Kimi Djabaté, Karam (Cumbancha; 2009)

This review was posted to Cokemachineglow.com today:

Kimi Djabaté
Karam
(Cumbancha; 2009)
Rating: 70%

Kimi Djabaté, a griot from the West African nation of Guinea-Bissau, was literally born to play music. Hailing from Tabato, a village famous for its griots—hereditary bards charged with telling the oral history of their tribe—he first learned to play the balafón, a resonant African xylophone, when he was three years old. From there, he learned to play kora (an African harp), various traditional percussion instruments, and guitar. But being a talented musician in a poor musical family had its drawbacks: he was often forced to sing and dance for money.

Djabaté has lived in Portugal since 1994, which led to another set of struggles. This personal history resonates through his second solo album, Karam, in unexpected ways. Its fifteen tracks are guided as much by layers of percussion and glossy stringed instruments as Djabaté’s longing lyrics, giving an otherwise uplifting set of songs a somber quality. “Mulo-nhaneta / Mulo-torrota-je,” Djabaté sings in the title track, in his native language of Mandingo. As bright strands of kora (African harp) and acoustic guitar float over an upbeat rhythm, these lyrics offer a sobering reminder: they roughly mean, “People suffer so much / It’s a tiring experience.”

Following the griot tradition, many of Djabaté’s songs pay tribute to important people—his mother (“Ná”), a strong woman named Fatumata (“Fatu”), a man who has lost his wife (“Dabô”). Using the tribute song as a framework for discussing society, he highlights the inequality that many contemporary Africans face, critiquing male chauvinism, misogyny, economic inequality, and ethnic prejudice. But the music is often simultaneously sad and beautiful: over the sublimely slow beat and wandering balafón of “Mogolu,” a chorus intones, “Yo mogolu mancaynhan”—“How come some have so much and others have nothing?” In that way, Karam is anything but hopeless. Indeed, more than once, Djabaté tells the listener, “Dance!”—and tracks like “Mussolu” and “Manla,” with their invigorating Latin-style grooves, are perfect for doing just that.

The slow, elongated woodwind refrain of “Kodé” exemplifies the suffering that Africa has experienced over the years: the strident anthem of African independence fifty years ago has evolved into a funereal dirge. In recent months, Guinea-Bissau itself has endured shocking political instability. With Karam, Djabaté highlights the kinds of prejudice that have contributed to this suffering. But his music feels like a kind of salve, glowing with optimism over words aching with sadness.

:: myspace.com/kimidjabate

Various Artists, Shadow Music of Thailand (Sublime Frequencies; 2009)

This review was posted on Cokemachineglow.com Friday:

Various Artists

Shadow Music of Thailand
(Sublime Frequencies; 2009)

Rating: 70%

Sublime Frequencies releases aren’t particularly thorough or edifying—with their cut-and-paste cover designs and scattershot liner notes, often they’re as makeshift as the woefully ignored or long-forgotten strains of global music they present. Of course, this is partly what makes these releases so remarkable and alluring. The dogs that some men are, sometimes all a record might need is a picture of two pretty Thai women in tiny dresses on the cover—as is the case with the 2007 comp Thai Pop Spectacular—and it’s sold. Then again, there are also serious music geeks who would simply be wooed by an intriguing title like Shadow Music of Thailand.

This compilation, which was released as a limited edition LP last year, isn’t nearly as party hardy as the label’s other recent releases (Omar Souleyman’s Dabke 2020 and Group Doueh’s Treeg Salaam), but it’s just as distinct. The comp’s seventeen tracks, many of them clocking in at under three minutes, document a uniquely Thai style of garage rock from the ’60s known as “shadow music,” named after the UK’s sly instrumental band the Shadows. In a way, the “shadow music” here is comparable to popular songs by Ethiopian artists like Tilahun Gessesse, who incorporated the pentatonic scale and traditional melodies into Afro-funk. Only in this case, Thailand’s regal folk melodies are employed to make something slower and headier, more akin to surf-rock.

The musicianship feels amateurish throughout, and the comp features more than a few janky guitar solos, but there is a worldliness and flexibility to these songs that make some of them infectious. The Son of P.M., one of several bands put together by the prominent singer and composer Payong Mukda, makes a psychedelic Latin-style groove in “Plaeng Yiepoun,” its lithe organ melody leading Latin-inflected rhythm guitar and gleaming xylophone chords. In “Pone Tala Pone (Indian),” a reverb-drenched guitar phrase melds with vaguely Eastern drumming and melismatic vocals, making for something strange and heady. In “Lao Kratob Mai,” Johnny Guitar creates an indigenous feel with a meditatively plodding beat, an ornamental xylophone melody and warm organ fills, but the band mixes things up by tossing in a grizzled and psychedelic guitar solo.

Sublime Frequencies got plenty of attention earlier this year when they hosted a UK and European tour that put Souleyman and Group Doueh in the same bill—making an irresistible and otherwise unlikely combination of gritty Syrian dabke and hypnotic guitar music from the Sahara Desert. But the label’s strongest point has always been its releases of splendid and obscure music from Southeast Asia. In that respect, Shadow Music of Thailand certainly gives the Khmer Rocks label’s Cambodian Rocks series a run for it’s money.

:: sublimefrequencies.com

Track Review: "Putcha Handz Up"

CLP f/ Rayzaflo :: "Putcha Handz Up"
From BASSS Brains (Brd Basss Germany; 2009)

Germans make stunning graffiti, but their hip-hop doesn’t have the best reputation. Unimpressed with the country’s heavy-handed gangsta rap, the production duo CLP—Chris de Luca and Phon.o—has teamed up instead with American and South African MCs more familiar with funky grooves. In “Putcha Handz Up,” rhymes are contributed by a stylish teenage MC from Jackson, Mississippi. And it’s no surprise that somebody who describes herself on Myspace as “HUMAN CRACK N THA FLESH” can make this track ooze with crunked aggression.

The point of putting your hands up isn’t necessarily clear. Where Cypress Hill’s “Throw Your Hands In The Air” conveyed a certain conviviality with its laid-back groove, and Danzel’s “Put Your Hands Up in the Air” exudes hype with its pulsating synths and mindless repetition, “Putcha Handz Up” makes a severe demand: “Getcha mothafuckin’ hands up.” Confronted with a slamming beat, a leering sample of what sounds like a plucked string, and Rayzaflo’s rapid-fire rhymes, you might wonder what’s coming to you if you don’t put those hands up. A Courvoisier bottle to the face, maybe?

:: myspace.com/rayzaflo

The Best Business Names in America

As an employee at a stationery and toy company, it is my job to get in touch with a limitless array of American businesses: gift shops, toy stores, pharmacies, hospital shops, wineries, camps, Audubon societies, car washes, general stores, specialty stores, boutiques, etc. Needless to say, in my work I come across a lot of different business names, some of them so unique and fantastic that they are worth publishing here for posterity. For everyone's enjoyment and inspiration, here is list No. 5, compiling the best of what I've come across most recently:

Heavenly Outhouse

Enchanted Closet

Wearable Vegetables

Uncommon Scents

Pull Yourself Together

Bed Bath n’ Bonz Inc.

Chubby Cherub

Bohemian Angel

The Flying Mule

The Flying Carp

Wacky Rabbit

Upstart Crow

Paper Tyger

Happy Owl, Too!!!

The Mugger

Tough Luck Cowboy

Jealous Gardener

Sugar Daddy’s

Real Baby

Bayou Baby

Hipster Kids

Author Squad LLC

The Booklegger

Valiant for Truth Bookstore

A Great Good Place for Books

A Clean Well Lighted Place for Books

Wild Card

Plum Crazy

Eclecticity

Chez Weenie

Wooden Heart

Blackmail

Avant Garden

Smile Herb Shop

Beastly Bites

You-Nique Bow-Tique

Marsha's Vineyard

Wallpaper History Society

Moritz Von Oswald Trio, "Vertical Ascent" (Honest Jon's Records; 2009)

For some the little orange and white rocket on the cover of Vertical Ascent might conjure a cinematic set of images: a suspenseful countdown, engines roaring to life, lift-off, the gradual climb, and finally disappearance into space. But don’t be mislead; there is nothing so straightforward, predictable, or bombastic here. In fact, the album’s most linear feature—the track titles, which move from one numbered “Pattern” to the next—belie the wonderfully prismatic shifts of glimmering percussion and impressionist electronics within.

A sublime paradox like this is just what one would expect from a collaboration headed by Moritz Von Oswald, who is celebrated for his contributions to the groundbreaking and otherworldly minimal techno outfit Basic Channel, among other things. Oswald has found natural partners in Max Loderbauer, from the ambient electronica group Sun Electric, and Sasu Ripatti, the versatile Finnish electronic composer who goes by many aliases. All of them are intimate with the ethereal realms of electronic music, and they are all classically trained (Oswald and Ripatti in percussion, Loderbauer in piano), but they are also just as capable of producing sultry, dance-oriented grooves. On Vertical Ascent, using hand-made metal percussion, Rhodes, and electronics, the trio has concocted four long improvisational tracks that are as heady and layered as So Percussion’s take on Steve Reich’s Drumming, but as fresh and cool as a Neapolitan.

Sounding at once organic and unreal, Vertical Ascent is full of beautiful contradictions. The crude, steady clap of “Pattern 1” at first sounds completely random as it rubs against brisk swirls of hi-hat, but gradually the two lock together to maintain a driving rhythm that mutates and glistens. The slow bass pulse of “Pattern 2” leaves breathing space for echoes of tinny percussion, lingering bells, and subtle strands of keys, making for a feverishly meditative twelve minutes. “Pattern 3” has an exhilarating but bizarre feel, its lush Rhodes chords and jarring waves of electronics driven by ricochets of mutant steel drums that pan from ear to ear. The heavy beat and dub bass of “Pattern 4” is a refreshing return to more conventional minimal techno fare, but eventually the steady groove is overtaken with quaking electronics—proverbial locusts descending on the cornfield of common practice, or just some mischievous fun?

It’s a testament to Basic Channel’s influence that hardly a day goes by without mention of the duo somewhere in the electronic music universe. Some might take the title of this album to be a preposterous suggestion that Oswald is looking to reach even greater heights in an electroacoustic realm. But it seems more likely that this trio has humbler intentions: showing little interest in wowing the listener with an impressive climax, they explore all the splendor of the journey itself.

:: honestjons.com

Rating: 79%

This review was published yesterday on Cokemachineglow.com.

A Roman naval battle... in Queens?

History tells us that the Romans relished the sight of blood and guts even more than Americans do. Where we have any number of slasher-film favorites (see two installments of Hostel, five of Saw, and soon 10 of Halloween), the Romans actually had live-action splatterfests with gladiators fighting to the death.

And every so often, the emperor would put on a piece of prime-time edutainment that rivaled anything the History Channel has ever produced: a nautical bloodbath called a naumachia, which pitted armies of prisoners in boats against each other in reenactments of historic naval battles. “It was kind of the ‘bread and circus,’” explains Duke Riley, an artist-in-residence at the Queens Museum Of Art. “But it always seemed to occur right around a point in time when society was about to fall apart.”

With America beset by two wars overseas and economic recession at home, Riley figured it was time to revive the debauchery of the Roman age. On Thursday, August 13, he will host a modern-day naumachia in a big reflecting pool near the Unisphere (the imposing globe sculpture) in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park. The spectacle will include lots of model ships and role-playing combatants waging war "with baguette swords and watermelon cannon balls."

Brawny and spread with tattoos, Riley is something of a renegade. He was arrested two years ago for taking on the Queen Mary 2 cruise liner in a single-seater Revolutionary War submarine that he built out of plywood and fiberglass. It was a profound reversal, as he saw it, of the British Siege on Long Island in 1776.

And then there's the fact that the props for his naumachia—the stands, the gladiators’ outfits, the boats themselves—have been built entirely out of refuse.

Using tons of reeds harvested from local beaches, chunks of Styrofoam pulled from the Flushing River, and junk salvaged from an abandoned ice-skating rink attached to the Queens Museum, Riley and a team of volunteers have built an impressive fleet of vessels that will be ceremoniously destroyed. Among them are a Peruvian catamaran, a gun-metal-grey battleship, replicas of the Staten Island Ferry and the Queen Mary 2 (“I had unfinished business,” Riley says), and a 30-foot-long Egyptian vessel with the fearsome head of a pointy-beaked bird affixed to the bow.

Over the past few months, Riley has been using the ice-skating rink as a construction space, all the while tearing the place apart and scouring for materials. A recent visit revealed a haphazard mess of useful materials, including broken palates, plastic bottles, fashion magazines, confetti, and the torn-up bottom half of a plush toy. Ceiling tiles have been painted to resemble the regal archways of the Roman Colosseum. Plastic hard hats have been affixed with colorful broom heads to make combat helmets. Bruised melons are rotting in preparation for their use as cannonballs and smashed heads.

During Roman times, prisoners set to engage in naumachia knew what they were in for, greeting the emperor with a resounding cry that Riley swiped for his spectacle's title: “Those who are about to die salute you!” But a big question hangs over the heads of this week’s combatants, consisting of teams representing different museums in Queens, the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Manhattan. No real blood will be spilled, Riley insists, but he is vague about how exactly things will play out. “I have some idea of what’s going to happen, but not entirely,” he says.

The naumachia is on Thursday at 6 p.m. The event starts at the museum, then goes to live music at the Unisphere, and then proceeds to the reflecting pool for the battle. Dress code: Toga.

You can take a trolley from the Willets Point-Shea Stadium 7-train stop to the museum.

This article was published today on A.V. Club New York. Photos by Kitty Joe Sainte-Marie.

N-Type, Rinse: 09 (Rinse Records; 2009)

Rating: 75%

Don’t be put off by the preponderance of iTunes as a DJ tool these days—DJing is, and has always been, an art form in and of itself. To say nothing of the prowess of mix masters like Jeff Mills, the relatively simple process of combining the right tracks to produce wonder and invigoration in a listener is a special kind of magic. Derrick May, one of Detroit’s first techno producers, explained it best when he said of the practice: “I learned the philosophy of how to make records speak to each other. How to make records sing to each other. How to make them talk to each other. How to make music out of music.” This is the guiding philosophy of the electronic music industry, and it explains why people buy FabricLive and Dubstep Allstars mixes when they can just as well download free Resident Advisor and Rinse FM podcasts. Also, it explains why Rinse’s new mix by N-Type isn’t a mere greatest-hits-of-the-moment comp, but a satisfying release of its own kind.

N-Type, a tall and bald DJ and producer who seems to take his name from a semiconductor employed in what’s called the doping process (how vaguely clever!), occupies a prominent position in the global dubstep community. Living near the London offices of the vaunted Rinse FM radio station, he stuffs his weekly programs with tracks from top producers like Kromestar, Coki, Skream, and Benga, along with loads of new material on those coveted pieces of disposable vinyl called dubplates. With credentials that are already impressive, Rinse 09 is a strong addition to N-Type’s already-strong CV—if dubstep pioneers were the type to have CVs. (Kode9, a faculty member at the University of East London, certainly is.) N-Type shows a predilection for dubstep’s dark, propulsive roots on this mix, but he also shows an enthusiasm for juicier and more bizarre elements that are emerging as dubstep grows internationally and becomes increasingly harder to nail down.

Rinse: 09 opens rather portentously, with a sample of a man giving a lesson on the likes of the “Badman” (which include “the best clothes,” “the best cars,” and “the best music”), his voice soon giving way to vapors of wobbly subsonic bass. From there, it’s all gastrointestinal bass rumblings, snapper-jaw snares, and dub-tinged synths from the likes of the Others, Benga, and Skream, along with more funky selections from LD. N-Type deftly mixes in some exceptional, varied elements: the steamy quasi-tribal beat of “King of Kong”; the feverish electronics and pulsating nuclear meltdown alarm of “Rhythm”; the tense jungle inflections of “Burning Up.” But the unrelenting grooves are what carry this mix from start to finish. To put it May’s way: these 34 tracks toast each other. They bump and grind with each other. They pogo together. Never letting up, Rinse: 09 makes one giant banger out of dozens of bangers.

For fans of Burial’s transcendent vibes, Rinse 09‘s sleek toughness might bring to mind the distasteful image of bros in North Face jackets and baseball caps surreptitiously puffing a blunt in a darkened club. But let’s just say that if these tracks were being mixed live, adherents to the heavy grooves of Dub Police would have good cause to demand at least one crowd-pleasing rewind.

This review was published today on Cokemachineglow.com.