If you are interested, please join the mailing list.

If you only know Delany from his sci-fi or fantasy, then you are in for a real treat! If you don’t know Delany at all, then perhaps short story collection Aye, and Gomorrah or its earlier incarnation, Driftglass, is a good place to start – “The Star Pit” is one of those rare stories that haunts me to no end. (I wouldn’t recommend starting with Dhalgren, only because I know a handful of people who couldn’t get into it and then didn’t investigate Delany any further.)

But Samuel R. Delany’s work has many, many entrances…

OK. Let’s keep those pages turning! For more online reading about this selection, Steve Shaviro wrote an excellent review of Times Square Red, Times Square Blue — indeed, all Steve’s Delany writings are great.

Stay muddy.

Goldman Sachs presents:

*
Five videos (in collaborations with artists Kamau Patton, Tabor Robak, Leilah Weinraub, Sophia Al-Maria, Ryan Trecartin and Rhett LaRue)

from the new EP, Genre-Specific Xperience, will be screened followed by a Q&A between Fatima Al Qadiri and artist Kamau Patton.

This trill cannot be duplicated says Venus X — and Drake retweets! — but it can be streamed. Last Monday’s radio show with special guest Venus X had the future turned up real high, just the way we like it. She did two fantastic, imaginative, busy-on-the-decks sets that put y’all lazy/conservative/chase-the-genre-of-the-minute DJs to shame. During the interview section we learned all about the American Gothic, Venus’s DJ roots,and lots more.

Check it out:

WFMU — independent, listener-supported, FM radio with incredible live internet streams and endless archives — is in the middle of our first silent fundraiser. If you like Mudd Up! radio and feel like sharing the love, please consider a donation – all the on-air DJs volunteer their time (as do our amazing guests). All funds raised go to keeping WFMU afloat and free.

Let’s take things up a level. Let’s get glossy.

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.”

>recent remixes from Dutty Artz stalwart Lamin Fofana.
_both remixes out now on Grizzly and Diskotopia

Jay Weed
On The Nile EP
GRIZZLY009
March 2011
http://bit.ly/nk6m5u

>

Visionist
Rock The Flock EP
DSK003
July 2011
http://bit.ly/nOX8Eh

pardon my a b s e n c e and tardiness… big up Prince Quan Luv and the Old Money massv.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.