Conor Oberst writes open letter for Zack de la Rocha's Sound Strike boycott of Arizona

Bright Eyes' mainman Conor Oberst has been an outspoken advocate for Zack de la Rocha's Sound Strike effort, joining fellow musicians and artists in a campaign to compel the state of Arizona to repeal its controversial immigration law. Ry Cooder, Nine Inch Nails, and comedian Chris Rock, Maroon 5, Gogol Bordello, My Morning Jacket, Ben Harper and Pitbull are among the dozens of artists that recently announced their support for the Sound Strike effort and have pledged to boycott Arizona, refusing to perform in the state until the law is repealed. Steve Earle, Billy Bragg, Sweet Honey in the Rock, Anti-Flag, Throwing Muses, State Radio, Aztlan Underground and DJ Spooky also announced support for the effort in a posting on thesoundstrike.net.
Charlie Levy, the owner of Stateside Presents, an independent concert-promotion company based in Phoenix that produces over 200 events a year in clubs and theaters throughout Arizona and New Mexico, published an open letter to the the artists involved in the Sound Strike, asking for them to reconsider the boycott and to use Arizona performances to register opposition to the law.
Below, Oberst responds to Levy with an open letter of his own.

Dear Charlie,

I read your letter and I do understand where you are coming from.  You bring up valid points.  I personally regret any of the collateral damage the boycott is causing you, other like-minded arts promoters and the fans in Arizona.  A boycott is, inherently, a blunt instrument.  It is an imperfect weapon, a carpet bomb, when all involved would prefer a surgical strike.  I agree with you in part, and the radio host you quoted, that the authors and supporters of SB1070 could give a shit whether or not my band, or any other Artist, ever plays Arizona again.  The only thing, clearly, that these people care about is Money and Power, that and the creation and preservation of an Anglo-Centric Police State where every Immigrant and Non-White citizen is considered subhuman.  They want them stripped of their basic human rights and reduced to slaves for Corporate America and the White Race.  They are engaged in blatant class warfare.  It is evil, pure and simple.
I have on many occasions spoken my mind from stage.  I have offered organizations table space by the merch booth.  I have donated a dollar-a-ticket, or the entire guarantee, to different causes.  I have registered voters.  I have played on behalf of political candidates.  Sadly, this time, I fear none of that is enough.  If I return to Arizona to pay lip service to a roomful of kids at the Marquee it will do absolutely no good for anyone.  What I can do is to help organize, and play my small part in, what I hope is the largest and most effective boycott this country has seen in a long time.  To work it will have to involve members from all sectors of society.  The Sports Industry, the Entertainment Industry, the Tourism and Convention Industry, other State and City governments, private businesses and individuals from around the country and the world---all of whom, by the way, are already participating in the boycott.  Much of the Artist end of the boycott is symbolic, I acknowledge, and no real threat to the economics of the State.  But it is an important part none-the-less for awareness and messaging.   The Boycott has to be so widespread and devastating that the Arizona State Legislature and Governor have no choice but to repeal their unconstitutional, immoral and hateful law.  It has to hurt them in the only place they feel any pain, their pocketbooks.
What I would encourage you to do, if you haven't already started, is to organize with all the local businesses you can to put as much pressure as possible on your State Government until the Law is repealed.  An economic death rattle is the only cry of outrage they will hear.
I realize that the people of Arizona did not vote on SB1070 and I empathize with the anger and frustration you all must feel.  I applaud what you are doing with Viva Arizona and do wonder if there might be a way to reconcile both our efforts while maintaining the integrity of each.  After all, we are trying to achieve the same thing.  But just as you may feel the boycott is an empty gesture, I fear that if we return to business as usual (under the guise of some civic movement) that this will all devolve into the typical grandstanding that is political activism in music. It might make us feel better but won't do a damn thing to change the minds of the radical, racist minority that seem to have controlled Arizona politics for decades. In short, it will lose its teeth.
Just this past week, the little town of Fremont Nebraska passed a very similar, almost more radical, city ordinance.  It was co-authored and championed by Kris Kobach of Kansas who helped write SB1070.  I was outraged, saddened and embarrassed for their town and my state.   I am already in the process of organizing a fund-raiser for the NE chapter of the ACLU who is suing the town of Fremont.  Our situation requires immediate legal action and a campaign for public awareness (there has been very little press on this).  Charlie, I promise you, if this Fremont law had been passed Statewide instead of in a rural town of 25,000 people, I would be the first to call for a boycott of my home state. This way of thinking and legislating is so dangerous, and such a threat to our basic ideals as Americans and Humans, that we cannot stand by and do nothing.  We cannot play on as if nothing is wrong.  This is not just about Arizona.  I am not just skipping a tour date.  This is not going to be easy for anyone.
Charlie, I consider you a friend and you have always been great to my bands and me.  I have played for you many times and I hope to do so again soon in New Mexico or anywhere else.  I sincerely look forward to the day when I can return to Arizona and this will all seem like a bad dream.  But I can't come back now.  I'm sorry. I hope you will understand.
Your friend,
Conor Oberst

@'Billboard'

Slavoj Žižek - the world’s hippest philosopher

Flapping his elbows and lathered in sweat, Slavoj Žižek looks like a man in the final throes of radiation sickness doing the birdy dance. But the world’s hippest philosopher is actually miming what he imagines it would feel like to be trapped inside an all-body condom.

“I saw this thing in an American store!” he explodes, lurching towards me in the quiet conservatory of a Bloomsbury hotel. “A total mask for the body! The ultimate in safe sex! So obscene! My God! But I do believe that by analysing this sort of phenomena you learn a lot about where we are. We want coffee without caffeine! Cake without sugar! And this is decaffeinated sex!”

 The 61-year-old Slovenian who is headlining this year’s London Literature Festival is a Tasmanian Devil of a talker. Spluttering, lisping and pawing frantically at his face, he can spin you from Heidegger to Hershey bars (by way of Hitchcock and Hizbollah) in synapse-shortcircuiting seconds. He is, by turns, a brilliant and buffoonish critic of global capitalism. Once he winds himself into an intellectual whirlwind you just have to sit back and wait while he sucks up and spits out 21st century culture.

In the hour we talk topics include his “growing admiration for the works of Agatha Christie — she worked through every formula!” and his condemnation of the 3D blockbuster Avatar as “racist”. He locates “a wandering Jew” at the centre of Wagner’s work and hears a beautiful, minimalist communism in the music of Eric Satie. He points out that the “close doors” button in a lift doesn’t speed the closing of the doors, it is just there to give the user the illusion of action. Voting in a modern Western democracy, he feels, is much the same. He pauses to pant, sigh and throw up his palms. But he is not pausing now. A provocateur whose work inhabits the place where Lacanian psychoanalysis meets Marxist philosophy is going to have something to say about sex.

And it is to alert us that “something weird is going on in Hollywood. Did you see the film of Dan Brown’s novel, Angels and Demons? There is sex in the book. They erased it from the movie! What is going on? It used to be the other way around. Hollywood inserted the sex. This is something, no? I agree with [French philosopher] Alain Badiou, who has a nice theory that with all this internet dating we are returning to premodern procedures of arranged marriage. He found in France a dating agency advertisement which promised 'We will enable you to be in love sans tomber — without falling’. It is a wonderful metaphor. Because this is love, no? A dramatic, traumatic, moment. But this is too dangerous for us now. We are too narcissistic to risk any kind of accidental trip or fall. Even into love!”

Such passion, in a man whose work forms a shaky, cartoon rope-bridge between the minutiae of popular culture and the big abstract problems of existence, is invigorating, entertaining and expanding enquiring minds around the world. Žižek (pronounced Gee-gek, with two soft g’s, as in “regime”) has now written more than 50 books and seen his work translated into 20 languages. His lectures rack up hundreds of thousands of YouTube views.

A master of counterintuitive thinking and a man in thrall to paradox, he has been attacked for being a crypto-Stalinist defending terror and for spreading bourgeois lies about communism, for being both anti-Semitic and spreading Zionist lies. He is both a serious revolutionary and an absurdist prankster. An atheist who has made a spirited case for Christianity. His work has been published in serious Leftist journals and in a catalogue for US fashion retailers Abercrombie & Fitch.

Although he tells me “I hate students. They want to ask a question? ---- off!”, he holds two academic posts – as president of the Society for Theoretical Analysis of Ljubljana and as international director of the Birkbeck Institute of Humanities in London – and has starred in two documentaries: Žižek! (2005) and The Pervert’s Guide to the Cinema (2006).

But Žižek dismisses those who dub him “The Elvis of Philosophy” with a brisk: “To the gulag! All of them!” And he hasn’t seen either film. “It is too traumatic for me to see myself. Whenever I see such a thing, my reaction is to ask: 'Would a woman allow me to take her daughter to the cinema?’ My God! Of course not! I don’t want to deal with myself. I don’t want to exist. I just want to think.”

But whether he wanted to or not, Slavoj Žižek came into independent existence in March 1949, in the then-Yugoslav republic of Slovenia. His father was an economist and civil servant and his mother was an accountant.

“My life is straightforward,” he says. “Nothing happened. At 15, I wanted to be a movie director. But I saw some really good European films and I accepted that I couldn’t do that. Then, at 17, I decided to become a philosopher.”

I try to suggest that all children are philosophers. That perhaps he was just one of those people who never got tired of asking “why?”. But he waves me away with a swift: “No, I don’t think so. It wasn’t any of this existential bullshit — it wasn’t that I felt that life has no sense and all that adolescent stuff. But in the former Yugoslavia philosophy had a certain dissident charm and I was intrigued by the beauty of the arguments. Our communism was a little more open than it was elsewhere. We could go to London, Paris and Berlin to buy books and so on. So we didn’t have any illusions about communism. We didn’t buy their bullshit. We were well located to see what was going on and had no illusions about the East or the West.”

Žižek started out as a Heideggerian, but changed his position as soon as he found a way to get more irritatingly under the skin of the authorities. “In Slovenia the 'official’ philosophy was a kind of Frankfurt School Marxism,” he explains. “Heideggerians were the dissidents. But in the late Sixties there was an explosion of so-called structuralism in France – Foucault, Lacan, you know? – and both the Heideggarians and the Frankfurt School Marxists brutally attacked it. Rejected it in the same terms. And this was the enigma to me. It is always interesting when old enemies unite. So I decided to become Lacanian.”

He had been in line for a professorship at Ljubljana University until there was “an Indian summer of communist oppression”. His masters thesis was rejected for being “non-Marxist” and he was thrown out in the cold.

“And this was a blessing in disguise. After a period of unemployment I got a post at an out-of-the-way university. I was able to survive and I had the freedom to develop my own ideas. Without that communist oppression I honestly believe I would be a stupid professor in Ljubljana. I am very lucky!”

The paradoxically freeing potential of such open oppression forms a key plank in Žižek’s philosophical rope bridge. It sends him spiralling back to the subject of sex.

“My psychoanalytical friends are always telling me that we once needed classical therapy to free us from internalised repression so we could do it. But today you feel guilty if you do not have wide-ranging sexual desire and experience. Once enjoyment becomes permitted it slides imperceptibly toward the obligatory. You have to do it and you have to enjoy it. Think about extremely hedonistic gay communities in America: life there is totally regimented. They eat the same food, take vitamins, watch the same films. We live in a permissive society but the price we pay is that there never was so much anxiety, depression, impotence and frigidity.”

Waving his pasty arms and tugging at increasingly soggy, proletarian grey T-shirt, Žižek tells me a favourite parable about “the falsity of permissivity”: “Say you are a little girl and I am a totalitarian father. It is Saturday afternoon. I say, 'I don’t care what you want to do, you have to visit your grandmother.’ You go but you secretly hate me and try to revolt and that is OK. That is good. But the monstrous permissive father will say: 'You know how much your grandmother loves you, but visit her only if you really want to.’ Beneath the appearance of a choice is a much more severe order. Not only must you visit grandma but you must want to and like it. I had such a father, which is why I hate him.”

Žižek has two sons (from different marriages — he is in the process of an “amicable divorce” from an Argentinian lingerie model 30 years his junior) aged 35 and 10. Is he stricter than his own dad? “I am worse! I am a catastrophe! I teach them all the dirty words. The only thing I insist is that they learn to work and don’t be evil to others.”

Suspicious of simplicity, Žižek believes in complicating the answers to even the most basic of questions. But it does seem that one aspect of his paternal ban on “evil” means he expects his boys to tolerate the beliefs and lifestyles of others to some extent. And yet he points out that the notion of tolerance in liberal democracies is a joke.

“One of my formative experiences occurred in Belgrade in the mid-Nineties. I was there secretly to see a friend who was dying and I happened to meet in a cafeteria some people who were murderers, ethnic cleansers. And they totally undermined the assumption that people like them would think that what was wrong with modern society was too many choices, the need for an order. No. For them modern society was too regimented. They said '---- it! In modern society I am not free to rape, to kill, to tell racist jokes.’” He turns this idea on me. “You are a feminist? Yes? Good. You don’t want your feminism to be only 'tolerated’, do you? No!”

It follows that 21st-century fundamentalists do not want their beliefs “tolerated” by a liberalism they want to destroy. “Can we even imagine the change in the Western 'collective psyche’ when (not if but precisely when) some 'rogue nation’ or group obtains a nuclear device, or powerful biological or chemical weapon, and declares its 'irrational’ readiness to risk all in using it?” he writes in Living in End Times. The premise of this wide-ranging, often revelatory, frequently bewildering work is that the global capitalist system is approaching an apocalyptic zero-point.

“Its four riders,” he writes, “are comprised of the ecological crisis, the consequences of the biogenetic revolution, imbalances within the system itself (problems with intellectual property; forthcoming struggles over raw materials, food and water), and the explosive growth of social divisions and exclusions.”

From the ashes, he argues, we should be able to build a new communism. “The standard liberal-conservative argument against communism is that, since it wants to impose on reality an impossible dream, it necessarily ends in terror. What, however, if one should nonetheless insist on taking the risk of enforcing the Impossible onto reality? Even if, in this way, we do not get what we wanted and/or expected, we none the less change the coordinates of what appears as 'possible’ and give birth to something genuinely new.”

But the book offers no clear idea of how its readers might begin to go about doing this. When I ask Zˇizˇek if there are any pointers I’ve missed, he explodes one final time: “I despise the kind of book which tells you how to live, how to make yourself happy! Philosophers have no good news for you at this level! I believe the first duty of philosophy is making you understand what deep s--- you are in!”

Noting with relief that our hour is up, he tells me he must to get back to work on his “megabook” on Hegel. “Because time is running out. I am 61, I have diabetes.”

He holds out a slippery paw and shakes my hand with warmth and vigour. “This is all? My God! Good. Goodbye!” 

Helen Brown @"The Telegraph'

DEA Agent breaks down 'The War On Drugs'

Noam Chomsky - the Iranian Threat

Fact Mix 164: Pinch

We’re delighted to this week bring you an exclusive FACT mix from Bristol dubstep trailblazer Pinch.

Pinch, real name Rob Ellis, has been a significant presence in our musical lives since his brutalist debut 12″ ‘War Dub’, released via his own aptly named Tectonic label back in ’05. Ellis’s more reflective 2006 Planet Mu single ‘Qawwali’ – among the best and most distinctive dubstep records ever made – paved the way for Underwater Dancehall, his debut album of 2007. Featuring a number of wisely chosen guest vocalists, including Juakali and house diva Yolanda, Underwater Dancehall stands up as one of the most coherent, sophisticated and satisfying dancefloor-derived albums of the noughties, and, as far as dubstep LPs go, it’s perhaps second only to Burial’s brace in terms of vision, ambition and virtuoso execution.

In the three years that have elapsed since then, Pinch has continued to work his fingers to the bone as a DJ and producer, releasing singles not only through Tectonic but also Punch Drunk, Soul Jazz and most recently Dancing Demons. As a label-owner and A&R he’s shown incredible commitment and integrity, rigorously maintaining Tectonic’s dubstep core while being bold enough to signmore leftfield offerings such as Pursuit Groove’s recent Foxtrot Mannerisms EP. A roll-call of some of the producers who’ve released 12″s and LPs on Tectonic, or contributed productions to its Tectonic Plates compilations, says it all: 2562, Flying Lotus, Skream, Peverelist, Distance, Shed, Benga, RSD, Loefah…

Interestingly, Tectonic is but one arm of the musical empire over which Pinch presides. Formed in 2004, Multiverse is a creative studio and publishing company that acts as an umbrella to the Tectonic, Kapsize, Earwax, Caravan and Build labels, with a recording and production facility on Bristol’s Whiteladies Road. A new double-CD compilation, Dark Matter, celebrates five years of Multiverse, and ranges from the grotty industrial dubstep of Vex’d to the springy UKF-inflected house of Baobinga & ID, via the subtle techno variations of October and Emptyset and the super-saturated purple funk of Joker. More than just a collection of tasty tracks, Dark Matter enshrines a hugely important spasm of creativity in Bristol, one which has seen it shed its early noughties reputation as a d’n'b ghost-town to become, once again, the envy of the global underground. Dark Matter is out now; for more information and tracklist, click here, and buy your copy here.

To celebrate the release of Dark Matter, not to mention his new quarterly DJ residency at London’s Fabric, Pinch has put together a 100% vinyl and acetate mix for FACT that’s absolutely stuffed with as-yet-unreleased material. There are a bunch of new tracks from Skream (‘Amitystep’, ‘Phatty Druma’) and Mala (’2 Much Chat’ ‘Answer Me’), Peverelist & Appleblim’s take on Bass Clef’s ‘Promises’, Pinch remixed by Pangaea and remixing WAX (aka Shed) as well as repping with three originals of his own (‘The Boxer’, ‘Elements’ and ‘Swish’). There’s further dubplate action from Jack Sparrow, Redlight, Distance and Goth Trad. If you want to know where dubstep is in 2010, get downloading and listening.

Tracklist:
1. Bass Clef ‘Promises’ (Peverelist & Appleblim remix) (Dubplate)
2. Emika ‘Double Edge Sword’ (Pinch remix) (Ninja Tune)
3. Skream ‘Amitystep’ (Dubplate)
4. Mala ’2 Much Chat’ (Dubplate)
5. Jack Sparrow ‘The Cahse’ (Tectonic)
6. Pinch ‘Midnight Oil’ (Pangaea remix) (Dubplate)
7. Dubkasm ‘Hail Jah’ (Jakes Remix) (forthcoming on Sufferer’s Choice)
8. Jack Sparrow & Ruckspin ‘Dread’ (Dubplate)
9. WAX20002b (Pinch remix)
10. Jakes ‘Time Ends’ (Tectonic)
11. Mala ‘Eyes’ (DMZ)
12. Distance ‘Ill Kontent’ (forthcoming on Tectonic)
13. Jack Sparrow ‘Terminal’ (Tectonic)
14. Red Light ‘MDMA’ (Dubplate)
15. Joker ‘Output 1-2′ (Tectonic)
16. Skream ‘Phatty Druma’ (Dubplate)
17. Pinch ‘Elements’ (forthcoming on Swamp 81)
18. Goth Trad ‘Sublimination’ (Dubplate)
19. Distance ‘Reboot’ (Dubplate)
20. Pinch ‘The Boxer’ (forthcoming on Tectonic)
21. Pinch ‘Swish’ (Dubplate)
22. Mala & SGT Pokes ‘Answer Me’ (Dubplate) [Tease]

@'FACT'

Gig promoters warn of price hike

Brion Gysin: Dream Machine New Museum of Contemporary Art. July 7 to October 3.

The New Museum’s “Brion Gysin: Dream Machine” is intended as New York’s reintroduction to this painter, poet, innovator, and total subversive, and that it will be. Gysin was the artist’s artist among the Beats, the man who invented William S. Burroughs’s favorite writing technique—the cut-up, in which newspapers or other printed materials are sliced and reassembled to make unexpected new connections—and is a key figure in the development of postmodern literature, Kinetic art, street art, spoken-word poetry, and experimental punk, rock, and pop. Yet outside the art world, he’s been almost totally unknown, at least until now.

But there’s another story underlying the exhibit. It’s the first major tribute to the artistic subculture rooted just across the street from the museum, at 222 Bowery. Together with the Hotel Chelsea, the building was to New York what the Beat Hotel was to Paris: the spot where artists and writers hung out, crossed paths, misbehaved, hooked up. Burroughs lived there; it was Gysin’s crash pad when he was in town. And unlike the Beat Hotel, it’s still an artist enclave.

The building itself is a sturdy-looking brick chunk, built in 1884, that would blend into nearly any downtown block. In its early decades, it was home to the first modern YMCA. During and after World War II, the artists started to move in. First came the French Cubist Fernand Léger; painters James Brooks and Wynn Chamberlain arrived soon after. In 1958, Mark Rothko leased the building’s huge gymnasium to work on his murals for The Four Seasons, the ones whose story is told in the Broadway show Red. Rothko handed down his space to the second-generation Abstract Expressionist Michael Goldberg in 1962. Lynda Benglis, whose own retrospective opens at the New Museum in February, secured her loft in 1974; the sculptor and painter Lynn Umlauf, who later married Goldberg, came in 1977. (Both women still live and work there.)

The real social butterfly of 222, though, was Gysin’s former lover, the poet and artist John Giorno, who followed Chamberlain there in 1966. Giorno remembers one of Gysin’s long-ago visits vividly. It was 1978, and their affair had long since fizzled. Gysin was in town for the Nova Convention, a poetry festival co-produced by Giorno and dedicated to Gysin and Burroughs—who had moved into his own loft at 222, which he famously called “the Bunker.” Gysin was used to Parisian garrets, and loft life, with its high ceilings and few walls, was a revelation. He took one look at Giorno’s space, cluttered with Oriental rugs and piles of poems, and remarked, in his particular British-Canadian cadence, “You all live like bohemians!” Which they did.

What followed was typical of Giorno and Burroughs’s interlaced lifestyle. They escorted Gysin (and others, like Burroughs’s longtime companion James Grauerholz) down to the Bunker, where Burroughs drank (vodka) and Giorno cooked (bacon-wrapped chicken was a Burroughs favorite). Guests were always high and liquored up by the time dinner was served, at a conference table surrounded by orange vinyl chairs. Drinking and smoking would continue until 10 p.m. or so, when Burroughs would retreat to bed, after engaging his guests in some convivial target practice with his blowgun.

Things were always a little more intense when Gysin was in town. There were visits with Allen Ginsberg and Blondie. Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat were always around, stopping by with their expensive pot after dinner, getting Gysin high, and hanging on his every word. But it was Burroughs who was most affected by Gysin’s presence. The two had known each other for decades, going back to their time as expats in Tangier in the fifties, and “Brion brought out a very somber, self-conscious Burroughs,” says Stewart Meyer, a novelist and Bunker habitué. Giorno agrees: “When William was asked, ‘Did you ever love somebody?,’ he always said, ‘I’ve never respected anybody more than Brion Gysin in my life.’ That was his word for love. He had lovers, but somehow Brion was on another level. They were gay and never had sex together, but in a certain way Brion was William’s lover.” Meyer says Burroughs was painfully concerned with Gysin’s perception of him. “William could not paint while Brion was alive, though he had wanted to. He did not want to overshadow Brion in that area, because he had already overshadowed him in every other area.”

That continued up to Gysin’s death at 70, in 1986. He’d never become well known and never saw full publication of The Third Mind, the instructional tome (created with Burroughs) that meant to introduce the world to the cut-up. (Burroughs’s own cut-ups, the “Nova” trilogy, were not only published but are still in print.) “Brion knew it wasn’t William’s fault. But in terms of the general popular culture not recognizing the importance of his contribution, there was a little bitterness,” says the artist Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, who befriended Gysin in the late seventies and credits him with inspiring the project he undertook with his late wife, Lady Jaye. (The two literally cut themselves up via plastic surgery to form the “third being,” with matching lips, eyes, beauty marks, and breasts. Gysin’s methods taken to the extreme.)

The building at 222 retains vestiges of that era. Burroughs returned yearly until his death in 1997, and since then, Giorno has preserved the Bunker, adding a Buddhist meditation shrine opposite the kitchen. Burroughs’s typewriter is still here, as are the Gysin paintings he prized. Giorno accumulated three apartments in the building, and he and his partner, the artist Ugo Rondinone (whose HELL, YES! sculpture hangs on the New Museum’s façade), still hold eccentric, intimate dinners. But their world is vanishing fast. The top two floors have been bought and are rented out at market rate. Green Depot, an ecofriendly home-goods chain, occupies the storefront, and Goldberg’s (and thus Rothko’s) old space is changing hands at year’s end, its hardwood floor still caked with traces of both artists’ paint.

Rachel Wolff @'NY Mag'

Moscow’s 2010 International Film Festival Breaks Down Borders

Lou Reed booed in Canada for free-improv set

 

Walk on the wilder side ... Lou Reed performs Metal Machine Music in London. Photograph: Jim Dyson/Getty Images

Lou Reed, Laurie Anderson and John Zorn faced a furious crowd on Friday night, playing cacophonous music to a cacophony of boos at the Montreal International Jazz festival. Fans expecting Sweet Jane or Walk On the Wild Side were instead met by the skronk and skree of Reed's more recent free-jazz work, infuriating sections of the crowd. As audience members hollered their complaints, Zorn responded. "If you don't think it's music, then get the fuck outta here." Then the walk-outs began.

The nature of the concert shouldn't really have been a surprise. After all, Zorn is one of the world's leading avant-garde musicians and Anderson is preceded by a reputation for, er, eccentricity. Reed was once, yes, a wry urban troubadour – but that was decades ago. Recently he has been touring his controversial album, Metal Machine Music – a work so noisy and abrasive that for years many thought it was a joke.

However, there weren't any punch-lines at this gig, which attracted more than 1,000 fans – some paying almost $100 (£62) for tickets. The concert consisted of just four instrumentals plus encore, according to the Globe and Mail, with "no singing ... [and] no rhythm section". The only sounds were Anderson's violin and keyboard, Zorn's alto sax, and Reed's electric guitar. In an interview earlier that day, Reed had gleefully promised a "fearless night of non-rock", "100% improvised". But the jazz festival programme had been less clear in its description of the gig, hinting at Reed's Velvet Underground past.

Though Montreal is well-acquainted with "free" music, hosting one of North America's premier genre festivals, this was a headline performance at a middle-of-the-road jazz festival. What's more, it was at the festival's largest concert hall. So it didn't take long for the first boos to come. Initially, these complaints were misinterpreted as calls for "Louuuuu!" but soon the fans became more direct. "Play some real music!" one called.

But others loved it. "There were moments of stunning synchronicity," reflected Globe critic JD Considine. Montreal Gazette writer T'Cha Dunlevy was similarly moved. "Zorn's never-ending sax trills were mesmerising and Anderson's unexpected melodic offerings late in the show were like flowers in the rubble," he wrote. Another Gazette critic, Jordan Zivitz, called it "marvellous noise ... [with] numerous moments of telepathic playing".

"Yes, there were those who claimed to enjoy the cacophony of discordant noise lacking melody, style, beauty or skill," replied one Gazette reader. "[But] to label it correctly, it was pure elitist, pretentious rubbish." At least it wasn't recorded for dogs.

Sean Michaels @'The Guardian'

For moustache lovers...who also love type

@'wit + delight'

The Heretic of Ether

HERE

Aust Post Punk radio doco - 18/27 July 2010

DO THAT DANCE! - AUSTRALIAN POST PUNK, 1977-1983
ABC Radio National, Hindsight audio-documentary 2 part series
Part 1: Sydney - broadcast & podcast ABC Radio National Sunday July 18th, 2pm
Part 2: Melbourne - broadcast & podcast ABC Radio National Sunday July 25th, 2pm
Produced by Sean O’Brien

Image of the only nuke ever detonated in space

What does it look like when you blow up a nuke in space? It's only happened once, in 1962, but newly declassified images shows exactly what happened.
Why, pray tell, did the government want to launch nukes into space? Well, apparently they wanted to test a few theories.

The plan was to send rockets hundreds of miles up, higher than the Earth's atmosphere, and then detonate nuclear weapons to see: a) If a bomb's radiation would make it harder to see what was up there (like incoming Russian missiles!); b) If an explosion would do any damage to objects nearby; c) If the Van Allen belts would move a blast down the bands to an earthly target (Moscow! for example); and — most peculiar — d) if a man-made explosion might "alter" the natural shape of the [Earth's magnetic] belts.

How crazy is that? Apparently none of their experiments really panned out, as that launch was the first and last space nuke ever detonated. But it's probably for the best that they didn't alter the planet's magnetic fields. NPR, via io9

@'dvice' 

The Bomb Watchers (NPR)
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Tricky teams up with Primal Scream's Bobby Gillespie on new album

Tricky has teamed up with Primal Scream frontman Bobby Gillespie on his forthcoming new album.
The trip-hop star's ninth studio LP - 'Mixed Race' is due for release on September 27 and the first single will be 'Murder Weapon' which is due out on August 30. Fans can hear the track on dominorecordco.com now.
"Every album is a learning experience and this is concentrated music, there’s no dilution," said Tricky of the new record, which was recorded in Paris. "I can experiment, I can be honest, and honestly, musically, I can’t be touched."
The tracklisting for 'Mixed Race' is:
'Every Day'
'Kingston Logic'
'Early Bird'
'Ghetto Stars'
'Hakim'
'Come To Me'
'Murder Weapon'
'Time To Dance'
'Really Real'
'Bristol To London'

@'NME' 

    
Tricky - Murder Weapon 
 

"If copyright infringement is theft, is photographing someone kidnapping?"

Tommy's boy!

SageFrancisSFR   Tommy Hilfiger's son is now a rapper. It's as great as you'd think. Maybe greater. http://tinyurl.com/TommyStinkFinga
exilestreet @SageFrancisSFR Dearohfugndear re Tommy's boy! Another vid going on about "home/alone/stoned!!! Nice use of beltbuckle w RAPE on it. Class! 

Police re-open investigation into Al Gore sex poodle claims (警察重啟高爾性侵害的調查)

Oily disasters: When will we ever learn?

The Deepwater Horizon rig off the coast of Mexico where the current disaster is occuring. (Credit: ChvyGrl via Flickr)

The Gulf of Mexico oil disaster was the worst accidental spill in history. No, not the one getting the headlines today, but the one in 1979 — although the current spill may eventually prove to be larger. Those of us old enough to remember may be experiencing déjà vu.

On June 3, 1979, a blow-out preventer failed on the Ixtoc I drilling platform off the coast of Mexico. The well was owned by Mexico's state oil company, Pemex, but the drilling was being done by Sedco, which later became Transocean, owner of the Deepwater Horizon rig where the current disaster is unfolding.

As with today's crisis, the experts tried to control the 1979 spill with a number of methods, including booms, dispersants, placing a giant metal "top-kill" dome over it, and plugging it with garbage and cement. None of these techniques worked then, and they aren't working now. The Ixtoc spill went on for more than nine months, spewing between 477 million and 795 million litres of oil that washed up on the coasts of Mexico and the U.S. It wiped out fishing along the Mexican coast for years and harmed and killed sea turtles, dolphins, birds, and other animals.

In the end, the Ixtoc spill was stopped when Pemex drilled two relief wells and pumped mud and steel balls into the well. BP is drilling relief wells at the Deepwater Horizon site but expects to take up to three months to complete them.

The main differences between the two spills are that no one died in the Ixtoc disaster, whereas 11 people were killed in the Deepwater Horizon blow-out, and the Ixtoc well was being drilled in 49 metres of water, while the Deepwater Horizon was more than 1,500 metres deep.

It makes you wonder if we'll ever learn. In Canada, oil companies are drilling a well off the coast of Newfoundland that is even deeper than the BP well in the Gulf. Oil companies are also gearing up to drill in Arctic waters, and the B.C. government has been putting pressure on the federal government to lift bans on drilling and oil tanker traffic off the West Coast.

These spills are just a visual reminder of the damage that our fossil-fuel addiction wreaks on the environment every day. After all, if the oil weren't being spilled, it would eventually be burned, spewing carbon emissions into the atmosphere.

Environmental havoc is only one reason to conserve energy and switch to cleaner energy. Security is also a crucial issue when it comes to global oil supplies. From the costly war in Iraq to the instability of some of the main oil-producing countries, we're seeing increasing problems with our reliance on this ever-more-scarce energy resource.

Some people argue that's a reason to increase supplies from domestic sources by expanding production in the tar sands, extracting oil from shale, and drilling more off our own coasts — but that's an absurd argument. Any one of these leaves us open to more environmental damage from spills and pollution during drilling, extracting, and transporting. In fact, a study led by the University of Alberta's David Schindler and published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science found that pollution from the Alberta tar sands into the Athabasca River and its tributaries is equivalent to a major oil spill every year.(my emphasis-beeden)

We don't seem to be good at learning from the past. No matter what the technology or energy source, whether it's fossil fuels or nuclear, we must be prepared for the worst-case scenario before we proceed. That's because, no matter how minimal the risk, the consequences of an accident, as we've seen from the Gulf of Mexico to Chernobyl, can be calamitous.

One thing we know for certain is that relying on diminishing supplies of fossil fuels for our energy needs has serious consequences for the environment, human health, the economy, and our security. And yet governments still continue to subsidize what U.S. TV host Rachel Maddow correctly referred to in a show comparing the two spills as "the most profitable industry the universe has ever seen."

Let's prove that we can learn. We need to conserve energy and we need to tell our governments that it's time to start the shift to a clean-energy economy and to keep the oil wells and tankers away from our waters.

 David Suzuki with Faisal Moola @'David Suzuki.org'

No fracking way New Brunswickers should ban the hazardous process of hydraulic fracturing.

In less than 60 days, using a process known as hydraulic fracturing or fracking, an oil and gas company will inject hundreds of tanker truckloads of freshwater laced with thousands of kilograms of toxic chemicals and sand beneath the ground. Their goal is to extract natural gas embedded in a shale rock formation near Elgin in southern New Brunswick.
At risk are the groundwater, surface water, human and non-human health.
A typical frack job requires between 11,400,000 to 15,200,000 litres of water, which returns to the surface highly toxic
Squeezing gas from a rock below ground involves unconventional drilling practices. A vertical well is dug vertically into the ground and then vertically across the shale formation (see attached figure). The fracking fluid is then injected into the well bore — under enough pressure to peel paint from a car — so that it causes the shale to fracture and release the gas from the billions of pockets found throughout this rock. The gas comes up the well, along with most of the fracking fluids.




Ultimately, the company sells the gas for a profit, and the province collects royalty payments. Private landowners may also lease their land to the gas company to supplement their income.
Controversy is growing, in Canada and the US, over the nature of the chemicals used in the fracking process, the sheer volume of water needed for the process, as well as the wastewater produced after the fracking fluid spews out of the well.
Scientists in the US report that 65 of the 300-odd compounds used in fracking are hazardous to both humans and non-humans. Some cause cancer. These chemicals are mixed with the water which comes from different sources: municipal water systems, rivers, ponds, and lakes.
A typical frack job requires between 11,400,000 to 15,200,000 litres of water — or enough water to fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool five to seven times over. Most of the water that is pressurized into the well, spews out once the pressure is released. Each well can be fracked multiple times. Safe disposal is an issue, because the water returns laced with toxic chemicals.
In just one year, 2000, the world's oil and gas exploration industry produced 77 billion barrels of wastewater, according to an article by Z Khatib and P Verbeek, published in the Journal of Petroleum Technology. Based on current rates of water consumption, that amount is equivalent to the volume of water needed by the City of Fredericton for the next 20 years.(my emphasis)

According to the United Nations, the world, including Canada, is heading towards a major water shortage crisis — due, in part, to water being used for industrial purposes like fracking.
Laying aside for a moment the moral and ethical questions concerning the industrial use of water in a world facing diminishing sources of good clean drinking water, the question remains as to what to do with the sheer magnitude of the wastewater produced in the fracking process. According to ProPublica, an independent newsroom that does investigative journalism for the public's benefit, it is still unclear as to whether or not we have the technology at our disposal to handle such vast quantities of wastewater.
In some jurisdictions, the wastewater is left in open pits. In other areas, it is emptied into sewage treatment plants, many of which are ill-equipped to handle this type of industrial waste. There are conflicting reports on how and where the fracking fluids are being disposed of here in New Brunswick.
There is no question these fracking fluids are highly toxic. ProPublica reported in 2008 that after treating a worker who got splashed with fracking fluid, an emergency nurse in Colorado ended up with multiple organ failure and nearly died.
Dr Theo Colborn, an independent scientist in Colorado who specializes in low-dosage effects of chemicals on human health, argues that even in very low doses, these chemicals can damage kidneys and immune systems and negatively impact reproduction. Among farm animals raised in close proximity to where the fracking wastewater was being misted in the air for evaporation in Garfield County, CO, a bull went sterile; sheep bred on an organic farm experienced a slew of inexplicable still births; and pigs as well as a herd of beef cows stopped going into heat.
The oil and gas industry, however, appears unmoved and undeterred by these concerns. In fact, a local newspaper published a story June 10th, 2010 in which a representative of the oil and gas industry was quoted in saying that fracking in New Brunswick "won't harm well water".
The fact is that nobody has done any research to see how the process actually works underground. No one knows for sure to what extent the fissures reach underground or whether cracks made in the rock create a passageway for these dangerous chemicals to contaminate the groundwater.
"What is needed now most," wrote ProPublica reporter Abraham Lustgarten in 2009, "according to scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency and elsewhere, is a rigorous scientific study that tracks the fracturing process and attempts to measure its reach into underground water supplies." The price tag for such a study would be around USD10 million.
In 2008, ProPublica reported that there were over 1000 cases documented by courts and local governments in Colorado, New Mexico, Alabama, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, where fracking is a suspected cause of drinking water contamination.
Filmmaker Josh Fox visited regular Americans across 24 US states to produce a documentary challenging and disproving the industry's contention that fracking is harmless. He found and filmed a shocking trail of people and their animals in rural communities getting sick. In one scene in his documentary film, Gasland, (which will air on HBO Canada August 1st, 2010), a local resident uses a cigaret lighter to light the gas that escapes when he tries to draw water from the kitchen sink tap.
Because of the controversies surrounding this process, fracking has been banned in New York State until proven safe. It is disappointing that New Brunswick has not introduced its own ban on this process in order to protect its citizens and our environment from such unnecessary risks.
For its part, in June 2010, the Conservation Council of New Brunswick hosted two public sessions to raise awareness on this issue. The first one happened on June 17th in Penobsquis, the second in Elgin on June 18th.
In Penobsquis, sauna-like temperatures in the meeting room did little to dampen the spirits of concerned citizens, packed like sardines, who came to hear Natural Resources Defence Council Attorney Kate Sinding and Catskills Mountainkeeper Program Director Wes Gillingham speak about their experiences and knowledge of this issue. The underlying message from this presentation was that the potential for contamination of surface and groundwater in New Brunswick is real. Yet despite these concerns, the process continues to occur unabated in New Brunswick.
Of the three companies currently exploring for shale gas in New Brunswick, one company has obtained the lease to conduct tests and see how much of the gas can be recovered from a million-hectare swath of land spreading from the Atlantic coast to the Maine border. It is difficult to predict how many shale gas wells might be constructed if this explorative venture proves to be commercially viable. Estimates range from 480 to 5000 wells.
Given that 29 wells have already disrupted the small community of Penobsquis, a minimum of 480 wells will have a significant impact on the landscape, freshwater supplies, air quality, and lifestyle of many more New Brunswickers. At the moment, New Brunswickers are facing the same situation faced by Pennsylvanians a few years back.
Like New Brunswick, Pennsylvania had no regulations in place to allow for a gradual and community based development of its shale gas industry. And like New Brunswick, it lacked regulations on fracking. Consequently, gas pads started appearing next to homes, hospitals, schools, and summer camps, transforming the countryside into an industrialized zone, with tractor trucks operating 24/7, gas burning flares affecting air quality, and citizens experiencing significant drops in their property values.
"As devastating as the experience is for those who have lost their fundamental right to have clean, safe, potable drinking water come out of their taps," wrote Kate Sanding on her blog April 15, 2010 after visiting Dimock, Pennsylvania, "what was perhaps most eye-opening was the utter transformation of the community." In other words, some of the prettiest and peaceful countryside became transformed into an industrialized zone.
Unless there are provisions in place, and soon, which would allow ordinary New Brunswickers to play an active and determinant role in how the gas industry may evolve in this province, there is no doubt in my mind that we will suffer the same consequences here in New Brunswick. It's too late for Pennsylvanians, but it's still not too late for us New Brunswickers. So, let's get involved.
Jean Louis Deveau has post-graduate degrees in both the natural and social sciences. He is the co-founder of the Friends of the Mount Carleton Provincial Park and an avid canoeist. Apart from proximity to family and friends, he and his wife chose to live and raise their two sons in New Brunswick because of its picturesque countryside, relatively clean air and water, and lack of heavy industrialization.

References
Gasland trailer shows flames from kitchen tap
ProPublica series on fracking

Jean Louis Deveau @'StraightGoods'

Quaint Towns, Deadly Poisons Welcome to Toxic Valley

Crossing the Ohio River into Indiana from Owensboro, Ky., travelers are greeted with an image far more symbolic of Hoosier life than an "Indiana Welcomes You" billboard or a drawing of Abraham Lincoln, who spent part of his childhood just a few miles to the west of the William H. Natcher Bridge.
Indeed, the Hoosier state's howdy dominates the horizon a couple hazy miles before the bridge, when fat plumes of opaque-white air pollution from the Rockport Power Plant first appear. The coal-fired plant's twin cooling towers greet passing motorists with a hearty, "Welcome to Indiana, Land of Pollution." Minutes up U.S. 231, the box-like AK Steel plant rises just off the roadway to the east, adding an exclamation point.
Between them, these two industrial facilities told the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that they released nearly 26 million pounds of toxic chemicals into the air, water and land in 2008. In their Toxic Release Inventory (TRI) reports to EPA, AK Steel reported 19.1 million pounds, American Electric Power's Rockport plant 6.7 million.
As John Blair, president of the Evansville-based environmental group Valley Watch has calculated, that's more toxic releases from two Indiana industrial facilities than New York City, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Chicago, Indianapolis, Seattle, Los Angeles and San Diego, combined.

Continue reading

Steven Higgs @'Counterpunch'

The list of "enterprises" daily destroying the planet continues, more horrific stories from Indiana, its time for the EPA to do its job, and its time for the shareholders and management to be held accountable. A thousand apologies to readers at Moana for going on about this, but the tide is becoming a Tidal Wave of Tsunami proportions, as business after business declines to meet its environmental responsibilities, as long after the deluge has broken only the ruined will remain, the quick-fix money addicts will have left the building with all its polluted walls and toxic cesspools, for others to clean-up. Contact your local government and ask them about any industries you have concerns about, these abuses will not stop unless our governments are aware of our concern and business is made accountable for its deliquency.........beeden

As Oil Industry Fights a Tax, It Reaps Billions From Subsidies

Happy 4th...

Iran's Guantánamo Bay: the cover-up won't work

Faced with undeniable evidence of a scandal, one solution is to blame others. But picking out a few expendable scapegoats from your own side – and punishing them – often works better. That is the tactic adopted by the Iranian regime in trying to shrug off revelations of atrocities in the Kahrizak detention centre.

This week an Iranian military court convicted and sentenced to death two officials who had been accused of torturing and killing three protesters in the centre during the aftermath of last year's disputed presidential election.

The reports added that nine other suspects in the case were also sentenced to flogging or prison terms and one person was acquitted. The verdict is said to be not final and can be appealed. No names have been disclosed and the court sat behind closed doors, so it is impossible to verify anything about the case independently of the official statement about the case.

Kahrizak, known as Iran's Guantánamo Bay among protesters, became a significant embarrassment for the Islamic Republic when a group of released prisoners gave testimonies to international media about the misfortunes they suffered in custody. It was built underground without proper ventilation and toilet facilities. Although it is supposed to have a maximum capacity of 50 prisoners, in the turmoil after Iran's presidential election it was filled with hundreds. At least five have died under torture there and some were raped.

In July last year, Iran's supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, ordered the closure of Kahrizak when Saeed Sadaghi, a pro-regime photographer, reportedly told him that he had been raped in the detention centre. However Khamenei didn't mention the rape until Mehdi Karoubi, an Iranian opposition leader, wrote a widely publicised letter to the head of Iran's Council of Experts revealing that he had met with a few of those who have been raped inside Kahrizak centre. The rape disclosure became a scandal for a regime that preaches moral values and boasts that it is an Islamic Republic. It sparked an outcry even within the supporters of the regime.

But it was only when 24-year-old Mohsen Rouhalamini, the son of a distinguished conservative figure, was named among those killed that the Iranian authorities were forced to respond. Subsequently, two other victims were identified, Amir Javadifar and Mohammad Kamrani. The two officials reportedly sentenced this week were charged with the death of these three protesters. (Opposition sources maintain that at least five protesters died in the centre, rather than three.)

As with other post-election scandals in Iran, the authorities first dismissed it as opposition propaganda, but later Iranian MPs assigned a committee to investigate the issue. In January 2010, the report of the investigation suggested that Saeed Mortazavi, Tehran's former chief prosecutor, was behind the affair. However the claim of rape was dismissed in the report. Mortazavi was then rewarded by President Ahmadinejad with his appointment as head of Iran's counter-smuggling department.

But since last summer, the more the government has tried to put an end to the scandal, the more the details have emerged about what really had happened. Last month, Roozonline, a US-based Iranian website, revealed that Ramin Pourandarjani, the examining doctor who had disclosed details of the deaths of some protesters, including Rouhalamini, was allegedly suffocated, although the government maintains that his death was due to natural causes.

The Human Rights Activists News Agency had interviewed a prisoner of Kahrizak whose name and gender were not disclosed for security reasons. The prisoner had said: "After 43 days, they let me to call my family for the first time and let them know of my whereabouts. They showed me a video clip of my son and told me that he's in custody and he'll be raped if I don't confess to what they ask me to do."

The agency documented the scandal by piecing together the personal accounts of those who experienced the jail in Kahrizak. "Flogging, beating with batons and metal bars and electric shocks were common. Some were forced to pose their sexual organ in humiliation and some were sexually abused by bottles and batons. Some were bound and others had to pee on them," the report says.

It is not the first time Iran has used the old trick of covering up a scandal by such trials. After a brutal attack on Tehran University campus 11 years ago, which left at least two dead and hundreds injured, the government employed the same method and put its police commanders and officers on trial. However in the appeals court almost all were acquitted, except one who was charged with stealing a student's electric razor.

The trials over the campus scandal were not an end to the story; every year since then students have protested on the anniversary. Iran is now using the same tactic, but it won't work – just as it didn't work for the university campus. A month ago, there was speculation from an opposition website that Iran has reopened Kahrizak by changing its name to "Soroush 111". The Kahrizak story is far from over.

Saeed Kamali Dehghan @'The Guardian'

Infringement is not stealing

Brilliant!

(Click to enlarge)

Crispian Jago @'Science, Reason & Critical Thinking'

Joy Orbison - Brklyn Clln (Michna's Brooklyn Bridge Remix)

 

Joe Nice - Mala Tribute 06/10/09

I just got the link for Joe Nice's Gourmet beats radio show from last night, and it contained a very special treat - 16 foundation dubplates from the man like Mala. Many thanks to Section 5 on the heads up.


Download the whole show

Tracklist

01 Adultz Only
02 Mountain Dread March
03 Cowboy Dub
04 Creepah
05 Jah Power Dub
06 Pop Pop Epic
07 Intergalactic Dub
08 Living Different
09 Explorer
10 Unexpected
11 Maintain Thru Madness
12 Big Leg Movement
13 Friday B4
14 Conference Part II
15 Sundayz
16 Bring Sut Unt

@'SMOKE/LESS/FUELS'

A London Dub – a best of Digital Mystikz & Loefah

I’d been looking for an excuse to do a DMZ only mix for a while now. And then my good friend Javier from Serie B mentioned that he’d never heard any of the early and classic DMZ releases until I linked him to the audio from the recent Red Bull Soundclash. I’d found the excuse I needed to do the mix. The idea was simple: do it like we used to back in the days when you’d put all your best songs on a tape for a friend to turn them onto something. Only this time the tape would be digital.

I spent most of the Easter weekend putting this mix together – it went from an all-out, in depth retrospective to a more measured attempt at a ‘best of’, or at least my ‘best of’. I’d originally got it just under 90 minutes to keep with the mixtape vibe but then realised I’d forgot a couple of tracks I absolutely wanted on there so instead of binning it and starting again I just added them and the result is 46 productions in 100 minutes – all tracks by Mala, Coki and Loefah including at least one track from each of the DMZ label releases plus key releases and remixes on various other labels including Tempa, Deep Media, Hotflush and Tectonic among others.

The following blurb about the mix is rather long so if you just want the music skip to the bottom of the post for link, tracklist and stream option.

Putting the mix together and listening back to it got me reminiscing about my own DMZ history and love story with the label, the artists and their music. It all started in 2005 on a rainy evening in London sometime after the summer. I randomly bumped into Steve Kode 9 – who at that point I hadn’t seen in ages – somewhere in Shoreditch who told me to come through to the Old Blue Last pub where he was spinning with some friends that night. I changed my plans and headed to the pub to find him alongside Mala from Digital Mystikz spinning upstairs to a small crowd (I think this night was part of the pub sessions which took place in 04/05 around London if memory serves me right…). And that’s when I discovered DMZ as a label and a sound for the first time.

I’ll never forget that night – every track Mala dropped had me rushing to the decks asking ‘what the hell is this?!’ before jumping around like a lunatic. I must have made a right tit of myself but I walked away that night with a grin on my face like never before and a phone full of release names and one label in particular, DMZ. In many ways this is also the night I ‘discovered’ dubstep again if you will, a few years after being first introduced by Kode to the dark garage mutations taking place in south London after he took me to some early FWD>> sessions at Plastic People and played me his early stuff.

The next thing I know I was in Blackmarket looking for DMZ releases and I went to my first DMZ dance in Brixton, the last one held at Third Base. The second one I went to was the now infamous night where they had to stop the party halfway through the night and move everyone from Third Base to the club upstairs, Mass, where they have been since because the crowd outside was stretching around the corner and there was no way Third Base would hold that many people.

It’s been nearly five years and in that time my love and respect for DMZ has only grown stronger. As a label they are for me one of the most consistent in the quality of their output, making them as fundamental to the sound and history of the music as Hyperdub, Tempa or Hotflush. As Mala and Loefah have both said in interviews, DMZ is a sound. It’s not dubstep, it’s the DMZ sound. It may be a part of dubsptep, but only as much as Hyperdub is or Tempa or Hotflush, to keep the comparisons with what I see as the other 3 key labels in the history and evolution of the music.

As a sound I never stop marveling at just how powerful the productions of these three individuals have been and continue to be. From Mala’s incredibly addictive percussive experiments to Loefah’s minimal sub assaults and Coki’s wobble experiments. These guys are responsible for creating, willingly or not, templates for the sound which have become standards. What’s more remarkable though is how they’ve steered clear of the pitfalls others so willingly fell into. They have always stayed true to their craft and their love of the music, and that’s not only visible in the productions, and their longevity (some of the tracks in this mix are 6 or more years old now), but also in their bi-monthly dances.

Going to a DMZ dance is something anyone who has ever felt something for their music should experience at least once if they can. I remember shortly after, and before, the dances became popular following the Mary Ann Hobbs special on BBC Radio 1 people would come to London from all over the world, literally, to witness the DMZ experience. The atmosphere, the people, the music all combined for some of the most intense and memorable live experiences I’ve ever had. When I left London for two years to go to Japan the one thing I always wanted to return for and missed the most were the DMZ dances.

All of which is a long winded way to explain that this mix is not only a present to a good friend of mine but also a way for me to say thank you to Mala, Loefah and Coki for their gift of music and the inspiration they have provided me in the last five years. Even if the label and dances were to stop tomorrow they would never be forgotten and will always live in my heart as some of the most important moments in my musical life. I spoke about this in more detail in my Red Bull Soundclash review, but one thing I realised after the clash is that to me DMZ, and their sound, are the musical epiphany equivalent to the jungle, hardcore and the early rave days of many of my British friends. I never grew up with rave and its offshoots, living in the south of France I was never exposed to that until I was 16/17 and moved to the UK. And while jungle and the post-rave mutations have been an important part of my musical make up, they haven’t had the same impact that DMZ, Hyperdub and others have had on me as a young man living in London who saw and witnessed the sound evolve, grow and become worldwide. I have a connection with this sound that is spiritual and goes incredibly deep. Like with rave music, I never knew about sound system culture until I was older and DMZ were key in helping me rediscover that culture and fall in love with it all over again.

Back to the point. You can download the mix below, or stream it, as well as find a complete tracklist. As I said before this is a best of Digital Mystikz (aka Mala and Coki) and Loefah productions – all of which are out, though most of the earlier ones are out of print and not all available digitally. All tracks mixed, mashed and dubbed in Ableton.

There are so many unreleased and lost dubs from these guys as well, many of which are for me incredible tunes (Mala’s Mountain Of Dread March, Eyez, Pop Pop Epic, Unexpected, Coki’s Lucifer, Loefah’s Boiler Suit and so many more) that I hope they one day see a release. In the meantime you should check out this amazing Joe Nice mix from the summer of 09 which includes a Mala only selection of all unreleased dubs. There are a few other mixes floating around with many of these lost dubs on there, so if you want more get hunting.

That’s it, all that’s left for me to say is enjoy and I hope you find as much inspiration in the music as I have over the last five years. And if you’re in London or Leeds when DMZ is in town be sure to come and meditate on bass weight – it’ll change your life.

Download A London Dub – A best of Digital Mystikz & Loefah (right click and save as) – 232mb, 320kbps mp3 file

 

Tracklist:
Mala – Changes (Deep Medi 004)
Digital Mystikz – Mawo Dub (BAM 004)
Digital Mystikz – Lost City (DMZ 002)
Coki – The Sign (BAM 009)
Loefah – Horror Show (DMZ 002)
Coki – Officer (DMZ 004)
Mala – Learn (DMZ 012)
Digital Mystikz – Ancient Memories (DMZ 008)
Digital Mystikz – Chainba (DMZ 001)
Loefah – Root (DMZ 005)
Search & Destroy – Candyfloss (Loefah remix) (Hotflush)
Digital Mystikz – Haunted (DMZ 008)
Digital Mystikz – Thief in Da Night (Soul Jazz)
Mala – Alicia (White Label)
Digital Mystikz – Earth a Run Red (Soul Jazz)
Loefah – Disko Rekah (Deep Medi 003)
Digital Mystikz – Molten (Tectonic)
Mala – Shake Up Your Demons (Disfigured Dubs)
Mala – Level Nine (Hyperdub)
Digital Mystikz – Anti War Dub (DMZ 008)
Coki – Bloodthirst (FREQ 001)
Loefah – Rufage (DMZ 009)
Coki – All Of A Sudden (Deep Medi 003)
Mala – Miracles (Deep Medi 012)
Digital Mystikz – Neverland (DMZ 005)
Mala – Blue Notez (DMZ 010)
Coki – Spongebob (DMZ 013)
Coki – Walkin With Jah (Soul Jazz)
Digital Mystikz – Twisup (DMZ 001)
Coki – Triple Six (DMZ 014)
Digital Mystikz – Ugly (BAM 004)
Mala – New Life Baby Paris (Deep Medi 012)
Mala – Lean Forward (DMZ 012)
Coki – Goblin (Disfigured Dubz)
Mala – In Luv (White Label)
Mala – Forgive (Deep Medi 004)
Johnny Clark vs Mala – Sinners (Disfigured Dubz)
Mala – Bury Da Bwoy (DMZ 011)
Loefah – Mud (DMZ 009)
Coki ft. Mavado – Gangsta for life (White Label)
Loefah – Jungle Infiltrator (BAM 006)
Digital Mystikz – Conference (Soul Jazz)
Loefah – System (Tectonic)
Digital Mystikz – Misty Winter (Soul Jazz)
Coki – Shattered (Tempa)
Loefah – It’s Yours (Ringo)
Coki – Burning (White Label)

 @'Saw You On The Flipside'

Stephen Fry on Social Media

Not the biggest fan of Mr. Fry - but he sure talks a LOT of sense here...

Bosnia - How music helped drown out the noise of war

HA!

World Cup replica made of cocaine found in Colombia