Dutty Artz family members Geko Jones and Uproot Andy have been a force to reckon with in New York’s club scene for years, with their monthly Latin, Afro, Caribbean Remix party – Que Bajo. But recently they’ve started to step out of the late night shadows and on to the stage – literally with their participation in Red Bull’s Culture Clash (an event that illustrated how corporate money can attract a shit load of press - NY Times, Vibe, and the QB-friendly MTV Iggy), and figuratively with the creation of Que Bajo Records.

Check out Andy’s great preview mix of upcoming releases – Worldwide Ting here:

And the dubplate – Fuego/Ashawo – finale of Que Bajo’s final round (cause you know, “Africans are immigrants too!”):

Click here to view the embedded video.

Let this post just serve as a warning for an impending global take over.

In related news, watch out for the official debut release by Geko Jones on Dutty Artz in June. He partnered with Adam “Atropolis” Partridge to curate and provide his own remixes for our Palenque Records Remixed Compilation. Other remixers on the project include Matt Shadetek, Captain Planet, Thornato, Rafi El, and myself. The Palenque Records Soundsystem will debut at Williamsburg’s Northside Festival on June 15th, more details soon to come!

SPIN premieres an Old Money track today in anticipation of their mixtape Fire In The Dark.

“Doctor Doctor” is the best Robitussin-themed song you’ve heard in a decade or your Money back. #SYRUP #HEALTHCARE #CREAM. Birdcall our brothers: @OLDMONEYCRIME

Co-written by DJs Ushka and Ripley.

When we talk about “global bass” as a genre and scene in New York, it’s not always clear what fits into this recently generated category. Who gets to claim “global bass” and what does it represent? This desire to cookie-cutter a range of musical genres as a way to identify a “scene” has in its doing led to the lack of inclusion, in media accounts, of many communities who are engaging with global music and culture in meaningful ways, with amazing music.

One party space that’s been slept-on is Azucar (bi-line: a queer Latin dance party), that for the last two years has made its home in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn at One Last Shag. The music –spanning Latin pop, punk, bass, salsa, kuduro, dancehall, you name it– keeps this bar space with a backyard packed to the brim, but the music also has deep roots. That’s what has helped it become a once-a-month home for diverse queer community of color and allies. It’s one of those parties born out of intentionality. The promoters Ivette González-Alé and Crystal González-Alé, and the venue itself are clearly invested in building a community – which involves honoring existing communities that lack social spaces: queer, latino and immigrant communities, and also invested in supporting talented deejays also conscious of who they want to be playing to. Among the roster of deejays that have set the scene for this familial dance community Azucar has built over the last two years are deejays like Precolumbian, Shomi Noise, Nolita Selector, DJ Nopales, Andalalucha, Dj Cristy Road, Mursi Layne, and Dj Angel boi.

In conversations that Ushka has had with Ivette and Crystal, they’ve talked about the waxing and waning of spaces for queer communities of color and the ways in which even in “alternative” party spaces for queer communities, people of color were not dominant. As parties that were former staples in the Brooklyn queer community of color reached their time (ex. Khane Kutzwell’s Sweat parties,Tikka Masala’s That’s My Jam and Ms. Thang), new spaces like Azucar and Brooklyn Boihood were born to fill the gap. What Azucar has done over the last 2 years provided a necessary social base, and a key aspect for keeping music exciting and sustainable.

Tomorrow (Saturday May 18, 2013) Ushka and I (Dj Ripley), who have each played Azucar parties before, have been invited back to deejay their 2-year anniversary party, alongside Azucar resident DJ Shomi Noise and guests DJ Oscar Nñ, DJ Mursi Layne, and DJ Nolita Selector. It’s a great  moment to praise the way that Azucar has grounded and supported the global bass music scene in New York and beyond. It’s also in line with what drew Ushka and I to Dutty Artz : a focus on music that links and crosses borders, supports resistance, alters the contours of mainstream discussions and fosters the life that grows in cracks in the system.

We wanted  to emphasize how these parties and DJs have been part of the creation of cultural establishments for a diverse range of immigrant sounds and are actually rooted in communities of immigrants & in regions that are constantly being “mined” for musical inspiration. It would be trivial and simplistic to relegate them only to being “queer or gay nights” or “lady dj nights” – instead they require that we interrogate the exclusivity of this so-called “global bass” scene and in fact (re)evaluate the role of community creation within any scene. Here, it is actually Latino, African, South Asian, Black, and Caribbean people on the dance floor and behind the decks. Here, all sexualities and gender identities are being celebrated. If there’s a recipe for a music scene with a long healthy life that sustains its members, it should include both those things.

A couple weeks ago, I was lucky to DJ a truly green party: Movable Party, a pedal-powered dance party in LA. Participants on three bikes with hub motors powered speakers, a mixer, and laptop in a corner of MacArthur Park with its lake, fountain, and vendors of fresh fruit con sal, limón, y chile. Fittingly the cycling-generated soundsystem made its city debut for CicLAvia, a street closure event which opens up LA’s streets for cyclists and pedestrians. All in the city where car culture was born!

Movable Parts, the organizers, planners and makers behind the Movable Party, are a group of collaborators and friends whose shared mission is “to deploy creative practices to re-imagine the streets and public spaces in the greater Los Angeles metropolitan area…. Our efforts augment the spatial and social flow of the public sphere at a human scale. We believe in the open-source ethos, promoting communalism and free exchange of knowledge…. Experimenting with high-tech and low-tech modes of practices, we make and transform materials ranging from the cultural and embodied, to the mechanical and computational.”

For over three hours Movable Party playfully reversed people’s relationship to electricity switching from merely consuming to generating power. In addition to their hub motors the bikes had been modified with Arduino sensors on the saddle, the pedals and the handlebars. Rocking back and forth on the saddle, squeezing the handlebars in different ways triggered various effects and peddling faster or slower altered the tempo. Voilá bike-human-synthesizer cyborg!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Plans for the future involve creating a moving–bike powered– performance platform with a generator and custom built sound system. Organizers including Wendy Hsiu take inspiration from other minimal resource and human-powered vehicles and street soundsystems, such as Nakashi street music trucks in Taiwan and various mobile music setups everywhere from Indonesia, Mexico, to Japan. I look forward to their next iterations of experiments in human-scale, transnationally inspired  sounds.

This will be the first in a regular series of interviews with the artists from my Good Bread compilation that Dutty Artz released a couple months back. We start with Nadus, a young producer from Newark, New Jersey, who is currently living in Philadelphia. He got his name in the local Jersey Club scene alongside his close friend DJ Sliink as part of the seminal Brick Bandits crew and the Cartel Music clique. He currently throws a roving party with the family called #Thread. The track we chose for Bread, “Scratchin’ Me Up”, was an Almaton joint (Moombahsoul, if you prefer), and was based off some Trey Songz samples. Below, he talks about Jersey Club’s appropriation by the wider electronic scene, what Club was like in his home town, and electronic trap music.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Iswayski: You were complaining about EDM kids making Jersey Club recently. What’s happening?

Nadus: I don’t know. It’s weird. Three years ago it was like pulling teeth getting these dudes to listen to our shit unless blogs posted it. I’ve heard a few records that sound NOTHING like Jersey Club with a Jersey Club genre title. It’s cool that it’s spreading though. I just hope it doesn’t become a phase. Also, people are forgetting Baltimore Club sometimes, which is sad.

Who’s making it?

N: A lot of people are. Brenmar. Noms. Ryan Hemsworth. Just to name a few. Cashmere Cat.

All these new “Club Songs” are Jersey Club influenced and nobody’s gonna say it. Or come our way. They get a blueprint and exploit it. Same thing happened with Techno (Detroit) and Juke (Chicago). There’s a lot of dope artists in Chicago making Juke, but nobody is in the public eye more than Spinn, Rashad, and Traxman. When people think Techno, they don’t even think Detroit anymore.

THATS MY PROBLEM WITH EDM. People shouldn’t exploit a sound for financial gain then dump it back off when it’s no longer “current.” Like, yes, I came up in the Jersey Club scene, but people don’t know me for my Jersey Club. They know me for my other music. Every time someone says they love my Club shit, they can’t name more than 10 songs. And I have hundreds.

Have you been to any of the Club parties in Brooklyn?

N: Yea, I’ve been to a few Tender Trap parties. A few of Contessa’s Cunt Mafia parties. And of course The Flat. They’re dope. I love Brooklyn and the music scene, it’s not too big or too small and all genres are welcomed there. From what I’ve been around. Brooklyn is openminded. I love the fun and bottle service-less spots.

What do you think about trap rave? A lot of Club producers are making it these days.

N: I don’t know… I make hip hop beats daily. Maybe I can just pass those off as trap beats. It’s never really excited me in a production sense. Or maybe I’m just being difficult. Some of it is really good, but a lot of it is just terrible hip hop beats with good mixing and mastering. And a build up, of course.

So what’s exciting right now to you?

N: “Crowd Control” by Sliink and Flosstradamus. And I’m not just saying that cuz Sliink family.

This is Trap though, lol.

N: It’s hip hop. Gucci Mane is Trap. Young Scooter is Trap.

It’s Trap Rave. It’s got the build-drop of Dubstep, the sonic equivalent of Dutch sirens, and the 808s of Trap.

N: Na, nobody is finding illegal warehouses, they’re selling out theaters and concert venues. Nothing “rave” about it. Show me illegal venues and sound systems, then we can call it Rave.

EDM trap?

N: C’mon Mike. Don’t use EDM because the media world tells you too lol. It sounds like an STD.

Lol. Fine, Electronic Trap. What else?

N: Sinjin Hawke, Cashmere Cat, TNGHT, Xaphoon Jones, 2 Deep, Mike Gip, Murder Mark, TT The Artist, Bach, Chopin.

How’d you get into production?

N: I got into production through arranging on sheet music. Learned music theory at a college level before I graduated 8th Grade. Toured Europe and all, singing as part of the Newark Boys Chorus.

I was already producing for local rappers at like 13-14 when I got asked to make some Club music for my friend Porter’s dance crew The Emperorz. I was winging it at the time but they thought the shit was hot, so I kept making it. Then I met Jayhood and he kinda pulled me into the scene.

Did you make much from DJing?

N: Yea. For a while I was making anywhere from $400 – $600 per event. Life was good in high school. But the scene started getting over saturated and new dudes started undercutting and taking gigs for like 50 bucks around ’09-’10.

What was the vibe like? Drugs? Violence? Just clean fun?

N: Violence happened, but it was never planned. Chicks fight over dudes and vice versa. Gang shit. No drugs though, we were young. We just wanted to see chicks dance. And dance on us.

Sometimes the fights got the venues shut down. It started happening more and more. Newark is already a violent city. If we had parties we had to book security or pay a shit load of money for cops to patrol. These crews throwing all the parties didn’t have LiveNation backing them so we got security crews. We did with what we had.

They were held at house parties, YMCA, Boys And Girls Clubs, Student Centers and all that. Any and everywhere. We were just tryna make music and be somebody.

All the DJs were walking around with big ass CD books for a while lol. That’s how a lot of us started out – CDJs with like 20-60 audio CDs lol.

How did word spread about the parties?

N: People set up street teams and had people in different high schools passing out flyers. Downtown Newark was the hangout spot for EVERYONE, so it was easy to promote a party down there by handing out flyers. Social sites too, like Myspace. We also had this local site called Teens Night Out that took pictures at all the parties and posted them, had chat rooms and all that, so it was easy to stay connected and aware of everything. But dude moved on to other shit and sold it to DJ Jay (former member of Brick Bandits) who just never relaunched it.

Is SoundCloud the main place where people find Jersey Club these days?

N: Now it is, yea. Used to be MySpace. Streaming was enough then, but you could download from Myspace at one point in time.

The #Thread party was a major part of Spin’s recent feature on Jersey Club, so go peep that for more while we wait for the next party… And buy Nadus’s shyt!!