This Wednesday, with the all-volunteer help of Spectacle Theater’s Akiva, Cassie D, and Zoe S, and WFMU’s Mike A, Bill B, and Dave E, we were able to continue our strange and occasionally bumpy journey down the path of live radio built from video clips & staged before an audience.
It’s an uncanny performance mode, talking to a roomful of bodies seated before Spectacle’s screen but knowing that many many more are listening at home, and attempting to create a path that works for both. Feels ‘experimental’ in the word’s basic sense: something for which the process and its possible outcomes aren’t yet established.
For the first of these radio-Spectacle nights, I screened Khaled & Cheb Mami rai comedy 100% Arabica, then in December it was Nass El Ghiwane documentary Transes.
And this Wednesday, on the first day of Black Mystery Month, I teamed up with Lamin Fofana, Chief Boima, and Old Money to host AFRO-SPECTACLE, two hours of live radio constructed entirely from DVDs & VCDs purchased in African-run stores in New York City, followed by a screening of Nollywood-NYC film God’s Own Country.
Are here are two selections from the evening: a jam Lamin & I have been into forever, a perfect song basically, based on an international collaboration between Sékouba Bambino & Kandia Kouyaté.(Lamin’s Brooklyn-purchased video version had much higher quality that this youtubery, alas.)
And my contribution to AFRO-SPECTACLE, a Don Cornelius homage in the form of David Bowie performing ‘Fame’ on Soul Train.
Last night’s radio show provided a particularly serpentine path through the fields of decentertainment, although sometimes things feel stranger than they actually are. Maybe always. End of show went elegy for Greek director Theo Angeloupolos, airing several selections from his long-time collaborator, Eleni Karaindrou. Streaming now:
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Brian DeGraw generously took the time to listen back and reconstruct his set list from the January 18th show. GGD’s BGD was really working with the mixer and FX (I brought my Pioneer DJM-800 for the occasion); here are the raw ingredients:
the KLF- Dream Time in Lake Jackson
Luciano- Los Ninos de Fuera
Lift Boys- Anarchy Village
Ku-Bo- Dingo Riddim
Joker- U Been Beta(demo version)
D Double E- Streetfighter Riddim
Javier Estrada- Crazy Indian
Nyamwezi (tribe)- Manyanga 2
Sonny Sharrock- Black Woman
Drumline Soundtrack
Paper Route Gangstaz- Woodgrain
Zomby- Digital Fauna
Debruit- Nigeria What?
Onipa Nua- I Feel Alright
Eski Instrumental
the KLF- Dream Time in Lake Jackson
This February edition of Sweat Lodge we’ve got a special guest for Sweat Lodge all the way from Colombia by way of London. Isa GT has been a friend of the DA crew for a while now and making and releasing some awesome music. I first met her a few years ago at SXSW when she decided to jump on the mic and MC a little during my set at the Peligrosa / Tormenta Tropical party. It was outside on a patio and I played between Dubble Dutch and NguzuNguzu (before I knew DD!) and it was the first time I heard El Bebe Ambiente by NguzuNguzu. Suffice to say it was awesome and in the process Isa made a big impression on me with her personality. Actually here’s a picture, w/ everyone I mentioned plus Peligrosa madman and homie Orion. My arm looks like a weird snake but really that’s some historic shit right there. I’m happy to say we’ve connected the dots and here she is in NYC!
>> FACEBOOK RSVP <<
Here’s a flavor of what she does, she’s going to do some performing and some DJing at the party.
˙∆ INFOS ∆˙
DUTTY ARTZ SWEAT LODGE
Isa GT *LIVE/DJ* from Colombia via UK
DJs:
DJ /Rupture
Geko Jones
Matt Shadetek
Friday Feb. 10th 10PM-4AM
$$ FREE $$ ADMISSION
at The Cove, 108 N. 6th St, Brooklyn NY. Take the L train to Bedford or G to Lorimer and walk.
We are kicking off (B)Lack History Month in style:
On Wednesday February 1st, at 7pm, DJ Rupture and Lamin Fofana will host a special 2-hour live radio show from south Williambsburg’s Spectacle Theater, with Chief Boima (new jams on the way!), Old Money, and a our favorite African video shopowner.
Following the live WFMU broadcast — built primarily from African music videos purchased in the cornerstores of NYC — we will screen God’s Own Country by director Femi Agbayewa. GOC presents the story of a young Nigeria lawyer who immigrates to NYC to discover that life in America is not like he hoped… As Boima explains, “It’s firmly in the Nollywood tradition. The story line is a New York story, and I think it’s the perfect context for the non-Nollywood initiated to get introduced to the industry. . . it is also referencing the tradition of the American hood gangster flick like Belly. Almost an amalgamation of the two.”
Palm wine and kola nuts are included with the $5 admission. Space is limited, so come early!
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.
I was orbiting in a space station above Las Vegas a few days ago, so I was unable to get on the mic during last Wednesday’s radio show. But fire is fire. And no voice means more music, which speaks for itself. You can stream it here. Highlights include an exclusive debut of the new Los Rakas single, ‘Pimpin Smokin Dro featuring E-40′. Cue airhorn:
& for next week’s show, January 18th 8-9pm, I’ll have Brian DeGraw from Gang Gang Dance on-air! We’ve successfully rescheduled and got him all the gear needed to do a DJ set live in-studio. Muddy gifts never stop.
A trio of visionary DJ/producers from Chicago graced Mudd Up radio on WFMU last night: we had DJ Rashad, DJ Manny, and OG Traxman. They did back-to-back mixing, everyone playing unreleased original productions — a true glimpse of what’s to come!
Footwork spread in 2011, speeding up and weirding out dancefloors in NYC and beyond, so it was a real treat to have these guys come through to share the new.
El Narco – Ioan Grillo. Lucid overview of “Mexico’s criminal insurgency,” putting the complex mayhem into historical perspective while avoiding the sensationalistic.
“If the East India Company was the first drug cartel, then the Royal Navy was the first band of violent cartel enforcers. After the two Opium Wars, the company won the right to traffic in 1860. The Chinese kept smoking and took the poppy with them in their diaspora round the planet.”
&
“I ask Mathilde [a poppy farmer in the Sinaloan mountains] to describe the effect of these flowers. What is the magic property they have? What is it that makes them so valuable? She looks at me blankly for a moment, then answers in a slow, thoughtful tone.
‘It is a medicine. And it cures pain. All pain. It cures the pain you have in your body and the pain in your heart. You feel like your body is mud. All mud. You feel like you could melt away and disappear. And it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters. You are happy. But you are not laughing. This is a medicine, you understand?’
I’m burnt out on the NYC 70s & 80s glorification/nostalgia/histories, a genre that seems to metastasize each year, but Will Hermes’ Love Goes To Buildings On Fireis exemplary for its wide-eyed span: a five-year history of musical innovation in New York City that takes on rock guitars, salsa, rap, jazz, minimalism. Rare that these contiguous/adjacent scenes get examined together. There’s a paragraph in here about how session musicians formed a kind of connective tissue across scenes & studios — so many ways to think about how music circulates and histories congeal. Here’s to more thought-provoking anticoagulants in 2012.
Radio last night was lively, with large exclusives from Traxman and DJ Matabaya, upcoming soca power from Poirier, the overlooked Luciano remix of a Salif Keita & Cesaria Evora song, and an overall energized future lean like Jay Electronica’s crushingly expansive Eternal Sunshine (The Pledge). Lets’s get open! Here’s lookin’ at you, two thousand one two! Streaming:
WFMU is a wonderful institution. The longest running freeform, independent community radio station in the United States! I’m excited and very much looking forward to doing this once a week this winter! We’ll staying true to WFMU’s commitment to unstructured-format broadcasting, and we’re going everywhere all the time. Listen in.
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:
WFMU’s Winter 2012 schedule kicks into effect this week, so tune in tonight to catch my WFMU radio show, Mudd Up!, in its new Wednesday night timeslot. Same hour: 8pm.
The audio from Monday’s live broadcast @ Spectacle Theater was lost to a database glitch, so that show will live on in our hearts and minds — but not as digitized stream of endlessly repeatable sound.
And because the belly of the web is always hungry, here’s a 7-minute excerpt from my 2007 mix, Secret Google Cheat Codes (available on split CD with Filastine, “Shotgun Wedding Volume Six”). Drawing that line from Neko Case to Sister Nancy to Caroline Bergvall to Carolee Schneemann to a little bit of Kat from The Ex singing in Hungarian. Also Yung Joc.
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This Thursday at Manhattan’s Housing Works Bookstore Cafe, you can check Jessica Hopper on M.I.A., Jace /Rupture on DJ Screw and slowness, and more. Their work was selected by the New Yorker‘s Alex Ross for inclusion in the yearly De Capo ‘Best Music Writing’ anthology, out now. Event is FREE.
DJ Rupture, Maluca, Total Freedom, Shawn Reynaldo, Oro 11, & Mas Exitos bringing the tropical whomp in San Francisco and Los Angeles this weekend. FELIZ CUMPLEAÑOS CABRONES! Epic.
Join us today, December 5th, at Brooklyn’s Spectacle Theater (124 South 3rd. btwn Bedford + Berry) for a live WFMU radio broadcast followed by a screening of Ahmed El Maanouni’s gripping and poetic Nass El Ghiwane documentary film, TRANSES (1981). Nass El Ghiwane, a group of working class musicians from Casablanca, revolutionized Maghrebi music in the 1970s and remain Morocco’s most important band. TRANSES captures them at the height of their power. The radio show will be built from a YouTube selection of some of my favorite Moroccan tracks and Nass el Ghiwane cover versions.
Here is an oft-compiled Nass El Ghiwane track, Mahmouma. This version comes from Stern’s epic 18-CD “Africa 50 years” box set (“The most comprehensive compilation of African music ever achieved. . . 183 classic recordings by 183 important artists from 38 countries in North, South, East and West Africa.”)
Sterns cut Mahmouma down to half its length, but the mastering is good:
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[John Francis Peters - Meryem by the sea in Casablanca]
And last but not least, head to Time Magazine’s Lightbox to see “Insha’Allah”, a photoessay by John Francis Peters, taken in Morocco as part of our Beyond Digital project.
