like the moon
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) […]
Read More →I enjoyed this so thoroughly yesterday that I need to post it here. Thanks to Frank Roberts for the tip. Becca called this 15 minute film “pitch perfect,” and I think she’s right. Hope you dig this as much as we. Someone needs to give Mykwain Gainey the resources to produce a series or something, […]
Read More →(via cshirky, who says that bit about the kidney) & while we’re YouTubing tweaked technoptimism, tis the season for this ol’ chestnut:
Read More →Tonight at Beat Research we’re happy to play host to Brent Arnold, who I had the pleasure to get to know last spring during Nettle’s residency at Brandeis. We like to keep things well mixed at BR, and bringing in a little solo cello + voice + processing is definitely par for the course, if […]
Read More →via Filastine (reblogged, more artfully than i&i, by /Rupture) — URGENT CALL FOR SOUND COMPOSITIONS On a topic even more urgent: Climate Chaos Deadline: December 13, 2009 Public Performance: December 16, in the streets of Copenhagen during the Climate Summit, broadcast from the Sound Swarm, a of battery of bicycle-mounted megaphones within the Bike Bloc […]
Read More →Thanks again to Tom, our man in Panama, who recently pointed me to an additional, and interesting, instantiation of the Miss Independent riddim. As we heard previously, the Ne-Yo instrumental — most famously reappropriated in Vybz&Spice’s “Rampin Shop” — has become a veritable version in Panama, supporting no fewer than a dozen local voicings (and […]
Read More →Como les prometí. Muchísimas gracias otra vez a nuestro anfitrión generoso, Ricardo. ¡Ya quiero volver!
Read More →Tonight at Beat Research we’ve got a special session in store: our main man, Pacey Foster, will be teaming up with heavyweight hip-hop scribe Brian Coleman to celebrate Boston hip-hop. Yeah, you read that right. And what? We rep da bean, knamean ;) The occasion is the publication of an essay by Pace on the […]
Read More →About to turn the corner on fall/winter, so allow me to remember my favorite season of the year with some choice moments made immortal (as the Internet). Longer time since my last, so a few more flicks than usual. Got a post devoted to Mexico to follow pronto. Here, a fair amount of family fare. […]
Read More →img by photog_friend (cc) Tonight at Beat Research, we’re happy to play host to one of our favorite producers/DJs of the moment, Kingdom! Have you heard his recent mix for Discobelle? You really should. It’s so many different colors of awesome, I can’t even tell you. I’ve been digging Ezra’s approach for a couple years […]
Read More →I’ve been dying to get back to Mexico City since I first went there a couple years ago. I’m headed there today (primarily to attend the SEM conf) and will be staying through the weekend, and I’m excited to report that in addition to #sem09 I’ll be playing a couple gigs! Big thx to my […]
Read More →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, […]
Read More →Tonight at Beat Research: the one-and-only Sonido Martines ! For those who don’t know, Sonido has been a driving force in the recent (re)surgence in cumbia interest outside of its longtime hotspots. He co-authors La Congona New Cumbia with Sñr Rupture, and he’s largely responsible — at least by my ears — for brokering the […]
Read More →First, tomorrow @ MIT (5:15pm, 14E-310): What can we learn about contemporary culture from watching dayglo-clad teenagers dancing geekily in front of their computers in such disparate sites as Brooklyn, Buenos Aires, Johannesburg, and Mexico City? How has the embrace of “new media” by so-called “digital natives” facilitated the formation of transnational, digital publics? More […]
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 →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 […]
Read More →I’m happy to report that our modest Monday throwdown, Beat Research, has been nominated for best Monday Night club thing in the Weekly Dig‘s 2009 Dig This Awards. We’re honored & flattered to be considered for this, as we do our best to hold it down for “experimental party music” here in the Bean each […]
Read More →I’ve been working on a talk/chapter called “Skinny Jeans and Fruity Loops” and while part of that has involved tracking floggers and tecktonik across Latin America, another part has required that I dig into LA’s similarly day-glo/geeky youthtube dance scene: i.e., jerkin. More on all of this research later. Meantime, I just want to share […]
Read More →Tonight at Beat Research we’re happy to host another cosmo-bass booster from the Great North. DJ Valeo from Toronto is perhaps better known to readers here as DJ Khiasma from Montreal, also known as Guillaume, one of the bloggers and radio hosts at Masalacism. Whatever he’s calling himself at the moment, Guillaume has been one […]
Read More →Ah, music (departments). Here’s an excerpt from an email I received this week from the academic administrator in my dept here at MIT (which, in case you didn’t know, is Foreign Languages & Literatures, not, as some might assume, Music & Theater Arts): In order to justify [cross-listing your course] to the Music Faculty, they […]
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