Have you heard about Sonic Warfare? Blue is King Midas Sound's power demonstration, one minute and forty-one seconds of ultra-bass infection… everything is there, from jamaican urban dances to Brixton's heavy weight meditations.
Please play it only on massive soundsystems or good headphones.
On today's New York Times blog, focused on a failed Pablo Delano's reportage in Honduras.
To gladden the reading - or maybe to emphasize the mayan stereotype - I suggest to download this very charming compilation of mayan marimba posted a while ago by Dj Bongo Man on Music City blog.
A procession in the department of Copàn, site of great Mayan city, Pablo Delano in 2008
Here is my piece (italian) on Netmage 2010, published on Alias/Il Manifesto last saturday. The festival is january 21/23, Bologna, check out the program of the festival here.
Click on the image or 'right click > save image' to read it
Cemetery by Carlos Casas recovers adventure films memorabilia and literally put yourself into another, multilayered, world; it is a work in progress on a future film about a cemetery of elephants. Let's take part in his safari next week at Netmage 10, Bologna.
Here follows some clips from the serie Archive Works, I prefer to embed the videos instead of linking the channel.
Dengue Fever mission is to rediscover cambodian pop from 50s and 60s, pre-Pol Pot regime eras - when Khmer Rouge moved in forbidding every half-cast music influenced by western psychedelic and surf rock.
Dengue Fever are actually based in L.A. but their singer Chhom Nimol's origin is cambodian. Apart from the wonderful atmosphere of their music, it's interesting to realize how they are trying to literally re-enact something that was already impure and postcolonial in itself. And they do this even spreading original music from this land and period, through a compilation of cambodian pop which is coming out this January; titled Electric Cambodia it has described as a "testament to the spirit of a modern Cambodia that existed not so long ago, and should be remembered today".
Together with the director John Pirozzi - who also directed the documentary Don't Think I've Forgotten - they toured Cambodia, trying to rejoin their roots. The result is a one-hour documentary titled Sleepwalking Through the Mekong; here are a clip and a still frame I'd like to share.
I've just finished to read the piece Charmless Man by Line Mounzer on the current issue of Bidoun. It's about her encounter with an unknown british musician on tour in Lebanon - "let's call him Ethan", she says - from whom for the first time she heard of Omar Souleyman, a wedding master of ceremony, like many others there (she mentions Naim el Sheikh and Ali el Deek, both from the border regions of Lebanon and Syria).
Line Mounzer takes obviously, how to say, an insider perspective, as she's writing from Beirut. She describes the concert, the attempts of a group of syrian workers trying to attend it, and a serie of personal episodes happened later that night. Apart from the romanticized and extremely overall vocabulary, at first blush the article should stand as a critique on Sublime Frequencies practices - and this isn't anything new - but at the end, the perspective is subverted, or better, it takes in consideration the reaction from an 'arab' point of view; I'll quote only one of the latest paragraph, inviting to read the entire contribution:
"It's not that Souleyman's music isn't catchy and danceable, because it is. And it's not that he doesn't have any charisma and stage presence required for a performer, because he does. It was more troubling that we'd [referred to lebanese audience] waited for him to be bought, and packaged, and resold to us by someone from outside before we bothered to notice him, to celebrate him".
I am quietly astonished because just today I bought my copy of Omar Souleyman's Highway to Hassake (Folk and Pop Sounds of Syria), I had the album on mp3 since its publication, but I wanted the real copy, maybe even prompted by last night dancing at a friend's birthday, when everything seemed decreasing, everybody got crazy on Omar's beats and lyrics.
The party was at an ethiopian bar in Milan, not such a crazy postcolonial city, but it's interesting to see how the local community of this place got fun hearing arab words and music played by italian guests, "Oh! This is arab" said an eritrean guy… and we all shared the dancefloor.
Well, maybe this post may need more space, and even more thoughts, but for the moment I just wanted to take this opportunity to report about same experiences from different angles and positions of contemporary panorama.
