TEDxIrie

Happy to be headed back to Kingston this weekend to be a part of this — Readers here are no doubt familiar with TED talks, those little video gems of infotopian brain candy. I’ve certainly enjoyed and admired a few. As you may know, TEDx events are independently organized and produced, but the most popping […]

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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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7 Years of Beats Researched

Tonight marks an amazing 7 years of warped records, self-destructing mp3s, and other mutant musical tricknologies at our modest but massive Monday institution, Beat Research! #swag To celebrate, we’ll be ringing the anniversary alarm with two of our favorite purveyors of bassculture-bred dance musics from the wide, wired world: erstwhile Bostonian DJ Ripley and Boston’s […]

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dubble dub (riddim meth0d repost)

Although I initially posted this mix in November 2005, springy days like today — it’s nearly 70 degrees and flowers are poking out of the ground! — always seem like just the right setting for my dubby take on dub, as prepared a little over 5 years ago for bredrin Brynmore‘s erstwhile weekly, Heavy Dread. […]

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Tribal Greengo

I’m happy to announce, and not a moment too soon, that I’ve arranged some festive music for today. When I put together my first St. Patrick’s Day mix some years ago, it was an obviously tongue-in-cheek gesture. You might recall that I began with House of Pain before bringing in the romping stomp of the […]

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Musical Encounters of the Fifth Kind?

NASA’s announcement in December about our impending arsenic-based overlords caused quite a stir, followed by a fair amount of disappointment. Despite oddly worded reports suggesting that “NASA has discovered a completely new life form that doesn’t share the biological building blocks of anything currently living on planet Earth” (his emphasis), it turned out that NASA […]

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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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Best African Dance Ever

So, yeah. There’s rearing; and then there’s rearing — Slightly older kids, well enculturated & irrepressibly motivated, can tend to take things to the next level, bumping body parts with acrobatic abandon and lighting rooftops (and laptops) on fire — Devotees of dancehall reggae and reggaeton will no doubt recognize elements of perreo and daggering […]

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Unauthorized Oz Wizardry

Tip of the virtual cap to “sharebro” and jazz wiz Josh Rutner for these — c/o MOVIEBARCODE c/o pughtube – The Wizard of Oz + Dark Side of the Moon…. many folks have tried to put these two together and succeeded, sort of. The people that even know about this probably still argue on which […]

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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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El Gasodoble Magnífico

To assist with the launch of NWLA (New Weird Latin America — read all about it), a new curatorial effort by some friends in the DF, I cooked up a video mashup I’ve long been wanting to assemble. The piece stitches together 13 performances of “España Cañi,” as collected on YouTube. It pegs them all […]

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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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