Just yesterday I was flipping over his Amen-breaking, dembow-dripped, synth-cackle, “Datsik – Firepower (Munchi Moombahcore Rmx).” And then this morning I find the following in my inbox. Readymade blogpost hype? I’ll take it. Seriously, though, I really love the way Munchi explains his thinking behind each track and his general tracing out of all the influences (confluences?) coming together in his mad, moombah-fried mind:
I have been listening to alot of Cumbia/Chicha/Guaracha/Tribal these days
and it inspired me to dedicate this months promo to it!
After the Moombahton Promo things got pretty wild and it appeared almost everywhere.
While still experimenting with this genre (now Moombahcore), i found myself listening to more and more Cumbia. Especially when i got introduced to Sonido Martines’ Sonambulo Orientalista Mix. Without exaggerating, the mix was on replay for weeks.
More and more Cumbia seemed to cross my path and after hearing alot of
mixes (especially Toy Selectah’s), Eric Rincon, DJ Icon, Sonido Del Principe,
Uproot Andy, Kumbia Queers, etc. it was Tribal that really caught my attention.
This sound -although completly different- seemed so familiar and close to me for some reason.
Hearing this reminded me of Brazil’s Funk, Dominican Republic’s Mambo, Angola’s Kuduro, Puerto Rico’s and Panama’s Reggeton, Jamaica’s Dancehall, Baltimore/Philadelphia/Jersey’s Club Music, Chicago’s Juke Music and more recently Dave Nada’s Moombahton.
All these genres have these simalarities in them which i personaly like, they are from a located area and carry the tradition of those areas. I think Toy Selectah described this best. He said it was all Hiphop. The Hiphop of those reigons. Also they have a certain rawness, alot of bass and a straight-to-the-point-ness with often sexuality as theme. In the case with Mambo the FL-cheapness that i really appreciate.
So i started experimenting and while making the tracks i realized it has very much in common with Kuduro. Unexpected turn, but proven when i changed some things up. It went from full Tribal to 100% Kuduro. I kind of like these type of connections and also found myself making this tracks with Mambo ‘heart’. The rawness and ‘cheapness’ were elements of Mambo that i put into this ep. Also turning the sexual vibes a notch up as that was the only thing that seemed to be missing in comparison with the other genres. I didn’t want to exaggerate and experiment too much as the key for the promo’s still remains staying true to the genre.
So here it is! Cumbia XXX EP. let me give you a short explanation:
Mujeres Tan A Jarro
The vocals from one of my favorite mambo tracks ever. DJ Sensual has made so much good its ridiculous. matter of fact, search him on google and see if you get some hits. You probably another dude with the same name. I guess he stopped making music.. because after the transition of the computer mambo to the mambo we know now, he dissapeared in thin air. The little ‘faults’ are on purpose, as in the whole ep. They are everywhere: progress of the track, the beat,
effects, etc. Out of tone accordeon, annoying melody, Sensual’s cheesy voice, random moaning.
Damn, i fucking LOVE cheapness!!!
Leite Condensão
When the track starts you might think ”Dude, this isn’t Cumbia.” I know, have patience my friend after you hear the oh so familiar and overused reverse crash of reggeton, it introduces a rather non-hype buildup that is made of ingredients that cause hypeness. Afrojacks familiar b-more kickpattern with Bmore a la Cumbia.
And after the girl tells you what she is expecting from you, you get this Cumbia track oozing of Baile Funk (thats why the title is Portuguese of course) with a hint of Bmore. I didn’t spare the use (read: overuse) of random moaning. True story: I sampled random Brazilian Porn for this track.
You know, i get this feeling all the time with Cumbia. Especially with this track, like this relaxed type of hypedness. Its like “Shhh, im getting hype to Cumbia. Do it quietly tho.” while rockin Native American inspired dancemoves. No agressiveness, just vibin. Its all good manito, it is all good.
Bellakeo
Starting with a dosis of epic cheapness. A lot of reverb, explosions, overused Reggeton effects and airhorns. It gives you: the out of tone accordeon. Dude seriously, i thought that i loved the way Mambo used dirty hihats as guiros or the timbal of Reggeton’s Dembow. The cowbell, man that shit is gangsta. I mean, there is even a break in it that consists only of cowbell and bass. After that it gets wild with a good old Dutch House synth. Btw the b-b-b-b-Bellakeooooo is me! Recorded in 05/06 or something and now i could finally use it!
El Gallo
This one is my favorite as this is the cheapest of the bunch. The synth is made of a phone sound, when you press a button. Not sparing you on the obvious reference, the track will make it clear to you when a random rooster thinks its time to wake you up. Couldn’t leave this EP without the overuse of Dembow’s timbal. But no in contrary of what you might think, this track reminds me of this crazy ass dude in D.R. which nickname was El Gallo. This dude thinks about
sex and women all the time, drinks Brugal as it were water constantly and watches girls at night with his binoculairs as a hobby (they all know it and leave the windows open on purpose lol). Did i mention that he is funny as hell. Gallo, this track is for you!
Deja Tu Vaina Mujer
Ay Tan Sucia!
my bad Dave, you know i had to give a shoutout to the Moombahton movement, ya tu sae!!
O yeah and btw, deja tu vaina mujjjjerrrr!
Well thats all for today lol.
Let me know what you think of it!!
i totally forgot to send you some tracks i worked on in late 2009 that were bubbling but influenced by dominican music. like perico ripiao, bachata or dominican dembow. i had these finished but i was working on a whole concept thing there.
Munchi – Dominican Bubbling Battle 2009
Didnt have a name for it so i called it like that. Sampled and cutted up a perico ripiao song, vocals from dominican dembow and with the oldskool bubbling taste. this kind of oldskool bubbling was my favorite, all over the place and so much going on going from slow to fast. made this right after i saw a bubbling battle video from 1995.
And here’s the video in question. Inspiring indeed!
Seriously, what a style! Dude gets LOOOSE. He’s totally syncing with bubbling’s distinctive double-time/half-time herky-jerk, and, like the genre, seemingly drawing on two kinds of raving at once: of the dancehall reggae sort, and of the hardcore techno sort. I like the nods to robot-style popping-and-locking, the plasticman wobbling, and all the transmuted bits of bubbling — and that’s bubbling in the original Caribbean sense. Butterfly, butterfly, mek we do the…
Munchi also shares a couple of tracks that seem to spring uniquely from his Dominican-Dutch circumstances:
Munchi – Mambo Con Sazon
which he describes as
Bachata guitar with also the bachata percussion and the familiar bubbling slowing down and speeding up. I was plannin to put a female reggeton artist on this track she would fit the track perfectly with the energy she brings.
And here’s one more to round things out. Munchi sez:
I made this in 2007 and its mostly bubbling but it flows into baile funk and reggeton
and it got me a bit of exposure back then lol.
Munchi – Nex Aan Te Doen Prt. 1
If it wasn’t clear in my previous post, I love the way that Munchi’s productions are so situated in the particular musical-cultural networks (actual and virtual) in which he finds himself situated (and actively situates himself, as with such keywords as “baile funk” and with, y’know, enthusiastic emails to bloggers like me and Dave Quam).
In light of these latest, I’ve been thinking about Munchiton — a genre all Munchi’s own (even though he’s personally embracing the moombahton tag) — with regard to a resonant quotation from DJ Earworm in that “borrowing culture” documentary I shared last week:
…in the future, when people listen to music, everyone’s gonna have their own custom remix … You heard that new song, yeah, check out my version. Oh yeah, check out my version. That’s not gonna be DJ culture that’s just gonna be culture.
In an age of FruityLoopy GarageBands, I think we’re just about already there. Sometimes this is called “remix culture,” sometimes “participatory culture,” sometimes “read-write culture,” sometimes “free culture.” Before too long, though, Earworm’s right: we’re going to stop thinking of remix practice as the exception, instead realizing that the 20th century’s “read-only” broadcast culture was an anomaly in human history and embracing the imperative to mix-and-mash all the stuff around us as what culture’s really about.
Along these lines, I’m enamored of the idea that not only will everyone be enmeshed in collectively, co-creating culture, right down to versioning the latest global (or local) hits, but that these efforts, in any particular instantiation (e.g., Munchi’s work), might yet coalesce into something even more unruly and awesome: genres of our own. New whirled music. Munch, crunch, mulch. Repeat.
a moomba, apparently — no relation to afrojack, i don’t think
Reggaeton doesn’t die, it just continues to fragment and reconstitute in a thousand different ways. (Sorry about the passive language there — I don’t think reggaeton has viral/memetic agency, but I still find myself using that sort of shorthand/emphasis even when what I want to think about primarily is how particular people in particular places× do something with the “genre”.) In this case, I’m not just talking about Dominican dembow or jerkbow, but other, equally odd revivalist fusions. I mean, it’s practically a personalized genre at this point!
First case in point: a couple weeks ago I got an email from a guy named Munchi, connecting dots and introducing prototypes —
There is this new thing going on that just has started but has huge potential. You see, I love Reggeton. But the things that came out these years (Regge-Pop) weren’t even Reggeton. I still have those great tracks on my mp3 in the time when Reggeton still was Reggeton. Althought there is a movement going on in my home country (Dominican Republic) where they use the Dembow with chopped up vocals or just make a party track, but that itself seems to be destroying the Dominican Hiphop market. Since everyone sees that the money is in the Dembow party tracks. But that is a whole other story. This type of Reggeton is just like those oldskool Playero songs.
This is a good thing but i dont see Reggeton getting out of the hole it is right now with this movement.
However, like i said there is a new thing.
You see i live in Holland and here we have Bubbling.
Holland always had its own thing i guess and with the Dutch House going strong at the moment, you certainly cant miss the Bubbling influence in it. Then of course when a couple of years ago Baltimore Club came out of nothing destroying every club in Holland ”Samir’s Theme” that influence got in it also. It evolved, just like the raggamuffin to bubbling and then dutch house (with the other genres of course). Puerto Rico and Panama had their own evolved version with Reggeton.
Now we come to the States, where the Dutch House thing is pretty big right now. Like the rest of the world. I don’t know about Reggeton but I guess it still gets played over there.
Those 2 genres met eachother there.
Dave Nada played Afrojack’s ”Moombah” (Huge Dutch House Track) & Sidney Samson’s ”Riverside” at 108 BPM. Almost Reggeton speed (96 BPM). He saw that the crowd loved it and he made the Moombahton EP.
This was just a month ago.
And I came across it and when I heard it, I couldn’t believe what i was hearing. The idea was so simple, yet THE chance for Reggeton to get out of its hole.
Eventhough that i love Reggeton, there are so many genres that are new and interesting to me. It’s all so inspiring and i want to make them all. So i haven’t been making Reggeton besides Dembow.
Yet when i heard this I immediatly made a Promo CD.
I worked the whole night and got 5 tracks.
You see Dave Nada had this fantastic idea, and with the Dutch House hype there is at the moment, its perfect. The genre is in its beginning, i dont know which way taht its going to go. I hear the Uncle Jesse rmx of whatyoudoin and i hear alot of percussion work. I hear people making the same as the original Dave Nada idea with just editing and slowing down dutch house. I also heard a juke moombahton rmx of Moombah which was fantastic. And what i did was make a house at a 108 speed with Reggeton samples. Also mixing it with cumbia/baltimore club/baile funk/merengue/miami bass/dominican dembow.
It felt so good that i could make ”Reggeton” again, with the inspiration i used to have while making it. I can see this becoming big. It has alot of odds for it, but im not even talking about that.
You see, like i mentioned before it all started with Raggamuffin. 2 different genres that evolved out of that in two different worlds are meeting eachother again after a long journey. And i think they will be stronger than ever.
This all happened today/yesterday, and im stoked.
I can’t wait to see this evolve and grow to something.
Let me know what you think and I hope to hear from you.
He included the five song EP, and I’ve been bumping it. (He also followed up with a buttload of bubbling videos, which I’ve not yet had the time to peruse. But, as Dave & I get grindin on that dreampipe of a book, I’ll be digging in.)
Up where they are, tempo-wise, Munchi’s tracks work well alongside Dave Nada’s bangers and Chief Boima’s techno rumbas, and they flow well from slightly slower dancehall and reggaeton tracks. Like dembow or bubbling at their core, we hear a mix of styles indexed and flexed, suffused with some of the most cherished sounds and patterns casting about. And yet, for all their nods to the back and the side, they sound as here and now as anything. Which is to say, they sound inspired –
I also kinda love that someone can be sent on a beatmaking binge like this. I suppose the same thing that Dave Nada put his finger on when he slowed down some Dutch house and sent a bunch of Latino highschoolers into frenzy is also vibrating over in the Netherlands (for Dominican kids especially?).
Or in California for college-going Colombian kids who grew up in Chelsea, Mass?
That’s what I have to surmise, reminded of some related sounds this past week when two Twitter frens tweeked out over the “Candy Flip Riddim”. The maker of that track, a guy named Johnny, first came to my attn last October via email from the moderator of dancehall.mobi, who pointed me to another track of his on YouTube, “Dembow Dynamics,” knowing that I’m a big fan of all things dembow. The email simply read:
I’m not sure if you guys do promo stuff but let me know if you like the sound. DIGITAL REGGAE for the world!
When I wrote to Johnny to ask about the track, he mentioned that a friend had played the track at a couple parties in Lawrence, MA, and “people were seriously diggin it.” Having done some beatmaking workshops up in Lawrence and neighboring Lowell, where I think I learned more about reggaeton than the kids learned about anything from me, I was intrigued to hear more about reggae/ton parties in Lawrence. Per Johnny:
Lawrence is the dancehall capital!!! (Strangely, I noticed that in Boston, reggaeton was bigger at spanish parties, yet in Lowell/Lawrence it was dancehall). I’m sure you probably heard of him, but if you haven’t, definitely check out Dj Styles on myspace. I remember in high school people would literally play the music straight from his page at parties, it was like the radio for Spanish people around Boston haha.
Although Johnny’s tracks could use a little help in the mastering realm (which I learned pretty quickly when trying to play them in a club setting — and which, yeah, kinda goes without saying in this brave new world of DIY/p2p music industry), I dig the mix of references in them and the way he mines the reggaeton oeuvre in the same way that reggaeton mines dancehall and hip-hop (and trancey techno too) for its own suggestive palette. Like Munchi’s experiments, Johnny’s music seems to express a return to roots (of a sort — DJ Blass is a root, right? rhizomatically speaking?) while offering an audible sense of reinvention.
I also found his description for “Dembow Dynamics” pretty interesting/provocative, especially the level of disclosure:
I want to sex dembow. This song is my representation of the night when dembow becomes a living female. My second credible riddim.
It’s funny how people say reggaeton is “dead” when in fact its creativity that’s dieing. Dembow is in my fucking SOULLLLLLLL!!!@!@!!!@!!!
I got shit from 7 different tracks:
Notch – Hay Que Bueno
Ranking Stone – Quiero Hacertelo
Don Chezina – Tra
Yaviah – Wiki Wiki
Unda Wata Riddim
Playero 41
Wisin & Yandel – Por Mi Reggae Muero
Those are directly in the track. other influences would include:
Dancehall, Diplo of course, Dj Blass, Electronica, SALSAAAAAAA, and whatever else I forgot.
Taking all these together, it’s striking how this sort of sound, shared among a few producers, can seem to voice a zeitgeist, to stand in for a multitude, when the evidence is emanating from 2-3 “bedrooms.” Funny how we can imagine a wider community of practice abstracted from but a few examples. (Or is that my tendency alone?) It makes me wonder how limited one’s claims about the meaning of this sort of “phenomenon” must be. But the fact alone of resonance — of, say, Moomahton especially, based on the rapid bloggy uptake and effusive, inspired acts like Munchi’s — seems to speak volumes about a broader (dare I say?) structure of feelings modulating with the music.
I hesitate to subsume this under the banner of global ghettotech or, as seen this week, “global ghetto house.” While there are global-ghettoey cross-currents here, as borne witness by Munchi’s and Johnny’s references to Bmore and Diplo, we might better attend to the far more specific genealogies that Munchi and Johnny draw, not to mention awesome myths of origins like Dave Nada’s. That the palette of what we’re calling here reggaeton (sometimes anachronistically) can go from largely based on hip-hop and dancehall to including a panoply of styles not limited to techno, (Dutch) house, electro, bachata, cumbia, and funk carioca, does seem to suggest that the old signposts have shifted.
The goalposts too?
[Update:Toy Selecta rightfully objects to me leaving raverton out of the constellation. He's been mining the same turf for two years now, and raverton certainly fits into the picture here. Beyond simply rounding out the picture, Toy's toying with reggaeton arguably made space for the likes of moombahton, finding favor at the Fader long ago. As it happens, just this week Toy unleashed his latest raverton opus, which I highly recommend.]
[Update II: Talk about timing, I see via Catchdubs that Munchi has posted a whole heap of other productions in this vein to his SoundCloud page. The Flashing Lights blog also includes a bunch of descriptions of several tracks, which go further into the sources & influences in the mix.]
I’m thrilled that Joro-Boro is due to join us tonight for a little Beat Research. A few months ago, I received a fortuitous email from him, linking me to a new mix he’d put together, full of what he called his “favorite local dirty sounds” — a familiar if distinctive melange of polyrhythmic electronic dance music from around the world, quite in line with the kinds of kulturmash I’ve here described as nu-whirled / global-gtech / world2.0, but notably, at least as focused on sonic significations of Euro as Afro:
It was a fortuitously timed email because I had recently posted a note to this blog announcing the appearance at BR of Gypsy Sound System, and the comments rapidly turned into a debate about the use of the term “Gypsy” to promote music, especially by performers who are not themselves counted among the members of the “stateless diaspora” that Rozele trenchantly invokes. Far as I can tell, entrenched as particular positions get, there’s no easy answer on this one given how dispersed and diverse the so-called Gypsy / Gitano / R(r)oma / Sinti / Tsigane experience has been and continues to be. The argument is not unlike disputes over the use of nigga/er (or black for that matter), though obviously there are important differences between these terms and their historical and contemporary uses. Put simply, while some understand gypsy as a slur, others use it in a far more neutral manner, including acts of positive self-identification. I’ve seen countless examples of the latter (now leaping out to me) in the months since.
Contentious as the discussion was, I was glad we were able to have it — and I remain grateful for the conversations that can happen here (especially as my rate of posting dwindles in the face of having two-kids-under-two). I was definitely glad that Joro-Boro decided to add his experienced and thoughtful voice to the mix, like so:
i’ve been struggling with this issue since my early days in mehanata and the release of the compilation (which i wanted to call ‘new york gadjo underground’). i realized that there is a reason why it is problematic to find a name for this music and the reason is this: there is no such thing as gypsy music!
‘gypsy music’ is a name given from outsiders, it is a totalizing machine that forces unity onto divergent cultural forms based solely on the ethnicity of their producers. yes, there are stylistic proximities between a soleá and a russian gypsy ballad, the question is can we just leave them to ethnomusicologists, since they are already in heavy market use on the festival circuit (both in the u.s. and in europe)? this reminds me of the discussions on this blog about nu-whirled music and global ghettotech. similar excluding/exoticizing operations take place when one talks about “world music” and about “gypsy music.” can one talk about “black music” today?
it seems that there was (and still is) a need to argue the historic continuity of roma identity as a tool for gaining political recognition and building a pan-roma identity (toni gatliff’s ‘latcho drom’), but that is not the same as selling tickets or cd’s by advertising a “gypsy music”. a friend of mine from berlin – dj soko – has always managed to avoid the issue by presenting his music (released on three compilations already) and his party as ‘balkanbeats’. when he started using it, the term didn’t refer to just club remixes, but any danceable music from the region (including ska, reggae, jazz and folk). soko is the only one to officially feature a popfolk singer from bulgaria (azis) on a compilation, thus breaking the brass stereotype. and on that note, i only know of one european dj who freely includes chalga and turbofolk in his mixes – dj rasputin. if you happen to know of other ones, please let me know. balkan music is surely more than just brass bands and i usually try to focus on that “more”: the decompressia mix (thank you for posting it wayne!) does start with a shantel track (covering/remixing ciguli’s ‘binaz’), but then also includes examples of both popfolk (ivana with the party mix) and chalga (amet – dogovori) and closes with a fantastic dub track done by a romanian producer with sampled vocals from esma redzepova (zgomot’s miri kamli). i attribute this to the influence of the american environment of hybridity, since it seems that european dj’s usually stay within the confines of one style (i might be wrong – birdseed, can you help me on this?)
but back to gypsy sound system: yes, it is insensitive of them to use that name for the project. and yes, they are “remarkably nice, gentle, warm people” and also my friends, but that’s beside the point. what about gypsy punk? i still think that gogol bordello should have stuck with ‘immigrant punk’ as a much more appropriate name for their style. balkan beat box attempted a neologism with ‘nu-med’ – new mediterranean music (with influences from roma traditions as well as the entire mediterranean). a poster can surely advertise ‘olah music from hungary’ or ‘wedding brass band from bulgaria’ and use “gypsy” only in a footnote as clarification (eugene from gogol bordello usually justifies his use of “gypsy” with american ignorance and fear of the audience confusing it with romanian or italian – from rome – music).
With all of that in mind, and the mix above too, I recommend you to some additional disorientalism from Joro-Boro while you note the nuances, esp in light of the comments above, of his self-description:
Joro-Boro was born in Bulgaria.
He plays and promotes Etnoteck – the dirty and uninhibited side of globalization force-fed back into a party without borders, a three-day Balkan wedding in a post-national state where noise, libido and extasy detonate the market mono-culture.
He established himself during his seven year residency at the Bulgarian Bar (Mehanata) in New York City where he produced the compilation ‘New York Gypsymania’. He is a monthly host of MoGlo (Modern Global) on Radio New York WNYE 91.5 FM.
Joro-Boro is not an artist / charlatan / mythologist. Joro De Boro could be just the opposite.
Finally, I’ll close pace Jace’s strikingly germane (and Germanic!) recent comments on how brassy Europea has worked its way into WM2.0 –
Most world music 2.0 seems to envision itself sweating in unspecified sultry climes – the word “tropical” bloomed across countless flyers this year, clueing clubbers in to a fashion aesthetic of bright colours and a non-genre-specific approach to music. Schlachthofbronx whitens up the tropical, grafting Bavarian pride onto black bass influences. Their embrace of the Euro-exotic is at once perversely funny and functional: anyone who so wishes can now spice up an Africa-themed dance party with conservative Munich volksmusik – and the crowd won’t miss a beat.
Come to the Enormous Room tonight and we’ll count together how many beats we don’t miss!
An ethno-colleague, who shall remain anonymous, had her students listen to the Afropop program on World Music 2.0. She was kind enough to send me a hilarious response. I’m rather floored by the ways it mixes a (kneejerk?) resistance to exoticism and an insistence on indigenous originality. I wonder how many other listeners/readers either A) miss the point and/or B) are unable to hear what’s interesting in the music we’re talking about –
The music of the “World Music 2.0″ genre doesn’t seem to really hold up on its own. Listening to it is extremely boring due to its repetitive nature and lack of any interesting musical forms. The only purpose it seems to have is to provide a dance beat at clubs or parties.
Can this music even be considered world music anymore? It sounds so western that I cannot differentiate it from club music created in America and Europe. We established earlier that just because a song is made in a non-western country, doesn’t necessarily mean it can be considered world music. If a song is created in a western style by a non western artist, then it is not world music.
Are there a lot of issues with copyright and originality that arise due to the internet based nature of world music 2.0? It seems as though a lot of songs result from various mixes and beats created by non-professionals that are then changed as they spread across the internet.
For all the confusion here, that last sentence really hits the nail on the head!
For those out-of-towners who were wondering (and I’m flattered, really), it turns out that last week’s talk at MIT, “Skinny Jeans and Fruity Loops,” was recorded after all. That said, it’s audio-only whereas my talk was fairly visual-centric at times, so it’s a little weird to not be able to see the accompanying videos, photos, and slides. If I get a chance, I’ll try to post some of the links here before too long; otherwise, get your search on. Special thx to Generoso Fiero for bringing the equipment & hooking up the CMS podcast, and to Ian Condry for the effusive introduction – http://cms.mit.edu/news/2009/11/podcast_skinny_jeans_and_fruit.php
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Finally, Beat Research won the Weekly Dig’s Dig This 2009 award for Best Monday Night! Big thx to all who voted in support. Now do us one better: come out and jam with us! Next week we’re psyched to feature one of our favorite up-and-coming producers in the transatlantic bass/dance scene: Kingdom. If you don’t know, get familiar–
Afropop Worldwide has a new program, airing currently on terrestrial radio in the US (and soon to appear online as streamable audio), which focuses on a subject near&dear to the heart of this blog: world music 2.0, aka nu-whirled music, aka global ghettotech. Or as they put it –
Afropop Worldwide takes us into the world of the globalistas, a far-flung grouping of polyglot hipsters, bass freaks, and digital beatsmiths who rally around the sounds of the 21st century dancefloor – rhythms such as Angolan kuduro, Brazilian funk carioca, reggaeton and dancehall, Indian bhangra and Argentine electro-cumbia. Ethnomusicologist/DJ/Blogger/Writer Wayne Marshall calls this music World Music 2.0, highlighting how digital production technology and the internet has created new, younger, international audiences for music from other places. Marshall will guide us through the sonic circuitry of global bass music and show us why old assumptions about “world” music might no longer apply. We’ll also speak with DJ Rupture, Dutty Artz founder and visionary world mashup artist, and, of course, listen to some ground shaking tracks from across the beat-o-sphere.
I’ll be sure to post a link here when the whole program comes online; meantime, if you don’t live in one of the radio markets where Afropop is carried, you can hear an 8 minute teaser here –
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This week on Afropop Worldwide, we took a look at how technology is shaping music production and listening practices around the world with Afropop Soundsystem 3: Nu-Whirled Music. Over the course of the program, we explore the question – is there such as thing as World Music 2.0? And if so, what are the consequences? Here, you can read our full interview with our guest Wayne Marshall, who has some pretty interesting things to say about the topic.
Wayne is an ethnomusicologist, blogger, and DJ, currently doing a postdoctoral fellowship at MIT. He is the co-editor of Reggaeton, an excellent anthology of essays on the Puerto Rican reggae-rap. He works, more broadly, digging into the “sonic circuitry” of contemporary global music.
You can read Wayne’s thoughtful rambles on technology, culture, and electronic dance pop from the globe at his blog Wayne & Wax. In fact, the colorful analysis on Wayne’s blog was the prime inspiration for this week’s program!
Thoughtful rambles! I can live with that ;) “Nu-whirl” on the other hand…
But ambivalent as I am about pretty much all of the terms being used to discuss this stuff (I disavow coining “World Music 2.0″ in the interview, though I do take responsibility for the monster that is global g-tech), I’m excited to see the conversation continue, and I’m especially thrilled to see Afropop bring some of these new sounds and styles (dare I say new worlds?) to the attn of their listenership.
Finally, I want to give special thanks to producer (and interviewer) Marlon Bishop for initiating this project and for making, as Rachel put it, “afropop sound like radiolab”!
What is a “DJed Lecture Series” you might ask? Sez the conference website:
It is a live musical paper that combines speaking with direct audio sampling. This special invite-only roster of ethno-musicologists/DJs will present on the subject of street music, a label often interchangeable with electronic music. What are the ways that society and the dominant open-source culture and technologies impact creative process and emerging genres? Come learn while celebrating and promoting the artists, sounds, and songs behind some of the most innovative and thriving musical movements today. 5 DJs. It’ll be like the best article you’ve never read on global street music.
I suppose I’ve been DJ-lecturing for years now, and I’m always happy to revisit some of my favorite well-worn musical materials (sometimes referred to, including by me, as memes) in order to talk about common practices of reuse, reference, and remix.
I’ve been feeling, however, less and less comfortable with the term “meme,” in part based on some persuasive ideas articulated recently by Henry Jenkins (and affirmed elsewhere). So part of my talk will trace a couple of my favorite so-called “musical memes” and the other part will call into question the very language a lot of us have been using to describe these phenomena.
Hence, my title — & allow me to share my copanelists’ as well:
DJ 1. Wayne Marshall, “To Meme or Not to Meme?”
DJ 2. Guillaume Decouflet, “L’Authenticité du Mélange / The Authenticity of the Mix”
DJ 3. Dago Donato, “Favela Soundsystem”
DJs 4 & 5 Jace Clayton & Brian Shimkovtiz, “Marketing The Local: Navigating the Divide Between Local Taste and Global Impact”
Definitely looking forward to the panel — and the conference more generally — not to mention just getting back to MTL, which is without a doubt one of the greatest cities in North America. So special. And get this: among other musical luminaries appearing at the conference, Roxanne Shante will be speaking on Friday; color me curious to hear what she has to say post-”exposé.”
Also (and this is a BIG ALSO), I’ll be in town for the launch of the Mighty Poirier’s new party, Karnival !
Don’t miss Ghis’s new mix, which gives a good sense of his latest melange of internat’l street beats.
Readers of this blog need no introduction to the mighty Maga Bo, our guest at Beat Reseach TONIGHT (!), but this blurb from his website sums it up pretty nicely without using the words “ghetto” OR “global” —
Maga Bo is a producer/DJ based in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. His work spans the breadth of international urban bass music from hip hop and kwaito to baile funk and jungle ragga to dub, grime and dubstep with flares of samba, rai, bhangra, cumbia, skewed electronic beats and loudspeaker jitter.
His live performances are a hybrid mix of DJ set and live PA where he mixes diverse sounds culled from pirate cassettes bought on the street in various parts of the world, MP3s from the internet, obscure vinyl found in underground shops, original beats, unreleased remixes and exclusive tracks. Divergent sources are combined and mixed live in a dubwise fashion with a DJ’s feel for the dance floor and the hip hop mentality of creating by re-contextualizing. Projected video and photo images from his travels and recording sessions bring an extra visual dimension to the music.
Come on out and feel the noise. Bo never disappoints.
I’ve received repeated requests to share the text I delivered in my pre-concert talk for the Nettle residency at Brandeis. It’s only taken me four months to post it here finally. Regular readers of this blog may find certain passages familiar; some are literally cut-n-pasted from posts here (where I do a lot of my thinking-aloud / work-in-progress). I’m glad so many attendees found the talk provocative — it was supposed to be — and I hope that people reading it here will also find food for thought. If I come across as something of an advocate, that’s because I am. Thanks again to Nettle for being so generous with their time and their thoughts, many of which helped to shape this speech and continue to resonate as I try to make sense of “new”/”nu” “world” music. Thanks also to all the thinkers and writers and scholars and poets, linked & quoted below, who’ve helped me shape and reshape these ideas.
…
Nettles, Neighbors, and Nu World Music
21 March 2009
I would like to echo Judy’s thanks to the Rose, and to all the organizations and individuals that have made this event possible. Special thanks to Scott Edmiston and Ingrid Schorr in the Office of the Arts. And, of course, to thank all of you for attending tonight’s concert, the culminating event of what has already been a wonderful residency.
Thanks especially to Judy Eissenberg, the soul of the Music department and a crucial voice and mediating presence in the Brandeis community. MusicUnitesUS should rightly be recognized as a hallmark institution here at Brandeis, in part because it so powerfully speaks to so many of the university’s would-be core values, as I hope to suggest here tonight.
It was very important to all of these people, to all of us, to make this MusicUnitesUS program, this spring residency, a reality. This is important for its own sake, as I’ll discuss in a moment when I tell you about our guests, Nettle, but important also because of the precarious position that the arts finds itself at this moment of institutional and financial crisis.
Our commitment to and our ability to put on as challenging and interesting and lively a residency as Nettle’s should serve as a potent reminder of the treasured and critically important role that artistic practice plays in our communities.
It feels quite appropriate to speak about such issues here in the Rose. In all the talk about the value of the museum — and in particular, its holdings — that has animated so much contentious chatter in recent weeks, we often lose sight of the more intangible reasons the Rose is so valuable not just to us at Brandeis or in Boston, but to the worldwide arts community. The Rose has, simply put, been a champion in promoting contemporary art, art which provokes us to think and rethink our situation and our selves. Art that does so by operating on the cutting edge, beyond canon, or at the margins of putative mainstream culture.
In this way, it offers a service to the community — to various overlapping communities — which finds a parallel, a partner, in MusicUnitesUS, both institutions projecting into several public spheres — and we can imagine campus, local, national, and global publics — art and artists that deserve that humble push from margin to center.
This spatial metaphor is not inappropriate in coming to terms with our guests tonight, and this week, at Brandeis. Nettle offers what we might hear as a form of decentertainment — and this is crucial, I contend, to the idea of a NU world, and of a NU WORLD MUSIC which not only reflects our new social configurations and cultural repertories but informs the shapes they take.
NU WORLDS AND NU WORLD MUSIC
The Nu World I am describing here (and signifying with NU so as to be clear that I am not simply referring to the Americas) is a strange kind of neighborhood, made to feel as such despite its global scale because of the ways that new technologies create social and discursive networks that allow us to imagine and interact with our respective communities in heretofore unimaginable ways.
The Nu World phenomenologies, if you will, which emerge from these new configurations are not, however, simply a product of an unprecedented degree of access and connection to far-flung places; these new ways of feeling — of inhabiting and refashioning selfhood, nationhood, and neighborhood — are coalescing at the same time because of the ways that our cities have been radically transformed in the wake of decolonization and globalization. Not only are we more able to access some “world” out there, we are increasingly aware that the world is all around us.
This shift in our socio-spatial position demands a new understanding of world music — not as something simply produced by the rest for the west, but something that instead embodies the profound and ubiquitous degree of interpenetration, intercultural contact, and interpersonal exchange that has become quite commonplace in our contemporary cities. A world music in which different cultural registers operate on an equal plane perhaps expresses what Paul Gilroy terms “vernacular” or “everyday” cosmopolitanism, what he understands as the ethics of living in a multiculture, or as he also puts it, a “twentieth-century utopia of tolerance, peace, and mutual regard.”
“The challenge of being in the same present,” Gilroy argues,
of … articulating cosmopolitan hope upward from below rather than imposing it downward from on high provides some help in seeing how we might invent conceptions of humanity that allow for the presumption of equal value and go beyond the issue of tolerance into a more active engagement with the irreducible value of diversity within sameness. There is another quite different idea of cosmopolitanism to be explored here. … This cosmopolitan attachment finds civic and ethical value in the process of exposure to otherness. It glories in the ordinary virtues and ironies — listening, looking, discretion, friendship — that can be cultivated when mundane encounters with difference become rewarding.
This notion of everyday, mundane difference, an otherness that can easily collapse into recognitions of sameness, is precisely what too often is missing from or distorted in the marketing category of “world music,” a category which, nonetheless — as we discussed with Nettle yesterday — remains a useful way for musicians to find audiences and patrons.
In a provocative article titled “World Music Does Not Exist” Tim Brennan argues that “world music characterizes a longing in metropolitan centers of Europe and North America for what is not Europe or North America: a general, usually positive, interest in the cultural life of other parts of the world found in all of the major media.” Unlike NU WORLD MUSIC, which foregrounds its constitution in the jumble of globally circulating signs and people and technologies, world music, Brennan contends, lulls us into other ways of listening and imagining the world, not as all around us, but as somewhere out there: “World music,” he writes “expands our field of cultural perception only by narrowing it, forcing us to admire artifacts that were made slowly and finely under irreducible conditions, but whose power to awe is then nullified by a uniformity of reception.”
To my ears, and as they would have it themselves, Nettle militates against this uniformity of reception. Even as they pragmatically embrace the term world music because of the cultural work it does and economic doors it opens, they also simultaneously subvert it. They abandon the easy fusion of World Music clichés for the intricate realities of border-crossing and cohabitation.
Despatializing and respatializing with their geography-defying mix of traditions, textures, and timbres, Nettle seems to embody one rich set of possibilities within the flexible matrix of nu world music and culture. The group troubles facile distinctions between the world and the West by giving the lie to these false binaries, bearing witness instead to a world of routed roots and rooted routes, of traditions with multiple origins and fractal futures, diasporas within diasporas, turtles all the way down.
DJ and producer Jace Clayton (aka DJ Rupture), a native of Massachusetts, formed the group earlier this decade while living as an ex-pat in Barcelona along with several other ex-pats (one from Scotland, a couple from Morocco, others from the US) — all of them speaking second or third languages in order to converse with each other. All of them, as they told us this week, feeling equally uncomfortable, out of place in their new home, and hence seeking a common place — and this is where music comes in — but NOT striving for unity. Rather, they sought to create and inhabit heterogeneous spaces, enjoying what they had in common but also what made each member distinctive in what they brought to the group.
Briefly, we hear in Nettle a collision of traditions, from Afrodiasporic electronic dance music to Berber folk songs, Arab and Andalusian pop to the Afro-Arab trance music of the Gnawa. The Maghreb via Spain via the Maghreb filtered through the black boxes of a globe-trotting DJ.
Although some members might think of themselves more explicitly as members of a diaspora than others, it is worth noting how diasporic discourse overlaps with the ideas about cohabiting amidst otherness. As anthropologist James Clifford notes, “Diaspora discourse articulates, or bends together, both roots and routes to construct … forms of community consciousness and solidarity that maintain identifications outside the national time/space in order to live inside, with a difference.”
Indeed, the distinctive sonic space Nettle creates seems to signal this desire to live with difference, a desire which more often finds the group preferring metaphors having to do with holding one’s ground and inhabiting spaces than with crossing borders, with deploying various notions of noise, with embracing friction as a creative force.
This place of friction, where the rubber meets the road, if you will, stands in contrast to other metaphors for globalization, especially those that emerge not from social and cultural spheres of activity but from economic ones, where capital is said to be frictionless and where fluid and easy crossings and flexible accumulations are the order of the day.
In this manner, Nettle’s music fingers the pulse of contemporary social theory _and_ social experience. Friction is not about culture clash, it is a more complex and subtle force than that. Friction is what anthropologist Anna Tsing calls “the grip of worldly encounter” — especially in “zones of awkward engagement.” The metaphor of friction suggested itself to Tsing b/c of the “popularity of stories of a new era of global motion” so commonplace, perhaps triumphant even, in the 1990s.
We see in some ways how these stories of global motion are true: all the musicians in Nettle did, after all, find themselves and each other in Barcelona, a home away from home for them all; but these stories are also clearly, resolutely untrue in other ways: take for instance, the group’s thwarted attempts to travel together in the past, or the fears and precautions and difficulties we worked through to ensure they could make it here this time.
For all the promise of an integrated and deeply interconnected world — A NU WORLD — and more tolerant, diverse cities where any and all may inhabit and enjoy, we suffer from an insidious tendency to ignore the divorce between rhetoric and reality, to embrace the symbols of diversity and tolerance and forget enduring inequalities and asymmetries.
A NU WORLD aesthetic demands that we resist romanticizing and aestheticizing the conditions of globalization. Ethnomusicologist Martin Stokes draws a clear line here:
Socially, it is important not to assume a direct relationship between aesthetic strategies (i.e., those operating in texts and performances of various kinds) and those of everyday life, particular among migrants and others living lives of enforced, rather than chosen, cultural fragmentation and hybridity. … At a general level, the fantasies characteristic of migrant music, film and dance, modernity, cosmopolitanism, upwardly mobile romance, and technological mastery must be understood in relation to the limited life chances and the endless and humiliating accommodations for the bureaucracies and work routines of host societies that characterize migrant everyday life. The cosmopolitanism of the rich thus must be clearly distinguished from the cosmopolitanism of the poor, even when the techniques and imaginaries of such cosmopolitanisms have common elements.
Given these constraints and concerns, something like “boundary smashing” — a world music cliche if there ever was one — is not an aesthetic project that appeals to Nettle. Despite their philosophical suspicion of, perhaps even hostility to, all kinds of imaginary borders — lines drawn between genres, places, people and so forth — we run into real walls and fences all too often to pretend they’re not there. Friction and dynamism are, instead, the group’s metaphors of choice.
NOTES ON NEIGHBORHOOD
My research often focuses on issues of nationalism and transnationalism, but lately I’ve been thinking less about nationhood and more about neighborhood — not in terms of an actual space or place (though that’s part of it), but something more akin to neighborliness, to being a good neighbor, to finding an ethics of neighborhood in an intensively globalized/mediated era. I’m curious about a musically-mediated aesthetics more specifically — one that responds not to the condition of living in a world of strangers, as Anthony Appiah might put it, but in a world of neighbors. This is a concept that I hope will be useful in coming to terms with what I’ve variously, loosely, referred to as nu-whirl music.
My embrace of “neighborhood” is meant as a way of reading nu-whirled music and movements in an engaged, positive manner. It, hopefully, moves away from notions of the foreign to the familiar. It recognizes that we become familiar with our neighbors when we have some regard for them, when we listen and play collectively. It proceeds also from a concern that if we are moved to work towards mediating the myriad conflicts in our world, especially those geopolitical conflicts that engulf and destroy so many people and places, that we must necessarily begin in our own backyards, as the saying goes — or in our own neighborhoods.
This is part of what underlies the mission of MusicUnitesUS. When I met Judy Eissenberg last year and she told me about the program & how she was inspired to start it in the wake of 9/11 as a way of embracing and exploring cultural difference though the special, mediating powers of art and music, I thought almost immediately of Nettle.
Whereas MUUS residencies in the past have offered an opportunity for intercultural exchange, bringing representatives of some ‘non-Western’ society to share their traditions with the Brandeis community, what is crucial about Nettle is that the group already embodies that process of encounter and exchange, and, moreover, that they choose to embrace moments where they “get under each other’s skin,” as bandmember Jace Clayton puts it. After all, that’s what Nettles do.
This metaphor for intercultural process, “getting under each other’s skin,” stands in contrast to a different model of cosmopolitan engagement, as recently reshaped by Anthony Appiah, who urges “that we should learn about people in other places, take an interest in their civilizations, their arguments, their errors, their achievements, not because that will bring us to agreement but because it will help us get used to one another — something we have a powerful need to do in this globalized era.”
Similarly, Paul Gilroy asks “Why should the assertions of ethnocentricity and untranslatability that are pronounced in the face of difference have become an attractive and respectable alternative to the hard but scarcely mysterious work involved in translation, principled internationalism, and cosmopolitan conviviality.”
But we might wonder whether Appiah fails to go far enough — “getting used to each other” is a relatively weak, if gentle, model for learning to live with difference; and we might ask whether Gilroy goes too far in demanding so much translation.
The music of Nettle, and they way they talk about what they do, seems to suggest that not everything is translatable or need be translated for us to agree to be convivial. Indeed, in seeking to translate everything, we also run the risk of erasing difference. In this manner, Nettle resists the temptation, if only rhetorical, of smashing boundaries or knocking down walls — at least certain kind of walls.
Perhaps good fences make good neighbors, as the old saying goes, even if the most famous projection of that phrase turns up, in Robert Frost’s poem, of course, in a rather critical or at least ambivalent context. For it is not Frost but his neighbor who utters the truism; Frost, on the other hand, ruminates on the ways that nature seems to seek to undermine the artificial boundaries of culture:
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
Frost’s sentiment seems undergirded by a less suspicious perspective, which is perhaps an outdated notion of the neighbor, the one who dwells near — but perhaps one that could use some new life breathed into it.
Ian Biddle, a musicologist concerned with what he calls “the political economy of musical neighbors,” and with “noisy neighbors” in particular, notes that
the figure of the neighbour … is rapidly becoming (if it has not already become) one of danger, marking the potential malevolence of dense living, of a community too close to our sovereignty. And it is precisely at this interface of community and sovereignty, at the imaginary line that separates ‘them’ from ‘me’, that the story of the noisy neighbour can be told.
For Biddle, neighbours “far from being the site of a guarantee of communal support” “have become the porous membrane between that guarantee and the threat of violence; neighbours speak to us now, it would seem, of a devastating ethical ambiguity”:
the neighbour, the bearer of noise, becomes the symptom of the new sonic disposition and it falls to the neighbour therefore to bear all the anxiety of his or her Other as one with whom we fight for limited resources.
According to Biddle, modernity has “imbued” neighbor “with a particular kind of ambiguity that blurs the boundary between what might be termed autonomy or sovereignty (and territory, privacy) on the one hand and the communal/public on the other.”
For all of the ambivalence around neighbors, however, that is, despite that they may remain, as Biddle puts it, “harbinger[s] of disquiet, … literally, the bringer[s] of noise,” I suppose it depends on how we feel about noise, at least we city folk. For exploring that shimmering line between sovereignty and community, self and other, music and noise, is, and must be, an ongoing project for all of us. Perhaps, as some suggest, that process of exploration is foundational to our very ability to learn and grow.
Biddle appears to think so. “The desire to know the neighbour,” he concludes, “is also (or, perhaps better, leads to) the desire for knowledge in general.”
Gilroy goes a step further, however, adding an ethical injunction to preserve the differences among us: “The self-knowledge that can be acquired through the proximity to strangers is certainly precious,” he acknowledges, “but is no longer the primary issue. We might consider how to cultivate the capacity to act morally and justly not just in the face of otherness –imploring or hostile — but in response to the xenophobia and violence that threaten to engulf, purify, or erase it.”
WE SHORE UP THESE FRAGMENTS, WE DO THE POLICE
I wonder whether we might hear this important impulse in the music of Nettle — in particular the way the group draws on music from North Africa and the Arab and Islamic world, employing musical signs that have become deeply fraught with contradictory meanings, overdetermined in the War on Terror. Despite this embrace and projection of the symbols of one of Europe’s most contentious and yet constitutive Others, we might do better to hear Nettle’s music not as another instance of orientalism, but advancing a kind of disorientalism, which seems especially appropriate in a world which has lost a great deal of its coherence as grand narratives have collapsed, as the integrity of cultural borders falls away, as we all increasingly draw on a fragmentary set of resources and symbols and texts to make sense of who and where we are.
Music, in its unique form as a figurative and temporal art, plays an especially powerful role in a world where sense is made from fragments. As ethnomusicologist Martin Stokes puts it, seemingly talking about Nettle but actually talking about how the spread of Irish folk music prefigured and made space for the emergence of the Irish pub as a global institution: “Music, clearly enough, plays an active role in creating and shaping global spaces that otherwise would not have ‘happened.’”
Likewise, for musicologist Phil Bohlman, it is in the reassembling of musical fragments that the New Europe finds its postcolonial voice:
Festivals, choral movements, folk-music collecting projects, the mixing and remixing of Europop repertories. These are the musical sites at which fragments are gathered and new processes of reconciliation converge. The struggles of nationless Europeans. The revival of repertories by the most repressed of Europe’s Others. The sounds of a New Europe thrive because they are fragmentary and because they belie the hegemony of empires and new world orders alike.
Nettle challenges us to hear suggestive fragments and elusive wholes. As we hear hip-hop and dub, gnawa and sha3bi, flamenco and genres unnamed, we also hear New Spain, New Europe, Nu Worlds to explore and inhabit. At the same time, we should resist hearing a series of discrete authentic traditions coming together to form a new authenticity, that of the hybrid. For if we do so, we risk overwriting the map-less-ness that the group pursues and projects.
Perhaps we would do better to hear Nettle as residing not in Barcelona of the New Spain or in the interstices of internet nodes, but in what Zadie Smith calls “Dream City,” a place that seems not unlike our contemporary polyglot cities but a place that is as much state of mind, a phenomenology and an ontology, how we feel and how that shapes our sense of who or what we are. It is a condition that marks the in-between experiences of people of mixed family backgrounds, but it is a sensibility that has come to resonate more widely, as evidenced, she proposes by the election of Obama and the multiple voices with which he speaks.
“In Dream City everything is doubled, everything is various,” she writes:
You have no choice but to cross borders and speak in tongues. That’s how you get from your mother to your father, from talking to one set of folks who think you’re not black enough to another who figure you insufficiently white. It’s the kind of town where the wise man says “I” cautiously, because “I” feels like too straight and singular a phoneme to represent the true multiplicity of his experience. Instead, citizens of Dream City prefer to use the collective pronoun “we.”
Obama, she continues,
had the audacity to suggest that, even if you can’t see it stamped on their faces, most people come from Dream City, too. Most of us have complicated back stories, messy histories, multiple narratives. … It was a high-wire strategy, for Obama, this invocation of our collective human messiness. His enemies latched on to its imprecision, emphasizing the exotic, un-American nature of Dream City, this ill-defined place where you could be from Hawaii and Kenya, Kansas and Indonesia all at the same time, where you could jive talk like a street hustler and orate like a senator. What kind of a crazy place is that? But they underestimated how many people come from Dream City, how many Americans, in their daily lives, conjure contrasting voices and seek a synthesis between disparate things. Turns out, Dream City wasn’t so strange to them.
Smith goes on to see this sensibility in Shakespeare as well, who, “in response [to far too much Manichean violence in his day], made himself a diffuse, uncertain thing, a mass of contradictory, irresolvable voices that speak truth plurally.”
In other words, if you will, “We do the police in different voices,” to remix a particularly heteroglossaic eruption in T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland,” which, of course, winds to a close with the fitting acknowledgment, still seeming to speak so powerfully of how we imagine a place like Europe, like the US, like the world — the acknowledgment that “we shore up these fragments against our ruins.”
And isn’t this sense of plurality, for all the difference and dissonance it necessarily entails, all the eruptions of untranslatable noise — isn’t this what harmony is really about — seeking sweet moments of interplay which can only be sweet in the presence of the unsweet?
Isn’t this a model not of conflict, but of acting in concert?
Let us recuperate then, recultivate a sense of neighborhood, of noises and nettles and unfamiliar idioms as things to be embraced for precisely their resistance to our tendencies to retreat into likeness and familiarity.
Let us appreciate how noises and neighbors — and the walls they erect — allow us also to hold our ground, to inhabit spaces with a difference, even as we seek still to let certain walls fall, walls that can prevent the dynamic process of musical collaboration from happening at all.
This seems to be what the group was getting at in our conversation yesterday when they reminded us that it’s good, even necessary, at least sometimes — maybe often — to knock down certain walls. The walls of suspicion or guardedness for instance — since improvisation and sensitive group interplay demands a certain degree of trust and openness.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down.
wrote Frost, and music is surely one such force, an elemental groundswell, a thing that resists boxes and borders, that permits sacred signs to enter secular spaces, among other magic tricks.
I was quite struck by how the group described itself yesterday as, in some sense, more of a “social project” than a musical one. Music unites them, gets under their skins.
We would do well to bear this in mind as we prepare to listen with open ears to Nettle, as we let down some of our own walls in order to appreciate the interpenetration so central to their sound and signification.
Or in other words, returning again to Frost’s poem and anticipating Nettle’s joyful jumble of folk and dance and art and noise and untranslatable sociability –
musicologist, internet annotator, and rapper-ternt-blogger.
