miércoles, 29 de febrero de 2012

David Pelham, el portadista sublime de Ballard y la ciencia-ficción de Penguin Books





http://www.ballardian.com/pelham-art-of-inner-space

ANTHONY BURGESS A Clockwork Orange, 1972       J G BALLARD The Drowned World, 1974     LEON E STOVER and HARRY HARRISON (Eds) Apeman, Spaceman, 1972

http://www.penguinsciencefiction.org/

Silbando en la Oscuridad



                                       http://vimeo.com/10059901

                          
http://www.stomper.org.uk/current/whistlinginthedark/index.html
http://www.stomper.org.uk/current/whistlinginthedark/artistsandpieces.pdf

Alex Ross ('Listen To This'): My Spine Is The Bassline



Renacimiento Musical Swahili




Lungu Lungu: Swahili Renaissance

yomewazushi_fader
Kenya keeps surprising me. The first shock came two and a half years ago when I discovered Just A Band. More recently I linked up with Anto, who in turn pointed me towards a young female rapper going by the name of YOme. And that’s where it all links together: YOme’s dad! is a multi-faceted producer I’ve had the pleasure of working with in the past: Robert Wawesh Wawero, one of the founders of fantastic non-profit label Penya Africa, home to incredible artists such as Sauti SolMuthoni the Drummer Queen, and… Just A Band.
It had been a while since I last spoke to Wawesh, who is no longer involved with Penya. As it turns out he relocated to Mombasa, the second largest city in Kenya, a place with a much more laid back vibe than Nairobi, and enough white sand beaches for days. The coastal area of Kenya (like the coastal area of Tanzania) is at the heart of Swahili culture and language. I’ve heard great stuff coming from Zanzibar and Dar-es-Salaam. I’m a fiend for Bi Kidude or Offside Trick. But coastal Kenya? I draw a blank.
True to himself, Wawesh is not only schooling me, but also pioneering a new sound there, and is already involved with a number of promising young artists. In particular, his daughter YOme and Swahili rap duo Wazushi. One of the first results yielding from these collaborations is the song featured here, “Via,” which means swag or being fly. I love the sample Wawesh used. I imagine a muezzin chanting early morning over hot, sleepy Mombasa. Except this is the bass heavy, street-ready version.
Download: Wazushi and YOme, “Via”
I picked “Via” out of a handful of tracks Wawesh made with YOme and Wazushi. It’s dark, layered, and gets my head bobbing uncontrollably. But the other songs, some of which you can check out here, are pretty amazing too. What I thought was nuts is that YOme, born in 1997, is into hip hop that came out before she was even born. Once I got past the realization that I’m getting old, and that the hip hop I listen to is now usually referred to as “golden era hip hop” or worse, “old school hip hop,” I could not help but wonder: How can YOme be so deep into Biggie or Tupac?
I suppose it helps to have a producer dad. It also helps to have a dancer mom. Although Wawesh is Kenyan, YOme’s mom is Salvadorian, and YOme grew up in Gothenburg, Sweden. Pretty far from Brooklyn or Oakland, but that didn’t keep YOme from learning the lyrics to entire songs and developing her own flow. Wawesh could not believe his ears the first time he heard her spit “Big Poppa” in its entirety. Luckily he has the tools to turn her talent into top notch songs, and I’m very curious to hear what comes out of this family affair. As for Wazushi, Tyga and Rapiz are two of many in this old school Mombasa posse. From hip hop to lifestyle clothing, Wazushi runs Mombasa’s underground. Now armed with Wawesh’s tight beats, they might actually prosper beyond Mombasa’s streets.
Wawesh’s ambition is not just to hand pick groups and develop them. His real plan launch what he calls resource centers for the urban poor—places where people can learn how to create quality beats, which software to use and how to take a project beyond the studio and into the real world. As he puts it, “In Kenya there are small islands of people re-inventing the wheel, there is no central point of knowledge.” What he means is that when you acquire skills informally, you may have an advantage over the people around you, but once you look at a broader picture, you may be doing what many have already perfected. Wawesh wants to see information flowing so people can take arts and culture further.
In a place like Sweden, where Wawesh spent many years, you can keep learning, experimenting and find access to loads of information. In the end, you can sharpen your skills and perfect your art. So once you get past the quality of Wawesh’s beats, this is the real piece he is bringing to Mombasa—building cultural capacity. I commend him on this mission, and hope I can someday prolong it in a place like Ghana, where I live, and where I see the exact same problems. Bahati nzuri!


Read more: http://www.thefader.com/2012/02/22/lungu-lungu-swahili-renaissance/#ixzz1nh0vkQaF

"The City of Samba"





http://vimeo.com/37157187



Jarbas Agnelli and Keith Loutit invite us to enjoy the daytime scenery and nighttime spectacle that is Rio de Janiero’s Carnaval celebration through the lens of their tilt-shift cameras.





  • Para a trilha sonora, Jarbas gravou em estúdio instrumentos de orquestra imitando os ritmos de um samba enredo. - na sexta-feira
  • Em 5 dias, durante o carnaval de 2011, Keith e Jarbas capturaram 167.978 fotos. - na sexta-feira
  • The City of Samba, curta feito em parceria com o australiano Keith Loutit. Assista no site do AD. - na sexta-feira

martes, 28 de febrero de 2012

Zindabad!





http://vimeo.com/37510715    /    http://www.zindabad.org/esp.html



http://eguzkibideoak.info/node/283

                                 

Chief Boima





http://www.xlr8r.com/podcast/2012/02/chief-boima



01 DJ Arafat "Frapper Naboula Tala" (Ivoir Mix DJ)
02 Chief Boima "Last Night of Your Life" (Dutty Artz)
03 BB Ramazani "Fouka Fouka" (X-pol)
04 Dollar R DJ "Wolosso Azoubagehi" (Section Zouk/Score)
05 Abou Nidal "Wrou Wrou"
06 DJ Passon "Kuduro Logobie"
07 DJ Bax "Kro. D'F.L.O Gringo" (Bazzerk)
08 Chief Boima "Logobi 1"
09 Chief Boima "Decolator" (Dutty Artz)
10 The Shine feat. Jimmy "Qual é a Dica"
11 Crystal Fighters "At Home (Cousin Culo Remix)"
12 Chief Boima "Cape Verdians in Paris"
13 MC Cidinho "Dinheiro (Maga Bo Remix)" (Comando Digital)
14 Walter Ananaz "Mboia" (Bizness Music/Bomaye Musik/Sérios L)
15 J. Martins & Cabo Snoop "Good Tym" (Don Family/Storm)
16 Oz Kiezos "Princeza Rita" (Lusafrica France)
17 DJ Eridson feat. Dj D.D.Cabeça "D.D 122 Dor de Cabeça"
18 Tshala Muana "Libanga Yatalo" (Syllart)
19 Osunlade "Envision (Dixon Version)" (Innervisions)
20 AJEButter 22 feat. Taymi B "Senrenre" (Studio Magic)
21 Geelex feat. Appietus & E.L "Bend Ya Body" (Agany Entertainment)
22 Lamin Fofana "Brokedown City (Aramac Remix)" (Sticks n' Stones)
23 Sorie Kondi "Without Money No Family (Chief Boima Remix)" (Dutty Artz)









Chief Boima's Africa in New York EP comes out On Feb 21st




                            (via Soul Cocina: blog.soulcocina.com)  

LaChapelle: "Earth Laughs In Flowers"





http://www.davidlachapelle.com/series/earth-laughs-in-flowers

http://www.fahrenheitmagazine.com/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=4442:david-lachapelle-earth-laughs-in-flowers&lang=es

David Hall - 'End Piece...'





http://www.p3exhibitions.com/  /  http://www.davidhallart.com/bio.html

Lillian F. Schwartz, en los tiempos de "la computadora"




                                           http://lillian.com/?cat=49


Robert Wyatt: Miles, Mingus, Manolo (Caracol)...




              http://pitchfork.com/features/5-10-15-20/8776-robert-wyatt/

"Sobre El Suicidio"




"In such a country and at such a time,
There should be no melancholy evenings,
Even high bridges over the rivers,
And the hours between the night and morning,
And the long winter time as well:
All these are dangerous!
For in view of all the misery,
People just throw, in a few seconds time,
Their unbearable lives away."
(Bertold Brecht, hace 60+ años...)

June Christy, portando la Antorcha



Ian Penman: "June Christy looks like a homely Doris Day doppelganger...

...Homely maybe, but this is also a home to the scorched hearth of the Torch - more The Apartment than Move Over Darling*"


"The places we met are out of the way,
  It's always by night, never by day...
  Whatever you've been, whatever you've done,
  Come out of the dark, walk in the sun..."
("Intrigue")




      *en castellano, "Apártate, Cariño" (1963): Doris Day y James Garner.

lunes, 27 de febrero de 2012

Spot The Differences





http://www.allthingsdeep.com/dge/bongo.htm
http://www.mrbongo.com/product/bongo-rock-lp-1305




http://www.grooveattack.com/2012/01/09/the-incredible-bongo-band-masterpiece-apache-gets-the-remix-treatment/
http://www.juno.co.uk/artists/Shawn+Lees+Incredible+Tabla+Band/

Mardin, arreglista y "legend" de Atlantic




En conversación con David Toop, 1986: http://testpressing.org/2009/09/the-face-david-toop-arif-mardin-interview/

Ayuda para Clinton



This man, LIVING LEGEND, has run into a financial crisis, like many of us, but he needs your help to save his legendary Mothership Studios.
It really saddens me, in fact it depresses me, that a living legend like him could be struggling in this way after 40+ years of hard graft in this industry!  The man is an absolute pioneer, a genius!


Here’s what his campaign is all about:
Our Story
He goes by many names……Dr. Funkenstein, Mr Wiggles the Worm, Lollipop Man. No matter what you call him his work is inescapable. George Clinton and Parliament Funkadelic are pioneers of funk music, whose sound is the DNA of modern Hip-Hop and Soul. From “I Wanna Testify”, “One Nation Under A Groove”, and “Mothership Connection” though “Flashlight”, “Atomic Dog”, and “Paint The White House Black”, P-Funk has been on the front lines of progressive creativity and has forged a sound and a style that has turned heads and tore up stages for over 5 decades! But the flight of the Mothership has not been without turbulence. Countless acts of copyright fraud, theft, and intellectual injustice have and still continue to attempt to derail the funk from fulfilling its mission. As George fights daily for the funk, this campaign acts as an opportunity for us to unite and return it to its rightful owners.
The Impact
As George continues to battle for the rights to his own songs we are looking to expand our self-sufficient nature, as to not need the powers that be: record labels, lawyers, and publishers. By expanding our own studio and creating a better environment for the housing of George’s classic material past and present, we are creating an opportunity for this and future generations of funkateers to be able to continue to spread the message that “Everything Is On The One!” and we are “One Nation Under A Groove”. As we put a stop to corrupt figures who continue to claim rights and ownership of the funk from the shadows, we are creating an environment that enables the funk to live on forever.
What We Need & What You Get
With this campaign we are looking to raise $50,000 for the restoration and preservation of original recordings, as well as urgent repairs and upgrades to the Parliament-Funkadelic family recording studio.
-Tape Machine Repair
-Neve Mixing Console Repair
-Tape Archive Construction
-Studio A Live Room Construction
-Studio B Room Construction
-Creation Of Two Pre-Production Rooms
-Sound Proofing
-Roof Repair
-Studio Wiring
-Recording Software and Hardware
-Microphones
In exchange for contributions, we are offering a number of exclusive and awesome perks, which include everything from autographed cd’s and gear, to your own personal P-Funk concert with your favorite tracks as the setlist.
Other Ways You Can Help
Please spread the word of this campaign to funkers everywhere on Facebook, Twitter, and everywhere else you can think of. Together we can keep the funk coming for generations to come!!
Check it all out here and for as little as $300 you can have a voicemail drop form the great man himself:
Extraordinary times!!


viernes, 24 de febrero de 2012

Quantic / Alice Russell / Combo Bárbaro - "Look Around The Corner (live)"




Pan y Café


                               http://soundcloud.com/xenia-rubinos

Sun Boxes


                   http://burningambulance.com/2012/01/30/sun-boxes/


 

Steinski in the mix! (Mid-90s show)




http://wfmu.org/playlists/shows/43927

http://www.amoeba.com/blog/2008/06/jamoeblog/what-does-it-all-mean-steinski-the-amoeblog-interview.html

Saint John C, por Paolo Parisi


(Paolo Parisi, Coltrane; Black Velvet, 2010)

http://kinga-thebooksnob.blogspot.com/2012/02/paolo-parisi-coltrane.html

Reynolds < Marcus



Greil Marcus: a life in writing

'I had an overwhelming urge to express the joy, the delirium, I felt listening to the radio and going to shows by the Stones and Dylan'
Greil Marcus
Greil Marcus … his work builds a bridge between music journalism and academia. Photograph: Ulf Andersen/Getty Images
Greil Marcus lives in a newly built, cedar-shingled house on the border between Oakland and Berkeley. Inside, the living room has the bare, impersonal look of a university's temporary accommodation for visiting academics. But Marcus and his wife Jenny aren't passing through: they've lived in Berkeley since the early 1960s. And while his work builds a bridge between music journalism and academia, there's nothing professorial about Marcus. In photographs he often looks as though trying to smile causes him pain, but in person he laughs easily and swears with disconcerting vehemence, whether speaking ill of the dead or raving about records from "One Chord Wonders" by the Adverts to Lady Gaga's "Bad Romance".
Marcus was at the forefront of the first generation of rock critics, the babyboomers who invented the genre from scratch around 1965, but none of his peers can rival his imposing body of work, which comprises four major books (Mystery TrainLipstick TracesInvisible RepublicThe Shape of Things to Come), several focused studies (such as his recent scintillating monograph on the Doors), and five themed collections of essays and reviews. He's made his mark as an editor too, from 1968'sRock and Roll Will Stand, a hard-to-find period piece worth hunting down, through the desert-island-disc anthology Stranded, to Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, a posthumous collection that cemented his friend Lester Bangs's reputation as the only figure who might have given Marcus a run for his money. Most recently he co-edited the monumental 1,000-page-plus A New Literary History of America.
We sit in his basement study, watched by a life-size cut-out of Buddy Holly. Marcus's voice is very Californian, with a warm-toned bigness that would work well on the radio. He's lived his whole life in the Bay Area. And it was at the University of California in Berkeley that three formative experiences occurred that have steered his course ever since.
Spring 1964: he reads in the newspaper that that a British rock'n'roll group is to appear on the Ed Sullivan Show. When he goes down to his college dorm's TV room, he's amazed to find 200 people waiting expectantly. Like most of his generation, Marcus thought of rock'n'roll as belonging to the past, a 50s flash that lit up teenage lives then petered out. Arriving at Berkeley in '63, like most middle-class kids he was a folkie, carrying LPs by Joan Baez and the pre-electric Dylan. But after the Beatles appeared on American television, he and his generation were reborn as rock'n'roll believers. It was back, it was here to stay, it was something that would grow with you all through your life.
The second revelation was encountering Pauline Kael's writing. Kael was a cult figure in Berkeley long before she became nationally known with 1965's I Lost It at the Movies. "Much of that book came out of radio broadcasts she made reviewing films on KPFA. Pauline started the Cinema Guild, a Berkeley arthouse movie theatre, and did the programme notes for hundreds of foreign and Hollywood movies." Kael's criticism – "such humour, such daring, this tightrope act of excitement and jeopardy" – struck him with a force comparable to rock'n'roll.
The third life-changer was the frenzy of protest and debate that convulsed Berkeley in the autumn of 1964. Sparked initially by agitation against racist hiring practices in Bay Area businesses, it escalated into the Free Speech Movement in response to the university authorities' attempt to crack down on the pamphleteering and recruitment taking place on campus. "People stepping out of the anonymity of their own lives", is how Marcus characterises this spontaneous upsurge of "public speech". During those "three solid months of arguing in dorm rooms and on picket lines, asking 'What's this place for?' 'What's this country about?'", Marcus "walked around the campus thinking how lucky I am to be here at this moment".
An academic career beckoned, but Marcus started writing about music for college papers, then pulled together Rock and Roll Will Stand, a project born of his "overwhelming urge to express the joy, the delirium, I was feeling from listening to the radio and going to shows by the Stones and Dylan". Then one day in 1968 he saw a copy of a magazine whose name was a triple-whammy tribute to the Stones, Dylan and Muddy Waters. From its professional look, Marcus "knew instantly" that Rolling Stone had to be the work of Jann Wenner, someone he'd known as a freshman at Berkeley. He started contributing, then joined the staff as its first reviews editor. "There were no rules, no right way to do anything," he recalls of this golden dawn of rock criticism. "Just complete freedom to do anything you could think of, in the most ambitious and iconoclastic and obnoxious way possible."
Back then Rolling Stone was closer to a collective, but Wenner tired quickly of the constant arguments. "To this day Jann will say I quit, I'll say I was fired," Marcus notes wryly. After an abortive second stab at academia, Marcus returned to full-time music writing and in 1973 embarked on his first and still most revered book, Mystery Train. Its subtitle, "Images of America in Rock'n'Roll Music", reflects what could be called "the historical turn" that rock took at the close of the 60s. Initiated by Dylan and the Band, followed through by everyone from Creedence Clearwater Revival to Randy Newman, the music moved beyond rock'n'roll's teenage immersion in the present to an adult sophistication steeped in deep knowledge of rock's roots in blues and country and lyrics that likewise looked to the past for inspiration. Songs on 1968'sMusic From Big Pink and 1970's The Band brought to life the civil war and the plight of farmers in the late 19th century.
For Marcus, listening rapt at the cusp of the 60s and 70s, rock was growing up in the richest and most unexpected way. What's more, his two great passions, music and American history, had converged. "Their music sounded like a new way to understand who you were, the fact that you weren't just a product of your own willfulness but also a product of the past," he says of the Band, the subject of Mystery Train's most compelling section (although the chapters on Sly Stone and Elvis Presley aren't far behind). "There was this sense that they were opening a door to your own country and your own history."
Love of country is a running theme throughout Marcus's work, but it is also a running sore, an endless source of anguish. "Patriotism in America, as I understand it, is a matter of suffering, when the country fails to live up to its promises, or actively betrays them." Because "American" is not a race and the land itself is too vast and varied to base identity around either, American patriotism is organised around an idea. The United States is an invented nation, one of the only ones there's ever been, and Americans, Marcus has written, always "imagine a destiny". But that also becomes, he says, a "burden", a struggle "in your own mind or in public to fulfill those promises".
Mystery Train is riveting for anyone who cares about rock music, but for some British readers, its all-American focus can feel like a slight: especially given that in 1975, the year the book was published, the UK could fairly be considered to share dominion over rock (the Beatles, the Stones, the Who, Led Zeppelin, Bowie). As it happens, the next music to enthrall Marcus came almost entirely from Britain. Unimpressed by New York punk, his imagination was captured by the Sex Pistols and the Clash, and even more so by the postpunk groups that followed, such asGang of Four.
"Hearing things like 'Wake Up' by Lora Logic, or the Raincoats' 'In Love' – that was something I wasn't prepared for. I couldn't hear anything that came before it in the music, and I didn't want to. I was absolutely in love with its out-of-nowhereness. Records that were the sound of somebody – more often than not, a she – speaking with a voice that had never been heard before. Somebody who'd never had the nerve to speak up before. I felt: 'I wanna meet these people.' Which is unusual for me: I don't usually want to meet the people who are making music that I like. But they sounded interesting." Some of these British postpunkers, such as Gang of Four and the Mekons, remain his good friends of Marcus. The affinity stems in part because they have the mentality of critics as much as musicians: products of art school, well-versed in theory, always up for a vigorous argument.
M arcus's pieces about these bands and other figures of the postpunk era such as Elvis Costello eventually formed 1993's collection In the Fascist Bathroom (aka Ranters & Crowd Pleasers in the US). But before that came Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century. At once epic and fragmentary, the book argues for the Sex Pistols as the culmination of "an unheard, invisible tradition" of apocalyptic protest-poetry stretching back via Situationism and Dada all the way to medieval millenarian sects like the Brethren of the Free Spirit. "Johnny Rotten is speaking for himself but all those other voices are in there speaking with him too. All kind of demands on society, on life, on ontology, on epistemology are present in the noise of punk and in that vocal sound, boiled down on to a little 7-inch piece of plastic."
"Secret history" has subsequently become a publishing-world cliché, but it was a fresh idea in 1989. Marcus says that he didn't actually coin the term. "It usually refers to books about the espionage history of the second world war, how we broke the Nazi codes. I wasn't consciously referencing spy-craft, it just felt like the right way to describe what I'm doing in Lipstick Traces." It's a useful explanation for his work as a whole: a particular song or performance arrests him, and as his writing presses hard against the object of fascination, the work opens up to reveal hidden depths.
Lipstick Traces took nine years to write. Marcus started out at the University of California library, stumbling on strange texts in the stacks. Eventually the quest took him to Europe: "I had to learn how to read French because so much of the Situationist material has never been collected or translated." This shift of his attention to Europe and the 20th century avant garde reflected his extreme alienation from Reagan-era America.
After the 1980 election, Marcus "fell into a depression for a whole year. I had hated Reagan when he was governor of California and I hated what he did to the country when he was president. I couldn't bear to look at America – to grapple with it intellectually, critically – during those years. It's always bullshit when people say 'if so-and-so's elected, I'm leaving' – I've heard that with every election. But in a way I did leave the country."
In the 90s, Marcus came home in a big way. Invisible Republic starts with the figure oddly absent from Mystery TrainBob Dylan. It uses The Basement Tapes, the just-for-fun recordings made by Dylan and the Band in the summer of 1967, as a portal into "the old weird America" (as the book was later retitled). In particular, it focuses on the odd, often fantastical traditional songs collected by Harry Smith for 1952'sAnthology of American Folk Music, as performed by singers such as Dock Boggs. "If Mystery Train is my Nixon book and Lipstick Traces my Reagan book, Invisible Republic is my Bill Clinton book," says Marcus. "I really liked Clinton. He made me proud to be part of this country again. For all of his failings, the way he put all that he'd done in jeopardy, I supported him from beginning to end."
Because of his books, his editing and his teaching (at Princeton), Marcus managed to get off the treadmill of weekly reviewing a long time ago, and he writes about current music only when the spirit moves him. In the last decade especially he's stayed close to his obsessions, artists whose heyday was the 60s and 70s. Hence the whole book he wrote about his favorite single of all time, "Like a Rolling Stone". Hence When That Rough God Goes Riding (Listening to Van Morrison). And hence his latest, The Doors: A Lifetime of Listening to Five Mean Years.
"There are a zillion books about the Doors but none of them are about their music," Marcus says, reiterating his lack of interest in the cult of Jim Morrison. "I just wanted to listen to the songs." When it comes to anybody he writes about, Presley or Rotten or Van Morrison, he's "not interested in them as people, their inner demons or the particulars of their upbringing". Even when focused on a single artist, his books don't engage in biography but rather mythography. And yet Marcus's own compulsive attraction to mystery, he reveals, is rooted in his biography.
His father, a Navy officer, died during the second world war, shortly before he was born in June 1945. When he was three, his mother remarried and, although Marcus always knew about his real father, he grew up thinking of his adoptive father as Dad. Even his relatives on his real father's side soon sensed that they weren't supposed to talk about their war-hero son when little Greil was around. So it is only recently that the veil of silence parted and Marcus discovered that his father had been one of many victims of a disgraceful episode in the Pacific War, the inspiration for Herman Wouk's The Caine Mutiny.
"My father was executive officer, which is second-in-command, on a ship called the Hull, one of three ordered into a typhoon by Admiral Halsey – an insane and sadistic decision. When the boat was on the verge of sinking, the other officers asked my father to arrest the captain and seize control of the ship. It was a choice between almost certain death and being hung for mutiny. My father refused because never in the history of the US Navy had there been a mutiny. So he died, along with 400 men on his own ship and another 400 on the other boats. This was a huge national scandal, there were congressional investigations. It wasn't an obscure story."
How eerie that at the very centre of Marcus's being are the tangled threads that run through his life's work: America and history, patriotism and a sense of national shame, secrecy and silence. "I've always known why I do what I do," he insists. "I didn't need to be psychoanalysed to find that out. An obsession with untold stories is a source of energy. It's why even if I don't seek out occulted subjects, I frame things that way as a writer."