like the moon
Last week Dutty Artz released a lovely, largely unpredictable set of 4 tracks produced by longtime blog/label staple but debuting artist, Lamin Fofana. (You can hear & buy individual tracks at Amazon and elsewhere around the web.) I wasn’t sure what to expect, never having heard any of Lamin’s productions. Sure, I’d heard mixes and […]
Read More →One of our guests tonight at Beat Research is Baltimore’s Sam Hopkins, aka Balagan, who promises to bring quite a (digital/digitized) crate with him. He might mix things up like — The great pic above comes from a piece Sam just published in Wax Poetics about searching for vinyl in Casablanca. Allow me to snip […]
Read More →Next week I begin teaching my second course at MIT. It’s a new syllabus, though it draws on certain materials I’ve used before. In contrast to previous offerings, however, this will be the first time I teach a class with a primary focus on reggae outside of Jamaica — on what I’m calling here “global […]
Read More →the duke, surrounded by “african flowers” — google img search, 1 sept 2010 I was really thrilled with the reception of my “Galangs” mashup last week. To see the video get passed along by the likes of the Village Voice, NY Mag, & NPR, and especially to get this sort of response from SFJ, was […]
Read More →my friend alex, sporting a shirt made special for him in Paris’s 11th & inspired by this guy (see e.g.) In yesterday’s re-post of a review, you might have caught the following barb-backed big-up: Ayobaness! continues a line of releases from Outhere portraying African popular music that is, you know, actually popular (not just what […]
Read More →Continuing my tradition of posting “director’s cut” versions of the reviews I freelance from time to time, here’s the latest: a review of a recent compilation from Germany’s Outhere records, Ayobaness!, which showcases the rich, vibrant South African house scene. This one was an interesting endeavor, as my editor, Derek, pushed me to foreground a […]
Read More →This is the second post in a sporadic series here at w&w, an ongoing excavation, digitization, and interpretation of my wife’s grandparents’ record collection — i.e., the historico-musical profile of Seymour & Bernice. See here for the previous entry, and here for a note remembering Seymour. Of the many delights I’ve come across in Seymour […]
Read More →Despite that the majority of what I listen to takes the form of DJ mixes, and that I probably download something around 3 per day, and that I probably like a good third-to-half of what I DL, I rarely find the time to write about all this great stuff I’m listening to. So aside from […]
Read More →Ezra Koenig, the brainy singer from the brainy band Vampire Weekend, did me the awesome service of bigging up this here brainy blog in the latest issue of Rolling Stone (Issue 1103, 29 April 2010). One upshot is that I actually went out and bought something with Black Eyed Peas on the cover. It’s also […]
Read More →[Well, the Riddim Meth0d domain has finally kicked the bucket, scattering our posts to the great Internet Archive in the ether, or elsewhere. I’m going to continue rehashing here certain posts that seem to merit the treatment. In that vein, here’s another bit of resurrected mashup poetics for you. I’m happy to report that the […]
Read More →It’s a gorgeous day in Cambridge. The first day (that I’ve been here anyway — think I missed a couple while in Austin) that you want to wear a t-shirt outside, spend all day outside, cook meat outside, drink delicious beers outside, and listen to music like this — >>>> melonhands, fatmix Between […]
Read More →When Boima was in Boston recently, back from a trip that brought him to Dubai and Dar es Salaam (aka Bongo) Nairobi, he mentioned that he noticed CDs on sale on the street, like the one pictured below, which compiled current hip-hop (and r&b) instrumentals, presumably for local rappers and singers to use for their […]
Read More →Just a quick post to let you know that Beat Research will be leaping into 2010 tonight with a special guest appearance by Chief Boima. We’ve been lucky to host Boima’s distinctive blends of the best dance music on the planet — with a heavy slant toward African and Afrodiasporic jams — a couple times […]
Read More →When Guillaume was here last week, we discovered in conversation that we both had long been sitting on posts that centered on the question of Africanness and UK funky. I joked that we should both finally get around to finishing these posts and drop them on the same day, causing a ruckus on the ol’ […]
Read More →I’ve really been enjoying all the feedback I got on my “treble culture” post. One idea that’s been especially interesting is the seemingly common notion — repeated & affirmed by many commenters — that we tend to imagine/assume bass even when we don’t hear it. I suspect that this phenomenon may be at work more […]
Read More →Botswana’s Ruff Riddims (now tweeting) have been putting in work lately. Now that the studio is up and running, they’ve been grinding out some promising stuff — a mix of kwaito and kwasa-kwasa, hip-hop and reggae — and they’re starting to reach out, nationally and internationally, to share their work with the wider world. Check […]
Read More →With their latest greatest up-to-the-timeness (actually, an overview of 08), the Heatwave remind me that I should really bring more of the many mixes I enjoy to yr attn. These days, and for the last several years really — ever since the rise of the mp3/blog mix (h/t L-R?) — I listen to music mainly […]
Read More →from a blog and forthcoming documentary re: “How rapid immigration from Africa and the Caribbean is transforming the African American narrative” (via) — The Neo African Americans @ Yahoo! Video
Read More →Since the conversation continues about trad v modern in African music, and since we read something germane about it for class yesterday, and since I’m still tryna maintain that pdf-blog grind, I thought I’d take the opportunity to share another: >> Monson, Ingrid. “Riffs, Repetition, and Theories of Globalization.” Ethnomusicology 43, no. 1 (1999): 31-65. […]
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