like the moon
As published in issue 377 of The Wire (July 2015), here’s my joint review of two recent books about soundsystem/DJ culture, each of them impressive efforts of deep documentation and deliberate framing even as each takes a rather different approach to the project. Together, they further round out our understanding of the soundsystem as global […]
Read More →Later this week, on Friday April 19 from 2-3:45pm, I will have the pleasure of hosting a panel of some dear friends & colleagues & all-around awesome folks at the EMP Pop Conference at NYC (at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts @ 721 Broadway). An experiment of sorts, this year’s Pop Conference will take […]
Read More →Estoy muymuy emocionado about tomorrow nights guest(s) at Beat Research. Dorchester’s own Trizlam, no stranger to BR, will be accompanied by his very own picó — or piquito anyway — a mini-replica of one of the Colombian Caribbean coast’s classically souped-up soundsystems, one of the very outfits that developed the local genre known as champeta […]
Read More →Tonight at Beat Research we’re happy to have Trizlam, a Dorchester native and crate-digging scholar interested in the circulation of musical media — he wrote an extensive essay on the importance of “yardtapes” in the Jamaican diaspora — who recently returned from a three-month tour of Colombia where he engaged in some serious picó peeping […]
Read More →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 […]
Read More →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, […]
Read More →I noted on Twitter the other day that one reason it was taking me so long to finish up the previous post is that “darts are harder to throw than confetti.” It’s important to critique, at least if we want things to be better, but I also always try to remind myself that there are […]
Read More →a once-obscure music that enjoyed a fanatic embrace in the _______ slums of _______ has become a full-fledged global occasion – This could be the mantra of global ghettotech. Could hardly have written it better myself. But I didn’t. Nor was it written, despite what might be its commonplace connotations, about reggae, or funk carioca, […]
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 →Considering the prodigious and idiosyncratically imaginative output of Mr. Munchi, it’s seeming more and more apt to call what he’s doing something like a genre unto itself. Moombahcore? Nah, Munchiton! 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 […]
Read More →A few recent projects of note landed in my inbox last week. And though I don’t have the time to really give them the write-ups they deserve (and don’t get me started on the backlog of projects I need to big-up), they each grabbed my attention — a remarkable feat in this age of info-glut […]
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 →That was quick. Reflecting on our latest pandemic scare and remembering such topical tropical fare as 2003’s Sars Riddim, I wondered aloud “about 4 hours ago” who would be the first to come up with a swine flu inspired track. /Jace chatted me up shortly thereafter to say that he had already been sent a […]
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 →Amazing how an Amazon link makes our book finally feel real. (Pre-orders in teh house!) And though they don’t have any imgs yet, I’m happy to report that I do, and — having lobbied HARD for this particular photo by Miguel Luciano to grace our cover — I’m thrilled to share it with y’all: On […]
Read More →I think I’ve finally got my linkthink flow resolved, so there should be a more consistent stream of delishish posts from here on out. For whatever glitchy reason, my recent taggage has gone un(re)published here, so I’m going to paste it in below just to throw all you loyal readers a bone or two. Plz […]
Read More →todo mundo » Blog Archive » Is that Lil Twane on the keytar? great post by kevin linking lil wayne to coltrane, miles, george duke and other techno-musical visionaries :: including the great question, "Is not Auto-Tune the wah pedal of today’s Black pop?" :: and, to boot, he inserts his video-supported commentary into recent […]
Read More →MySpace.com – Lyndon Livingstone aka STONEZ – Port-of-Spain – Electronica / House / Club – www.myspace.com/lyndonlivingstone housey-trancey T&T producer — check the trance mix of collie buds's "come around" !! (thx, brian) (tags: trinidad myspace trance techno house soca reggae remix) montag: Musique pour bébés this page links to some raymond scott audio i posted […]
Read More →TRANS #11 Revista Transcultural de Música – Transcultural Music Review new issue :: music & youth culture in argentina + zoomusicology (tags: academic journal argentina buenosaires youth identititity cumbia rock spanish) La cumbia villera y el fin de la cultura del trabajo en la Argentina de los 90 article (en español) on cumbia villera, youth […]
Read More →hawgblawg: gothic bellydance per recent discussions, ted swedenburg links to a fascinating “goth bellydance” video, which is set, interestingly, to a custom refix by enduser of some _bollywood breaks_ material (tags: bellydance video arab middleeast US goth breakcore orientalism blogpost dance) YouTube – The Story of Rapper’s Delight by Nile Rodgers chic’s nile rodgers offers […]
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