Musik Line

Welcome to Musik Line

2011-01-09T08:07:00.000Z

Musik Line is a journal / blog dedicated to sound system culture and to African, Caribbean and other music. I hope to update it irregularly with a selection of articles, interviews, mixes, reviews and other interesting sonic and literary fragments.

Current features are:

Mixes Part 1: Dub

- 70s roots, digi, UK steppas, dubstep and beyond

Ras Kush: Sound of Brooklyn

- Black Redemption and the New York sound system scene

Ten years of reggae and dub

- 2k0-2k9

Tambou means drums

- a short mix from the Antilles and Africa

Wall of Sound

- Berlin Wall sound map

African Dancehall and Hip Hop Minimix

- bump and grind

RAW dub style

- the Berlin dub scene and the RAW.tempel

Sofrito and the Antilles

- a musical voyage round the French Caribbean

1315 Broadway, 1988

- a first encounter with The Music Institute and Detroit techno

Empty Barrels Make The Most Noise

- soundboy killing with Stone Love

Gnawa: Music and the Black Diaspora in Morocco

- notes on the gnawa confraternity in Morocco, their history and identity, from the sixteenth century to the present day

Play the Music Stand Tall Man!

- dancehall session from the Stand Tall sound system in Paris, 1993

Tarantism

- the Italian cult of the tarantula, and its relation to music, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries

Shaka in Africa

- Jah Shaka's history lesson about the repatriation movement, from 1989

Hip Hop in Nouakchott

- a snapshot of the hip hop scene in Mauritania in 2005

Rih: Folk and Blues from Morocco

- mix, with notes, of spiritual and popular music from 1970s Morocco

What is Musik Line?

- music and business with Prince Nico Mbarga and Rocafil Jazz

Stay tuned for future installments. Please feel free to leave your comments, or get in touch via musikline at googlemail com.

Enjoy!

Mixes Part 1: Dub

2011-01-08T07:06:00.012Z

In 2010 I did less writing about music and more DJing. A few highlights:

Dub and dubstep at Wax Treatment, Berlin;
Paw Paw Jam African sessions in the New Empowering Church, Hackney;
Soca, bashment and UK funky in the DH Gedda Tower, Addis Ababa;
The Sofrito posse New Year zouk and soukous mashup in Dalston's Bar 23.

Thanks to all those who showed up and got down at these and other parties ... and thanks also to Mystic Sound for hosting my impromptu appearance on NYC's East Village Radio a few weeks back!

At this juncture I thought it would be a good idea to collect together some of my mixes and session recordings which have been floating around for the last few years. Some of these were previously on www.ialityhifi.co.uk, but this seems to have fallen into the dark web following some kind of accounting oversight. Others have been hosted by various people in various places. I'll be adding to this over time, so keep an eye on it if you like that kind of stuff.

The first group is a dub selection: vintage 70s pieces, 80s and 90s digi, 21st-century UK dub, dubstep and other dub-influenced material. The earliest of these is from 2004. This is the first "Hasan Sabah..." mix, which was an attempt to do a continuous mix (rather than just a comp) of (mainly) versions of JA digital roots tunes. Actually the mixing leaves something to be desired but it was a blueprint of future attempts so there it is, along with the sequel I recorded some years later.

Meanwhile, around 2007, I started an exploration into the territory of dubstep, UK steppas and other modern dub-influenced material, beginning with "N15DUBZ" and leading through a series of "Dub Journeys" mixes, three of which are included below.

"Repatriation Soon", on the other hand, goes back and digs into the deeper strata of 1970s roots and culture.

There are also a couple of live sets, unreleased bits and pieces and so forth. More is to come.

Hasan Sabah Captures the Towers of Dub: digital roots and dub, recorded Aug. 2004. Download here.

Hasan Sabah Captures The Towers Of Dub by Musik_Line on Mixcloud

Hassan Sabah Commits Murder in the Dancehall: 80s and 90s JA digital roots. A sequel to the above. Download here.

Hassan Sabbah Commits Murdah In The Dancehall by Musik_Line on Mixcloud

N15DUBZ: dubstep and UK dub from the vaults, recorded 2007. Download here.

N15dubz by Musik_Line on Mixcloud

Higher Heights: digital dub and dubstep, recorded in Berlin in Jan. 2009. Download here.

Higher Heights (Dub Journeys 4) by Musik_Line on Mixcloud

Xberg Flex: digital dub and dubstep, originally recorded for a Wax Treatment podcast in Feb. 2010.

Xberg Flex (Dub Journeys 5) by Musik_Line on Mixcloud

Live at Wax Treatment, 25 July 2010: unreleased pieces, extract from live set.

Live At Wax Treatment 25.7.10 by Musik_Line on Mixcloud

Dubplate Selection 1: unreleased pieces featuring Judah Eskender Tafari, Turbulence, Scepta. Recorded 2008-10.

Dubplate Selection Vol. 1 by Musik_Line on Mixcloud

Live at Wax Treatment, 28 Feb. 2010: roots session featuring Tikiman, Rick Wayne and friends.

Wax Treatment 28 Feb. 2010 Part 1 by Musik_Line on Mixcloud

Repatriation Soon: deep vintage roots and dub, originally recorded for Natural Self in October 2010. You can download it there.

Repatriation Soon by Musik_Line on Mixcloud

Ras Kush: Sound of Brooklyn

2010-03-17T21:18:00.019Z

Ras Kush is one of the foremost ambassadors for the UK dub style in the USA, as a sound man, producer and architect of the Black Redemption record label. We first met in 1999; he was working in Jammyland, then the Lower East Side's foremost reggae store, and I was doing a spot of crate digging. We got chatting about dub and sound systems and we've been conversing and collaborating ever since. He's always been a mine of knowledge, so the other day I took advantage of his visit to Berlin to ask him to reminisce at greater length. We sat down with some black bean stew and a pot of cerasee and got chatting. Here's the transcript: a feast of information concerning his musical background and development, hip hop and reggae in 1980s Brooklyn, drumming patterns and their relation to ritual, his encounters with Wackie's and UK dub, the evolution of the Black Redemption sound system and label, and many other matters.

Once you've digested that, as a bonus, you get his recent Wax Treatment session: an intense two hours of dubplate pressure, recorded in Berlin on 28 Feb. 2010.

"Ever since I was a little child growing up in Haiti I love music. When I was like toddler age, I had a little toy piano, toy drums, toy guitar, these were my favourite toys. I used to like to sing and dance and I used to make up some dance to some songs that I would hear on the radio. There was compas, the original compas music, I love compas; they play also Antilles music, music from all the French Caribbean, Afro-Francophone music. Maybe I don't like that term "Afro-Francophone": it's African music, made by people that were colonised by the French, and so they speak this language, they sing and communicate in a similar vernacular. African music, tribal music, and voodoo, you have different drum patterns for different ceremonial rites. And some of the music have different drum pattern as foundation. So maybe certain tribes get mixed, and then you have a collection of different tribal rhythms in a location. They develop and evolve and produce this music that's electronically infused or whatever, but I guess these places that were colonised by France have similar tribes and similar tribal rhythms, so that went into the musical composition and made it kind of relative to all these people, whether you go to Martinique, Guadeloupe ... like zouk, in the Antilles, Haiti, everybody's doing it, even in Africa you know...? I guess I listened to this kind of music, compas, and a lot of other music, cadence, and then reggae, Jamaican music. The first time I heard Bob Marley was from my dad, I was between five and seven. I remember we drove cross-country from Port au Prince to Saint-Marc, and the whole while he was just playing Bob. That's how I got into Bob Marley's music. Then there were people in Haiti that were influenced by Bob, for one this artist named Ti Mano, he's done a couple of reggae cuts, some in Creole and some with English words. This was up to the mid / late 70s.

I was born in New York, but I was brought to Haiti when I was very young because my parents favoured the system of upbringing and education there more than what would be available to me in Brooklyn at the time. I lived in Haiti up to the age of 11 but I would come to New York every summer. I had many cousins who were there, and they for the most part were born there, raised there, and by the time the late 70s came around, they lived in the ghetto around the projects, in Brooklyn, and they were into hip hop. So I got into hip hop hardcore like that, African American sound system style, from hanging around my cousins. If I hang out with them, I can flex with them, and I got to go where they go, because I was like 9 and they were like 16, 17. Yeah. And I would go spend the time at their home, away from my parents, because I always liked hanging out and seeing this thing, because it was cool. In the projects sometimes sounds would string up, of course they didn't go that bass heavy or speaker heavy, but they would string up using public electricity and play. Around the same time where I was growing up there was a lot of Jamaicans and they were always pushing their things. In New York, when I come over in the summer, my mother always lived on St Marks on Nostrand Avenue. Nostrand Avenue was always Dread Central. So, you know, of course my parents warned me not to go near that [laughs], because it's drug dealing and drug infused and bad elements, basically you were an instant criminal once you go round that element ...

So when I moved into New York I was 11 years old. I guess at that time I was listening to a little bit of everything, a little bit of pop, everything, but on the radio they would play certain reggae music. Of course they would play Bob Marley, because he had just died, it was like a big thing, but they would play other music. And then I found 1190 WLIB, it was an excellent, excellent radio station for all Caribbean culture. It was a black owned and operated radio station, it come out of black underground political grassroots movement. On the weekends and sometimes late at night you get Caribbean programmes, so my parents would listen to the Haitian programme on Sundays and right after is calypso, soca, then there's reggae. So if you start listening to it you get a variety of music. From I moved to New York I had that as the staple.

Later on, toward 84-85, when Yellowman got big, a lot of hip hop DJs would play Yellowman. And I remember DJ Red Alert, when Sleng Teng came out, every Saturday night, you could hear a cut of Sleng Teng in his hip hop mix. Then you had all this hip hop reggae, Just Ice, Boogie Down Productions ... I'd like to say this, in hip hop there's a spiritual aspect, a grassroots, urban street movement. Just like in reggae you have Rasta, hip hop have the Five-Percent Nation of Gods and Earths. A lot of the spiritual codes, the disciplinary codes that was involved in hip hop music, breakdancing, all that stuff, was put there by these people. They don't get no credit: since hip hop music was taken over to a commercial level it became something different. When you say Just Ice, he's one of those persons that come to mind. The whole Afrika Bambaataa Zulu Nation is all that, it's coming out of Nation of Islam, it's coming out of black progressive struggle, urban development, all that stuff. So hip hop music is a movement that came out of that, but it got bought and turned into something else. I'm happy I got to see a different part of it.

A lot of these people took a lot from reggae or from Rasta, because they're into herb, so this cross culture that took place, I think that brought reggae into hip hop. So there was a little segment of hip hop reggae that was going on. But Sleng Teng, Sleng Teng shattered a lot of things. When Sleng Teng came out, there was nothing like it. I remember in New York, everything about it was just maddening man, when you hear that come through a speaker ... I remember Sleng Teng was the lick. When Sleng Teng lick, I don't think there was any music than can say anything to reggae in Brooklyn, in New York, at that time. All over, man. Also Super Cat, Boops, Boops was huge. You go to a hip hop basement party, or in the park or in the projects, you hear those. When that play, everybody's like, "That's the shit!" So I think at that point, I was pretty much won over. As far as dancehall music, as far as music of the people go, that was it. And at that time I took music to myself, seriously.

I started buying records as soon as I could, early 80s, like 75 cents for a 7". So I started a collection, I didn't have my set but my older cousins had sets and they threw parties, and I like to get my record play on their set because I didn't have one yet. Every summer from you are 14 years old in the City of New York you can work for the New York City Youth Employment, and so I would work every summer and my money would go toward buying pieces, so I can have my own DJ set. Then you learn to count beats, to beatmatch, mixing, catching the beat, two turntables with a mixer.

- So when you first started out DJing, what sort of tunes were you playing?

Like I say, Boops, man, Boops, Sleng Teng, those things. That was the music that was doing it for me man. But I also liked to rap, I liked Slick Rick, I liked Lovebug Starski, styles that sounded funky fresh, you know? My cousins would do basement parties, of course they would not let me play really for the people, but when nobody's there, I play my music and I heard it loud in a party even though the party wasn't going on yet [laughs] ... I give thanks for that, man, it was like fulfilment till I got my shit going. Then by the time I got my shit going I had a little crew, there was my boy Sammy D, he beatboxed, we went to the same public school, he's from Haitian parents also, we had a lot in common, he was into hip hop, reggae. He got into Bob a little bit way heavier than I was at that time. I just felt most of the party people couldn't party too hard to Bob like that.

Then eventually we just evolved, you know, getting to know music more, getting to know different sounds, and maybe around 16 I got very politically aware and conscious, first from an angry black person perspective on history, being in the ghetto, the system and what you see on TV. And a lot of my conscious awakening was coming from stuff that I was getting from the street, from people from the Five-Percent Nation that was involved in hip hop. That's where the science, the knowledge, the information, the wisdom, the history, the real ... you know what I'm saying, it got passed on like that. KRS-One I think is a very good example of an outcome of the good that was there, that, once the media bought it, they made sure like it shut, you know? You had crews like Brand Nubian still in the 90s, and I guess it's still there but it's so commercial that I don't think it's effective any more. But anyway, through this consciousness, I start to evolve to a more global ... like the system sucks on many many levels, it's like an organized thing. Then you get to see that it's not just black people that is the victim.

I got into the whole Vietnam thing, the capitalist system and how that is fucked up and how in communism everybody can have and there's no haves and have-nots. I think coming from a ghetto perspective it's very attracting to think that there isn't a class. I don't know whether it can be real or not. But anyway, all those things made me get into music that was somehow relative to that. And then, through hip hop and beats, and playing beats to rhyme on, you start looking for beats, and when you start looking for beats you get into different kinds of records, new wave records, records you wouldn't normally buy because of the artist but you buy because of a beat that's in there. So you get exposed to some different kind of music. So like that my interest developed. And then toward the late 80s, early 90s I guess, I think by that time I'd come into Rasta, come into being, living as a Rasta person. And musically also I was in a different place. I think I'd gone to a studio and recorded for some producer, rhyming, I did a rhyme over hip hop beat stuff and some reggae thing, a combination with this guy named Valentine who was the singer.

- Was this stuff ever released?

I don't think so man...

- So basically you went into the studio and the producer voiced you and he gave you like 5 bucks or something?

He didn't give me shit! I didn't want shit, I just hope like he do some shit with it. I didn't want shit, I was like if he does something with it, I'll be so happy, man! I did one thing for Countryman, this guy named Countryman, he was in Bed Stuy, he had a sound, a studio. He had a badass DJ on his sound, I don't know if he ever bust, he was from Trinidad, speed rapping, he was bad, bad! I always wanted to see him and Papa San go at it. Bad! Wicked! I forgot his name, man. I also voiced for Soul Boys, which was a sound system which was maybe the first big sound system I got involved with. A huge sound system. The guy was from Dominica, he used to live in England, went into the sound system thing in the early 70s, moved back to New York and he played all music, reggae, soul, whatever, but a big huge sound system, Caribbean style. I was involved in that sound system, I used to show up, help carry boxes, then be on the mic. I was one of the mic persons, sometimes the only mic person. The DJ was the infamous Ashworth Doe, Ash the Hyper Freak. A lot of dance music people credit him for a lot of stuff, companies like Wild Pitch, Soul Kitchen, they all come out of Ash. When I was a rebel, 16, I left home for a period, and a lot of those times I spent sleeping on Ash's couch. Every room was just massive records, records, all kinds of records, everything, reggae, soul, jazz, everything. Ash was real sound system, music, production, everything, education. I voiced for him with Valentine. I don't know whatever came out of it either. And of course it was always non-money, because I was learning, and I'm very happy, very thankful for it.

Then I got into distributing records around DJs, going to places where I could get records, a whole bunch, and maybe I could beat some record shops to it and sell it to DJs. So I tried to establish a little DJ pool to try to make a business for myself. I was getting into some hip hop but mostly reggae, new pieces and then some Studio 1 cuts that everyone wanted, because at that time the beats was always like a remake, so people always wanted to get the original. So if you're having a party you can stay on a riddim for however long, you can go from the most current to the most oldest, that's how the DJ style was around that music. I tried to get to as many DJs as I can, to have clients.

So maybe around that time I discovered Wackie's music. I really liked the sound of it. It was just like, I don't know man, it was dread to me, dread, heavy, dark, spiritual, how it sounded. So I liked it. He was up in the Bronx, he got a record shop, he got all these records sitting there, nobody wanted them... but then, nobody wanted them...! [Laughs.] I really liked it, man, I couldn't understand why they didn't like it. They said all kind of shit, but one person in particular said "Dread, it sound like the music don't finish." And I got lectures. I got lectures, specifically because these people had record shops, and they resent the fact that I would try to sell them these records. I would try to sell it to them because I was like, "Wow, you don't have this one here, this is a good one here." And basically they know they don't have this one here, and it's not a good one here. It's not complete, it's not finished, it's harsh, it's unpolished, it's not mastered, it's not ... it's not pleasant. They play it me, "Yuh hear a dis sound now! Now listen to this, see me?" I still thought they didn't know what the fuck they were talking about, because that shit sound wicked, but I took a blow and I lived with it.

But in the late 80s until the early 90s for a while I stopped the whole music thing, because the music had changed, and I'd gotten a little bit more serious into Rasta, and the lyrics were not really pleasing to me, overall. So I took a pause and those times for a while I lock off from reggae, lock off from sound, from everything. I thought like reggae, you know, there's nothing progressive about it, people killing people, gunshot, everybody selling coke, everybody wear gold chain, I know nuff dread but everybody smoking coke or crack out or whatever, and there's big competition for the most x-rated outfit, and the black woman mentality and the black man also, sometimes it's degrading for me to accept, because part of my involvement in music was also consciously oriented. So I kind of lock off from that. But I needed finance still, I worked a fair amount of time as a messenger, bike messenger, foot messenger, but for extra money I started cooking, making ital stew and going to the dances. Big dances, I got to see a whole heap of big dances selling ital stew. Some day I could get in the dance and feed the staff, feed the music people, I'm in there.

- So which sounds were big at the time?

There's a sound from Brooklyn called Terrorist, big bad Terrorist. Yes. Terrorist was the sound, Terrorist made a lot of things happen. The guy that owned the sound sang with a group called the I-Plees, late 70s, early 80s. Eventually he was shot. They have some tune on this label Stero, Stero is Stero Fletcher. Wicked label by the way, wicked roots tune come up on that label, like the original Still Cool "To Be Poor Is A Crime" came out on that label. Shaka licensed that tune. Now dem man deh is same crew as these guys, Terrorist. Singers like Sluggy used to sleep at Terrorist's front door till they get let in, understand? I can give you a list of big names, who if it wasn't for Terrorist ... and nobody say nothing about Terrorist because when he got shot, the people who was behind his shooting, everybody was so terrified of this person, you didn't even talk about Terrorist. But when that sound play, and the music play ... yeah! And I think he's one of the first to bring sound system from just strictly people's basements to a hall, you understand? Nuff respect for that. But these names don't get called.

That's a sound, but there were many sounds, Inner City, Downbeat, Sons Junior ... Wackie's sound pretty much had gotten shut down, and shot down, by that time, when in the early 80s they shot Munchie Jackson ... you had Earthquake, Third world ... Dillinger used to be on Third World in Brooklyn, legendary Dillinger, in the 80s, also Lone Ranger too. But nothing ever really surpassed what Jah Love sound did for me. You had all these artists that was involved in the Jah Love sound system because it was the Twelve Tribes sound system. Jah Love would come over to New York and play, many times. Briggy, Charlie Chaplin, Josey Wales, those dances I always went to, and Cat would always come. I love Super Cat from long time, to me is one of the baddest DJ ever born. Like God say I'm gonna make a DJ born, and that's Super Cat, understand? I'm just saying, respect due. Endless, nuff DJs, but for me, where I'm coming from, from an outside perspective on pure flow, style, lyrical presentation, delivery, everything, Cat is one of the baddest thing on earth. Cat would always show up on the Jah Love dance and that always did it for me. You had the culture, baddest DJ, Selassie I ... I love it. So even now, I appreciate very much the UK sound system, but it never take away from that aspect of the Jamaican sound system, and I cherish that as well.

The place to party, late 80s now, where I could sometimes hear roots and culture was Reggae Lounge, then they changed the name to Island Club. Volcano played there, Volcano played there with so many people, Ranking Joe, Toyan, I saw Shelly Thunder when she was just busting out there, Shinehead. Then there was a sound from the Bronx, African Love, around that time African Love played the most cultural music, they play Yabby U, they played heavy music, even music that I now consider heavy, they play it. They played all kind of events, they would keep big dances, but they would keep cultural dances too, where you know you see Rasta music all night. And by that time I would be in heaven because the other thing was shit to me. But those music was all something of the past. There was an organization called IRI, Iniversial Rastafari Inity, they would put on dance, I saw the legendary Jah Wise Tippatone in the 80s playing some music ... anyway, you would hear music like you don't hear ever. Serious thing. And for me that was it. Then I was contented just to be a collector, have all this Wackie's music that I never could release to anybody, as well as music for myself that I was buying and collecting to keep, to document, you know, this great message music and great musical recordings. But it was just for myself, personal, I wan't playing that. But I think I was highly influenced hearing those guys play to maybe have gatherings in my house with bredren and bredren and bredren, you know, hook up the mic, and I was highly influenced by Jah Love and Briggy so I used to like to play A side and B side and chant ises, because at that time I was going to binghi regular, so I would chant ises over the riddim, chant down Babylon ... herb smoking, everything nice. But it was just like bredren and bredren and bredren and bredren.

(Kush in Ex-Bodega, Yokohama, Jan. 2008.)

Then in 1992 was Haile Selassie's centenary, and I got an album from England, which was like all this fresh Rasta music, roots, over this digital modern music, but the riddim composition, the bassline arrangement, the drum pattern, fits that late 70s thing that I've grown to love. Going back again to the African drumming, drumming have a lot to do with the music, so you listen to roots reggae music and you listen to dancehall as it evolved, as opposed to the nyabinghi rhythm, which most roots music is based on, it's a different spiritual influence. So I always knew that certain things would not flow too right or would not last on that beat, because the spiritual influence for it is some different thing. Like in calypso, in soca, sometimes they talk about bachanal, that kind of rhythm. What those rhythm are based on and celebrating is highly sexual, it's not bad, but how it's presented and confined, there's a lot of tension, so those tension I think bring about different influence ... different influential forces gain power through those rhythms, as opposed to roots rock reggae music.

- So as you were saying at the beginning, different drumming patterns are linked to different ceremonial aspects, so the patterns are carrying through a certain kind of a vibe...

Exactly! Different drum patterns for different reasons. And that's from Africa. So the way I discovered UK roots music is because of a bredren who, whenever he's in New York, he come over to the Nyahbingi House. He's Dr Iauwata, a very brilliant musician, keyboard player, he's played with Burning Spear, he was part of that Roots Studio in England that put out "Hail Him", he did works like Colour Red's "Revelation Time". Anyway, I know him from the Binghi House, from the late 80s, in Brooklyn, on Bergen St and Nostrand Avenue. I would spend days in there. So he brought over this music, I really loved it, it was an album, Haile Selassie I Centenary [Surr Zema Muzik]. That's how I discovered UK roots. So he was saying there was this thing going on. I'd heard Shaka's music, I'd heard the records that he sang on. Twelve Tribes House in Queens at the time was the other place that if they keep an event I was guaranteed to hear roots music, and that's where I heard "What is this we've got to do, know yourself, we've got to keep on trying..." Shaka, "Know Yourself", a wicked roots tune Shaka sing. So I know him as a roots singer. Iauwata was saying about Shaka and the sound and how people go there, so I'm wondering what is this thing? So then I would get tapes.

I appreciate the UK thing because to me it was like a victory, that whole thing overcame the dancehall thing, the different drum pattern and musical influence, the rhythm, the kind of bassline, the notes, the tones, everything, it stayed and I can appreciate the raw rough edges of it because I'm coming from the Wackie's appreciation of that kind of music. Then I started meeting people who liked Wackie's music. [Laughs.] Wicked! Then when the whole Bobo thing came out, when I heard Sizzla, man, I think first "No White God" or one of those tunes, he was on a similar temperature as Cat - not Cat, but similar temperature, around that dial there. And as far as respect for Rasta in the music goes, Xterminator was doing those kind of drum sounding style, the snare and delay, kind of dubby, wicked. So I said, you know what, I'm gonna get into the sound thing again. I'm gonna do it. So when I got back into sound in the 90s I started doing a lot of strictly roots events. I went on to select for IRI at a few of their events, played sound, bring my equipment and everything.

- Were you playing under the name Black Redemption then?

At that time I was playing as Ras Kush but I had linked up with another bredren that was playing sound system from the late 70s, I also met him through the Binghi House, from St Vincent, Sano Judah. He always kept current with the music, he bought everything. He was more about the music generally than I am, I've always been like specific music, specific vibe, specific style, he's just "you know, give the people what they want". But he knows the orthodox music and he consider that sacred. We linked up, we were going by Rootsman Potential, we were called Potential for short.

Then I met Takashi [Ras Takashi from Dubsensemania] and he became my roommate. This was around 95, maybe, 96. I was still doing catering and by that time I was cooking for Israel Vibration in a restaurant they own in East New York. Takashi got into the whole thing, the whole vegan food catering and the whole sound system thing with me, and he was playing sax very well. So I say "Yo, let's go by Wackie's and record." I took him to Wackie's. Wackie's recorded him but Wackie's was like maybe "meh," you know, he got tons of sax players, he's got Roland Alphonso who was still alive at the time ... Roland Alphonso I used to buy records from, because he used to sell records in this Jamaican restaurant called Apache, he use to set up records there and he would sell original Treasure Isle, Studio 1, original presses in those times, for cheap. Big up to Roland Alphonso, my collection was greatly enriched by him ... Anyway, Wackie's had sax players, that was not gonna do it, so I say he play the melodica too. Wackie's is like [mutters] "mm...Pablo..." [laughs]. But I bought him over and he played, Sugar Minott was there and they kind of coached Takashi and helped him develop a signature style of playing. So then Takashi became part of the sound, part of the Wackie's family.

(Kush and Takashi in Ex-Bodega, Yokohama, Jan. 2008.)

Anyway I just felt like Potential, the name Potential wasn't delivering [laughs] ... I always felt like, because what the music did for me, taking me out of the state that I was in - in hip hop at that time, you know, hip hop came to me through street education, which was also a life of crime, to be a criminal ... and I think reggae changed a lot of that for me, and Rasta, because Rasta took me from adolescence into manhood. My dad wasn't around, so all the guidance and father figure came from Rasta. Rasta was like a rite of passage for me. And regardless of how I've grown, and evolved, and known this and that, and figured this and that, I'm most comfortable as a Rastaman. So it's not about belief - this is who I am, this is how I'm most comfortable being myself, this is how I'm true to myself, so good or bad or whatever, that's me.

So the music is like redemption to me, you know, and the music, the message, the lifestyle that Rasta is about, is like a black man redemption. Not in the way of the different movements that were taking place in America, which was about anger and striking back and uprise ... because they got more guns, you know what I mean? They got tanks, you know? Whatever fucking civil rights or bullshit rights is fucking ink on paper, I think black people need more than that, more than recognition and appreciation and a place from the white man in America, saying "OK, we'll accept you too, you can live in our streets and you can eat with us." I think it's more than that, for the black man to get a lot of property in America and make it and still pay Uncle Sam all this huge tax, ha ha, he gets his due any fucking way. Black man was promised forty acres and a mule ... So nuff respect to all the movement, because the movement did a lot for so much oppression and suppression that black people were facing, but I think maybe by my generation more was needed. I grew up looking up to the Black Panther Party, and then you find out x-y-z got shot, and so it seems like almost anything you do they're gonna crush. So Rasta now come with repatriation and the idea of culture. Culture's a big thing, if you have your own land, your own nation, your own language, that's more powerful than to get recognition in someone else's.

So all that made more sense to me, and hating Whitey was not the solution either. There's a book by Walter Rodney called How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, a very interesting book, and there's another one by a brother from Trinidad, I can't remember his name ... but basically they break down racism, how racism is manufactured to have people feel certain ways, so they can create a situation that they won't get so much of an uprise from the masses. If you could make somebody feel that comfortable with seeing another human being degraded, and give them whatever reason, religious, social, then you can pull a lot of wool over their eyes. Walter Rodney spent a lot of time in the hills with Rasta people, educating, sharing, exchanging knowledge and information, so in some deep grassroots in the Rasta movement his teaching is there. And you learn as a pro-African militant person that racism is not necessarily hating or having anger or whatever, it's a systematic formulated thing, and to counteract it you got to have a systematic formulated plan also. You got to make preparation for preservation and survival, you know, so if the black man don't have a proper unified front representation he cannot really get the right proper respect that he deserve. You have a lot of small African states and Caribbean states, but it's so small and segmented ... Anyway, whatever, so Black Redemption to me meant everything that the music, the movement had done to me, including my love for humanity, my love for nature ... I like peace and love, I like when people get together and everybody's having fun, I think that's a good thing, so the music does that, because the music bring healing, it bring education, it bring things up that people have to deal with to progress and move. So that's what it did for me, because I'm not a Jamaican person. But I felt kind of uneasy putting the word black there and the person who made me feel very comfortable to put it there and not worry was Takashi, because he's into black music. So that's the name.

Then 97-98, Takashi went back to Japan and we did a Wackie's Japan tour to establish what became the Wackie's Far East Chapter. Before this I was doing the Wackie's distribution, selling it to the major distributors, because at that time in the 90s Wackie's had a revival, so I used to take care of selling his music, I'd be the one making the deals with the different distributors. I was working at Kim's Record Shop in Manhattan and that become like another Wackie's outlet. I was the music buyer and manager for reggae, world music and jazz. But when I went on this tour, Wackie's talked to this guy named Ira who owned this record shop named Jammyland, and basically when I came back I was to go to the shop to help him take care of the distribution, do the distribution from that shop. Then it became like another record shop gig for me and I end up being there for a while, this is like 99.

Jammyland was a great institution in the City of New York. Actually Jammyland brought dub to New York. They brought all Shaka stuff, they brought all the Mad Professor stuff. John, the guy who first opened Jammyland, he loves the music, he opened Jammyland primarily for love of the music. The records didn't really sell, they just sat there. John just wanted to try a thing, anything, you know what I mean? He loved Lee Perry, loved dub, loved Jamaican music, loved everything about it. Big heart. He didn't mind what sold or didn't sell, because he could stay there and play it for himself. He had a lot of people come into the record shop, I forgot when they opened, if it's like 94, 95, anyway, but nobody was getting into it. I went in there one day and I saw all these records, as many Lee Perry as he can find, as many Mad Professor as he can find, as much Shaka as he can find, and he had record signings, but really people didn't know what from what. So a lot of records stayed there.

When I was in Japan I fell really heavily into Mighty Massa. And for the duration I was in Japan that time, maybe it was six months, almost every month I reported on the mic. Massa was highly influenced by Shaka, Aba Shanti, Joey J ... Massa, man. Mighty Massa. Nuff respect. After seeing him do this in Japan I was convinced that I would have success with it in New York. "If this guy could do this thing here in Japan, this must can work in New York." That's what I said to myself. I'm still trying ... [laughs]. I'm not giving up, you know what I mean, I've seen highs and lows but I'm proud that I've given the people of New York an opportunity to experience people that I love and respect in the music. I made them see Shaka proper, with speakers and sound and everything, they've experienced Disciples, I couldn't get the whole of Iration Steppas but Sammy Dread came representing them, I played with Cultural Warriors ... I went out with a vengeance to play, as much as I can play, I played this music uncompromisingly and if people don't like it, they can just walk out.

I was doing a Friday night and I was doing a Sunday night. I was doing a Friday night called Studio One Lounge, we start with Studio 1, roots, dub, dub, dub ... [laughs]. I would get many different selectors who collected vintage roots to come down and play, like Dudley One, a great collector, and brother Vincent, Twins ... I started a party in the late 90s, before I went to Japan, because I was getting more and more of the dub stuff through Kim's, called Roots Revival, and that was at a place called the Cooler, a nice underground place in Manhattan by the meat district way in the west side ... it was heavily Yabby U oriented, heavily Black Ark oriented, deep, psychedelic sounding, and steppers stuff to get people into a trance kind of vibe. But when I came back from Japan I really wanted to do it at a level, you know, sound system and everything, so I got a siren, I didn't have a preamp but maybe I used two mixers and a four-way crossover, and different delays and stuff to make my own set up. One turntable, facing the wall.

Then I met some friends who did visuals. So I started doing this thing called Roots Steppers Dub Dance, and it was just roots, steppers and dub. I would do that once a month. I would do the Studio One Lounge on a Friday where I would invite these selectors, like rare, vintage, some tune like "I bet you don't know..." kind of situation, and then on Sunday nights at Swim, I would do kind of early big classic tune, quality roots out of Jamaica, and then dub. I always look for monthlys wherever I can get them, so one of the place was the Knitting Factory, in lower Manhattan, Tribeca. In Williamsburg I used to rent a loft and I would bring my sound there, maybe four double 18s, 12s, two massive horns, we'd string up, this place was called the Family, it was right under the JMZ train rail so you could be as loud as you wanted. That was like dub and steppers, roots steppers dub dance. And I was doing the Knitting Factory also once a month. Then there was a following, it had reached hundreds, you know ... I played for thousands, I played at the Brooklyn Museum, a thing the city does, early 2000s, they have a huge lot, near Prospect Park, I played at PS1 which is another public space, and Joe's Pub ... Then around that time they passed the smoking ban and that fucked up the scene, and gradually we stopped doing that.

But anyway, working at Jammyland, I started to put together a little home based studio. I started up with a Tascam tape machine, four track, a Yamaha keyboard, and I experimented with stuff, taking acapellas and messing around with mixing dub that I have with acapellas. Then Iauwata, the same who introduced me to this music, came to my house and he's telling me I can make my own music here. We must have made two albums worth of riddims in the space of a week, just laying riddims, him showing me how to do it. Then I met this kid named Karl, he's from Seattle, plays wicked bass, and we made a few riddims. "We Dem A Watch" was one of those, my first single. Before Glen Brown voiced on it I recorded Congos, Nicodemus, with Ashanti Roy, called it "Free Up Jah Children". Maybe I still have it, I never released that. Around that time also with Ashanti Roy we made a tune called "Black Market Babies" which he remade with somebody in France a couple of years ago. Then I linked up with Ptah, an old time musician, used to be around Jah Love, we made "Rise Up". Ranking Joe gave me my very first dubplate for my sound, Ranking Joe and Roman Stewart. If I was gonna record a DJ I always felt I should do something with Ranking Joe, and the people received it well, I was kinda happy with that. We Dem A Watch, Rise Up, come out of family vibes, people we have a family vibe with, that's how I got into the music and now that's how I'm doing it.

I'm now reaching a point where I'm doing a lot of work with as many veteran artists in Jamaica as I can, and some of the new ones. I've developed a working relationship with Judah Eskender Tafari. Judah is another one of those orthodox artists from ever since that really didn't get a proper due in so many different ways and aspects, he's into this music, being that he's a musician, he understands the music, we've had a strong working relationship and I'm looking forward to doing more stuff with him.

I want to big up my bredren who help with the sound, who also believe in the music, like Ian, Chandel, Levi, Tipabol, Prince Collin, a lot of bredren who help with the sound, in vocals or selections, collecting, just being there ... and big up to all the record shops, Moody's, Tony Ryan in the Bronx, those guys, historical, you know? They kept the fort when a lot of places lock down. A lot of big sound bust out of Brooklyn, like Addis, Bad Boy, Inner City, but a lot of sounds that were there in the 80s and 90s don't get the recognition. Hopefully some day somebody can do a history of sound system in Brooklyn, because I believe that if sound system had gotten more respect and more recognition maybe there would be more of a scene in New York. How it develop now is just DJs with specials, it's very rare you hear like sound, some tune that you hunt for, and you hope some time in your life before you die you get that tune ... Big up to the sounds, because if it wasn't for sound system a large part of my life would be different than it is now.

I'm happy doing what I'm doing, I love it. It's not very rewarding, it's very taxing, but there's a personal satisfaction. I'm more mature now, so I'm thinking business-wise about what I do. I still enjoy myself, but do it in moderation so that I'm safekeeping my survival and my responsibilities. But I love what I'm doing, I love the music, I give thanks that I discovered the music scene that developed in England, due to Shaka and everybody that played their role in making it a scene, to the point that it's all over Europe now, that I can play this music in Germany, in Berlin ... I never thought I'd be doing this when I started. I didn't think I'd be putting out music or anything like that. You have to follow your heart, man, you have to be selfish enough to allow yourself what you love, because life, situations in life sometimes can deprive one of giving oneself. That's life, that's part of your living experiences and they add to your life. Thank God for art."

(Note: A number of sessions from some of the New York sounds mentioned above, including African Love and Terrorist, can be found on WCTD over here.)

Live session: Kush at Wax Treatment in Horst Krzbrg, Berlin, 28.2.10. Wax Treatment is a night dedicated to bass-heavy music of different genres, which was set up in Spring 2009 by the crew from Hard Wax, Berlin's seminal techno and reggae record shop. Sound on the night is provided by the Killasan sound system, imported a few years ago from a club in Osaka, Japan, which for me is Berlin's best sound system (with due respect to the Funktion-One rig at Berghain).

This is a dubplate-only selection, featuring a heap of fresh unreleased tunes from vocalists like Judah Eskender Tafari, Fred Locks, Naggo Morris, Turbulence and many others. On the mic, apart from residents Tikiman and Koki, are special guests Rick Wayne and Sister Rheeah.

(Download: here and here.)

Ras Kush at Wax Treatment Berlin

2010-03-03T16:12:00.006Z

This session can now be found here.

Ten years of reggae and dub

2010-01-14T10:53:00.013Z

Here's a partial (in both senses) glimpse of reggae, dub and related genres from 2000-2009. This isn't intended as a historical overview or anything like that. What it represents is a cross-section of tunes produced in the last ten years which I have played more than usual on sound system, in clubs and bars or in my house. I’ve attempted to give it some kind of vague thematic organization. As a result there’s a multitude of one-away pieces which I’ve left out. But never mind. My more productive and prolific colleague Mr Eden has recently offered an excellent account of the same period over at his place. We have a couple of tunes in common.

1. Much of my roots selection concentrates on the 1990s. Don’t tell the avid 80s digital ebay posse, but this is because the 90s was the strongest decade for JA digital roots. So here, as a starter, kicking off the decade on the Fat Eyes label, are two big cuts in a 90s digital style, Culture’s Revolution and Morgan Heritage’s Kebra and the Fetha.

2. Which leads us on to Ruff Cutt. When thinking about this list I was struck by how many of my favourite upbeat roots tunes are on Ruff Cutt and Charm: two UK labels which have generally followed a more JA sounding direction. In particular I tend to think of Ruff Cutt as something like the UK’s answer to Xterminator. In the late 90s I was rinsing Freddy McGregor’s Give Jah the Glory and Glen Washington’s Give Jah Praise Every Day. Then in 2000-2001 came the Betta riddim, with cuts by Mighty Diamonds (A Better Day), Junior Kelly (One Day) and Anthony B (All Jah Children). These were followed by Starky Banton’s Blaze Up The Fire, Junior Kelly’s Jah Live On, Starkey Banton’s Righteousness and Nereus Joseph’s Rude Boy Town, all of which received heavy rotation at the time and ever since. Charm, meanwhile, put out the Bandits riddim, with cuts by Yami Bolo (Babylon Is Out Of Control), Luciano and others. At some point I might do a mix to showcase this material and other related stuff. In the meantime, here's Anthony B:

3. Generally known for hip hop and hardcore dancehall (too many to mention), Bobby Konders (Massive B) also put out a number of heavyweight relicks of classic riddims. His Cuss Cuss and Truth and Rights pieces were solid, but for me the crown goes to his massive cut of Tempo, featuring the inimitable Burro Banton.

4. Some time around 2003 I went round to visit a friend and found him waving his arms round his head and shouting about dancehall. ‘It’s coming from all kinds of angles right now!’ he said. And he was right: surprising and innovative bashment riddims were bumping and booming out of JA at a steady rate. One which hit me and stayed with me was 2004’s Big Up. Here's General Degree (D'Music) and Bounty Killer (No More Suffering).

5. Dave Kelly's 85 riddim is a case-study in how much can be done with how few musical elements. Cham's Ghetto Story was the original hit, but the YT counteraction, England Story, was really the one, with its litany of UK sound systems: 'I remember those days, Saxon used to shock, when dem and Coxson had People's Club locked, Unity from North London a run the place hot, and Java dat a West London top-a-top...' The 85 in turn swiftly gave birth to John John's Nukie riddim, which if anything is even more minimal: my favourite cut is the stomping Old Gun A Bus by a resurgent Tonto Irie. Here they are together:

6. Nick Manasseh has always been one of the most versatile producers on the UK roots scene: witness his early Riz label, and particularly his work with Earl 16 (Zion City, Natural Roots) on the one hand, and the raw Riddimwize with Danny Red on the other. Starting in 2005 he released a stream of storming 45s on the Roots Garden label, as well as several showcase LPs. When the Levi riddim came out in 2007 I was telling everyone who would listen that the Luciano and Ras Zacharri piece, River Jordan, was my tune of the year. I’m still feeling it.

7. What about UK dub? For me UK dub went through a bit of a stagnant period in the first half of the decade, bouncing back around 2007. Throughout the time, though, a constant point of reference is Russ Disciples, whom I regard generally as the benchmark UK dub producer. I wouldn’t necessarily say that his output in the last ten years has been as innovative as his early stuff but it’s always heavy, well arranged, with effective melodic hooks and strong percussion. Among the tunes that never leave my crate are Danny Vibes's Feel the Vibe, Tony Roots's Chant, Lutan Fyah's Serious Ting, Nya-Azania's Work With It, Singie Shante's Mental Slavery and, most recently, Johnny Clarke's Intruder.

8. The last ten years saw UK dub increasingly spreading throughout the rest of Europe, with the result that UK-based producers and sound systems are often heard to say that they get bigger, better crowds abroad than they do in their home territory. I’m not going to attempt to compile a representative list of big dub tunes from France, Italy, Switzerland, Sweden, Germany, Greece, Poland and so on. Instead, here’s a single early example which I’ve played a lot and which never fails to recall dark grimy squats and booming bass bins: Uzinadub's From The Tribe, released in 2003.

9. In 2007 I thought that dubstep might be what I wanted UK dub to turn into. It seemed to share several production features but push them further; it had space and weight, deep bass and unexpected percussion. It worked well with Richie Spice’s Burning too, although I didn’t feel that any of the numerous subsequent reggae refixes really matched this. A few years later I’m not following dubstep with the same intensity but some tunes are always cropping up in my UK dub mixes. Here's just one example: Over It by RSD (i.e. Rob Smith of Smith and Mighty), on Tectonic, one of dubstep's most consistently interesting labels.

10. And one for 2010. This year I’m sure that the soca / bashment / UK funky nexus is going to be huge. London's Heatwave crew and Montreal's Ghislain Poirier are right on top of this stuff. Here's one of the more recent things I got: AO by MJ Cole and Serocee. Brap!

Tambou!

2010-01-07T22:26:00.011Z

In the absence of various articles and interviews that are still in preparation, here’s a short mix, concentrating on music from Martinique and Guadeloupe, with a few things from other places thrown in. There’s already been some mention of the Antilles round these parts: the music featured here is later than the pieces on the Tumbélé comp, and generally more percussive. Much of it is based around, or influenced by, the rhythms of gwo ka and chouval bwa. For instant education on the history and meaning of gwo ka, turn to Duke Etienne’s article in the current issue of Shook Magazine (Vol. 1, No. 7) or check out the online companion piece here. The following notes are just a brief introduction to the mix, which at some point I hope to expand.

My first meeting with Antillean music was a chance encounter with a Gratien Midonet record, his extraordinary Ven en lévé, the LP from which the track ‘Mari Rhont...’ is taken. Midonet is usually described as a poet, composer and singer. I know of four albums by him: Ven en lévé (1979), Bourg la folie (1984), Linité (undated) and Potlach (2003). Bourg la folie is apparently the music from a film of the same name, based on a novel by Roland Brival.

Midonet’s music is a fusion. Some of the other tracks in this mix are far more stripped down, especially those by Esnard Boisdur, Eugene Mona and the Akiyo ensemble. Mona, singer and flute player, died in 1991 and was commemorated in 2006 by a tribute album entitled Léritaj Mona. Dédé Saint-Prix, also a flute player, can be heard here veering towards a sort of raw zouk.

These rhythms go back to Africa. Without trying to draw any specific parallels, here are also three tracks from, or derived from, Nigeria, to counterpoint the Caribbean pieces. Agbe De O, by the Sound Millionaires, is a bit of juju-influenced funk, or funk-influenced juju, depending on how you look at it. Jeka Jose is by the percussionist Gaspar Lawal, who was active as a session musician in London in the 1960s and 70s. Shacalao, meanwhile, is a storming version of Fela Kuti’s Shakara, rerouted via Colombia.

At some point I hope to expand this sketch with a more considered account of these tracks and their context. But in the meantime, here’s the music. Tambou means drums: read about them here.

Esnard Boisdur : En Moué O
Gaspar Lawal : Jeka Jose
Sound Millionaires : Agbe De O
Gratien Midonet : Mari Rhont Ouve La Pot
Fabriano Fuzion : Sé Kon Sa
Akiyo : Akiyo La O La Kale Kon Sa
Dédé Saint-Prix : Soldat Papillon
Lizandro Meza Y Su Conjunto : Shacalao
Eugene Mona : Guerie Guerriez
Fabriano Fuzion : Kaladja Vivilo 1
Gratien Midonet : Kannaval Sakré Pou Tout’ Z’Heb’ Poussé

Download here...

(Thanks to Frank and Paulo.)

Wall of Sound

2009-09-19T11:57:00.005+01:00

Berlin's Netaudio Festival kicks off on the 8th of October, bringing with it a wall of sound: a sonic map of the Berlin Wall, composed of field recordings taken all along its length. I asked J-Lab, musician and techno producer, about the genesis and development of the project, and the live performance, by TRIoon, which will grow from it.

(Source: berlin101.com)

"It all goes back to last January when we started talking about the Netaudio Berlin festival for this year. 2009 is the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Wall, and we were talking about different things, about how netaudio and creative commons are breaking down barriers in the music industry, breaking down walls ... last winter I was living in the Lohmüle trailer-park, which sits on the former death strip, the no man's land between the two walls, so it was very much in my mind. I thought about all the different commemorations of the Wall, the chunks that are left remaining, the way the route has been marked through the city, and now the Mauerweg path that follows the Wall all the way round. And I thought, no one's done a sound map of it.

I put the idea around a couple of people and they liked it, so the thing then was finding a way of doing it technically. Actually going out and making a field recording is so easy these days - we use a digital Zoom recorder, running off SD cards, you get great quality recordings out of it. But the organization of it, trying to find a partner to host it, that was a bit difficult. Then we got in touch with Udo from Radio Aporee, which is a global field recording website. He was really keen, keener than some of the other people we spoke to, so we set it up. Me and [musical collaborator] Bogdan decided to go out and do chunks of it. Bogdan's a native Berliner, he grew up very close to the Wall in West Berlin, it was part of his life. We do a collaborative project, TRIoon, together with a visual artist called Servando Barreiro. We got asked to play at the festival, so we decided to create a musical performance that uses a lot of elements from these field recordings, cut up and spliced, looped, sequenced, whatever. That's basically the project in a nutshell. It's an open source project, it works on a creative commons basis, so anyone can load stuff up. We've had a few other contributors so far but mainly it's been me, Bogdan and Servando running round different chunks of the Wall.

- How much of it have you covered so far?

There's about 25km out of 163 which haven't been done yet.

- Do you do it absolutely systematically, every certain number of metres, or what?

No, not really, we decided to do it by feel. There was this idea that we could do it at every significant spot, make a recording where every person was killed trying to cross, for instance, where every checkpoint was or every watchtower, but that's just too much of a headfuck. The thing about it is to capture the essence of what has been left behind. Has that scar disappeared? Where is that scar? Because in some places of the city you'd never know the Wall was ever there. Then in other places, on the edge of the city for instance where the Brandenburg and Berlin boundary is, there's a huge scar in the forest 150 metres wide. Some of it's grown back, some of it hasn't, the ground was so screwed up with pesticide spraying that nothing's grown back. Then there's other areas where people are building yuppie houses on the site, you've got Club der Visionäre, a trailer-park, there's many interesting different environments that it passes through.

- Do you record at night as well or just in the daytime?

We do want to make some night recordings, the city centre's the ideal thing to record at night, places like Club der Visionäre, Yaam, Maria's ... you get a different acoustic environment.

- And what's the most bizarre sound you've encountered?

Where the Wall crosses Elsenstrasse, it's quite a famous spot because a tunnel was dug underneath it back in the 60s. There was some extreme South American death metal coming out of someone's stereo. Normally you get bicycles and stuff like that, fragments of people's conversations, a lot of traffic noises, a couple of drunks popped into the background of one recording ... nothing so out of the ordinary. But when you start processing it, chopping it up, getting it ready for the live set, listening to it closely and picking things out, then you start getting interesting sounds.

- So that's a spinoff project right? You take bits that you've done on the map and what do you do with them?

You just process them really, it's the same as grabbing any other sample. That sounds a bit simplistic ... the great thing about digital music technology is the fact that you can take field recordings, samples and stuff, and completely destroy their original reference and context, move things. It's like painting an impression in sound of what is now at the Wall, where the Wall stood. Some of it I've chopped up, detuned, turned into basses and things like that. But there's a few really powerful percussion sounds I've managed to pick out from background industrial and construction noise. You don't have to do anything with them, just clean the air and noise off the recording a little bit and you're ready to go. I've been jamming around with it, you can make complete industrial noisescapes and stuff like that, or you can use those loops to add a narrative or context to another recording or a song. I've put some musical motifs in and really all I do is select a sound which I think is apposite - just playing some field recordings, you get an emotional response to what you're hearing, colouring it, putting the recording in a kind of frame.

- I saw on the Berliner Fenster today that, according to a recent opinion poll, 15% of Berliners want the Wall back.

I've often said that, in light of what's happening to some areas, parts of the city that we know and love, maybe it would be a good idea to build a new wall, but this time around the entire city, not just through the middle, and make it out of dogshit. It'll keep the investors out for a few years.

- That wall is already well in progress in Neukölln and Friedrichshain.

It is, yeah, it's just not distributed in the right place in the city."

African Dancehall and Hip Hop Minimix

2009-09-15T13:55:00.006+01:00

Keep warm in the approaching winter, cure colds, flu, toothache etc., with this bumping and grinding 30-minute minimix of African hip hop and dancehall. It features Nouakchott's 994 Crew (whom I've previously written about here), Pee Froiss (Senegal), African China (Nigeria), Pupa Bajah da Lyrical Bomber (Sierra Leone), Smod and the Zotto Boyz (both from Mali). The tracks are taken from a miscellaneous bunch of CDs and tapes, mostly purchased in Bamako, Nouakchott or in the African Union Headquarters in Neukölln, Berlin. Apart from the sites linked here, those interested should also check out futureafreeka and africanhiphop. Two small nuggets of information: Smod's next album is apparently being produced by Manu Chao. And I'm pleased to note that 'Our Government Bad' references my favourite Fela tune, Shuffering and Shmiling: '49 sitting 99 standing...'

994 Crew feat. Pee Froiss : Diogg Jengou [Art de la RIM]
Pee Froiss : Million [Konkerants]
African China : Men Wey Sabi [Crisis]
African China : Our Government Bad [Crisis]
Pupa Bajah : Raw War [Half Man Half Amazing]
Pee Froiss : High [Konkerants]
Smod : Racisme [Dunia Kuntala]
Zotto Boyz : I Sigi [Keledabila]

(Thanks to Amadou, Xuman, Robin Bah.)

RAW dub style

2009-09-13T07:18:00.021+01:00

Sooner rather than later, the stray dub fan in Berlin encounters the RAW.tempel. RAW stands for Reichsbahnausbesserungswerk – a defunct factory complex in Friedrichshain, used in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries for maintenance of trains. In 1998 the site was taken over by a project group who started to use it for artistic and musical events: it now houses several venues of different sizes, and hosts numerous workshops and activities – political, ecological and social as well as artistic. There’s also a climbing wall and a skate park. Prominent on the site is the RAW.tempel, which over the last decade has secured a reputation as one of the centres of gravity of the Berlin dub scene. Berlin’s a long way from London and accordingly the dub scene has a different history and a different focus. In late May 2009 I met up with one of the RAW crew, Raimund Reintjes, to ask him for his perspective on dub in Berlin. We talked about the history of the RAW.tempel, the evolution of dub in Berlin and the ever-present threat of gentrification, along with the influence of the netlabel scene and the ‘third wave of dubby ideas’ which has the city locked right now. But it all begins with psychedelic trance ...

"In the mid-90s dub was a big thing in Berlin, not in comparison with the techno scene of course, but there were regular dub events in lots and lots of venues. Towards the end of this movement, at the end of the 90s and early 00s, the psychedelic trance scene gathered at RAW.tempel. At this time psychedelic trance and dub were quite closely related, because dub was nice for the chill out area, along with the chai shops and everything. That was the first connection between RAW.tempel and dub. The psychedelic trance scene then moved away but the dub scene stayed, and it's really established itself there.

- So what kind of dub are we talking about here?

When we're talking about the mid-90s, most of the dub played here was UK style: Adrian Sherwood’s On-U sound, African Headcharge, Dub Syndicate, Audio Active, along with Dreadzone, Rockers Hi Fi, the Disciples, Zion Train and the Universal Egg crew - this is what I mean when I say UK sound. They were much more present than Jamaican dub, which had been ruling the scene for the previous 20 years but was not really recognized in Berlin. There was a time for reggae, the late 70s and early 80s, it was really big, but that was Bob Marley, Jimmy Cliff, and there wasn't so much talk about King Tubby, Lee Perry, Sly and Robbie or King Jammy. Then the techno thing started, and it influenced dub production. So with new technology and fresh ideas from electronic music they formed this 90s electronic dub, which was mainly done in Britain. So the dub and reggae idea came up again but in a new 'coat', let's say. And this second generation of dub got quite popular in Berlin and some other German cities. A guy called Deeroy [proprieter of the celebrated Deeroy’s Dub Store on Pappelallee, now closed] organized the Dub Cruiser, and together with a guy called Lujah he opened the legendary Dub Club. Then the scene died down again, at the end of the 90s, and now it's coming up again mainly in the form of dubstep and dubtech. It gets fresh ideas again, it's kind of the third wave of dubby ideas.

- Do you find that the same people who listen to 90s dub listen to dubstep?

Yes, it goes quite well together. If you see what's going on in RAW.tempel, there's the Dub Wohnzimmer every week on Wednesdays, and for years they've been doing nothing other than UK dub, sound system dub, with some Jamaican roots, and now they're also heavily involved in dubstep. But many organizers or places where they do dubstep also come from the drum'n'bass side. It doesn't really matter which side you're discovering it from. What I'm expecting and hoping and really like is the idea that people are discovering dub because they have discovered dubstep.

- You said to me a while ago that you were really interested in European dub rather than UK dub right now.

It's a personal thing of mine, in the 90s I was listening to so much UK dub, I know it for some fifteen years already, and I’m always hunting after fresh ideas. And what I've found is that there's a large, growing scene in Europe, especially France, which has a completely different cultural input into their dub community, because they're not so related to the English speaking part of the world and they have a lot of immigrants from North Africa and Arabian countries. They often have a combination of a lot of different musical influences, so it's sometimes really hard to explain to anyone why I would call it dub, because if you're not into the subject you don't hear that there's a dub idea inside. So French dub has this drum’n’bass aspect, Arabian sounds, rai, hip hop, breakbeat, a nice unique mixture of different styles, open to a lot of things. This is what I really like, this is vital.

- Can you give us some idea of who you’re thinking about here, which artists?

Kaly Live Dub, Le Peuple De l'Herbe, Zenzile – though they’ve seemed to shift away from dub now. And above all Hi Tone and Brain Damage from the Jarring Effects label. It’s one of the most creative labels I know, where genre borders don't exist, a very fusion-orientated label. They get musicians from a lot of styles, a lot of countries, a lot of musical backgrounds, put them together and form new projects, but the dub idea is still linking everything or nearly everything. 60-70% of the output of that label is related to dub in any case. Led Piperz is a fantastic dubstep project also from France, and you have Fedayi Pacha. Led Piperz performed at the Jarring Effects night in Maria and I wanted to go home because it was early in the morning and I was kind of through with the day, but Vincent, the label manager, forced me to stay to see them: 'They do some dubstep, but it's not only dubstep ... if you've seen Benga and Skream already, forget about them, it's much better...' Well, I'd seen Benga and Skream at the beginning of the year at Club Transmediale, and was really impressed by their performance, so if someone's telling me that there's a dubstep project which is even more powerful than Benga and Skream I won’t miss it. So I stayed. And I really did not regret it. It was absolutely amazing!

Dubstep is really popular now and it's really pushing things in an interesting new direction. But there’s also the releases from the netlabel scene, the combination between electronic music and dub. All the techdub and dubtech, which is becoming more and more popular, I think it's a child of this netaudio idea, because I never heard something like this before and I discovered a lot of stuff on small labels who are releasing mp3s for free. There's a lot of labels in Europe now specializing in techdub, which also gives the development of dub a fresh and interesting direction.

- Again, give us a few representative names.

Ok, Deepindub, an Italian netlabel run by a guy called Maurizio Micelli. Qunabu, a Polish label run by Piotr Kaliński. Then we have the German spearhead Jahtari, for chip-tunes reggae, 8 bit dub. Disrupt, Jan Gleichmar, who is the founder of the label, has really done a lot of good networking, he's come around, spread the idea and people really like his kind of music. The label also promotes this Bo Marley thing, a Danish performance group with mobile soundsystem and some freaks in incredible outfits. The singer speaks German and the rest of the band take it as funny voice samples. So this is a funny dub project who don't take things too seriously, they sing about meat, for example, an anti-vegetarian song, but with a twinkle in the eye. When you follow the words, the beginning of the sentence is different to what they're telling you at the end, they mix things up, make mistakes, do illogical things. There’s some quite Dadaistic aspects in their music and performances. I like this because they play with everything, they make music which makes you smile. And Marko Fürstenberg, for example, from Leipzig, the same town as Jahtari, he's done a lot of excellent releases in the past years. Volphoniq from France is a big name in the netlabel community, great performers, and also in France there’s Fresh Poulp Records. In Germany Stadtgrün from Cologne have put out a lot of decent techdub. And then there’s Ornaments, a vinyl label who are re-releasing some netlabel dubs or new stuff from netlabel dub artists.

- When you say techdub, do you mean stuff influenced by Rhythm and Sound, Basic Channel, stuff like that?

Yes, but it goes further than that, it's much more related to the minimal techno sound. Techdub or dubtech, you can have hard techno beats with a dubby tune running through it, so you have this relaxed atmosphere inside a really hard beat. Also you can have a dub tune which is so minimal that it is really reduced to the very basic elements, so you can hardly call it dub any more. It's not this loungey deep house dub thing, it's really a dancefloor filler.

- Is it particularly a Berlin-associated phenomenon or not really?

It's a niche, it's not a big wave rolling through the streets which everyone's excited about, but there's a small community who really like it. So for example last weekend there was the Thinner label night in the Arena Club, and they had an exclusively techdub lineup: Das Kraftfuttermischwerk from Potsdam, Marko Fürstenberg, Gabriel Le Mar who was a big name at the end of the 90s in the psychedelic trance scene. The night was completely done by techdub artists. These kind of events don't happen very often. But three years ago no one would have been attending. So they're creating something which is strong and getting stronger hopefully.

- Back to RAW.tempel: it seems the RAW.tempel is more directed towards dub, while Yaam is more reggae and dancehall. Is this a deliberate policy?

No, it developed a bit like this but Yaam is now doing more dub things also. The dub festival [3-5 Sept. 2009] will take place at Yaam. There's a small amount of people who organize these kind of events, and a small amount of venues where you can organize them: Yaam is bigger than RAW.tempel, you can fit more people in, you have the possibility to do a second floor, outside things even, so it's much more suitable for festivals. I'll probably go as a visitor, it’s relaxing to enjoy two or three days of heavy dub music without any pressure. So really I'm fine with this.

On the other hand, RAW.tempel was really supporting dub in the darkest days, at the beginning of this decade, when no one was playing any dub at all, and dub was a lost idea from somewhere in the past. Dancehall grew stronger and all the venues jumped on the dancehall idea. But we did dub, dub, dub, and no dancehall, and only a little reggae. And now with the growth of dubstep and the return of dub into the clubs, techdub, we're benefiting from the fact that we've been doing dub for all these years without looking at whether anyone else is doing it, or if we are cool or hip. There was a small dub community who were able to do their thing, and now this small dub community has become a bigger dub community. We do concerts, we have the weekly Dub Wohnzimmer, a lot of people are involved and some of them also do the Dubstation at the Fusion Festival. We've also started doing dubstep events with a series called Interzone. Not at RAW.tempel, but as a kind of spin-off, there was an attempt to relaunch the Dub Club, in the spirit of the original venue from the 90s. Eventually this didn’t happen but some other projects appeared like the Dub Pub, which is done by a lot of people also involved in RAW.tempel. Then there's the Dub Camp at Rieben in June, a festival outside Berlin, which is also a spin-off of all the city's dub activities. And there’s dub in summer beer gardens and illegal open-air things in parks. So it's a good time to enjoy dub in Berlin these days.

- It seems that this is a time of a lot of change for Berlin, in terms of structures, venues, gentrification, the Mediaspree project ... is RAW.tempel affected by these currents?

On the one hand I have to disagree: the situation since the teardown of the Wall has been constant change, this city is always changing. There were massive changes in the 90s, when Berlin became capital of the reunited Germany, when they started to heal the wounds of the partition. So I wouldn't say that this is a time of specific change, it's been the same before: venues opening for a few months, closing, opening again on a different site, a new name, illegal, semi legal, vanishing again ... Berlin's been like this for 20 years. But on the other hand you're right. Development in the inner city districts, like Prenzlauer Berg and Mitte, was the topic of the first 10-15 years after reunification, but now change is more or less over in these areas because they're settled in a certain way. But the things you were mentioning, Mediaspree, this is the third and maybe last big field of inner city empty space where you can really form attractive places, whatever attractive means, and whoever you want to attract ... Mediaspree is a huge area, with major pressure from money, investors, big companies, global players. Of course RAW.tempel is affected by this, though not so heavily as all the alternative projects situated directly in the Mediaspree area: Yaam, Bar25, Maria and the others which are going to close to make way for towers and office blocks.

I hope Mediaspree is the last really big mistake in Berlin, because the politicians should recognize that they've been going too far by allowing nearly everyone to buy out the right and left side of the Spree. They’ve got rid of an area which is so valuable in so many different ways, like recreation, alternative culture, the feeling that Berlin is not just a big city but also a very lively space for many different cultures and peoples and attitudes. So what they are doing is monostructuring all the Spree with office buildings and this kind of stuff, and pushing alternative projects, which have been there for ten years, out of the area. This is what we mean by gentrification: people who with creative energy and power get into a space, create something interesting, and are then thrown out on account of money, because they’ve been making the space interesting.

This kind of thing is affecting RAW.tempel, because what's actually happening is that the whole area – we're talking about an area larger than 80 football fields – has been bought by a company whose only interest is making money out of land speculation. They don't want to develop anything, they don't want to create city spaces, do something where you can discuss if it's good or bad, they just want to push the price of the land up and get money out of the fact that they own it. So in this case they bought the site for 4 million euros two years ago and they might sell it for between 11 and 20 million next year. So they triple or quadruple the money they invested. Of course 4 million is not a price which reflects real monetary value, it reflects a lot of circumstances and aspects which you have to keep in mind: you have to spend a lot of money just to get rid of great parts of the rotten old structures, get rid of the chemicals in the ground, build an infrastructure so that you are able to develop something. So you will have a lot of cost just to get the thing in shape.

The investors want us to be a project who they can throw out at any time, where they dictate the framework of what we can do and how we have to do it. We were the first who developed anything on this empty space, attracting people to come and see what they can do with it, so there's no way that anyone is going to tell us what we can do there and what not. So we're arguing this, and we're also arguing that the whole area should not be developed just for maximum profit, but instead they should keep in mind the needs of the people who live in the area around, who don't have any playgrounds, or any green, open space just to be in. Because we say this, and we mean what we say, we’re not just trying to get a better position in negotiations, it's difficult for the investors to deal with us. And this is why they'd like us to go. But I don't think they will manage this. There's a strong political will to keep RAW.tempel, because with the public voting about Mediaspree, political parties and responsible authorities have realized that people really don’t like things going on like this without anyone having a brake in their hand. So I don't think politicians will make the same mistakes in the RAW area as they did with Mediaspree, but of course it will not be heaven on earth. An investor wants to earn money, and he wants to develop the thing, so there have to be compromises in some or many fields. But that does also mean that there has to be space for alternative cultures, recreation space for the neighbourhood, away from the cars, the pollution and all the velocity of the city."

(Since this interview took place, RAW.tempel appears to have been the victim of a campaign of harassment, suffering several arson attacks of unknown motivation. Nonetheless, some signs are appearing that its future may be secured, on a legal basis, for another decade.)

Sofrito and the Antilles

2009-05-21T06:27:00.013+01:00

On an almost tropical May evening in Hackney, Musik Line met Hugo Mendez and asked him about his involvement with promoting the music of the French Caribbean islands: Martinique, Guadeloupe, Dominica and associated places. Along with the other members of the Sofrito crew – Frankie Francis, Mighty Crime Minister and MC Kwasi – Hugo has been responsible for putting on some of London’s more kicking parties of recent years, rocking east-side warehouses (as well as more overground venues such as Cargo) with rarely heard highlife, calypso, gwo ka and cadence records, as well as releasing some tasty re-edits. He is currently working on a compilation of French Caribbean music, to be released later this year on the respected Soundway label. It’s a part of the world that isn’t that well known in non-francophone countries, so I asked him to tell us a bit about its musical context and styles: about forms such as compas, gwo ka and bele, which flourish alongside more well known rhythms like calypso and beguine. I also asked him about Sofrito, their parties, their releases and his project with Soundway.

- Start by telling me a bit about Sofrito, as a label and as promoters.

We're not trying to make it a world music listening thing, it's meant to be more a club / party thing. We think that the music is brilliant to dance to and it creates an atmosphere in a club unlike any other music. So even if it's quite cheesy, if you play a great old calypso record, people who have never heard that music or anything like it before can immediately identify with it and dance to it. Whereas if you get involved with the old music scenes, the rare music scenes like funk or soul or jazz, it tends to disappear up its own arsehole. People are trying to out-rare each other.

- Same in reggae!

Well at least the thing with reggae is it's all got big bass, it's fat ... but this stuff, it's irrelevant whether you know it or not, we're not trying to make it obscure, we're trying to make it accessible by playing really fun music. A lot of the musicians that have played at our parties, who are in bands that play funk or jazz or afro stuff, they're also into awkward, weird music – not to denigrate it, but they love Sun Ra, odd music - stuff not naturally intended for dancing. The point of the parties is to play stuff that's happy, it's not deep, introspective, weird, it's music to make you smile and dance and if it doesn't do that we don't play it. We might have a few records that are may be rare or interesting in some way but if you can't dance to them it's irrelevant. Luckily we've never had a trainspotty crowd come down to our nights and it's always been a good percentage of women to men. Something like dubstep, which is interesting, very well produced, my experience of going to a dubstep night is it's 95% geezers, stoned, in caps, staring at the DJ and not dancing. The music might be great but that's not my kind of party. I’d rather go somewhere where people are naturally smiling. Calypso, Latin, highlife, beguine, compas, it's not serious music. You can take it seriously in that you're really into it, but you can't be really serious and moody about compas because that's not the point. It's carnival music. So the atmosphere is only really made by everyone involved, not just everyone standing looking at a performance. It's a much more collective thing.

- How long have you been running parties in London for?

Only three years. The first party we did was at Passing Clouds [in Dalston], and it was too busy. The next party was at this warehouse in Whitechapel, which was far too busy, it was a bit bigger than Passing Clouds but it was very narrow. That was a wicked party. But unfortunately the people that ran that place had just started it the week before and we managed to shut them down. The party was so big that they could never do anything there again. Then we did it at the Old Boys Hall [in Dalston], we did three or four there, then again at Passing Clouds, we did one up in Stoke Newington somewhere, then the Empowering Church came along, which is really good, that's been the best venue so far. The Old Boys Hall was probably the best parties that we did but again it was too dangerous, too many people, there's only one exit.

- You generally have some live stuff as well as DJs.

We did put together a band, the Sofrito All Stars, for a while, which was great. We had some of the guys from Heliocentrics and some really great horn players and a guy called Alfred Bannerman, a Ghanaian guitarist who used to be in a band called Boombaya in the 70s, then in Osibisa. But it was too difficult to have a ten piece band. All of them had more financially viable things to be doing and it was very difficult to hold together a band like that for the odd gig. We did a few gigs with them and it was great, we'd love to do something again in the future. We did a kind of Latin thing with some of the same guys and some different people last year which went really well too. It's just a question of getting time to rehearse.

- The parties came before the releases?

The label was our effort to get people who were more into their house or dance music to listen to something slightly different. The releases are more on the kind of dance / disco tip. We cut an edit of the first track we did, using it as a dubplate to play out, and percussionists or horn players would play over the top. And then we cut a version of that. We took loops, built it up from the bottom again. The other track on the first 12” is a more recent thing, from Ivory Coast, that's an edit as well, a kind of mystery track. So far there's the two 12s, a remix for Far Out Records which is a Brazilian thing by Sabrina Malheiros, more straight forward and dancey, and then we've done a remix for the Akoya Afrobeat Band from New York, which is coming out soon. They gave us the whole session on DVD, about twelve hours of music for one song. We did a highlife version, got some people to play extra bits and completely changed the rhythm around, trying to take people away from the idea that African music is just Afrobeat. Afrobeat is amazing but actually for me, on the dancefloor, it's not the best African music. Highlife is as interesting, rumba is as interesting, there's a lot of music from Africa that is as interesting as Afrobeat, so we were trying to take it and give it a bit more of a bump. Ideally we’d like to be putting out new music. One of the reasons we wanted to start the label was simply to put out the kind of records that you might play in Cargo rather than a warehouse party, a bit more commercial. That seems to work because people pick up on the fact that it’s not big or clever, it’s something you can play out which has got a slightly different style. It’s the kind of thing you can stick in your bag and play.

- How many copies of the Sofrito 12”s do you press?

It varies. We don't expect to sell many, maybe 500, but we did three times that for the last 12”, and the next one, from the reactions that we've got from people that have heard it, should certainly do quite well. It's got to cross over from people who like African or Latin music to people who like house or disco, otherwise you won’t sell it. You've got to sit a very fine balance. The reason the last one went so well was that there was an edit of a Caribbean cover version of a jazz fusion track by Ralph MacDonald on it. All the jazz heads recognized the tune and bought it for that. That's something that's difficult to repeat. The next one is going to be a Caribbean / African disco thing and a really raw highlife thing, which is more what we play. Hopefully people will be more into the highlife stuff than the disco stuff at some point. Some of the African disco stuff is cool, but I guess for me what I like most is Latin and Caribbean music, calypso, beguine, Haitian stuff.

- Do you find it hard to get?

As long as you're not buying it in England it is – or was – pretty easy to get. No one valued it. Especially in France, people were still turning up shitloads of that stuff for nothing. If it hasn't got a funk track on it then no one wants it. You can go into a shop after someone that's looking for funk and they'll leave all the good stuff and take very second-rate funk records for a lot of money. Then you can go in and buy two-euro records that are great. Listening to bits and bobs on CDs, then going there and finding loads of stuff, meeting loads of people, developing your taste, you find out what you do and don't like. And then learning more about Latin music and understanding the huge exchange between the rhythms and all the different islands and countries. There are such similarities between music from the north coast of Colombia, Guadeloupe, Trinidad, Puerto Rico, it was just flying around. Change one bar of the rhythm and you've got a different style. People were covering each other’s records, and the bands were touring all around, on cruise ships. one of the most important bands in Guadeloupe and Martinique in the '60s was probably Ryco Jazz, a Congolese band. They moved to Paris in the mid-60s and then they were booked by a Congolese guy in Martinique to do a season there and ended up staying for five years. They went to Guadeloupe, did the cruise ships, and they brought Congolese rumba, which was already being sold in the French Caribbean but they caned it, they mixed it, a lot of the players in the band by then were Antillean percussionists and that's how that particular sound came about.

- Where have your own travels in that part of the world taken you?

I've been around a few islands but the main ones are Dominica, Guadeloupe and Martinique. Dominica's kind of different. It was French, then it was English, then it was French, then it was English again. Now it's wholly independent, it's not subsidized by anyone. The biggest investors are Venezuela, Cuba and China, so it doesn't have a whole lot to do with Europe. Guadeloupe and Martinique are obviously still part of France, colonies. There’s a huge amount of problems, and with the riots that were going on earlier this year there's some really heavy stuff going down. There's a fair amount of innate racism and most of the money is held by white old plantation families, Békés. The islands are very different in character. Guadeloupe is more rural, Martinique is more metropolitan. Martinique's a bit richer. But they're very cut off, the only airlines that really fly there are Air France or Corsair, although American Airlines flies once a week. For some reason the French don't encourage foreigners to go there, they keep it in the family. They're pretty neglected places. Compared to a lot of other Caribbean islands they're quite well off but they're more expensive than going to Paris, everything is imported. An average Guadeloupean will make ten times what someone from Dominica will make, but they're poorer because it costs so much money to do anything. The bureaucracy on the islands is stunning. If you're trying to do any work, license any music or anything like that, it's a mixture of French bureaucracy and Caribbean timekeeping, which is a stunning combination. But I've met some wonderful people in Guadeloupe, alongside some very awkward people. The first thing they ask you is "are you French?", and when you say no they're a lot nicer to you.

- So you were out there digging for tunes and looking for stuff to license for the forthcoming Soundway comp?

The first time I went there it was more just exploring, to see how the land lies. I had a few contacts but because they're small places if you go and ask one person, they'll know someone else and so on. I made most of my contacts the first time, interviewed a few people, tracked down a few people, found a bunch of tunes, came back and then a year later got it together to go over and license the tracks. The first time I went it was very vague. The second time I had a much better idea, I more or less had a track listing. I hoped I'd find loads of new stuff but I had a track listing and I think about half of the tracks I went out there with are still on the comp and the other half have been replaced by things I found out there the second time. It's going to be interesting to see what people think of the album because although it's similar to a lot of other things, it doesn't tick the funk box, it doesn't tick the Afrobeat box, it's not hip for the people that like psychy African music, it's not hip for the funky people. But it's great music and certainly through DJing now it's the stuff that gets the best reaction.

- So what sort of genres are we talking about?

It's early, we're doing 65 to 72-3, so it's before zouk. It's kind of "roots of zouk" I suppose, but there's some Latin stuff. The Latin stuff has got a particular flavour, it's quite shrill in the horns but it's a really interesting way they treat the rhythm. It's got some heavily Haitian-influenced stuff, it's got beguine, which is the standard style from Martinique and Guadeloupe. It's got some calypso, some raw gwo ka, Guadeloupean drumming, and bele in Martinique which is similar thing, a set dance which is really powerful. Going to see a bele in Martinique was an astounding experience. So it's got some of that. A few Latin things, raw, quite jazzy, a couple of merengues. Merengue comes from Dominican Republic and Haiti but it was picked up massively in Angola as well and a lot of the stuff sounds Angolan, which is practically nothing to do with the French Caribbean, so it’s interesting to see how the rhythms go around. Merengue from Dominican Republic is faster and harder, Haitian meringue tends to be a bit slower, a little jazzier. The merengue now from Dominican Republic sounds like rave music, 180 bpm stuff, much more four-four, much more African. That was big back then as well but it was much more mellow. Then there’s compas, a lot of early compas-style stuff.

- I'm never quite clear what compas is rhythmically.

The best way I describe compas is ragga, "boom ba-doom, boom ba-doom", it's that beat with a slightly different twist on it, it's that bounce, that bump. It's easier to hear in the later stuff. Earlier on it's more complex, big band stuff. That beat is obviously also in Jamaica, but in a sense it doesn't have that much to do with reggae, it's a different rhythm, it's come from the whole Caribbean I guess, in the same way that zouk is a mixture of many different things.

- What's the comp called?

Tumbele. It’s a rhythm, the rhythm that Ryco Jazz gave their name to, a slow bouncy semi-Haitian semi-Congolese rhythm. We put one track Haitian track on the album, although it was recorded in Martinique. We put it on because Haitian bands were touring all the time and they were influencing the music, so it's important to have a track from a Haitian act that recorded there. But a lot of the Haitian stuff that was recorded in Martinique is really badly recorded, it's very interesting music but sometimes difficult to listen to because it's got no bass and it's really shrill, which is unfortunate because some of it's killer. The early Haitian stuff, there's a label called Ibo, and Macaya, they used to record the stuff in Haiti and press it in New York. They didn't press many copies, they might have pressed a few thousand of the early releases. I've found a few and they all tend to be knackered, but there's some amazing stuff. There’s a lot of Haitian music on 78s, really mad shit. A label called Ansonia, which I think was originally based in Dominican Republic or Puerto Rico, put out loads of Haitian stuff, some of which is good, some of which isn't so good. And they were putting 78s out, a long time ago.

- Have you got any?

None of the 78s, they tend to break. The 78s I've had in my hands, the sound quality is so terrible. They're great as artifacts, but I'd rather buy the CD reissue that someone's cleaned up. You can't really use 78s for Djing. But yeah, the Haitian stuff is brilliant, and again it's a beat that's not really known over here, but when you play it people respond to it immediately. It's accessible, that's why people made it, and that's the thing with Sofrito, just trying to be really simple and play something that works.

- Is this a big eBay market now?

I wouldn't say it's a huge eBay market, there's some of it on eBay but not many people buy it. Again, the things that club/DJ people are looking for at the moment don't tend to be on those records, although there are people that are really into collecting old compas and calypso.

- So it's a good time to be buying Haitian and Antillean music?

It kind of was. It's more difficult now. But even so, when there's no sound samples, it's just stuck up on eBay ... there's a guy in Paris, he deals records, and he was playing me some really killer Guadeloupean and Haitian stuff, saying "oh, I've never found another one of these and if I did I'd sell it for this much money...". I thought, all right, well, go and look on eBay, there it is, $5, I’ll have it - that doesn't happen too often, the ebay hype is all down to how things are presented. It's good to be able to buy a few. But I've never been a mental collector, I like to have nice records of course, but I've got other things to spend my money on, I'd rather go out and have a good time. If you're collecting records and you think, "oh, this is worth 200 quid", it's only worth 200 quid if it's mint and the cover's mint, which it tends not to be, most of the time it's going to be knackered. So it's not worth 200 quid, it's worth what you paid for it, but you're happy to have it, there you go. When you start thinking about records mainly in terms of money it gets a bit dangerous because they don't really have an intrinsic value.

- Do you find when you go to Martinique and Guadeloupe that people are quite attuned to European record collectors coming over and looking for stuff?

Not really - because no one's interested in records over there, the people that would have bought records back in the day have binned them all, they've gone; and all the people that are really into their music have got the records, they don't really care what they're worth, they are never going to sell them. I've dubbed stuff off people over there. I'm more interested in having the music than the object. Of course everyone loves a cool record, but it's not the be all and end all. And people get a bit funny about records.

- Very true! And presumably for every couple of days digging you have to spend months of licensing.

Yeah.

- How do you do it?

Mostly luck! And they're small places, so if you have one contact, that person might know everyone you need to know. Or they might know someone that knows someone else that knows someone else.

- Do you run into the classic kind of problem that you have in Jamaica of disputes over copyright and ownership? Because in Jamaica famously it's all pretty messed up.

It's messed up pretty much everywhere. The law has changed since the music was made and people have a different understanding of copyright ownership in different countries.

- Give us some background on the general music scene on the islands.

If you go to Guadeloupe or Martinique, they’re split into communes, like small boroughs, a lot of them are pretty rural. Each commune has its own celebrities and bands and music. In Martinique they have a bele, a drumming thing, on different nights. It's not a big concert, it could be in a car park, by someone's house, outdoors somewhere - it's just something that you do. This stuff's being going on for hundreds of years, you see people going down there and they're not wearing their national dress for tourists, they turn up in their tracksuits. They've been running or they've been to a bar or something, and they come down, hang out for a little bit, dance, go away again. It's just a part of what's going on and it’s not really trumpeted.

- Is there a sound system thing going on there as well? Do people set up stacks of speakers and play cadence and stuff like that?

Yeah they do. Zouk, cadence, ragga's big, there's a lot of live bands playing over massive sound systems as well. Then in Dominica, there's a couple of clubs in Roseau [the capital of Dominica] where they will invite DJs over from Martinique or Guadeloupe and the rest of it is they'll have a jam in the village, string up a small set. They don't have sound systems in the way that Jamaica will have many different named sound systems, you just go down to Melvina's bar and someone will be playing some music. They'll play bouyon, soca, ragga, a bit of reggae, cadence. And in all the villages they'll have a little thing now and then, get a barbeque going, sell some beers, play some music. It's not big enough to have clashing sound systems although there's some really good DJs. The bands all tend to be local bouyon bands, which is a bit like soca but even faster, with no basslines and lots of air-raid sirens. It’s super jump-up music, it's pretty intense but it's fun. There's two main bands on the island, WCK and Triple K. WCK are slightly older, Triple K are the youngsters’ band. They always play at the Creole festival, it’s in a big park with a stage, everyone's jammed in there, there’s a small gate so it's all ringed off. I've seen Triple K play maybe five or six times and most of the time they play there's some kind of fight in the crowd. They hype it up a bit, it's kind of the badman thing and all that, it's not for me. It's good fun to dance to but it's pretty relentless.

- Are the DJs playing CD or vinyl?

It's all CD and it’s all ripped. CDs are expensive there, if you want to buy an official release it will cost maybe EC$60, about £20, but you can go to someone, they'll make you a compilation of what you want for EC$10. So people tend to do that. And limewire. People have got internet, they're downloading stuff all over the shop.

- But it's all 128 bit mp3s?

Yeah. Played in bars through a slightly knackered sound system that's had one too many rums poured on it. It's interesting.

- Any other thoughts you want to add?

Music from South America and the Caribbean and Africa works so well in a club, and if you don’t tell people exactly what it is – this slightly nebulous idea that you could call tropical music – people love it. I think it's kind of a collective thing. If you listen to the raw gwo ka stuff from the Caribbean, or Afro-Venezuelan stuff or some of the Brazilian stuff ... it's capturing a moment in time. It's not just a band that have written a load of songs, sat in a studio for ages, polished and polished and spent like seven years making their magnum opus. It’s more pragmatic than that. I've always thought that, without getting philosophical about it, the greatest art is craft. And this stuff is not people trying to make some crazy record or anything like that, they're just knocking it out and this is the sound of what they do, capturing moments. And it’s a great sound.

(Photos courtesy of Hugo Mendez.)

1315 Broadway, 1988

2009-05-21T06:03:00.008+01:00

Neil Ollivierra grew up in Detroit. In the late 80s and early 90s he managed Derrick May’s Transmat label; subsequently (among many other projects in various media) he produced several classic records under the name of The Detroit Escalator Company. Musik Line asked him for his reminiscences about the early days of Detroit techno. Here’s what he said:

I was first introduced to the Detroit Techno scene in 1988, by a female friend of mine named Michelle Warner. I'd asked her what her plans were one Friday night, and she responded: "Dunno; thinking about going to the Institute..."

I didn't know what she was talking about. "You never been to The Music Institute?" she asked. No, I'd never even heard of it...

She gave me an address, 1315 Broadway, and told me to meet her there around 2:30 am, with the caveat that the place didn't really get jumping until around 3 a.m. Now the thing about Detroit, Michigan circa 1988 is that there wasn't shit going on in that city at 3 am. The place still hadn't recovered from the 1967 riots. This was before the word "loft" was even a blip on the radar. At 2 am, you could literally lie down in the middle of Gratiot Avenue and take a nap without fear of being run over by a car...

So I got the surprise of my young life when I arrived at this storefront at 2:30 am and saw a queue around the block; about a hundred young black people were trying to get into a place that held around 150-200 people. I couldn't believe it.

An interesting aspect of this crowd is that none of them were geared up for what I then understood to be a night at a club. There were no dresses, skirts, slick shoes or pampered hairdos. There were no gold chains, fancy watches, earrings, or any other such trappings hanging off anybody's asses. These people were dressed to sweat. It was all about tennis shoes, sweat pants and t-shirts.

When I finally got to the front of the line, the tall, light-skinned bouncer working the door asked if I was a "member."

"Member?" I asked him, incredulous.

"Membership. You got a membership card?"

"No, I'm afraid not..." I replied.

"S'aright. Eighteen dollars."

At this point, it was as if I'd fallen down the rabbit hole. In Detroit, Michigan, circa 1988, there were maybe 2-3 proper "clubs," and none of them charged more than $4. And if you got there on the right night, you'd get $2 drafts all night long. Where was I? What the fuck was this place?

I paid the dough and went inside.

I got searched, and immediately checked in my jacket because it was over a hundred degrees fahrenheit in that place. It was literally packed with black people. There were no chairs. There were no couches. There was no resting place of any kind, though you could make your way over to the "bar," where a couple people were selling bottled water and soda for a buck a pop, and where the dancing decelerated to something more like a shuffle.

The place was one square room with a 30-foot high ceiling, an overhanging strobe light or two, and stacks of massive custom built speaker cabinets stationed in the corners. There were, I remember, one or two gel lights, but they were rarely used; I later learned they were turned on mainly at the end of the night to indicate that it was time for everybody to get out and go home. The DJ booth was a secluded box poised high above the dancefloor, with a rectangle cut out in the front. It looked like the supervisor's booth in an assembly shop of some kind, and at one point in time years ago that may have been exactly what it was. You could barely see the outline of the DJ's head through the rectangle opening. The DJ wasn't on a stage, there weren't any lights poised on him, and nobody was really paying attention to him anyway; it was what he was generating out of the sound system that was important. I later learned that you could only get up to the DJ booth by taking a staircase at the back of the building, which was blocked off by a locked door and a firm but friendly bouncer.

The sound system was loud as fuck. You couldn't talk to anyone, even if they wanted to listen to what you had to say; you'd have to holler dead in their ears at point black range for them to hear anything at all. A few noobs like myself were hanging on the sidelines, allowing ourselves to get crammed up against the wall. Everybody else was bouncing up and down, the strobe lights making them look like they were moving in slow motion syncopated fits and starts...

You have to understand the culture of Detroit at that time to be able to appreciate the wonder of this place. Detroit at that time was a very destitute place to try to make a living. It was renowned as the murder capital of the United States around that time, and prided itself on that fact. Unemployment and poverty were high, and for this reason so was crime. The very few people who lived there were generally unhappy, and there was a lot of brutal masculine energy to the city, especially at night, in the bars and clubs. It was a bad idea to look another man in the eye; god help you if you got caught staring at his girl. And a bunch of black people crammed together in a place like this was – I can tell you as a black man born and raised there – a fucking recipe for disaster. Fights, shootings, and cold-blooded murder were common occurrences in bars and clubs of that era.

Yet here I was, in the middle of a bunch of screaming, dancing black folk, all recklessly throwing limbs and elbows this way and that, bumping and grinding into each other, some dancing together, some dancing alone, some of them (holy fuck) clearly and openly gay, some of them straight... And without the exception of a single soul, they were literally having the time of their lives. They were switching dance partners, arbitrarily it seemed, with no thought whatsoever, much less jealous rancor. When certain key and familiar songs were introduced – stealthily it seemed – by the DJ, complete strangers would meet eyes and whoop, yell, and pound each other on the shoulders before biting their bottom lips, scrunching up their brows and flinging their limbs out and around in some of the most acrobatic and contagious joy expressed in dance that I'd ever seen in my life. It was literally beyond belief. I counted only three bouncers, and they weren't trying to make their presence felt. One was working the door outside, one was working the cash box inside the entrance, and the other was casually watching the door to the DJ booth staircase and chatting up some sweat-drenched girl gulping a warm bottle of soda.

I never even saw Michelle that night. The shit went on until after 6 am, and I walked out of there utterly flabbergasted...

Neil also selected a few tracks which were, as he put it, ‘considered seminal at The Music Institute at the time’. Here they are:

Mr Fingers : Can You Feel It
Suburban Knight : The Art Of Stalking
K Alexi Shelby : My Medusa
Baby Ford : Fordtrax
Tyree : Hard Core - Hip House

"There's also this one remix of 'Welcome to the Pleasure Dome' by Frankie Goes to Hollywood: the fruitness mix. At the time, I think, it was a bootleg. It was consistently the very last song that Derrick May would play at the end of the night at the old MI. It's the track that he'd play when they turned on all the lights and told everybody to get out. It wasn't a dance mix, exactly; it was very dynamic, and had a fast tempo, but key was the fact that it had rather a thoughtful and slightly melancholic vibe to it that was perfect to cool everybody out and calm everybody down after a night of thrashing and jumping around."

The Music Institute closed in 1990; the address is now occupied by Burt's, "an upscale downtown club [which] caters to the urban night lifers". Another interesting account of it can be found here.

Empty Barrels Make the Most Noise

2009-05-21T05:51:00.005+01:00

A lesson in sound killing from Stone Love: from the LP 'Stone Love in JA & UK' (Sir George, SGLP 009). An excerpt from a clash in the Auckland Centre, Birmingham. There's no info on the record about who Stone Love were playing against or when this took place. This clip features a brutal counteraction to their opponents' previous tune, a Banana Man piece evidently (and optimistically) entitled 'My Sound Rules the World'. Stone Love's Wee Pow denounces this play ('joke dat') and warns the opponents that 'tonight is your night man ... you bruck up pon the stumbling block with Stone Love'. Selector Rory launches into an accapella followed by a solemn instrumental cut of the 'Burial' rhythm, Wee Pow shouting 'you gone' as the bassline drops. The crowd reaction speaks for itself. Stone Love then deliver the coup de grace in the shape of the Colonel Josey Wales, who goes on to refer back to Peter Tosh's famous earlier cut of 'Burial' ('they say that dreadlocks no go a funeral ...'). It's hard to imagine a soundboy recovering from this onslaught.

Gnawa: Music and the Black Diaspora in Morocco

2009-04-13T14:08:00.016+01:00

Many visitors to Morocco will have encountered gnawa in some form or other, usually in the central square of Marrakesh, the Djma' el Fna, or at random in other towns, or perhaps in the more official setting of the Essaouira festival (established in 1998). Perhaps they have been irritated, amused or baffled by the sudden appearance of several men dancing around them, wearing dreadlocked hats, clanging large metal castanets and asking for cash. This is the most visible manifestation of a long tradition, the less obvious aspects of which can be found in esoteric musical ceremonies, carried out behind closed doors and involving therapy through possession by various spirits. This tradition traces its origins back to black slaves imported into Morocco in the sixteenth century.

It's not really possible to summarize in a few words the nature of these ceremonies, which take place after dark and are known as lila (the Moroccan Arabic word for 'night'). Books on the subject tend to rely specifically on one or a handful of informants, and therefore provide local or specific accounts of the phenomenon without being able to cover its whole range of regional differences. It's therefore difficult, and perhaps unwise, to give a generalized abstract account of gnawa. Some statements should be uncontroversial, however. The ceremonies involve healing or therapy of individuals regarded as possessed by powerful invisible entities. These entities, referred to as mluk, are a part of Islamic tradition (although their status therein is ambiguous) and are assimilated with related concepts of djinns and saints. As in tarantella and other musical healing practices, the musicians are able (within the proper ritual framework) to work on the relationship between the possessed individual and the entity possessing him or her. The ceremony takes place under the joint guidance of a male master musician (m'allem) and a female 'medium' or 'seer' (entitled moqaddema). The musicians play a three-stringed bass lute (hajhouj), metal castanets (qarqaba) and sometimes a drum (tbel or ganga). They also sing. Anthropologists have cited connections between the songs, the mluk they relate to, colours, smells, ritual objects and so on, not to mention various more complex symbolic patterns (see, for example, V. Pâques, "Le Monde des Gnawa", in L'autre et ailleurs, ed. J. Poirier and F. Raveau, Paris: Berger-Levrault, 1976, pp.169-82).

(A hajhouj. Source: instrumentsdumonde.com.)

I don't intend to comment here on the precise nature of these ceremonies (nor am I qualified to do so). Instead I offer a brief note about the culture of which they are a part, namely, the black diaspora in Morocco. The most thorough published account of this relationship can be found in Pierre-Alain Claisse's recent work Les Gnawa marocains de tradition loyaliste (Paris: Harmattan, 2003). Claisse distinguishes between four related historical movements which together are encompassed by the term 'gnawa': the influx of slaves into Morocco in the sixteenth century; black soldiers serving the Moroccan royal family in the seventeenth century; the confraternity of ritual musicians; and a modern movement among marginalized Moroccan youth.

In the sixteenth century the Moroccan empire, under the Saadian sultan Ahmed el Mansour (ruled 1578-1603), expanded southwards in an attempt to profit from the trade links (specifically salt and gold) of the Songhai empire in what is now Mali. Moroccan forces progressed through the Sahara and captured the important desert trading posts of Timbuktu and Gao, dismantling the Songhai empire in the process. They were unable to consolidate their success, however, and remained in control of this distant territory only briefly. One result of this expansion was the importation into Morocco of black slaves. A number of these entered royal service and by the end of the seventeenth century, under the rule of the Alaouite sultan Moulay Ishmail (1672-1727), their descendants had come to occupy the position of bodyguards to the emperor, a sort of 'praetorian guard' with considerable power of intervention in state affairs. According to Si Mohammed, a gnawa master from Casablanca who was an important source for Pierre-Alain Claisse's book, this group should be distinguished from those who were not attached to the royal family, but instead pursued relatively humble careers as artisans. The former were able to an extent to maintain their military role until independence (1956) and finally lost their position following the attempted coup against King Hassan II at Skhirat in 1971. Meanwhile the latter, in the context of increasing urbanization and modernization, began to lose their traditional role of artisans and, Claisse says, started to find employment as bouncers, parking attendants and other such jobs. This group, however, maintained their identity as musicians engaged in rites of healing and possession, in a context which was avowedly Islamic, but nonetheless susceptible to charges of heterodoxy. Gnawa is often identified with Sufism, although Sufis do not necessarily agree with this interpretation. One Sufi adept, who gave me a lift in his freezer van through the Western Sahara in 2005, was scornful of the idea that gnawa was a Sufi movement. Women dancing and men playing instruments was not true Sufism, in his opinion: instead Sufism involved a path, tariqa, of quiet contemplation.

The potentially non-Islamic side of gnawa is underlined by the story, narrated to Claisse by Si Mohammed, of a gnawa master named Ba Dergo:

"Ba Dergo, a Gnawa from the land of the blacks, had scarification on his face; he went into the royal palace with a two-stringed hajhouj. This first hajhouj of the masters of the cult of possession was made from a big tortoise shell, as found in bilad-as-sudan [West Africa]. I know that two types of people in Morocco have scarification: Berbers and Jews. Now, Ba Dergo was a Jew. He was a Jew, a black Jew, because on his face he had, not tattoos, but scratches, incisions! What's so surprising about it? Since the Exodus, the Jews are to be found in every country on earth, including the bilad-as-sudan." (p.30)

On the other hand, as another scholar, Abdelhafid Chlyeh, points out, the gnawi would not themselves tolerate any assertion that they do not have complete adherence to Islam (Les Gnaoua du Maroc, Morocco: La Pensée sauvage, 1999, p.15). Overall, the spiritual entities whom they invoke appear to draw on a mixture of traditions from sub-Saharan, mainstream and Moroccan Islam and pre-Islamic Berber beliefs.

(Painting by Louis Endres. Source: P. Thornton, The Voice of Atlas, London 1936, p.94.)

Not all the descendants of black slaves are part of the confraternity of gnawa musicians, and not all gnawa musicians are black, many being of mixed heritage, Arab or Berber. The confraternity itself can be divided along various lines, geographically or in terms of practice, but generally all its adherents recognize as their ancestor Sidi Bilal, an Ethiopian, early convert to Islam, companion and muezzin (caller to prayer) of the Prophet Mohammed.

Since the 1960s, a subsidiary movement of 'gnawi' has gathered momentum, represented largely by disadvantaged youth who attach themselves to the idea of gnawa without necessarily having the expertise that the confraternity of masters have. To some extent, Claisse points out, this new wave, whom he refers to as 'gnawi sauvages', compete with the established masters in their ceremonial practice. They are viewed, however, as parasitical, and as potentially dangerous, in that through their less than complete understanding of the power of their music they can provoke trances which they are unable properly to control. The growth of this movement was to an extent promoted by the interest in 'folklore' shown by the Culture and Tourism ministries: tourists at hotels in Marrakesh and elsewhere are routinely entertained by groups of 'gnawi sauvages', who are not linked to the established confraternity of masters, whose work remains essentially underground, although they do on occasion perform in more public contexts (in which mluk are not invoked).

In the 1980s Morocco, like much of the rest of the world, was turned on to the sound of reggae (typically Bob Marley).

Young gnawa musicians rapidly came to identify themselves with these black singers, descended from Caribbean slaves, whom they perceived, via the media, as their trans-Atlantic homologues. "We represent the reggae movement in Morocco," they are fond of saying.

Claisse notes that he attended a 'very serious' ceremony, at the end of which, to his surprise, the musicians, with the agreement of their master, performed a sort of Bob Marley tribute in Marrakeshi gnawa style (pp.60-1). In this sense the music of the black diaspora can be said to have completed a circular journey, setting out in opposite directions from sub-Saharan Africa, and meeting once again in Morocco at the end of the twentieth century. It should be pointed out that there are also recent connections between gnawa and jazz, specifically in the work of the Tangier-based gnawa master Abdullah el Gourd and his recordings and live performances with pianist Randy Weston and saxophonist Archie Shepp.

(Those interested in this subject should also check out the recent article by Chouki el Hamel, 'Constructing a Diasporic Identity: Tracing the Origins of the Gnawa Spiritual Group in Morocco', Journal of African History, 49 (2008), pp.241-60. Since writing this article I have also obtained a copy of the most comprehensive treatment of gnawa in English, Deborah Kapchan's Traveling Spirit Masters, Middletown CT, 2007, which I highly recommend for a more in-depth account. A set of CDs containing an example of a complete performance cycle was released by the scholar Antonio Baldassarre: see the review by Philip Schuyler.)

Play the Music Stand Tall Man!

2009-04-12T18:45:00.006+01:00

Part 1:

Part 2:

This was the first ever sound system session I attended. It was in a youth club or sports hall (the Salle ALJT), down at the end of the metro line in Chatillon Montrouge, in the south suburbs of Paris. It was 31 Dec. 1993; I had missed my rendez-vous with a friend and was alone. The hall was full of smoke and gyrating bodies. I had never heard music like that before and had no idea how it all fitted together: the records, the mic men, the selector, the operator, the guy with the keyboard doing samples and fx all seemed to combine mysteriously into something extraordinary.

Anyway, as luck would have it I picked up a tape of the session a couple of months later at Blue Moon, the now defunct reggae record shop just off Boulevard St Michel. So here it is: a wicked juggling selection played by one of France's premier dancehall sounds. Being New Year's Eve, it opens with the sound of bells (Big Ben, I do believe) before busting into Beres Hammond's 'Fire'. After that it's pure classics (although at the time they were mainly brand new and fresh).

Stand Tall's selector was Polino: among the mic men were Daddy Nuttea, Daddy Mory, Moodirow and MC Janick. Nuttea went on to release an excellent mini LP, entitled simply Volume 1, and also collaborated with the Marseille hip hop crew IAM ('La 25eme image' among others). Mory was part of the celebrated Raggasonic along with Big Red and Frenchie (who now runs the excellent UK dancehall label Maximum Sound). Janick can be found on an interesting early comp of French hip hop and dancehall, 'Les Cool Sessions', produced by Jimmy Jay, MC Solaar's DJ, which came out around the same time as this session.

Stand Tall myspace

Tarantism

2009-04-11T17:02:00.008+01:00

‘Beside the Adriatic sea, near Taranto, are found certain small animals, called tarantulas, which have perhaps taken their name from the place. ... Others call them spiders: but they are very different, since they are almost black in colour, and have only three feet on either side, and the male is not distinguished from the female... . Tarantulas bite more in summer, because their poison is then more intense; in the winter they withdraw into holes in the earth, lest their heat be extinguished by the cold weather. In summer they have a greater opportunity for biting, when the peasants are carrying the crops which they gather. Their bites or pricks have widely differing effects: some people sing, some dance, some sleep, some get palpitations, and of one peasant, it was said that after being bitten he evermore wanted to give orders and be in charge. Their poison is very earthy and torrid. From a bite or a prick, a small portion of it can penetrate the surface of the skin, where the motive and sensitive nerves are, although their teeth are too small to go as deep as the veins; and then the poison is carried through the nerves (or a branch of them) to the brain. There, because of its earthiness, it sits, and binds the thoughts which relate to the parts of the body which give rise to motion or sensitivity. It also affects the imagination and memory: for the thoughts are bound by fetters of poison, and the memory is compelled to continue in the form in which it was.’

Thus was the tarantula, and the phenomenon of tarantism, conceived in the sixteenth century, in this case by Ferdinando Ponzetti (1444-1527), author of the Libellus de venenis (‘On poisons’, 1521). He prescribed a cure of ten grains of mastic, taken with milk, the watery, loosening and warming effect of which would counteract the sludgy nature of the poison. And he also noted in passing that ‘sufferers are sometimes cured by dancing: because it dissipates the poison, or expels it in sweat.’

In later works, this connection between the tarantula, its victim, and music became more and more prominent. While a number of Renaissance scholars contributed to this trend, the central role belongs to Athanasius Kircher (1602-80), ‘the last man who knew everything’ as a recent work entitled him. Kircher was a prodigious polymath who composed vast tomes on many subjects, including Egyptology and hieroglyphs, the construction of Noah’s Ark, subterranean tunnels and volcanoes, and acoustics. Kircher regarded tarantism as a sort of magnetism; at this time, magnetism was much in vogue, and Kircher argued that everything – the action of the stars and planets, plants, even love – was due to different types of magnetism. The tarantula had its own magnetism, which manifested itself in a wondrous sympathy with music; music, therefore, was the only effective cure for tarantula poisoning. Kircher’s account of this sympathy was to become classic, and was repeated by a number of writers in the seventeenth century. Soon after its composition it was translated into English by Walter Charleton and included in his Physiologia Epicuro-Gassendo-Charltoniana (1654).

Kircher described how musical instruments caused movements in the air, which entered the head through the ear, and passed into the spiritus (a substance mediating between the soul and the body). The spiritus conveyed these harmonic movements to the muscles; in the muscles, the movements encountered the lurking poison and made it start to itch, which made the body twitch and jump and eventually break out into a dance. This in turn created heat, which relaxed the body and opened the pores, out of which the poison evaporated.

The practicalities of the cure, however, were rather more complex than this idealized theoretical sketch. In the first place the sort of music to which the victim would respond depended on his or her complexion and temperament. Some people were sluggish and melancholic, and would respond only to loud banging or noisy instruments, and not to strings; for others, strings were quite sufficient. The cure could be disturbing for all concerned, including the neighbours: ‘a certain Girl of Tarentum, being there bitten by a Tarantula, and affected with the stupendious symptome of Tarantism, could never be excited to dance by any sounds, but those of Guns, Alarms beaten upon Drums, Charges and Triumphs sounded in Trumpets, and other military musick.’ For others, however, the ‘Harmony of Lutes, Vials, Virginals, Guitarrs, Tiorbas, and other stringed Instruments’ was sufficient (Charleton, Physiologia, p.369).

(Page from Charleton's Physiologia. Source: EEBO.)

In the second place – and this, for Kircher and indeed for most seventeenth-century writers who discussed the matter, was cause for great astonishment – just as the music evoked a sympathetic reaction in the human victim, so it did in the tarantula; and just as the human victim danced in response to a certain type of music, so too did the tarantula. Kircher relates an account of an experiment, in which a tarantula was placed on a stalk floating in water, and a lute player summoned. The playing of the lute initially had no effect, until it hit upon the particular sound which was appropriate to that particular tarantula, at which point the creature began to wave its legs and shudder its body in time to the music, only stopping when the music stopped. Thus it is also recounted that in Taranto, when musicians are called to attend a tarantula bite scene, they first ask the victim where the event occurred, and what colour tarantula it was. They then go to the indicated place, catch a tarantula of the sort described by the patient, and ‘instantly fall to their instruments, and play over whole sets of Lessons one after another’ until it starts dancing. At this point they can return home, safe in the knowledge of how to treat the patient, a task in which they ‘seldom or never fail’ (Charleton, p.370).

This account, synthesized by Kircher and popularized by those who followed him, remained standard throughout the remainder of the seventeenth century. As Thomas Willis puts it, in his Essay of the Pathology of the Brain (1681):

‘Truly, musick doth easily carry men sound and sober, whether they will or no, or thinking of another thing, into actions answerable to the sound of the harmony; that presently the standers by, at the first striking up of the fiddle, begin to move their hands and feet, and can scarce, nay are not able to contain themselves from dancing: Let none therefore wonder, that in men bitten by the Tarantula, when the animal spirits being moved, as it were with goads, they are compelled to leap forth, and wander about hither and thither willingly, if they are excited to dancing and composed measures, at the stroke of an harp, so that as in these distempers, the spirit of the music, as it were inchanting the outrageous spirits, and in some measure governing, and changing their convulsive motions, serves instead of an antidote: for that the animal spirits, being very much, and for a long while exercised, after this manner, wholly shake off the Elastic Copula, contracted by the poyson, or otherwise; and they being very much wearied, at length rest from that madness, or its incitation.’

(The classic modern work on tarantism, which also contains a good account of medieval and Renaissance discussions, is Ernesto De Martino's The Land of Remorse:A Study of Southern Italian Tarantism, originally published in Italian in 1961 and now available in an English tr. by D. L. Zinn, London: Free Association, 2005. See also G. Tomlinson, Music in Renaissance Magic: Toward a Historiography of Others, University of Chicago Press 1993.)

Shaka in Africa

2009-04-11T14:30:00.001+01:00

Jah Shaka Sound System, from a 1989 session in Ashwin St, Dalston, London. Shaka runs a Gregory Isaacs tune on the Promised Land riddim ('I do love you'), then plays the version, giving the following account of his recent trip to Ghana and a history lesson about the repatriation movement, before dropping a thunderous bassline.

"Take a trip the other day
to visit my brethren inna Ghana...

My brethren, my brethren, greetings from Ghana
greetings from Accra, Ghana, y’know
been on the radio been on the TV
been on the radio been on the TV
they wanted to know about His Imperial Majesty
and a reporter said to I
you are a Jamaican
what is the connection with you and the Ethiopian Haile Selassie?
I said to him, is a long story
but I will cut it short
in 1930
the Kings of Kings was born
and we have a prophet by the name of Marcus Garvey
that told the people in Jamaica
about the coming
about the coming
he said look to Africa
where a king shall be crowned
the conquering lion of the tribe of Judah
[loud applause]
and I said to them
we are his children
and we hope to return to Africa some day.
Jah!
[crowd shouts "Rastafari"; he rewinds tune to the top]

The promised land
going to the promised land.

And I asked the reporter
what happened to the Black Star Liner
that Marcus Garvey set up
cos Marcus Garvey have a link with the crewman
of Ghana
and he said to me the Black Star Liner is still running
and it comes to the dock in Tilbury, East London
[loud applause]
it runs under the flag of the Black Star Liner
[shouts from crowd]
I told them
we will fulfil Marcus Garvey’s dream
we will return with our treatments
we will return with our skills
we will build a better nation in Africa
and I spoke with the nurses at the clinic
they said to me
will the people of London adopt this clinic?
ya hear me?
I said the nurse said to me
will the people of London adopt this clinic as their own?
and I said unto them
we will endeavour to do the best we can
so all the nurses
all who had studied nursing and doctors
you can check I and I, give me your phone number and address.
We have a direct link with Ghana!
[bassline drops to loud shouting]

They ask for our quick return
they are longing for our quick return to Africa
bear that in mind.
The youth of today
are the man and woman of tomorrow."

Hip Hop in Nouakchott

2009-04-11T14:12:00.009+01:00

From the archives ... a snapshot of hip hop in Mauritania, written in 2005.

Nouakchott, Mauritania, January 2005. Another dusty evening. On our way to a gig we get pulled over. Not that surprising – there were police at this junction permanently, stopping cars for whatever reason they thought fit. It wasn’t the car’s European passengers they were interested in. It was the driver, a young black man. The black community in Mauritania are to a large extent segregated from the Moorish ruling caste; they have few privileges in this nation where slavery was abolished, on paper, in 1981. Our driver, the police said, was contravening the law by acting as a taxi when not licensed to do so; in other words, by giving us a lift. They took away his driving permit and told him to pick it up the next day, with a fine. He returned to the car disgruntled but seemingly unsurprised.

The gig was the weekly hip hop jam, held every Friday evening in the Nouakchott ‘Maison des Jeunes’ or youth club. The door was run by soldiers; they took our ticket money, gave us our tickets and went back to controlling the crowd milling around outside. Inside it was incredibly hot. The building was evidently an old theatre and it still had its raked rows of seats leading down to the stage. The seats were all occupied and the crowd spilled out into the aisles and around the back of the hall. They were mostly young, male and female in equal proportions, and black, although standing next to me was one elderly Moor with a walking stick. At the foot of the stage was a sound system and video clips were projected onto the walls: the American hip hop pantheon, Busta Rhymes, 50 Cent, Tupac.

The weekly jam provides an opportunity for a variety of musical goings-on. We saw a performance by a band called Walfadriji, who mix Mbalax and traditional Moorish music with their own brand of ‘Afro-Peul’ (the Peul, also known as Fulani, being one of the prominent West African ethnic groups). This was followed by a film interviewing Nouakchott rap crew Diam Min Tekki (who feature on the compilation reviewed below) and a series of performances by young local rappers, each of whom did one piece over a backing track of his choice, to generally thunderous applause. The event ended suddenly on the stroke of midnight, half-way through the last song; perhaps, I thought as I found myself suddenly swamped by a tidal wave of flying limbs, this was something to do with the soldiers.

On the strength of this evening I tracked down a copy of the only (to my knowledge) compilation of Mauritanian hip hop, a cassette put together by Nouakchott’s 994 Crew and entitled ‘L’art de la RIM’ – ‘RIM’ signifying both ‘rhyme’ and ‘Republique Islamique de Mauritanie’. It’s a collaborative work which, the sleeve notes say, aims to show the country’s African neighbours that the Mauritanian hip hop scene is active. Production and arrangement was the responsibility of Tom Select and Selecta Mani2; various rappers contribute vocal performances, which are partly in French and partly in Hassaniya, the local Arabic dialect, with occasional snatches of English. The beats and overall production are stylish: although the percussion sounds and synths are simple and sometimes seem maybe a little dated, they’re nonetheless imaginatively put together, with some well-chosen samples and heavy basslines. There’s a definite reggae flavour in the background of many of the pieces, notably the squelching ‘Diogg Jengou’, in which Senegal’s acclaimed Pee Froiss put in a guest appearance, and ‘Musicam’, which borrows the melody of Sister Nancy’s 1982 dancehall smash ‘Bam Bam’. The debt in this direction is rather more evident than that to traditional local music, although a kora-sounding sample makes an appearance on one occasion. ‘Amergua Guana’, meanwhile, is driven by a sparse but effective combination of accordion and melodica. There’s a softer, more R’n’B feel to pieces like ‘Mbeuguel’ and ‘Si Tu Savais’ but generally the sound is bouncy and gritty. Interspersed with the tunes are a variety of film samples and radio clips and overall the cassette adds up to an interesting and varied mix. Not being a Hassaniya speaker, a fair amount of the lyrical content escapes me, but I can say that the rappers’ flow is universally tight without being rigid.

For Amadou, the young enthusiast who introduced me to Mauritanian hip hop, its appeal is clear: rappers always tell the truth, he says – in contrast to other more established forms of communication. Six months after I left Mauritania a military coup – the fourth such attempted in only a couple of years – toppled the long-standing ruler Maaoya Ould Taya. The junta replacing him stated that their intention was ‘to create the appropriate circumstances for an open and transparent democracy’ and promised to hold elections in two years. I don’t know what effect, if any, this might have on Mauritania’s black community but I do know I’ll be trying to get hold of more Mauritanian hip hop to find out.

Here's a clip of Sene*Rim. Diogg Jengou is featured on the African Hip Hop and Dancehall Minimix.

(There's some more info about this tape here. The promised election did indeed take place, in March 2007.)

Rih: Folk and Blues from Morocco

2009-04-11T13:49:00.007+01:00

This mix blends pieces from the great bands of the 1970s Moroccan new wave - Nass el Ghiwane, Jil Jilala and Lemchaheb - with folk music, spiritual music (from the Joujouka and Aissaoua confraternities) and a couple of examples of collaborations between Moroccan and non-Moroccan musicians. It's called Rih, signifying 'wind' and also 'tune', and features percussion instruments (t'bel, bendir, qarqaba), stringed instruments (banjo, hajhouj), flutes and voices. It was mixed with Ableton Live: some of the pieces run more or less complete, others are broken up into loops or fragments.

00.00 Section from Lemchaheb, El Jounoud (Hassania, EH3410)
02.46 Loop cut up from 'Etude rhythmique de mode traditionnel lent (2 gros bendirs)', from Anthologie de la musique populaire marocaine vol. II. Marrakech et le pays des Kasbahs (BAM, LD 5835)
04:20 Tanja l-alia, from Moroccan Folk Music (Lyrichord, LLST 7229)
10:24 Loop from 'Etude instrumentale avec accelèration rhythmique T'Bol et crotales de fer', from Marrakech et le pays des Kasbahs, as above
10:58 Arouech (first of 6 pieces), from Marrakech: Musique populaire de la place Djemaa el Fna (BAM, LD5811)
11:52 Jil Jilala, Lahkaya (Disques Esperance, ESP 1706)
15:32 Loop from Arraks teht a 'l Kamar, from Bachir Attar with Elliott Sharp in New York (Enemy, EFA 03514)
16:32 Rih ash-Sheikh al-Kamal, from Moroccan Sufi Mystics (Lyrichord, LLST 7238)
17:22 Jil Jilala, Naditak Falghonna (Disques Esperance, ESP 1706)
23:14 Reprise of Rih ash-Sheikh al-Kamal, as above
23:47 Abdelhamid Boujendar, Myriem (Disques Esperance, ESP 9304)
25:51 Kwaku Baah and Ganoua, Rif Zef Zef (Island, ILPS 9491)
30:00 Spoken intro, looped and overlaid, to Jil Jilala, Mazzine Ossolak (Disques Esperance, ESP 1706)
30:42 Nass el Ghiwane, Mahmouna (Azwaw, AZW 140)
39:18 Extract from Brian Jones presents the Pipes of Pan at Joujouka (COC 49100)
39.18 Reprise of 'Etude instrumentale avec accelèration rhythmique', as above

A few notes. Some of these pieces are essentially field recordings. The Arouech, a piece of Berber festival music, was recorded by Francois Jouffa in the early 1970s. The pieces on Marrakech et le pays des Kasbahs were recorded by Jean Mazel. The LPs on Lyrichord (Moroccan Folk Music and Moroccan Sufi Mystics) were recorded by Philip Schuyler. Tanja l-alia is an example of 'Jiblia' music from the Rif mountains in northern Morocco. Schuyler notes:

Jiblia songs are generally short (5 or 10 minutes), but under conditions of excitement songs may be strung together. A Jiblia song cycle may commence with an introductory instrumental in free rhythm by each member of the band. They then go into the first song, usually in a slow, dragging rhythm; the pace picks up; a bridge increases the tempo and leads into the next song, more spirited still; one, two or more songs may follow after succeeding bridges, after which the piece closes with a long instrumental. During this l-'ail ("the boy") gets up to dance, dressed as a woman. He is a standard feature of most Jiblia bands; an added touch is dancing with a tea tray with pot and glasses on his head.

Rih ash-Sheikh al-Kamal ('Wind/Tune of the Perfect Leader') is dedicated to Sidi Mohammed ben Aissa (1465-1524 AD), the patron saint of the Aissaoua brotherhood. From Schuyler again:

Every devotee has a certain tune which can drive him into a trance almost automatically, and another which can bring him back to consciousness as soon as he has satisfied himself dancing. And each brotherhood has certain acts the members perform when they are in a trance. The Aissaoua may drink boiling water, eat cactus or pass torches over their bodies. This rih comes from around the Meknes area. Pure and unadorned it is played in the second or third part of a hadra [meeting] when the musicians are trying to calm down the adepts and work some of them out of their trances.

The lute virtuoso Abdelhamid Boujendar (b. 1941) studied in Rabat and Versailles and at the time of this recording (1978) was Professor at the National Conservatory in Rabat. The lyrics are by the poet and songwriter Driss Alaoui (b. 1946). The LP from which the song is taken brings together the Franco-Arab work of Boujendar and Alaoui with interpretations of Moroccan popular songs by the group Nahawand (also from Rabat).

Nass el Ghiwane, Jil Jilala and Lemchaheb were themselves influenced by the Moroccan spiritual confraternities such as the gnawa and the Aissaoua, but mixed these traditional musical forms with more contemporary lyrics and instrumentation. There are also a couple of examples of collaborations between Moroccan and non-Moroccan musicians. The “gnawa-style” work of percussionist Reebop Kwaku Baah (in collaboration with Abdellcada Zef Zef and Mohamed ben Hamou Saidi) is an unusual 1976 release from Island records. An excellent account of it can be found here. There is also a short loop drawn from the American composer Elliott Sharp’s 1994 collaboration with the Bachir Attar, from the Master Musicians of Joujouka, who themselves had been introduced to non-Moroccan audiences by Brian Jones in 1971.

What is Musik Line?

2009-04-11T13:31:00.002+01:00

Musik Line is dedicated to notes about sound system culture and music around the world. It is likely to concentrate on African, Caribbean and UK dub music although it will probably make some forays in other directions as and when it feels inclined.

Music Line is also a killer highlife tune from 1977 by Prince Nico Mbarga and Rocafil Jazz. The cover of this record is so good that Strut used it on their excellent Nigeria 70 comp even though they cheekily didn't include any Prince Nico tunes on it...Prince Nico narrates a story 'about my own very, very self'; about how he tells his papa that 'music go be my work', to which his papa replies, 'music be no good, musician they never get better money, they never marry'. Prince Nico, however, after three months has made 'big big money', after a year has married 'one fine girl', and six months later is on to wife number two. As he says, 'music is business!'