I’m happy to announce that tonight I’ll be playing some records — yes, honest-to-goodness slabs of vinyl — alongside Tim of A Stack of Dusty Records, at an old and fave haunt: River Gods — the spot where I used to host Wicked Wicked Thursdays back in my pre-BR days and, yes, the place where Skip Gates and Sgt. Crowley had a post-WhiteHouse beer once back in the People’s Republic.
I’ll be playing two sets, an hour each, probably 9-10 and 11-12. For the first, I’ll be digging into the mid-century exotica I inherited from Seymour & Bernice, and for the second I’ll be dipping into my random assortment of reggae, hip-hip, r&b, and turntablist oddness. If you’re around, should be a fine spot to quench your thirst as well as your appetite for sonic snaps’n'crackles.
Joining the illustrious ranks of “Pan con Queso,” here’s another hilario cross-lingual take on a contemporary club banger (apropos of this, via @carolyneweldon) –
Tonight at Beat Research we’re happy to have Trizlam, a Dorchester native and crate-digging scholar interested in the circulation of musical media — he wrote an extensive essay on the importance of “yardtapes” in the Jamaican diaspora — who recently returned from a three-month tour of Colombia where he engaged in some serious picó peeping with the help of Fabian from the Africolombia blog.
In addition to visiting various old picós, replicas of the old greats (one of which he’s apparently shipped to Boston!), and new-style picos alike, he also got lots of great photos and conducted some interviews — & of course, he picked up a bunch of champeta, cumbia, and música tropical, a fine selection thereof he’ll be sharing with us at Enormous Room tonight. (No report on whether he’ll have any choque versions that I’ve yet to hear, but rest assured I’ll be asking him, especially since his tour also took him to Buenaventura.)
Since arriving back in the Bean, Triz has been blogging up a tropical storm, including a post on the picós he visited. In a case of great timing, the latest features a cumbia mix culled from all over South America. Go get a taste of what you might hear tonight, and add Ruff Luxury to whatever it is you add URLs to these days.
Yesterday Cluster Mag posted my second contribution to what we’re calling a “multimedia mash-up series.” (The first was my Lambada mega-mix.) As with my “Gasodoble” remix, this mashy montage sources related clips from YouTube — in this case drawing from Colombian (and a Dominican) choque vids and a variety of folk (mostly US-based) doing the bump — and collides them together (artfully, I hope) to pose some fun questions about symmetries, genealogies, and notable departures.
musicologist, internet annotator, imagined community organizer.
