Tuesday, 8 June 2010
Constructing a Song: Trent Reznor’s Cacophony of Beats
Lots of musicians have studios; Trent Reznor [
] has an alchemist’s laboratory. On hiatus from touring, the Nine Inch Nails frontman has stuffed a converted garage with blinking electronic doodads, from modded synthesizers and sequencers to archaic drum machines. Reznor is using all this gear for his new band, How to Destroy Angels. Here’s how one song off the group’s forthcoming EP evolved from a seeming cacophony of beats and weird noise into a dense, polyrhythmic track.
] has an alchemist’s laboratory. On hiatus from touring, the Nine Inch Nails frontman has stuffed a converted garage with blinking electronic doodads, from modded synthesizers and sequencers to archaic drum machines. Reznor is using all this gear for his new band, How to Destroy Angels. Here’s how one song off the group’s forthcoming EP evolved from a seeming cacophony of beats and weird noise into a dense, polyrhythmic track.Continue reading (with audio samples)
Scenes From A Mob
Via Ben Smith, the Bergen Record’s Mike Kelly lets the anti-Ground Zero mosque set display its canny and subtle understanding of Islam:
At some point, we simply have to recognize that these people are the real useful idiots. Build the Ground Zero Mosque.At one point, a portion of the crowd menacingly surrounded two Egyptian men who were speaking Arabic and were thought to be Muslims.
“Go home,” several shouted from the crowd.
“Get out,” others shouted.
In fact, the two men – Joseph Nassralla and Karam El Masry — were not Muslims at all. They turned out to be Egyptian Coptic Christians who work for a California-based Christian satellite TV station called “The Way.” Both said they had come to protest the mosque.
“I’m a Christian,” Nassralla shouted to the crowd, his eyes bulging and beads of sweat rolling down his face.
But it was no use. The protesters had become so angry at what they thought were Muslims that New York City police officers had to rush in and pull Nassralla and El Masry to safety.
Music Stirs the Embers of Protest in Iran
Parisa remembers the precise moment she heard her first song by Shahin Najafi, an Iranian rapper living in exile in Germany, on her illegal satellite television in the small city of Karadj, west of Tehran.
“His words cut through me like a knife,” she said.
Parisa, a 24-year-old university student, stayed up long after midnight one night, when the Internet connection was faster, and spent six hours downloading Mr. Najafi’s songs.
Since the Iranian authorities have cracked down on the demonstrations that rocked the country after a disputed election a year ago, a flood of protest music has rushed in to comfort and inspire the opposition. If anything, as the street protests have been silenced, the music has grown louder and angrier.
The government has tried all manner of methods to mute what has become known as “resistance music.” It has blocked Web sites used to download songs and shut down social networking sites, which the opposition also used to organize protests and distribute videos of government and paramilitary violence.
In April, a shadowy pro-government group that calls itself “the cyber army” shut down Mr. Najafi’s Web site. The group, which hacked Iranian Twitter in December, left a message saying the site had been “conquered by anonymous soldiers of Imam Zaman,” a reference to the Shiite messiah.
In late December, the authorities detained Shahram Nazeri, a prominent Persian classical musician who had recorded the song “We Are Not Dirt or Dust,” a tart response to the words President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad used to characterize the antigovernment protesters. The government briefly took his passport, detained and intimidated him; he has not released anything since.
But clamping down on music in the digital age is like squeezing a wet sponge. Protest songs are downloaded on the Internet, sold in the black market or shared via Bluetooth, a wireless technology that Iranians have adapted to share files on cellphones, bypassing the Internet altogether. Fans have also made dozens of homemade videos, setting montages of protest images to music and posting them online.
Parisa first heard Mr. Najafi’s song on Pars TV, an opposition satellite channel beamed out of Los Angeles. And, despite being blocked by the government since last summer, Mr. Najafi’s Web site can still be found by computer-savvy Iranians with the help of circumvention software.
“Music has become a tool for resisting the regime,” said Abbas Milani, the director of Iranian studies at Stanford University. “Music has never been as extensive and diverse as it is today.”
The music of dissent spreads virally, so there are no Billboard or Nielsen SoundScan charts to quantify its popularity. But the anecdotal evidence is persuasive.
An opposition Web site has posted about 100 protest songs recorded since the election. About two dozen of them honor Neda Agha-Soltan, the 26-year-old teacher shot at a protest in Tehran in June who became an icon of the opposition after her last moments were captured on a video that has since been widely circulated.
Street vendors in Tehran sell bootleg CDs and MP3s at traffic lights for $2 or $3. Protest music plays on stereos at parties and from cars on the streets, Tehran residents say. Music blasting from car speakers at a stoplight has become one of the more public ways still available to signal to others that the spirit of struggle still lives.
The music can just as easily turn up in quiet and unexpected places. Niki, 25, who, like others quoted in this article, withheld her family name for fear of retribution, said that at a bookstore in downtown Tehran she found the salesman, a man in his 60s, weeping while listening to a new song by Mohammad Reza Shajarian called “Brother, Drop Your Gun.” After more than 70 protesters were killed by government and paramilitary forces during the postelection demonstrations, according to the opposition, the song, based on an old poem, was a melancholic plea to the soldiers to end the violence.
“I had seen people at protests carrying banners with those words, ‘Brother, drop your gun,’ ” Niki said, “but this scene was much more emotional.”
The government’s success in repressing dissent may help explain the increasingly angry tone the music has taken and the popularity of artists like Mr. Najafi, who tap that anger.
If Mohsen Namjoo, the folk troubadour whose poetic lyrics and tuneful melodies appeal to older listeners, is, as he has been called, the Persian Bob Dylan, Mr. Najafi may be the Rage Against the Islamic Revolutionary Machine, whose harsh lyrics and hip-hop beats have captivated Iranian youth.
His verses, according to e-mail messages he has received from former prisoners, have been scrawled on prison walls and hummed behind bars. His bitter ode to repression, “Our Doggy Life,” has become something of an anthem to a generation:
Shut your mouth; accept the condition; this is the tradition of the Prophet; accept it; man or woman, there is no difference, die; this is our doggy life.
As Mr. Najafi sees it, anger is an honest response to the beatings, killings and executions the government has meted out to dissidents.
“The anger in my music comes from deep within me,” he said in a telephone interview from his home in Cologne, Germany. “I am a man who is always shouting sadly and angrily.”
A native of the Caspian city of Bandar Anzali, Mr. Najafi bought his first guitar when he was 18, and by 25 he had been thrown out of Iran for a song he wrote satirizing clerics. Although Iran’s ban on pop music, condemned by the revolution as un-Islamic, was softened in 2000, during the reform era of President Mohammad Khatami, only apolitical music was tolerated.
Mr. Najafi’s satirical “I Have a Beard” crossed the line, and a three-year prison sentence and 100 lashes await him if he returns. Like other Iranian artists in exile, his heart is bisected by borders: his life is in Germany, where he has artistic freedom, but his homeland will always be Iran.
Helplessly watching the events of last summer from about 2,500 miles away affected him deeply.
“I still belong to my country and feel their pain,” he said. “Distance has no meaning with Internet. We are a generation that was always suppressed and humiliated, which makes you sad and angry.”
The government-sponsored violence enraged other artists, too. In a song about last June’s election, Arash Sobhani, of the rock band Kiosk, calls the clerics who supervised the elections “dinosaurs” and says, “Compassion under the blow of batons; we all saw your justice.”
Even the Dylanesque Mr. Namjoo adopted more strident language in his last album, going so far as to ridicule the supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, as the “supreme position of superiority.”
Although his lyrics are more metaphorical than Mr. Najafi’s, they, too, are angry.
“People are considered brave in Iran because whatever they do — from riding a motorcycle in the chaotic traffic of Tehran to staging protests against the government — is risky,” he said. “You have to constantly live with fear.”
Today, Mr. Namjoo lives in Palo Alto, Calif. But the fear, he said, never goes away.
Nazila Fathi @'NY Times'
Reflections by a Former US Marine on the Mavi Marmara On Cowardice and Violence
"Please explain how we, the defenders of the Mavi Mamara, are not the modern example of Gandhi’s essence? But first read the words of Gandhi himself. I do believe that, where there is only a choice between cowardice and violence, I would advise violence.... I would rather have India resort to arms in order to defend her honour than that she should, in a cowardly manner, become or remain a helpless witness to her own dishonour. – Gandhi And lastly I have one more challenge. I challenge any critic of merit, publicly, to debate me on a large stage over our actions that day. I would especially love to debate with any Israeli leader who accuses us of wrongdoing, it would be my tremendous pleasure to face off with you. All I saw in Israel was cowards with guns, so I am ripe to see you in a new context. I want to debate with you on the largest stage possible. Take that as an open challenge and let us see just how brave Israeli leaders are."
Ex-Stereophonics drummer Stuart Cable found dead at Aberdare home
Welsh rock star Stuart Cable has been found dead at his Aberdare home this morning.
The body of the former Stereophonics drummer was discovered at about 5.30am.
His mother Mabel, who will be 80 this year, said: “Stuart has travelled all over the world with the band and I have worried myself silly.
“He is now settled down and then this has happens. It has not sunk in yet.”
Stuart's brother Paul said: "The family has no further comment to make at this stage. It is in the hands of the police."
South Wales Police confirmed the sudden death of a 40-year-old man. The cause of death has not yet been established but there are no suspicious circumstances at this stage.
Next of kin have been informed.
South Wales Valleys coroner Peter Maddox has also been informed.
BBC Radio Wales has cancelled 'Tom Jones Day' as a mark of respect to Stuart Cable and his family.
A spokesperson for the BBC said: "Sadly BBC Radio Wales presenter and former Steroephonics drummer, Stuart Cable was found dead this morning. The BBC has decided to pull the Tom Jones birthday party as a sign of respect. Our thoughts go out to all at BBC Wales."
Monday, 7 June 2010
Fact Mix 156: Kode9
Today’s FACT mix comes from the man behind Hyperdub, and one of modern dance music’s most celebrated producers and DJs, Kode9.
Debuting on Tempa in 2002 with ‘Fat Larry’s Skank’, Kode9 has spent the last decade exploring an aesthetic that’s taken him from suffocating dread-filled dubstep to toxic house music. Along the way, he’s released a superb album (Memories of the Future, with frequent collaborator Spaceape) and become just as famous for his record label as his own productions: since Hyperdub’s inception in 2004, it’s released albums by Burial, Ikonika and King Midas Sound, and singles by Zomby, Terror Danjah, Cooly G, Mala and more.
This month, 9 will release the latest in K7’s DJ-Kicks series of mix CDs, a journey from elasticated house and dancehall, through soul, funk and hip-hop, to overbearing dubstep and grime. Kode is one of the world’s best DJs – his extended sets at Plastic People last year are spoken of with pure reverence, and this year he’s let out specialist mixes in 2step and “sino-grime”. Here he contributes a mix of “mostly ’94-’96 jungle”, bound by an icy, misty quality. Lemon D, DJ SS, Undercover Agent and more feature.
Next week, Hyperdub, Plat du Jour and FACT will be presenting an off-Sonar party at Club Mondo, Thursday 17 June. Already on the bill are Darkstar, Cooly G, Ikonika, Guido, Mweslee and Kode9 himself, plus Plat du Jour residents. There’s also a ton of special guests – to find out who, you’ll have to attend. For more tickets, click here.
Download: FACT mix 156 – Kode9
(Available for three weeks)
(Available for three weeks)
Tracklist:
1. Soundman & Don Lloyde with Elizabeth Troy – Greater Love
2. Lemon D – Manhatten Melody
3. Dope Style – You Must Think First
4. Nut Nut – Special Dedication
5. Undercover Agent – Oh Gosh
6. DJ SS – MA2 remix
7. 12-10 Series Mk 1 – All that Jazz
8. L Double featuring Bassman – Da Base too Dark
9. Urban Jungle – Back in the Daze
10. Sacred – Kall the Kops
11. Fusion Forum – Vintage Keys
12. Maldini – Def Roll
13. Bad Influence feat. DJ Rush Puppie – Time & Time
@'fact'
1. Soundman & Don Lloyde with Elizabeth Troy – Greater Love
2. Lemon D – Manhatten Melody
3. Dope Style – You Must Think First
4. Nut Nut – Special Dedication
5. Undercover Agent – Oh Gosh
6. DJ SS – MA2 remix
7. 12-10 Series Mk 1 – All that Jazz
8. L Double featuring Bassman – Da Base too Dark
9. Urban Jungle – Back in the Daze
10. Sacred – Kall the Kops
11. Fusion Forum – Vintage Keys
12. Maldini – Def Roll
13. Bad Influence feat. DJ Rush Puppie – Time & Time
@'fact'
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