Interview – This Is Africa

Posted on by
Reply

“In Europe, rhythm was seen as something “primitive”, “animalistic”, and characteristic of the music of “savages” and the lower classes. These attitudes still persist today: serious music is for silent contemplation, and dance music is largely seen as “entertainment for drunk idiots’. But the opposite is true: European classical music was developed precisely as pure entertainment for the rich, and dance music is descendent of the true musical and cultural heritage of our species.”

from interview by This Is Africa.

NGOMA MIX 13 – Juju-Juke

Posted on by
4

Ever since drums were banned on most slave plantations in N. America during the 1600s, after the masters discovering that the slaves organized revolts with their talking drums, the expression of poly-rhythms in N. American popular music has primarily been through use of the voice.  This is the reason music in the US is typified by the simple 1-2 “dupple” rhythm, in contrast to more complex beat patterns in South-America or the Caribbean (which kept their drums).  Thus the evolution of all subsequent Afro-North-American music was profoundly shaped, from Blues to Funk to Disco:  kick on the 1, and snare on the 2; all the way down to the late 20th Century – complex poly-rhythms in hiphop is produced with rap, and the drums remain a skeletal, minimalistic boom-bap, as if just to mark time.

Now in the 21st Century a renewed sense of rhythmic complexity returns to  Afro-North-American dance music in the form of Juke/Footwork in Chicago: interlocking 2s and 3s form intricate beat structures, unmistakeably related to many forms of percussion styles in the motherland (but still often keeping that N. American hard snare on the 2).

OR: STREAM: MIXCLOUD //// DOWNLOAD: SEPARATE TRACKS OR SINGLE TRACK

This NGOMA volume demonstrates this reconnection, after centuries of separation, between African tradition and Afro-Diaspora:  between Nigerian Juju/Fuji music and Chicago Juke/Footwork, between Ethiopian dance styles and Detroit Ghetto-Tech, between Iberian trad-modern street sounds and American R’n’B/Pop, between Afro-Punk and Club Music, between Congolese Mbira workouts and Hiphop, between Ghanaian and Senegalese drumming and Urban Bass Pressure.   Let us pump up the volume and remember the power and spirit of rhythm which survives every hardship, cruelty, and oppression, and rejoice in the timeless Music Of the Drums.

big thanks to Keith Jones for knowledge passing, Itzi Nallah, Sonic Diaspora and states side massive for making the Juju-Juke tour possible, my B-girls Jessi and Maya for support.Juju-Juke Tour kick off in Belgrade

I have played this set a few times now during the Serbia, Germany, and US East Coast tour  a few weeks ago, and crowds have gone completely BONKERS as the energy went straight through the roof: 500 screaming people and massive MOSH PIT at 3AM during Mikser Festival Belgrade; club crowd which refused to leave, clapping and hollering for 20 minutes after lights went up and sound was turned off at The Shrine Chicago.  I guess the world is more than ready for 160 BPM Afro-Footwork pressure!!!

and here is that adrenaline fueled misanthropic juke edit of South African punk rockers Koos by itself (download and drop into your set if you are wo/man enough :D):

FUSION FESTIVAL 2012

Posted on by
Reply

For the 5th year in a roll, Fusion Festival going to get proper NGOMATIZED Friday 29. June 7-10pm on the Querfeld stage, featuring, for the first time, the mind bending tones and textures of Austrian Trombonist/Multi-Instrumentalist Werner Puntigam, alongside resident drummer Marcel and dj zhao. Will be a Northern Tropikal set in true Afro-Futurist spirit to remember.

UPDATE:  When Werner first started going in with the Trombone i felt actual fear.  Beautiful monster sounds like a hundred whales or a solar eclipse.  The sheer power, finesse, and extraordinary sense of composition this man who comes from an improvisation and free-jazz background brought was simply immense.  (Very different feeling from our set last year with trumpeter El Congo) Together with my deep and hard Afro-Tech selections and Marcel’s dexterous drumming, this proper Northern Tropikal set raised a thunder storm which caused entire Fusion Festival to be shut down for 15 minutes.

video was shot by 2 great film makers from Spain on 5 cameras, soon come!

Steve Albini on “Piracy”

Posted on by
1

(from reddit, thanks to The 13th Tribe for heads up)

Fan:  What is your opinion about music Piracy? Does it hurt you economically?

Steve Albini:  I reject the term “piracy.” It’s people listening to music and sharing it with other people, and it’s good for musicians because it widens the audience for music. The record industry doesn’t like trading music because they see it as lost sales, but that’s nonsense. Sales have declined because physical discs are no longer the distribution medium for mass-appeal pop music, and expecting people to treat files as physical objects to be inventoried and bought individually is absurd.
The downtrend in sales has hurt the recording business, obviously, but not us specifically because we never relied on the mainstream record industry for our clientele. Bands are always going to want to record themselves, and there will always be a market among serious music fans for well-made record albums. I’ll point to the success of the Chicago label Numero Group as an example.
There won’t ever be a mass-market record industry again, and that’s fine with me because that industry didn’t operate for the benefit of the musicians or the audience, the only classes of people I care about.
Free distribution of music has created a huge growth in the audience for live music performance, where most bands spend most of their time and energy anyway. Ticket prices have risen to the point that even club-level touring bands can earn a middle-class income if they keep their shit together, and every band now has access to a world-wide audience at no cost of acquisition. That’s fantastic.
Additionally, places poorly-served by the old-school record business (small or isolate towns, third-world and non-english-speaking countries) now have access to everything instead of a small sampling of music controlled by a hidebound local industry. When my band toured Eastern Europe a couple of years ago we had full houses despite having sold literally no records in most of those countries. Thank you internets.

Paris: 18, 19, 20 May

Posted on by
Reply

Friday, May 18, 2012

10:00pm – 4:00am

2, rue des Goncourt, 75011 Paris
FREE

Samedi 19 Mail 2012
de 23H à l’Aube
@ LA DAME DE CANTON
Quai François Mauriac [Face BNF]
Paris 13è
M° Quai de La Gare / Bibliothèque F. M.
PAF : 5€

 

 

and on Sunday, on the outdoor terrasse of the same party boat of previous night, Dj Zhao will be spinning all afternoon into the evening.

 

where my punk rock jukers at?!

Posted on by
Reply

To help celebrate the first Punk in Africa screening in Berlin at the first Too Drunk To Watch film festival, a likkle mash-fixed shot of adrenaline 4 da footworkin Afro-Punk massive.  Healthy misanthropy and apprehension of what our world faces in the coming decades…

R U READY TO MOSH!?!?!?!?!

and a stand alone cut from the Punk In Africa Official Mix – some political grime-punk to put a little actual aggression in your polite dubstep sets.

Fresh Shangaan Jams from Jambatani

Posted on by
1

dj LeBlanc has made a 1 hour mix of new material coming out of the Tsonga scene in SA.  in his words:

“In december 2011 I met the Shangaan music producer and singer Hanyani Maluleke, aka Mr. Jambatani, in Johannesburg, South Africa. I got in touch with him by my dj buddy Sebcat (Rebel Up! & Brussels Up!) who asked me to find cd’s of him as he had heard a couple of songs on the blog of Ernie Hoggins, whom is hereby credited for introducing the man and his music for the first time.
Back home in Brussels, I realised that one of the 5 home burned cd’s that I had gotten from Jambatani was unreadable, as were all of the title tracks of the 4 cd’s left.
But the music is great, so just following my ears, I made a selection of 12 tracks from about the 45 songs that were on the cd’s. At first, the variation in tempo’s (slow, fast) grasped the attention, which roots it firmly in the xitsonga music tradition (tsonga disco, shangaan electro) as well as the rich instrumentation, choirs, funny samples and vocal crazyness of Mr Jambatani himself. ”

and after that when you saying to yoself “hot damn i need more!” here is another dope mix of Shangaan business you won’t hear anywhere else by our man in Brussels:

04/05 May: Linz and Vienna

Posted on by
Reply

Friday 04 May Dj Zhao will will be delivering music of the drums all night long as part of Treffpunkt Afrika at Strom in beautiful Linz.  True Rhythm Culture doesn’t actually give a shit about being hip because it invented hip, is the very definition of hip, has been and will always be hip, even after all the world’s hip have become died and gone to square heaven. The following night Fokn Bois and Dala Dala Sound are playing.

Continue reading →

Dance Music’s So Called Progressiveness

Posted on by
1

Morgan Geist commented on a pretty scary NYT article on the commercial success of Electronic Dance Music.  For now i will leave the numerous serious problems with the article itself aside, and focus on the quote of a quote:

“Let’s remember a quote from a Detroit techno pioneer (possibly Jeff Mills) that I think of often: “At rock concerts, people scream when they hear something they know and have heard before. With techno, people scream when they hear something they’ve never heard before.”

While on the surface it rings true, the much applauded and alleged “progressiveness” and “open mindedness” of electronic dance music culture, now nearly 30 years on, is debatable to say the least. A more accurate description would be:

“techno crowds scream when they hear something they’ve never heard before, but which bangs exactly in the same manner as something which they have heard many, many times before.”

Continue reading →

Authenticity

Posted on by
Reply

It is important to critique interpretations of Authenticity and the restrictive ways it is used, point out its limits and flaws, expand upon its reductionism, and demonstrate how its uses can be harmful for individuals as well as culture at large.  But the concept is still useful, and can be readily defined:

In the sphere of cultural production, Authenticity is a relative, mutable, non-fixed, non-singular, and non-universal concept which connotes:

A. a product having resulted from the actual subjective life experiences of its maker, created with his/her aesthetic and otherwise decisions, as opposed to decisions made from more impersonal and alienated methods such as statistical information, focus groups, etc.

B. a product originating from within a collective historical body, the shared language and customs of a social group, the cohesion of distilled individual subjective experience over time, which we can here call Culture; as opposed to imitations of such products, by superficially appropriating its language, aesthetics, or characteristics, from agents which exist outside of the particular tradition, the particular culture.

SUMMER 2012

Posted on by
Reply

May: Linz, Austria / Paris, France / Munich, Germany – stay tuned for details.

June:  planning the solo USA tour for June – roughly first week or 2 East Coast, Texas in the middle, and hopefully last week or 2 West Coast. if anyone has any leads or connections for gigs, please send my way! thanks and hope to see some of you this summer!