Ghe20 G0th1k Meets Hatsune Miku Uptown in Cambridge

A little more about this Monday’s special edition of Beat Research… I’m thrilled to report that Venus’s partner-in-rave, $hayne (pic’d above), will be joining her on the trip. That means we’re gonna be treated to a tag-team/4-handed Ghe20 Goth1k performance the likes of which Greater Boston has not yet been party to. So get ready, […]

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Rethinking Music Industry w/ Nancy Baym

For this week’s “Back Talk” — the Q&A that runs on the back page of the Phoenix — I had the pleasure to pose a few questions to Nancy Baym, a scholar who’s work (& Twitter feed) I’ve been following for a few, especially as my own research turns more to questions of music “industry” […]

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Have Some Reggaeton With Your MP3

Sorta blows my mind that someone would upload something like this. Sorta. (Available for download too!) Don Omar Ft. Daddy Yankee – Miss Independent (OFFICIAL PREVIEW) By Jannick. ! by ReggaetonCaleta1 In an edutaining essay published 5 years ago (prelude to a book) media scholar Jonathan Sterne examines the MP3 as a “cultural artifact” with […]

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Social Media & Electro Diasporas

This Saturday I’ll be at Cornell, speaking on a panel alongside some esteemed colleagues. The subject at hand is, more or less, the animating force behind this blog in recent years: “(post-)regional dance musics and their transformation through the internet” — The students organizing the event have an ambitious agenda for digging deeper into this […]

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Global Forum Here Folks

Ok, I promise to quit kvetching about SoundCloud soon enough, but the material just keeps piling up. So permit me one more for now, a little ludic repair, if you will, courtesy of Carl Craig, rightly revered innovator of Detroit techno’s so-called “second wave.” (Here’s a recent interview if you’ve got some catching up to […]

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Orange Rainy Clouds & the Oldest Profession

In this week’s Chicago Reader, Miles Raymer offers an informative and interesting account of SoundCloud’s recent policy shifts, as chronicled and critiqued here (and here and here) at W&W. I’m happy to note that I make an appearance in the article, alongside the one and only Catchdubs, providing some familiar points (if you’ve been reading […]

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Limits to Your Love, Take Two (Thousand)

Following up on recent posts, I decided to do a little looking into how many remixes of James Blake’s “Limit to Your Love” currently reside on SoundCloud. I confess that I stopped after combing through 20 pages of returns for my (somewhat sweeping) search, though SoundCloud indicated that there were another 30 pages or so! […]

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More SoundClowning Around

Thanks for the continued conversation re: the limits to your love. I enjoy plotting to create better possible futures with y’all, and I “Beat Me Back” — or, more precisely, what makes one loop hackish (and hence disrespectable) and another inspired (and thus tolerated). Note how this commenter on another instantiation attempts to tease out […]

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Limits to Your Love

How many times do we need to be SoundClowned before we get wise? Back in late December, tellingly/suspiciously right in the midst of the holiday vacation lull, SoundCloud started sending out the same sort of automated take-down notices to its users that YouTube has been using for years. Mix-style DJs and remix producers found certain […]

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New Lambada New Lambada New Lambada New Lambada

Thanks to DJ Effresh for putting me on to yet another interesting instantiation of the “Lambada.” Here’s Vakero, one of the DR’s fiercest MCs, jumping on a dembow-influenced reworking of a truly perennial tune, as hashed out here, way back when — Discussing this over at my/our Buzz, Birdseed pointed out that there’s a recent […]

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Catch a Spark

If you’d like to hear more about how Masala’s collaboration with Ruff Riddims relates to the central questions of “world music 2.0” — a term that has seemingly (thankfully?) gained as much traction as “global ghettotech” (if among the commentariat rather than, say, DJs and bloggers) — you should tune in to a recent episode […]

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Airtime for Bots Brethren

Last week month marked the release of Airtime, an EP from Masalacism Records. A happy convergence for me, the project brings together two sets of friends from far-flung parts of the world: Canada’s Masalacists and Botswana’s Ruff Riddims. The EP features the singular style of MaSuper Star, a dynamic duo who teamed up last year […]

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Dembow Criollo

If I were writing my mega-essay on reggaeton today, I’d want to make a lot more space for the Dominican Republic’s local take on the genre. Generally referred to as dembow (rather than reggaeton) — or dembow dominicano, to signal a certain national(istic) distinction — the Dominican artists and producers working in the style essentially […]

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Berkman Talk w/ Reax

My Tuesday lunch talk at the Berkman Center is now available for viewing/listening/downloading/etcccc And I’m happy to report that, in fine Berkman tradition, the talk has already been blogged by some very astute observers of digital/internet culture: Jillian York offers an affirming precis here David Weinberger, author of Everything is Miscellaneous, live-blogged the talk in […]

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Platform Politricks

orthogonal image copied from some website or other I’ve been working on this monstruo post since last January, and hinting at it here and there, making it feel all the more urgent to finish though I haven’t had the time to tie it up. And yet, what has made finally publishing this post so hard […]

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Berkman Lunch Talky

Sorry for the silence here, dear readers. Been a busy month of literal and figurative heavy-lifting. I hope to strike things up again very soon, especially after next Tuesday, my final presentation of the semester, about which I’m very excited. I’ll be appearing in the Berkman Center’s Tuesday lunch series to talk about the “unstable […]

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A Whole Nu World?

Last week a daily newspaper from Abu Dhabi, The National, published a piece I wrote about “nu world” music under the title “Sounds of the wide, wired world” (29 Oct 2010). As usual, while I think my editor — here, the mighty Dave Stelfox — did an utterly admirable job of making my prolix prose […]

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Nigerians Are the New Jamaicans

Louis Chude-Sokei has just published one of the more textured and sympathetic accounts of Nigerian 419 scammers I’ve read to date. Touching on everything from e-waste to Nollywood, proposing a tongue-in-cheek anti-eco-tourism, and taking into its analysis the way that transnational hustler culture speaks through the (dated) language of hip-hop and dancehall, it’s an incisive […]

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Demo My Demo My Demo My Media

Yesterday, in a post about music and cellphones, Jace said something striking and funny and perfect — More is my favorite type of music, actually. Then comes 128kbps, one of my favorite musical genres. This reminded me that my favorite co-producer these days is without a doubt AVS Media Demo — (h/t who else but […]

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Realtalk & Sockpuppets, Little People & Worldly Worlds

darts not pictured Against my own best intentions, the saga continues. While some interesting but sprawling discussion continues to happen on the cumbia worlds post, my more recent entry, detailing an exchange with Barbès’ Olivier Conan, was derailed late Friday evening by a classic bit of trolling: just goes to show that a musicologist, journalist, […]

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