Endless Grift: Thief at Your Window

F*CK A RE-UP MIX

THIS IS RE-SUPPLY



The Wire's Lester Freamon


WEEKEND PRINCE - F*CK A RE-UP







Tracklist

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.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

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.



[read A R-G's obituary in the Guardian]

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.

SO WET, YOU'RE LIKE A RAINFOREST

Brooklyn experimental-pop outfit Animal Collection minimitizes R. Kelly's bestial erotics.

R. KELLY: THE ZOO (ANIMAL COLLECTION REMIX)




Were one to feel a slight pang of doubt, understandable to be sure, as no life on this world, no matter how serene and secure, is free from such pangs, that cosmic disco was not of particular relevance in today early 2008, one would have to look no further than this recent B-side by LCD Soundsystem in order to encounter evidence to the contrary. The beat is discoey, slow, spaced, and at the end following a goof-off drum solo there's a weird synth-ed up detour which appears without warning.

LCD SOUNDSYSTEM:FREAK OUT/STARRY EYES




The recent recipient of glowing praise among the purveyors of contemporary indie music, El Guincho has often been described as a heavily tropacalia-inflected mutation of last year's Panda Bear solo album. There is not much reason to contend, dispute or enhance this description. There is reason, however, to dispute the claim made by the recent Pitchfork review that 'there's nobody else making music like this right now': Manu Chao, anyone?

EL GUINCHO: PALMITO PARK




Little is known to this writer about Mogollar other than it can be described by means of the phrase, 'Turkish progressive folk-pop of the 60s-70s.' An ill and mellow jam, all things considered.

MOGOLLAR: KATIP ARZVHALIM YAZ YARE BOYLE

Animal Collection cover art by Bret Pittman

Why Go Beardo?

The Casual Wizard - Weekend Prince


Cosmic Parsley – Daniele Baldelli
Never Satisfied – Sarah Dash
We Can Make It – Purple Flash
Evening Standard – Jesse Rose
Flashing Lights – Kanye West
Stick Up Kid (Weekend Prince Remix) – Lyfe Jennings
Train (Ewan Pearson 6/8 Vocal) Goldfrapp
Walking Through Heaven – Chris & Cosey
I Wanna Dance With Numbers – Girls on Top
The Devil in Us – Black Devil Disco Club
Front Man (Idjut Boys Girthius Maximus Mix) – The Emperor Machine
Effective Placebo Affect – In Flagranti
All Flowers Must Fade – Daniel Wang
Lily was Here – Dave Stewart & Candy Dulfer
The Zoo (Weekend Prince Remix) – R. Kelly
Commune – Rub N Tug
Sorcerer – White Magic
Life’s a Beach - Studio
Mary Jane (All Night Long) – Mary J. Blige

It is generally believed that the father of beardo disco is Daniele Baldelli, DJ of the Italian club Cosmic in the early 80s. When referring to current subgenres of danceable electronic music that derive from Baldelli's sound, 'space disco', 'cosmic disco' and 'beardo disco' are all more or less interchangeable, the last of these terms stemming ostensibly from the appeal that such dense, trippy sounds have for a particular brand of grizzled layabout.
This musical strand and Baldelli's influence have in the past two years or so come again into cultural consciousness, in part because of the sheer sonic experimentalism that its purveyors are afforded. Here is Baldelli, describing his mixing style in an interview with Daniel Wang, himself a current producer of space disco who has recently relocated to Berlin:

For example, I used to play Bolero by Ravel, and on top of this I would play an African song by Africa Djola, or maybe an electronic tune by Steve Reich, with which I would mix a Malinké chant from New Guinea. Or, I would mix T-Connection with a song by Moebius and Rodelius, adding the hypnotic-tribal Izitso album of Cat Stevens, and then Lee Ritenour, but also Depeche Mode at 33 instead of 45, or a reggae voice by Yellowman at 45 instead of 33. I might mix 20 African songs on top of a Korg Electronic Drums (machine) rhythm pattern. I would play a Brazilian batucada and mix it with a song by Kraftwerk. I would also use synthesizer effects on the voices of Miriam Makeba, Jorge Ben, or Fela Kuti, or I would play the Oriental melodies of Ofra Haza or Sheila Chandra with the electronic sounds of the German label SKY.

In part Baldelli's efforts produce a kind of short-circuiting of what's called 'world' music, because the mixes and effects interrupt the ear's understanding of the 'world' and of the different exotic music styles which represent it. It's no-world music, or end-of-the-world music, producing countries that don't exist, much like Eno & Byrne's My Life in the Bush of Ghosts was designed to, and much like some of Werner Herzog's films like Fata Morgana or Lessons of Darkness, which take images of distant lands and alienate the viewer from them until they seem to longer to be documents of reality but emanations from a realm of strangeness.

Beardo Disco, however, does not begin with Baldelli, in Italy, in the 80s, or as music. It begins in a posthumously published story by Franz Kafka, "Homeless Wizards and Casual Pansies", in which the enmity between these two cultures is portrayed as a fable in the desert. The Wizards tell the Beardo Disco DJ he is the only one who can murder the pansies and liberate them, and the pansy scoffs and dismisses this as fantasy. In fact, the only solution to the deadlock, so palpable by way of its concentrated absence in the story, is a dialectical synthesis of the worlds of homeless wizards and casual pansies in the form of beardo disco. In other words Baldelli is the story's unnamed narrator:

Excerpt from
Homeless Wizards and Casual Pansies
by Franz Kafka

“..We know,” the oldest began, “that you come from the north. Our hope rests on that very point. In the north there is a way of understanding things which one cannot find here among the Casual Pansies. You know, from their cool arrogance one cannot strike a spark of common sense. They kill animals to eat them, and they disregard rotting carcasses.”
“Don’t speak so loud,” I said. “There are Casual Pansies sleeping close by.”
“You really are a stranger,” said the Wizard. “Otherwise you would know that throughout the history of the world a homeless wizard has never yet feared a casual pansy. Should we fear them? Is it not misfortune enough that we have been cast out among such people?”
“Maybe—that could be,” I said. “I’m not up to judging things which are so far removed from me. It seems to be a very old conflict—it’s probably in the blood and so perhaps will only end with blood.”
“You are very clever” said the old wizard, and they all panted even more quickly, their lungs breathing rapidly, although they were standing still. A bitter smell streamed out of their open jaws—at times I could tolerate it only by clenching my teeth. “You are very clever. What you said corresponds to our ancient doctrine. So we take their blood, and the quarrel is over.”
“Oh,” I said, more sharply than I intended, “they’ll defend themselves. They’ll shoot you down in droves with their guns.”
“You do not understand us,” he said, “a characteristic of human beings which has not disappeared, not even in the high north. We are not going to kill them. The Nile would not have enough water to wash us clean. The very sight of their living bodies makes us run away immediately into cleaner air, into the desert, which, for that very reason, is our home.”
All the wizards surrounding us—and in the meantime many more had come up from a distance—lowered their heads between the front legs and cleaned them with their paws. It was as if they wanted to conceal an aversion which was so terrible, that I would have much preferred to take a big jump and escape beyond their circle.
“So what do you intend to do,” I asked. I wanted to stand up, but I couldn’t. Two young wizards were holding me firmly from behind with their jaws biting my jacket and shirt. I had to remain sitting. “They are holding your train,” said the old wizard seriously, by way of explanation, “a mark of respect.” “They should let me go,” I cried out, turning back and forth between the old one and the young ones. “Of course, they will,” said the old one, “if that’s what you want. But it will take a little while, for, as is our habit, they have dug their teeth in deep and must first let their jaws open gradually. Meanwhile, listen to our request.” “Your conduct has not made me particularly receptive to it,” I said. “Don’t make us pay for our clumsiness,” he said, and now for the first time he brought the plaintive tone of his natural voice to his assistance. “We are poor wizards—all we have is our teeth and our epic beards. And our robes and sneakers.” “So what do you want?” I asked, only slightly reassured.
“Sir,” he cried out, and all the homeless wizards howled. To me it sounded very remotely like a melody. “Sir, you should end the quarrel which divides the world in two. Our ancestors described a man like you as the one who will do it..."

As concerns the Casual Wizard mix, let it serve as a primer for the curious and ill-informed. My own contribution here is not the inclusion of a number of beardo heavy-hitters and usual suspects, but that of a handful of r&b vocals and remixes - this kind of disco does have a kind of sexuality to it, but it's a white european sexuality, sleek and drifty. Thus the goal is to inject a foreign element, in this case the sweat and sweet musk of American R&B....Rhythm and Beard?

For more on beardo/space/cosmic disco see: