U R invited: thurs, dec 18 10pm. Savalas Presents: Boogie Sugar. special dj tag team: robbie loggia & weekend prince. Bedford between Grand and South 1st. Dancing time for dancers. Ass-warming grooves for wintertime, in a serious disco party way. Come get down, busy and loose before you have to fly home for the holidays and watch reruns!
The temperature has dropped. Don't let your spirits go with it. Join us this thursday night at 11 for Ridin' High at Savalas, on Bedford between Grand and South 1st, where you can warm your sweet flesh to some afro-brazilian heat and then some disco-house fire. It's better than a coal-burning stove.
Resident: Weekend Prince aka Billy Rauscher (Disco-House Fire)
Special Guest: Sex Panther aka Jonathan Forgang (Afro-Brazilian Heat)
w/ Resident DJ Weekend Prince (Narcos Discos, Open Secret) - Weirdo Disco / Yacht Rock / Minimal Beats. Special Guest: DJ Bravestar spins rare Chopped & Screwed Avant-Progressive Dub Trance
- With Halloween & Election night both looming, it's a special horror edition, aka a night of ghosty beats and haunted house.
- Weekend Prince controls to the fullness.
- As always, this is our turf, NO Rasta takeovers.
Fox - The Juggler Faze-O - Ridin' High Cole Medina - Love You Inside Out Lee Ritenour - The Countdown Stroer - Don't Stay Till Breakfast Vivian Vee - Alright Patrick Cowley - Mind Warp (Remix) Tussle - Rainbow Claw African Suite - Grass Trouble Funk - Trouble Funk Express Franco Battiato & Juri Camisasca - Himalaya
The WP podcast series is now officially named "Ridin' High" after the cosmic love stonker by Faze-O, brought to my attention by Zade. It's one of the horniest, most stoned-out escapist psychedelic jams I've heard. It sounds like you will never have any problems again, because it's 3am and you are in another world. I tried to do an edit of it once, except that you can't edit it, because editing involves taking out the not-cool parts of a song and looping the cool parts more, and "Ridin' High" is already just perfectly cool parts looped forever.
The mix ends with a looped break from DC go-go masters Trouble Funk underpinning a weirdo 1975 T.Rex-y mystical pop track from Italy called "Himalaya" - it's compellingly, hypnotically goofy-glam enough, with great two word chorus "Himalayyyaa.....Katamandu!" with a general misty-mountain hippie vibe, that it's one of my recent favorite dug-up oddball tracks, so I present it to you in full as a bonus treat from my heart. Plus the album cover is an awesome iron death ship. Or a gladiator mask, I can't tell.
David Crosby - Orleans Giorgio Moroder & David Bowie - The Myth Thin Lizzy - The Sun Goes Down Tiedye - Nothing Night Plane - Stroke You Up Todd Terje - Bodies (Prins Thomas Orgasmatron) Lemon - A-Freak-A Lee Douglas - Cum N Go Piston Fiston - Pluto's Retreat (Fabrizio Mammarella Remix) Kelly Polar - Sea of Sine Waves Lindstrom - Grand Ideas Max Essa - Back to the Beach Zero 7 feat. Jose Gonzalez - Futures Steve Hillage - Palm Trees - Love Guitar
We: are swathed in days of stuporous heat. The search for delicious, crushed-ice refreshments and dabutt trumps all others. Every summer has its share of ailments and remedies, and every summer around this time the disease known as Balearia begins to manifest its symptoms in those it has afflicted.
The name Balearia refers to an incurable parasitic infection both contagious and hereditary. It is derived from the musical term "Balearic," which refers to a certain style of beachy, sun-melted smooth trippy disco. The designation Balearia is used in conjunction with the symptom of: always needing to go to the beach, all the damn time. Sufferers are unable to find pleasure in non-beach activities such as: extended hanging-out in an urban environment, having to wait in line for stuff, and wearing pants.
Once an addict, they say, always an addict. Do not attempt to reason with the Balearia victim or otherwise curtail his/her efforts to get a fix. This mix is intended to be played in the car ride on the way to the beach, so that those suffering from Balearia can earn some morsel of respite while they patiently wait to arrive at the shore, like white-knuckled junkies clinging to the handrest.
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I've always wanted to open a mix with "Orleans" by David Crosby, which shows up at the very end of his solo record, and has a haunting chamber music vibe. "The Myth" is a soundtrack piece from "Cat People". "Stroke You Up" by Night Plane, you know. The Lindstrom track is fiery and is from his upcoming album release, "Where You Go I Go Too." It's three tracks long and each is an epic disco voyage ala Moroder's theme for "Battlestar Galactica."
1. Peaches and Prunes - Nightlife Unlimited (Ron Hardy edit) 2. Faze Action - Hypnotic 3. Photonz - Trembler (Discodeine mix) 4. Cappucino - Hell Dance With Me 5. Frankie Valli - Beggin' (Pilooksi edit) 6. La La La - Segun Bucknor & His Revolution 7. Paul Kalkbrenner - Bingo Bongo 8. Jessie Rose - Evening Standard 9. Gotye - Heart's a Mess (Supermayer Remix) 10. Goldfrapp - Train (Ewan Pearson Mix)
A commemorative mix. A belated thanks to those in attendance last weekend, who helped us enjoy amazing food and discover beats. Gratitude to James a gracious host, and Wade, whose athletic, adventurous cooking efforts made the day such a success.
Special commendations: Jesse: Medal of Bronor Jonathan: MVB
Bonus tip: This mix opens with a disco burner, Peaches and Prunes, edited by Ron Hardy, one of the grand wizards of early Chicago house. You can listen to a bunch of his mixes from the early 80s here:
One of this site's guiding principles is to avoid posting entire albums. The reasoning behind this is evident in its exceptions. An entire album may be posted without derision or scorn here only when it is out of print or otherwise difficult to obtain. Or, lastly, when it is really important to do so. Because music, the most incorporeal of the arts, not only sooths beasts, on humans it can as well compel and possess.
Inundated as we are with dystopic images of future days, it was striking to watch the future-segment of "2046" and encounter a tomorrow that seemed beautiful, naive, decadent, suffused with the neon streaks of an opiate light. Not a political warning or cultural satire, or PKD-style engagement with the schizo-dissociative powers of technology, just a completely oneiric escapist fashion-magazine spread, one that produces a radiant digital narcosis.
So here now are three works that can be said to intersect with such a dose of bright tomorrows:
"I believe in the signal of the bass drum. It it the heartbeat of my life." - Wolfgang Voigt, aka Gas, Mono.Kultur #08
The real name of ambient-techno artist Gas is Wolfgang Voigt. Voigt is the co-founder and co-owner of Kompakt records, and is a highly influential and prolific electronic musician.
There's much that can be said about the maternal heart-pulse of the techno bass drum, and as well for the warm, pulsating, embryonic womb that the well sound-system'ed club attempts to emulate (Fabric Room One, for example). This sound is compelling enough that it can keep me in its sonic amniotic suspension for minutes at a time, until the spell is broken and I am reminded that I'm in a weird dingy club in the immediate vicinity of NYU, surrounded by total randos.
A new luxurious Gas boxed set will soon be released, meaning that technically Pop still remains out of print, and well within an acceptable domain of full-album posts.
As for a description of this record, we would be hard-pressed to beat Voigt's own, from the same interview:
"I had an image in my mind of a gaseous and nebulous sound, of an exhilarating streaming music which literally flows over, which has no beginning or end no hard edges, only softness. My association was this music drifting through the coppice of a misty wood in vast sound spheres, a very elegaic sound repeated over and over in the far distance, held together by an invisible bass drum that comes marching by somewhere hidden in the woods coming closer and fading away again."
It's an amazing sunday sunset record, preferably one of those hazy interminable twilights, one of those blue-gray and feathery evening come downs.
In a sense, The Field is a kind of punk reduction of Gas's near-classical sense of dynamics and ornament - The Field takes up this loop-based ambient techno approach and fidelities it way down, brutes it up, takes it from the Germanic sylvan idyll and kicks it back into the city streets.
So in the case of these records, geography is everything. Gas is the Germanic sylvan idyll, when you're out stamping in boots for boar among the brush.
e2-e4 is a beach record. Recorded in 1981 in Berlin on a two-track in one take by Gottsching, guitarist for supreme face-melters Ash Ra Tempel, it effectively helped invent techno music. It consists only of an unspooling of an infinite synth, and the soaring, tremulous clusters of an electric guitar windblown across the waters. Like Gas, it doesn't ever seem to be going anywhere, but unfurls blissfully in place. Again, the timelessness of the womb, the sublime "oceanic feeling" that Freud describes in Civilization and Its Discontents.
E2-e4 is often regarded as a founding track of Balearic, which is an extremely broad dance category, but generally associated with electronic beach beats. It covers everything from trippy yacht disco to the filth enjoyed by the worst baggy bepanted pill poppers the imagination can conjure. The Guardian ran this article on the Balearic resurgence a few months ago. The descriptions of the DJing style parallel those describing Baldelli's sets at Cosmic, which marked the birth of 'cosmic disco': slow (11obpm or so), eclectic, an emphasis on experimentalism and texture.
The original version of "Memories of Green", which would later appear in rerecorded form on the Blade Runner soundtrack, here taken from Vangelis' 1980 album, See You Later. The soundtrack's voluptous digital sheen is absent here, leaving behind the hairier, lower-fi predecessor.
Track List: 1. Fuck Buttons - Bright Tomorrow 2.Ricardo Villalobos - Lazer at Present 3. Paul Kalkbrenner - Keule 4. Fleetwood Mac - Rhiannon 5. Jesse Rose - Evening Standard 6. Fuzz Against Junk - Born Under Punches (DJ Harvey's Punch Drunk Mix) 7. Adam Freeland - Silverlake Pills (Gui Boratto Mix) 8. Jona - Exoplanet Dub 9. Discodeine - Ring Mutilation 10 .Junior Boys - No Kinda Man (Jona Remix) 11. Animal Collective - Peacebone (Pantha du Prince Remix) 12. Roberti di Simone - Secondo Coro Delle Lavandaie
-In 1968, Japanese architect Arata Isozaki presented an artwork for the Milan Triennale which consisted of images of ruined futuristic cities being projected on a screen printed with an image of Hiroshima flattened by the atomic bomb. The name of this artwork was 'Electric Labyrinth'.
-In 1971, George Lucas directed THX 1138, a science-fiction film about a colorless, dystopic world in which the populace is controlled by android police officers and forced to take a litany of medicinal drugs to regulate every facet of their lives. The name of the original student film on which this feature was based was 'Electric Labyrinth'.
Intro: The Wire, episode 59 Pylon – Danger Ebony Bones – We Know All About You Liquid Liquid – Optimo (JD Twitch Edit) The Gossip - Standing in the Way of Control (Playgroup Mix) Ghosttown DJ’s – My Boo Kano – I’m Ready Paradise – In Love With You The Chemical Brothers – The Golden Path (Ewan Pearson Extended Vocal) David Bowie - TVC15 Dondolo – Dragon (Shit Robot Remix) Montell Jordan – Get It On Tonite Gui Boratto – Like You (Supermayer Mix) Supermax – Love Machine Love & Rockets – So Alive Playgroup – Number One Lindstrom – Another Station (Todd Terje Mix) Grinderman – Honey Bee
The Borgata hotel, Atlantic City, NJ
Why f*ck a re-up? Don't we like re-ups, because that's where the goods come from? Aren't re-ups necessary for life? If we diss the re-up, do we still get to listen to Clipse? In episode 59, The Wire's police officials break out from simply catching drug dealers conducting re-ups. Had they remained in the re-up, it would have been like a grey, existential french drama. Re-up after re-up, with no end in sight.
On Friday night at the Borgata hotel in Atlantic City (AC), after having driven down with several close friends of mine for a long night of bro-ing down, I personally had to say f/ck a re-up, and I was all the better for it. Let me say here that if you are to visit the lovely Borgata hotel, and you want to know who there is not on your side, his name is Joe Vanderslice, the manager of crowd control. Mr. Vanderslice, a stocky, stoic man, refused, even after an extended well-argued and even-tempered plea from me, to admit my passport (issued to me abroad, at the US Embassy in Prague) as a valid form of ID, thus allowing me to drink alcohol and to gamble on the premises. While I respect the relatively unpleasant and joyless labor of maintaining order at a busy New Jersey casino, and the attendant lack of human sympathy that I imagine is an invaluable tool in such a career, I remain convinced that I suffered an injustice as a result of Vanderslice's painfully limited knowledge concerning legitimate forms of government-issued identification.
In a casino, while gambling, one's drinks are re-upped periodically gratis by the house. Denied the re-up, I went for re-supply: sympathetic to my situation, my friends agreed to retreat to our hotel room, where room service was entreated to produce a bottle of Absolut, the contents of which were then enjoyed with gusto, the remainder going into a clear plastic water bottle I had procured earlier from an in-hotel Starbucks. I treasured the fact that I would be the only one that night who could get in trouble for drinking, high-school style.
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On scanning the tracklist, the attentive reader will notice that several of the pieces do not make their debut appearances here, but have in fact been utilized in at least one, perhaps more than one, previous mix. It's possible that the reader will greet this observation with a twinge of disappointment. Why this persistent attention to these particular songs? Should today we not look forward, are we not, as it is said, in an era that craves and deserves change?
There is a kind of change associated with upheaval, radical disjunction, and the jolts of sudden difference. And then there is the change of modular repetition, of unfolding, of infinite permutation. The former is what is hungered for by an appetite trained by the rhythms and intensities of industrialized entertainment. In this context, technology is used to deliver the promise of the first change, while a deeper potential lies in its capacity for exploring the second.
The most intense exploration of this capacity in sound is in electronic dance music, and in language, the French postwar nouveau roman, exemplified by the repetitive narrative techniques of Alain Robbe-Grillet (who passed away less than a week ago) and others.
What R-G shares with techno is the engagement with modular repetition as a phenomenological lens on the world. A mental object, be it a condensed literary scene or a four-bar loop, is held, bound, suspended, rotated, its possibilities and potentials unfolded and ignited, again and again, without progress, without tragic arc, without end.
This world is marked everywhere by the permanent tension between possibility and determination. Each object or event carries in itself more possibilities than can ever be realized, all of which make equal claim to the right to be manifested. Modular repetition stages the interruption of the process of determination, holding the object up the light of potentiality and engaging in infinite inspection.
One of the benefits of a blog is that its disposable character, its off-handedness and comparative instantaneity give it a workbench-like atmosphere. The reader is not a tourist in a museum of finished masterpieces, but a casual visitor to a craftsman's studio during work hours. Hence the reworking, the investigations of alternate drafts, discarded revisions, and the compulsive return to old favorites.
final episode 60 of The Wire now available from HBO On Demand. As if you're not so deep in it right now.
In the moment we are born, the spirit that we are before we enter into this world is split. I don't want to say that it is split into two. Because, it's not a matter of the one becoming a two, two symmetric halves, that might one day become again the one. As is spoken, for example, in the famous image from Plato's Symposium. In that scene, the reconciliation spoken of is one of love, and of a relation between two beings of the same kind. Here, instead, I mean that in order for us to take a living form, a form that is alive in this world, there is part of us that is clipped or cut, and sent away. I don't know where it goes to. I don't know if this part is sent to meet with the other parts that have been clipped from all those in the world, and if they know and commune with one another, in some phantom city never seen, erected on an Asian plain, or beneath the ocean's deepest doldrums, where furious currents have gone to die.
I know that there is a way to meet this split spirit again. Or maybe it is not a meeting face-to-face, maybe it is a way only to wear the face of this spirit, the way that one acts on a stage, or wears a festival mask. In the way that there are some things that live in this world as a mask, a disguise, a costume, and when the costume is laid down again on the bed, the spirit is gone.
Often this way involves visiting a foreign country. It can happen that while traveling abroad, this shadow lost before birth can be heard in a silent speech by one's innermost ear. No matter what, you will never see or touch this shadow, at most you will hear its wordless pronouncement: here, in this land, you and I may come to know about each other. And in all that you take in about this land, its foods and languages and music and so on, it is in a kind of mute and private acknowledgment, a recognition, a greeting.
So it is, I think, with Christina and Italy. Who for our all-too-brief trip seemed to be living the life of another, not one which is an escape from one's first life, but which makes the first seem to be an extended exile from the second. In some people, travel is a catharsis, a kind of necessary semi-regular exercise useful in purging built-up energies and tensions. In others, it cleaves the psyche in two for good, such that dynamic energies are sparked for eternity. It is not known whether in this case the soul becomes permanently restless, or turns to face for the first time the restlessness which has always haunted it.
On a trip for five days through Rome, in the ceaseless heat, on the stony earth, each day punctuated by the shot from the noon cannon. Those traveling days where everything bears a faint halo of mythic intensity. We spent three days on the island of Ischia, a volcanic island reachable by ferry from Napoli, and home to several thermal springs, one of which is cava scura, 'secret cave', and that lies at the end of a path one can take from the small beach of Maronti, where we took seafood pasta on the beach for lunch.
Not on purpose is the song structured into three parts. The song is so structured, in three parts which do not repeat in an A-B form, because this form is boring and constraining and I can't do it. Whatever inner daimon it is whose hand moves my creative impulses, it is one that seems to prefer the horizontal flows, tangents, contiguities, unfoldings, and so on, and all those other trappings of nomadic freedom.
(..As much as on the other hand there is another daimon, perhaps one who resents the first, one who craves the brutal cut, the unforgiving amputation, the diabolical reduction....)
The American Museum of the Moving Indian, the cherished Battery Park institution dedicated to preservation and celebration of heretofore under-heralded contributions by Native Americans to dance music, recently commissioned Brooklyn techno producer Masta Bingus to compose a new track in honor of the museum's centennial festivities. Bingus' dancefloor ode to traditional Native American hospitality underscores the traditional Native American shelter of teepee or 'wigwam' as being the original pre-white people version of the techno club.
AC presents MB's original mix, together with a Weekend Prince remix, not so much a remix as a altogether new track which is built from the original's tech-tribal stomp and twists it into a mopey synth-disco jam. Enjoy please.
Bingus is a natural choice for the AMMI's commission, as his forte is the combination with a perverse and cartoonish sense of characterization, unsurprising given his animation background. The words on 'Welcome to My Teepee' are those of a collaborator known for his remarkable Navajo vocal mimicry. The original text was quite long and appears here in highly truncated form, the remainder being set aside by Bingus for the production of an Indian-themed cartoon, which will greet visitors to the AMMI's Kidz In Da Teepee children's exhibit.
Ancient Teepee
The musicological premise of the AMMI is to emphasize the process of secularization by which the organized drum ritual of the Native American slid into to the modern electronic music spectacle. 'Welcome to My Teepee' helps reassert this genealogy, also while extolling the virtues of the teepee. Indians used to have ecstatic drum parties which were encased in temporary architecture as opposed to boring who gives a shit clubs. The clubs would go with them. They could make beats wherever they wanted.
Modern Norwegian Teepee with Bose speakers
From a broader critical perspective, the largest change once drum rituals went from being religious to secularized is that the psychological energy which is released or produced in the listener is no longer so rigidly directed. Without being so bound up with maintaining in ritual a connection between terrestrial and divine realms, the releasing of this energy makes manifest a fundamental ambiguity not only about rhythmic music but art in general, namely regarding the nature of catharsis. Music is a drug, and it all depends on the dose. You can never predict when it's going to get energy out of your system in a relieving, purifying, cathartic way, or whether it's going to jack you up, get you distressed and overstimulated, get you addicted and wanting more. This is arguably one of the biggest changes once art became de-coupled from its original cultic value.
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As well a designer and video director, Masta Bingus operates out of a converted firehouse in Far Eastern Bushwick, where his closest neighbors are Pumps, a blue-collar exotic-dancer bar, which has elsewhere earned blog comment accolades such as this from "Slappy McGee III esq": The only skin bar I've been too wear the strippers have on aviator shades, sports coats and hoodies ... fucking awesome!, a lonely BP gas station alit in ghostly neon, a number of gnarly junkyards with the appropriate fauna, and an impressively desolate and fetid stretch of canal which seems to have as much of a chance of spewing into the river Styx as it does hooking up with the East River.
Of the number of Bingus videos on the web, the music clip for Hot Tub Johnny most embodies Bingus' process of getting one of his friends to act like an ass and then making a techno track out of it. The result is kind of disconcerting because it is kind of difficult to stamp the video with an origin or a context. Is it a joke? Is it for real? Like 'Teepee' it gives off the effect of having, in the middle of the night, turned on the television in a low-starred hotel somewhere in Eastern Europe, only to be harassed by an inexplicable transmission. Who are these goony ravers? Why do lights shine out of their punches? What should I do, now that I know that all kinds of things are up in this place?
Hot Tub Johnny - Let Me Tell You
Also recommended is Bingus' video for Laibach "B Mishina", viewable on the Bingus blog here
Addendum: Two additional tracks in the tribal-chant vein have been added as supplements to the Masta Bingus - Weekend Prince throwdown: minimalist Ricardo Villalobos' highly-buzzed new track 'Enfants', and a very out-there song by Roberto Di Simone, experimental Italian conductor, together with his group, New Company of Popular Music. The blog Marathonpacks indicates that this track was recently the subject of an uncredited cover by the Japanese group OOIOO on their Thrill Jockey album TAIGA.
*for more on the Di Simone track see the entry on Marathonpacks blog here
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