I’ve got 4 interesting gigs this week. All-out parties on Wednesday and Saturday, a free artist’s talk / Q&A /demystifying-what-i-do-mini-set on Friday, and my duo for guitar & turntables with Andy Moor on Thursday. I’m psyched to meet Chattanooga!

details:

Wed. Sept 9: Madison WI @ the Annex. event info + interview ‘on cumbia and Stephen King

Thurs. Sept 10: Chicago IL. Duo with Andy Moor at The Wire’s Adventures in Modern Music festival, Empty Bottle. Lucky Dragons will also be performing!

Fri. Sept 11 + Sat. Sept 12: Chattanooga TN. On Friday, a free artist talk/Q&A/turntablism demo early. Club gig on Saturday. The talk with be live streaming and maybe twittering here. Friday talk facebook page, Saturday party facebookery.

WorldTown flyer

Raekwon-OnlyBuilt4CubanLinxIICover

[audio:http://nyc.duttyartz.com/mp3s/Raekwon-10Bricks.mp3]
Raekwon – 10 Bricks feat. Ghostface Killah and Cappadonna

[audio:http://nyc.duttyartz.com/mp3s/Raekwon-ColdOutside.mp3]
Raekwon – Cold Outside feat. Ghostface Killah

Raekwon‘s Only Built 4 Cuban Linx II is a great album! In fact, it is an infinitely better rap sequel than Jay Z’s Blueprint 2 or 3.

…Swastikas on the church, they Satan
Holiday Season is here, I’m vexed
Who the fuck made Christmas up?
I’m fucking broke, it ain’t making no sense
Newport is 7.50, a box of Huggies is of the meat-rack
She’s back, 30 days she relapse
Our troops need to leave Iraq, and rap n****s need to go on strike so we can get more cash… –
Ghostface

Jahdan Blakkamoore BUZZROCK WARRIOR album release party!

quebajo2

The album drops September 15th, and on the 17th Que Bajo?! is throwing a party with special live performance by Jahdan, accompanied by super producer extraordinaire and deejay Matt Shadetek.  Jahdan & Matt are also getting ready for some touring and special performances later this Fall and into the Winter. Dates and details will be here soon. For now, come enjoy the party! On the same night, we are also blessed with the appearance of the great Eddie Stats of The FADER and GHETTO PALMS series. Eddie Stats is sharp, efficient, and just ridiculously good behind the decks. DJ Rekha of Basement Bhangra will also be live with tunes for the all around dance floor massacre. Dutty Artz family/Que Bajo?! resident deejays/two of the wickedest sound men I know Geko Jones and Uproot Andy will be in the building serving their usual, tremendous heat, along with some blazing refixes. facebook RSVP here.

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So Mi GoOd FriEnD Maga Bo’s stay inna New York has come to an end but the dance no done till the Water Taxi babylon give us a run.

Friday, September 4th 2009
TOTH @ Water Taxi Beach Queens

DJ Mariano & Cato (Beleza) + Nappy G on percussion. Special guest from Brazil, DJ Maga Bo!! Mago Bo brought the Cumbia, Reggae, Big beat FIRE last year & we’re happy to have him back once again!! Another DJ on the cutting edge of Music from Brazil, Colombia, Latin America & more!! http://www.myspace.com/magabo

Address: #2 Borden Ave in LIC QUEENS. $10 / 8PM – 2AM. Free Water Taxi’s from East 35th Street to the party & back all night!

Real talk from one of my favorite DJs in the UK Funky scene. In this interview by Blackdown Marcus Nasty speaks out in his traditional opinionated way about why he thinks the grime scene died and the way forward for UK Funky which he has become one of the leading DJs in. I enjoy Marcus sets because as a fellow post-grime person he is playing house but keeping it raw. I love the new UK funky sounds and have been playing a lot of it and find that it is even leading me into some of the smoother stuff but basically I still like raw, percussive, heavy tunes. Getting into a lot of what people think of as ‘normal house’ is just too far for me and a lot of the DJs coming from there into funky play too smooth for me. Marcus has (or has had, he’s sounding a little more mature now) a rep for being a big muscle-y dude who will beat you up and you can tell he’s pretty unconcerned about offending anyone which lends a certain truthiness to this interview.


Marcus Nasty Interview at Blackdown.

cross-posted to Mudd Up!

my10

Notable instruments: Oberheim DMX, Drum machine, Electronic keyboard, Sequencer

 

10 years ago I was driving through Boston listening to one of the reggae mix shows on WERS (i think). A riddim came on which nearly made me stop the car. It was Steely & Clevie’s Street Sweeper. A strident minimal percussion pattern, little fragments of guitar washing in & out. A string flourish there, a whistle sound here, a vocal snippet. I’d been following dancehall for awhile and was used to surprises, but Street Sweeper floored me. As a DJ, producer, and listener.

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[Wycliffe ‘Steely’ Johnson]

It was possibility and emphatic silence as much as it was a song. To clarify: Steely and Clevie built the Street Sweeper riddim, which a few dozen vocalists transformed into songs, riffing on the beat’s undeniable power to deliver some top-notch chatting. Here’s a youtube medley of the popular versions:

Wycliffe ‘Steely’ Johnson passed away in New York City & the world is poorer without him. Street Sweeper cracked things open for me; they had countless other hits but it was these moments of skullcrushing genius economy that made this riddim one of my all-time favorite pieces of music.

“In 1993, at the height of apartheid in South Africa, the incarceration of black males was 870 per 100,000. In 2004 in the U.S., for every 100,000 people we are sending 4,919 black males to prison. And the majority of those are for nonviolent drug offenses. But we’d rather send people to prison than give them information and treatment.”

Great article on the benefits of full legalization & the drug-prison-cop industry over at Esquire.

jahdan_general

A grimy mix of hip-hop, dancehall, electronic, dubstep,and pretty much anything else with chest-caving bass, Brooklyn’s Jahdan Blakkamoore is a vocalist who’s taking that pan-global headknock from neon-coated Philadelphia warehouses back to NYC, where cohort DJ/Rupture kicked this shit off almost a decade ago. It helps that he’s dragging it kicking and screaming through the streets. Blakkamoore’s Buzzrock Warrior has a hip-hop-centric noir feel that matches the darker, moodier topics it covers:…

Head over to the Village Voice blog SOUND OF THE CITY to read the feature on Jahdan and download an MP3 of “The General (Remix)” featuring Smif-N-Wessun’s General Steele.