“When someone takes a beating or gets killed by police, city bureaucracies go into siege mode, reflexively stalling and delaying at every turn. The patience of complainants and their families is stretched to the limit. Embarrassing information, if it ever comes out, comes out years later, long after the streets have calmed down.” Continue reading I Can’t Breathe-the killing that started a movement (Matt Taibbi):
Sami Ben Redjeb & Analog Africa have been knocking-out some absurdly-gorgeous, vintage composites of lost/forgotten/obscure 60’’s/70’s/80’s African recordings for over a decade now, retrieving some utterly superlative gems that had long been lost to the topsoil of time. Such recordings may entail magnificent, hypaethral sessions (a lot of this stuff was recorded outdoors), of black American Funk & sometimes Rock-themed modus, dipped in local traditional forms of bush or orisha antics & raw African interpretations jumbled with homegrown mediums. Continue reading African Scream Contest 1 & 2 (Analog Africa) LP/CD’s:
These reports have been stalled behind massive sand-berms, flattened castles, toppled turrets…the Taylor one as I was waiting on a specialist to deliver a more punctilious exergete, which never showed-up, & the Muhal affair because I was so vexed at the loss of a well executed & adulatory review that had just been comprised (I failed to transfer it ‘successfully’ to a USB on a proxy computer, where the original was then deleted) >< . two pianists, one year either side (birth/death) & one premonition – Continue reading Muhal Richard Abrams – Cecil Taylor
Anda union rolled through town again tuther’ day. This is a great & pleasingly successful collective of largely young musicians from Inner Mongolia playing traditional Mongolian folk music with a few of their own tweaks & personalizations stowed in tha mode. Their success is indicative of the growing suffuse of the “World Music” epithet, but it’s also what happens when the machine gets behind a specific act. Continue reading Egschiglen – Anda Union – Chinbat Baasankhuu – Bayarbaatar Davaasuren – sounds of Mongolia
So, Eddie Harris asserted himself early (his first album surfacing in 61) as a band leader & composer, playing sax, keys & vocals. The tenure of his that are the focus of this garble comes in the very late 60’s, when Harris started to transmute from Bop to spectrums of Funk, Fusion, Soul & very importantly – Free Jazz, without discarding his bop groundings. Nothing wrong with his derivations, & the earlier epoch, but the major excitement for me comes from when he started to effuse the new found multiplicity head-on & load more & more humour, mischief & cross-curricular dynamism in his music. Continue reading Dope as fuck Eddie Harris:
So there’s this rapper in Australia right.. Sri-Lankan Australian in origin, going under the nom de guerre Pataphysics. He is a composer, accomplished trumpet player, MPC player & what are we going to call this guy? – ‘activist’? He makes some of the most politically fervent Rap you will ever hear, period. Long’ long since the current trend (very much forced by recent events), this guy has been ploughing into subjects that are deigned too sensitive or controversial for sustained debate. Continue reading Pataphysics-tip of the spear LP:
Jonathan Miller brings us the first biography on homicidal mayor turned mass murdering populist dictator Rodrigo “The Punisher” Duterte. Martial law, extra judicial killings (EJK’s), murky & nondescript rampaging death-squads & excessively-crass n’ crude expletive-lumbered vocal attacks on anything deemed challenging, annoying, non-compliant et-al. A leader in egregious authoritarian bollocks basically. As funny as this foul-tongued psycho is, the body count makes it less amusing – “On day one, he launched a Latin America-styled ‘Dirty War’, and with it introduced the darkest of Latino shadows: the death squad. By the end of year one, he was presiding over the largest loss of life in Southeast Asia since Pol Pot took Cambodia back to Year Zero”. Continue reading Duterte Harry-fire and fury in the Philippines (Jonathan Miller):
A big rip through the craniums soft-contents here. It’s a three-pronged fusillade, with all three defendants discharging simultaneously. Thus massive dynamism & extreme scope. It’s terrifically harsh as well, – grating, serrated free-fall & hyper expressive short-circuiting, ear-scouring high-pitched strangling. Softer static distortion, modulated air-borne pitch-paroxysm & burnt-out waste-scapes littered with extreme electronics & random sounds/compressed samples from atypical quarters of estranged refuse dispensary. Continue reading 886VG + Armenia + Nego – orgullo, ruido y tradicion cdr:
Been waiting for this one. An absolutely splendorous debut from Patrick Winn, bloviating (almost four hundred pages!), without any monotony, on the intricate, seldom-covered anthro-cosm of modern South Asia & the litany of difficulties, crisis & threats facing this extraordinary region. This is an expanse of stupendous versatility & complexity, much of which gets almost no attention in the international press save the odd incident, – “On the mainland, militaristic Buddhist kingdoms abut a pseudo-communist regime that is, in fact, ravenously capitalistic. All this is half-encircled by a largely Islamic archipelago – one that terminates in islands beholden to the Vatican.” Continue reading Hello, Shadowlands: inside the meth fiefdoms, rebel hideouts and bomb-scarred party towns of southeast asia (Patrick Winn):
Controversy, contagion, contamination, calamity, climate catastrophe, – pick your own bunch & call it what you will. Another pipeline? Coursing crude-oil from north Dakota to Chicago (the Dakota Access Pipeline-DAPL) to line-up more apocalypse for self-exterminatory short-termenomics. Continue reading Awake: a dream from Standing Rock – documentary (Josh Fox, James Spione, Myron Dewey)