December Selection
December, Melbourne, the end of a crazy year. Fairly typical yo-yo weather, with the added bonus of more intense tropical-style lightning storms (do we give thanks yet to climate change?) Total eclipse of the Gemini moon, so it’s not only me going crazy with the urge to be super-social before this curious thing called “christmas” puts us under family house arrest. Too many bongos at the CERES party at the end of our street, which the local kids are having scooter races down, and I keep getting caught stealing figs from our neighbour’s sidewalk tree (she gives me a Greek octogenarian stare which is obviously intended to make every ill-gotten fig taste bitter, but so far it’s not working). The tomatoes and the zucchini and the feijoa and the strawberries are flowering, and so are we. Summer!
Here’s an eclectic December selection, wandering back and forth across the boundaries of spoken word and song – poetry, hip hop, chant, and later, a bit of an end-of-the-world political rant and some uplifting desert blues song…
If you follow me on Facebook you’ll have seen the links to some of these sounds (if not, go ahead and ‘like’ … Link’s on the left … 
So first up, how about some “yoga step”?! From MC Zulu and Knight Riderz … ‘Om Shanti’ dubstepped. Now, this could easily go wrong. And I guess it often has, the mixture of chanting and beats, mantra and funk … but Zulu’s voice is powerful and authentic, he has the spiritual weight. And the beats from KnightRiderz are amazing, complex, and addictive enough. This is the chant of one of my weekly yoga classes so I’m tempted to take this track in there for us to kick our own asses to next week! (It’s out on on Muti Music‘s Acid Crunk 4 btw)
This track resonated as around the time I heard it, I was watching Martin Scorsese’s documentary about George Harrison. This may seem like a bit of a leap, but stay with me ….. There’s a song by Harrison “Be Here Now” which is in my mind, a successful modern creation of universal mantra. Very few attempts at that manage to not sound trite and just, well, ‘cosmic’… In Scorsese’s documentary there’s much of George talking about mantra, how through chanting you can actually reach “god”; actually connect with spirit. Explaining that mantras are created specifically to sound nice – the reason they work is that it’s simply really nice to do it – you don’t want to stop chanting. That’s true. It’s the same, then (this is George’s logic and I think it’s solid logic) with good songs, melodies that stick in your head. It’s unfortunate that so few pop songs have messages to convey beyond the addictiveness of the melody, but I guess we don’t live in George’s world after all…
I aim to wear my heart on my sleeve without minding if it’s the fashion so here’s a YouTube clip of “Be Here Now” … enjoy, go on, it’s my christmas present to you …
Now, from the sublime to the …. owwww…
Taking our cue from Zulu’s redux of ‘Om Shanti’, more fusion of old and new, this time at the other end of the spectrum, in the dark and brooding poetic past. Atmospheric spoken / electro experiments from MachineGun (Francevia “Antarctica?”). First up – with text from ‘Fin du 3e Chant de Maldoror’ – the third canto of the poetic novel by Comte de Lautréamont (alias Isidore Ducasse).
Oddfonix & MachineGun – Inner Workings Original Remix
This dark and macabre thing (which I admit I gave up on when I tried reading it at university) was a surrealistm catalyst – Dali, Duchamp, Man Ray, Max Ernst, all mention this poem as in inspiration. The third canto recited in this track is particularly, well, crasseux …? Because I really don’t speak French it’s interesting listening to tracks like this, without knowing the frankly gross subject. The sound allows you to know it’s dark, you feel the darkness in the voice and also the timbre of the words. But if you haven’t read the poems, you don’t know about the dirty bucket of water … for example …
It’s a similar experience to one of my favourite spoken word / electro CDs, the Air production of Alessandro Baricco’s “City (Tre Storie Western)” So much of that album sounds so beautiful – Baricco’s voice is gentle and poetic, Air’s music is whimsical. But if you know Italian, or you’ve read translations of these stories you’ll know there’s some heavy shit going down involving pistols and prostitutes. Especially in the prettiest track!
‘Romance Espagnole Original Remix (Jeux Interdits)’ – to the sweet guitar of ‘Spanish Romance’ a poem by Serge Jean Venturini – I think! It could be sweet in fact, or dark as hell – but it’s pretty either way…
Anonymous & MachineGun – Romance Espagnole Original Remix (Jeux Interdits)
How about a teenage Rimbaud, wandering barefoot and stumbling across a ‘sleeping’ soldier with holes in his side, to a soundtrack from Coltrane, Davis, and Duke Ellington? ça va..
Coltrane, Ellington, Miles Davis & MachineGun – In a Sentimental Mood Original Remix
Keeping things intense, some great new hip hop out of Lebanon, from الرأس aka السيّد (El Rass – The Head) AKA Mazen El Sayed, he is a journalist from Beirut.
He says: “My Arabic identity is a digital bedouinism, with roots as deep as my branches are reaching for the sky. No nationalism, no nostalgia, only passion for creating our new identity. This is how I understand our revolution, and this is how I am it. My musical instruments are my words, my baglama, my voice, my flow, my digital armada and the constructive ears of humanity.”
This first track is a taster from an album coming in February which I’m looking forward to hearing.
Another: كفاني (Enough):
واطف لوطن-القاموس بمشاركة الرأس l’qamous feat. el rass
For these next two tracks I have to thank Mehmet Akif Coşkun, a nice connection inTurkey… he got me onto Argub, a turntablist and producer from Istanbul working with samples from Turkish film and popular culture. Brilliant sampling and scratching! From the Vinyl Obscura EP …
Dirty Harry and his 44 magnum!
So December is turning out to be about mantra, passion, political fury, and mad sampling… After a furiously paced and confusing year, I don’t know at all where we are. The paradigm is definitely shifting, the tipping point approaching for the good (the people’s movement) and the bad (the climate change endgame). So all things, after a truly crazy 12 months, the dark and the light together.
Here is some excellent passion from Balkan Beat Box, the video for ‘Political Fuck’ – good for letting off some of this year’s frustration steam! I get an energy from this track that reminds me of some music of the mid-80s, early 90s, another period of massive political frustration maybe … frankly, it’s a Faith No More vibe.
Whilst we’re on the subject of political fucks … Filastine, Astu “tooliq” Prasidya and vocalist/ hip hop poet Nova Ruth are asking for our help to complete two short pieces of cinematic art cut to new compositions by Filastine. “Colony Collapse is filmed at sites of ecological friction, the fault lines of conflict between humanity and (the rest of) nature. We snuck into a gas drilling site gone awry, and performed in the midst of traffic jams in a megacity where those fossil fuels get squandered. We filmed in a landscape of garbage, and in a supermarket where all that discarded packaging originates… This is the slow-motion apocalypse, uncomfortably close and personal.” Watch the video: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/filastine/2-new-filastine-music-videos-colony-collapse-and-g/widget/video.html
The title of Grey Filastine’s blog – “Observations on the Beginning of the End of the World” - has been rolling around in my head all week, as I read messages from friends and organisations in Durban at the climate change conference. “The bad news is…” writes the Australian Conservation Foundation today “…that while the science is in, the commitments to cut pollution are not. All countries have agreed that warming should be kept below two degrees, but their commitments to cut pollution won’t even meet this goal, much less the cuts we need to keep our climate safe.” The good news? That there is an agreement to establish a new … agreement. In 2015. Given that the scientists now say we have five years to do something global and drastic to protect our climate from catastrophic change, and that by 2015 that will be one year to do something, this is not so much good news as no news. Perhaps a friend who was at the conference put it better: “The outcomes (I use the term loosely) are worse than Copenhagen and Cancun. And there’s even less disappointment about it! It’s pretty much business as usual.” Political fuck. Slow-motion apocalypse? As despairing as these outcomes can make me, I still believe we can’t stop now. We’ve got to double our efforts campaigning for change, as well as doubling our efforts at creating change, as the hippies used to say, being the change. Creating, building, telling stories, chanting mantra if that’s your thing – it’s all valid. Whatever we can do, each human, in our own way, without prejudice. Giving in is hardly an option now.
So part of that is in supporting endeavours, artists, people we believe in, throwing little bits of money at any project that can forward some sort of enlightenment. As George Harrison did in bankrolling the Monty Python “Life of Brian” film (see how I managed to tie him into this full narrative after all?) – I want to see these films so I’ll happily pay in advance. Because I believe that those of us in in privileged countries and situations need to see these situations that we do not see if we don’t make the journey ourselves. We need to know. Our planet is at risk, and we really don’t have the luxury of introversion any more. And as we’ve been saying this year, it’s not being televised.
A video of Filastine with Nova Ruth from a couple of years ago, one of my favourite tracks of his:
After the year we’ve had, I want to finish up this selection with three new tracks I just love, and a mix to take to the party …
Something new from Dubsahara to bring us back to a more meditative state …
To chill us out! … Aaron Ross and the Sterling Ensemble work with the incomparable Ursula Rucker on “Alive” (listen to the dub track, mainly)
Aaron Ross and Sterling Ensemble feat. Ursula Rucker – Alive
Some cumbia dub – from ElBarba Dub (Brendan featured a great set by him on Dialectic Radio earlier this year) jamming live with Gaston Lober on trumpet and Paolo Autino on spoken vocals:
Cumbia nocturna DEMO // elBarba Dub ft. Gaston Lober & paolo autino
So now we’re feeling brighter, how about we take a trip? Our friend Mondo Loco has been putting together mixes of classic mid-20th-century psychedelic Turkish vinyl, gleaned from trips to Turkey (and his grandparent’s collections!) What’s lovely about these mixes (apart from the true analog wax sound) is Serhan incorporating spoken samples from the discs in between tracks, creating real emotional adventures. We feature the “Bos Kadeh 1 – Turkish mix of emotions” in a recent Dialectic show (hopefully that will be up on the interwebs for you to hear soon) – so I’ll share with you this month, the second ‘Bos Kadeh’ mix, Turkish blues 45’s.
Bos Kadeh 2 – Turkish blues 45′s.
Glad to get the political fury out of my system, and concentrate on summer joys, to build up energies for another year. Opa! To 2012.
