off to Knoxville’s Big Ears festival! It sports an action-packed lineup (The Ex, The xx, jj, GGD, Nico M, Joanna N, et al). I’ll be performing three times, in fairly different contexts:
a late-night dance set on Friday (with Ben Frost opening).
a Saturday afternoon set in a theater. w/ Dirty Projectors and William Basinski! Remember: a seated audience is a captive audience.
and finally, Saturday night The Ex’s guitarist, Andy Moor & I will do our improv duo performance. Here’s a nice preview writeup of my hyperactive weekend.
Sometimes Andy & I go way out. Sometimes, like here, I’ll let a beat play for awhile and we gather corners together until it feels like a song.
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“Nothing lasts forever” writes Cesar Aira, “something else always happens.” Needless to say, it sounds – is – much better in Spanish.
A side-effect of Andy playing with me is that he gets confused even more frequently with the popular British trance DJ of the same name. Eventually we’re gonna accidentally get booked to play with Tiesto, I know it.
This snippet is from a show in Orleans, France. Photos by Andy.
and this audio is from a gig we did in Holland last summer, here overlaid with an anonymous Iranian video on the eve of election protests (remember those green twitter jpgs? ah, slacktivism! ah 2009!):
dubstep choir, London collective, AN ALTERNATIVE TO BURLESQUE, SHIT TV AND BAD BOY BAND WATCHING – Gaggle “I Hear Flies” from their forthcoming Life Stand.
The world will be tested by Texas Instruments and English diction…
One of my favorite bands released an album sometime in mid-2009, and I’m only coming across it/listening to it now. They have been gone for so long, and their buzz so quiet now. Nevertheless, it’s great to see Tjinder Singh & Co. return with more brilliant tunes. When I Was Born for the 7th Time is their most cited album and it’s charm is undeniable, a true classic— but (in high school and college) I found myself listening to Handcream for a Generation and Woman’s Gotta Have It more than anything else.
Lucky Dragons’ performances overturn conventions of electronic music with generosity and grace. On Monday October 12, they will join DJ Rupture to share sounds and discuss the relationship between social and sonic experimentation, Los Angeles, erasing the barriers between performer and audience, and more.
(Also, something I’m aware of but completely forgot to mention:) Lucky Dragons opened for Thom Yorke’s new band debut (both nights) in L.A. last week!! You know, that new band that also features Flea of Red Hot Chilli Peppers. Thanks to Big Brother Rupture for the reminder!
Subscribe to the Mudd Up! podcast if you want downloadable versions: , Mudd Up!RSS. Listen, get involved, throw in comments, questions. Again, Mondays @ 7PM.
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“Lollipop” has been sampled by David Banner, covered by rock and country musicians, and now versioned by a mysterious Swedish pop outfit, with a radical lyrical shift, a stretch, an expansion – bottles are replaced with pills, and shawty is getting high on her own supply. The same aesthetics, but more drugs and less sex. Either way, Wayne, Jonsin, and Static will be/would be proud.
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Jahdan’s album Buzzrock Warrior drops in September. In the meantime, we’re setting the Summer on fire with Jahdan’s Bazooka Shot mixtape, which is coming sooner than you think. The night this freestyle was done, I think the guys (Jahdan, Klash, and Matt) recorded five other tracks, and this was the last one. It was pure fun. I gave the instrumental to Matt, he edited/re-shaped it in less than two minutes, Jahdan & Klash went in. Jahdan was alredy familiar with the hit song by Toronto’s own Drake, and was singing it the minute he heard the beat. I had never heard this song by choice. Klash wasn’t familiar with it, so he start singing Radiohead’s “Climbing the Walls,” and I was like yeah! Anyway, the vibe at Casa de la Jones (Geko Jones’ home-studio, where it all goes down) was great, and everyone was having a good time. We’re doing it again next week, putting the finishing touches on the Bazooka Shot tape. Jahdan and Klash are going in again, and they might be remixing, freestyling, covering whatever tune they feel like again.
New York Tropical is exactly a week from today! Check the flyer – we are designers, you already know. To get ready, I have put a podcast together containing mostly women voices over beats and sounds composed by men. I wasn’t specifically looking for female voices on male constructed instrumentals, it just happened most of the tracks I gather are refixes and songs with women voices recorded by gentlemen producers (I was tempted to call this Women… In The Vicinity Of Men. Thankfully, I settled on Mousso. We need some more gyals in here… too many man, too many, many man!
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I was going to post the tracklist a little later but we all know how Björk feels about writers not giving credits, so here it is -
Umalali – Uruwei (The King)
Clouds featuring Tiiu – Protecting Hands Part 2
Oumou Sangaré – Dugu Kamelemba
Björk – Nattura (Switch Refix)
Geiom featuring Marita – Reminissin’ (Shackleton Refix)
Amadou & Mariam – Sabali
Taken By Trees – The Sweetness of Air France
Dirty Projectors – Stillness Is The Move
Various Production – Deadman (Milanese Remix)
Filastine featuring Jessika Skeletalia Kenney – Fitnah
Love Joys – Stranger
Tanya Stephens – It’s A Pity
TOTAL FREEDOM and NGUZUNGUZU – Total Ciara (Like You Refix)
Matt Shadetek – (Tanya Stephens) Can’t Breathe Remix
Nicki Minaj – Beam Me Up Scotty
Uproot Andy – El Botellón Remix
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I’m finally getting used to the weather here- the unusual is the routine. Today, it’s cold, cold rain- everything is slow- trains, buses, lines, money, etc. Two days ago, it was warm and sunny in Brooklyn, and I was running errands, in t-shirt, borough to borough (park to park, Central Park north in Harlem and Prospect Park in Park Slope) enjoying the sweetness and soulfulness of Bitter Orca (not every song stood out/there were two or three tracks I skipped over, but nonetheless the album has some very good moments)
The groove on “Stillness” is easy (because the musicians involved are comfortable and talented) and the voices are almost restless, transient and sugary, echoing the best of Mariah, Christina, Ashanti, etc– while maintaining Dave Longstreth’s signature and timing. Longstreth has a distinctive style and voice, which I’m not going to attempt to describe here.
Dirty Projectors managed to deconstruct and reinterpret sugary teen-pop R&B as something inoffensive, harmless and nice,* the same way Vampire Weekend reimagined Kanda Bongo Man/Kwassa Kwassa/Koffi Olomide into “Cape Code Kwassa Kwassa.” It’s a little strange, but you can still listen to it while walking in the park and sipping lemonade.
*Let’s face it, Mariah Carey has some of the most abhorrent pop songs- aside from the remix joints she did w/ ODB and LOX and, of course, that Bone Thugs collaboration.
Those of you who read these pages no that I am not a fan of Justice’s cock rock techno. This article accompanied by photo evidence (above) catching Justice playing “live” with an un-plugged MIDI controller is just too funny to pass up. As someone who has done real live electronic music back in my Team Shadetek days I know how difficult this is to do and do well, so on one level I’m sympathetic, on the other level, you shouldn’t lie to your fans guys. I stopped doing live electronics when my music took a turn towards hiphop, dancehall and grime and I didn’t think that any of the live improvisation I would do would improve the music. Since then my show has been me DJing tracks from a laptop, sometimes with effects. I play lots of un-released new dubs of mine that no one else has and make up my set list as I go along. I figure that’s worth the price of admission. You get to hear my music, mixed and selected by me and get a peek into my present sound, IE the future since it always takes so long to get records or CDs out. I have a new project (more on that soon) that might be appropriate to a live format and so am I actually considering going into loop djing mode (breaking down the tracks into parts and re-constructing live) for that, probably using ableton live, but we’ll see. However, you will NEVER see me on stage with an un-plugged MIDI controller making faces and pretending to do things that I’m not. Thanks to Dan @ Dubspot for the link.
Lil Wayne announced the official release date and title of his next album: Rebirth is due April 7 — and his publicist has confirmed that it will be a rock album. Of course, Wayne has been rocking with a guitar for some time now.The first single is called “Prom Queen” and will debut on the Internet right after a live stream of his concert in San Diego on January 27. The show will be available for stream on MySpace.com.
There, for those of us who have been waiting for the next likkle wayne nooz. You can thank The NMC for this pretty little leak – you don’t have to wait one more day for the song to debut, here it is loaded with tags and all, autotune-rock from New Orleans own & the best rapper alive -
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Mudd Up! 
