I think it is safe to say I have lost interest in featuring monthly podcasts, and I am abandoning the endeavor. However I am slowly but surely working on a mix in the style of the screwed remix I posted recently.
On that note, I never thought I’d say this, but I am loving the latest beta version of Audacity. It is still a fairly clunky and inefficient program, but it has some useful new features, and it seems to work.
New podcast is up. This month I selected some of my favorite cumbias that I’ve been able to track down. Shout outs are due to Ghetto Bassquake, Lacongona, Mudd Up!, and San Francisco’s Mission District, without these resources my guess is I’d still be completely ignorant about all this amazing music.
Cold Tropics Podcast No. 4:
Daleduro – Bombon Asesino
??? – La Danza Del Hombre Churrumay (Extended Mix)
María y José – Ola de Calor
??? – Andinas 1.2
Alika y Nueva Alianza – Para Bailar Cumbia (El Hijo de la Cumbia remix)
??? – 2 Pac v. Sgcolombia
Sekreto – Gota (El Hijo de la Cumbia remix)
Sonido Desconocido – Cumbia del Falso Contacto
Toy Selectah – Shove It
Los Daddys – Cumbia Negra
??? – Son de Cumbia
??? – Cumbia del Heavy Bass
Formula 5 – La Cumbia Maestra
Next month’s podcast is gonna drone. I hope everyone has a happy Day of the Dead tomorrow.
Finally, here at long last! This month’s belated podcast is about the cross sections of musical cultures that form bold & promising new cultural spaces for people to explore. The first time I heard Rhythm & Sound I could hardly believe that two seemingly incompatible genres had been merged together to an exhilarating effect. But it goes beyond a mere hybridization of genres of course. Rhythm & Sound created something distinctly there own, and stand head & shoulders above the sort of bland, cookie-cutter dub techno mixes that proliferate.
I remember being in high school and attempting to explain to some other people the awesomeness of the Ex records with Tom Cora. “So what, it’s punk and classical?” This sort of equation is deeply offensive. To approach another culture’s world there are all sorts of snares and pitfalls that one might get stuck in. Records are just commodities, but they are commodities that can potentially contain the dreams & aspirations of an entire society. A failure to respect the importance of that is seriously unethical, and goes against a greater cosmic justice.
But despite the potential difficulties of communing with a foreign body, it is a path worth exploring. The Marshall Jefferson remix of Tom Tom Club revealed a common and shared identity. When Arthur Doyle jammed with the Les Rallizes Denudes dudes, it made the impossible doable. Tony Conrad & Faust droning into infinite may have just seemed like some seriously weeded out fever dream at the time, but the resonances of that meeting of minds is still with us today. Genre keeps us on firm ground, where we know what we are bearing witness to. When you open yourself up to the unfamiliar however, all conventions are decoded, and for a moment we glimpse something much bigger than our own existence. That is when the promise of liberation permeates the spirit of the music we make.
Cold Tropics Podcast No. 3
Tracklisting:
DJ Screw – (Sadly, like most of my Screw Tapes, no metadata)
Rhythm & Sound – History Version
Burnt Friedman & Jaki Leibezeit – Gegenwart
Tony Conrad & Faust – From the Side of Woman & Mankind (excerpt)
Marshall Jefferson – Don’t Say No (Pumpin’ Acid Mix)
Takashi Mizutani, Sabu Toyozumi, & Arthur Doyle – Live in Japan 1997
The Ex, Getatchew Mekuria, & Guests – Moa Anbessa
Next month’s podcast is going to be all cumbia!
No, I haven’t dropped off the face of the earth, and as proof I am here with the second episode of the cold tropics podcast. For this one I took an international selection of music. I regret not covering Asia or the Middle East, and Sweden is probably over-represented in this mix. One thing that occurred to me while putting this mix together is that psychedelic doesn’t seem to refer to anything in particular. In this mix you’ll hear stuff that is funky, proto-punky, heavy, light & folky, etc. Simply passing it off as a drug-subculture doesn’t make much sense either. Some bands undoubtedly were on heavy lysergic trips, but that doesn’t explain the music that came out of Japan, which still to date has draconian drug laws, and drug use is simply not prevalent there the way it is in the West. But it is this open-ended characteristic to the music that perhaps help account for its international success, there was literally nothing to tie it down to one area.
Tracklist:
Black Merda – The Folks From Mother’s Mixer
Electric Funeral – To Be One
Simply Saucer – Here Come the Cyborgs (Pt. 2)
BLO – Chant to Mother Earth
Parson Sound – 10 min.
Amon Duul II – Luzifer’s Ghilom
El Polen – ???
Book of AM – Morning; As the Wind Blows
Joakim Skogsberg – Offer-Rota
Les Rallizes Denudes – ??? (Japanese characters I can’t translate)
The Professionals – A Part of Being With You
“It was cheap, it was easy, go and do it”
Well here is my foray into the world of podcasting a.k.a. amateur radio. I’m going to try and do this on a schedule of the first Sunday of every month. I figure a monthly schedule should keep me motivated enough to keep doing this without getting burned out, and I thought Sunday is a good day to listen to radio or radio-like programs. At least that’s usually when I listen to radio. Every podcast is going to be based on a theme of some kind. I decided to start off with Chicago, the city I called home for seven years. Chicago is a big city any way you like it, and it would have been impossible to have covered everything (I do regret not having any Chicago juke on this, I didn’t know about it at all when I lived there, and I still have a lot to learn…) I decided to limit myself to the more humble task of trying to convey a much more general impression of Chicago music. Chicago, unlike places like New York City, the Bay Area, or L.A., doesn’t really have much in the way of hype infrastructure seeking out local talent. The consequence of this is there is a healthy don’t-give-a-fuck ethos displayed by a lot of musicians who don’t worry too much about taking risks, or fitting neatly into the easy categories favored in press releases. Sometimes this attitude results in a lot of hubris, but other times it could result in Chicago feeling like the most exciting place on the planet.
Cold Tropics Podcast no. 1
Tracklisting:
Mr. Fingers – Stars
Ghost Arcade – Datenaustauch
Memo – Coal 45
Binges – Bad Batch
Mayor Daley – M.L. Pony
Killer Whales – Ode to Puerto Rico
Bird Names – ??? (Track 6 off of Fantic Yard EP)
BobbyConn – Jealous (Winners Remix by Magas)
Jitney – Snowhite Sneakers
Fake Lake – Untitled (Track 4 off of s/t… presumably s/t anyway… CD-R)
Deep Earth – Worldly Men
Magical, Beautiful – Untitled (Track 5 off of Obscure Love CD-R)
Unfortunately I’m still figuring out the details about how to setup a podcast so that new episodes regularly update on your music/media browser (if anyone is familiar with this get in touch!), so for now you just get a boring old mp3 file. Next month I will be covering psychedelic music with an extremely heavy international slant that eschews the Sgt. Pepper’s and Grateful Dead paradigm.
If you’re looking for some great rap from the Ivory Coast check out this mixtape by CIAfrica. It features some really superb production. Unfortunately, my French isn’t quite up to the task of following most of the lyrics, which is too bad because from what I understand they are on the political awareness tip. I remember seeing a documentary on Link TV not too long ago about rap music from Mali (I believe?), and I saw some performers, and the documentary had subtitles for their lyrics which got into some deep & excellent points about the challenges Africans face from Western economic liberalization policies.
And let me sweeten this post by making it a 2 for 1 deal with this podcast from Brian from awesometapesfromafrica.
All this music is very beat-oriented, and that illustrates a serious annoying recent development of rock critics describing bands as having an African or tribal style drumming. Obviously these critics are being lazy and don’t know what they’re talking about, or else they would recognize the diverse range of styles that exist, and also the way the West and Africa really do share a common musical lexicon.
Anyway, shout out to mudd up! and wayne&wax for bringing all this excellent music to my attention.