Filastine Frequency

Extra dirty! Extra bomb! Extra short fuse! Extra long flavor? New EP of remixes from Dirty Bomb now a la venta. Eight lovely tracks that shit on geography & genre, drenched in the sweat of Jahcoozi, Cardopusher, Ill Gates, Maga Bo, Electromeca, phowa, & Deep Throat X. Frequency is the lowest common denominator- put stress your subwoofer: get it right this very second via download, iTunes, or on 12″ vinyl.

Since this is a “personal” blog I’m obligated to tell stories while trying to sell you something…

A1. Opium Den (Jahcoozi remixes Desordenador)- Deservedly loved and respected Berlin heroes that somehow make ecstatic pounding bass music that speaks about serious themes like gentrification & the vacuity of hipsterism. We played together in Marseille once, they were wonderful.

A2. Discontinuities (Cardopusher remixes Singularities)- Just walking down the street in Caracas is an act of will. Doing so with dreadlocks down to your ass is asking for serious trouble, and trying to introduce audiences to music like breakcore & dubstep in such a context demonstrates a rare fortitude of character. Cardo lives in Barcelona now, he’s a neighbor.

A3. Hungry Ghosts (phowa remix) feat. Wire MC- I met the Jeremiah aka phowa at dawn in a crowd of sleep-deprived ravers at a music festival in the Canadian forest. He told me that he’d be coming to Barcelona. Everyone says that, but he actually showed up. Later in Vancouver he organized one of the most enjoyable gigs of the 2009 tour, at a derelict movie theater, followed by an afterparty so packed that it was drizzling inside from the sweat condensed on the ceiling.

A4. Desordenador (live version feat. cellist Amélie Bouard)- The day before I was due to fly to Reunion Island from Lyon, France, my accompanying VJ cancelled. The ticket permitted passenger name changes, with less than 24 hours notice we somehow found & confirmed cellist Amélie as a substitute invited artist. She heard my songs for the first time with headphones during the 12 hour flight to the Indian Ocean. Now we are a regular team.

B1. Pharma Sutra (Ill Gates remixes Fitnah) *only on the vinyl- Deeply lucky to have met this other Mr. Gates, a digital jack of all trades- producer, vj, and educator who is not afraid to get political. His contribution was too good to wait for this delayed release, we let it out digitally earlier on compilation, where it topped Beatport’s charts.

B2. Con Las Manos en la Masa (Deep Throat X remix) feat. Malena D’Alessio- They came up to me during a wild semi-legal street party in Tokyo with a CDR and saying, with polite smiling and bows, “japanese ghetto sounds,” later i saw them on stage rocking old school drum machines while wearing balaclavas. They are associated with the expanding situationist/anarchist scene there.

B3. Batalha Cotidiana (Maga Bo remixes B’talla) feat. Rabah- Maga Bo is my closest colleague & fellow bootstrap nomadic producer. Without each other we probably would have long ago given up on the precarious and often degrading attempt to survive via music. He spends half his year moving around (mostly africa), the other half in a cinderblock hut on the roof of a residential skyscraper in Rio de Janeiro.

B4. No Lock No Key (Electromeca remix) feat. DJ Collage- On tour in australia in 2007 I was gifted a few gigs of breakcore and found Electromeca’s work. It’s next-level grit, in his own words: “hectic B-Boys break-dancing in a puddle of motor oil, The Bomb Squad meets Russolo in a Z-movie disco-club, FM-radio harsh beats, dismantled stuttering beat-box, muddy boom-bap”

The vacation from being Filastine is about to come to an end. What have I been doing this last month? Mostly looking for an apartment, nothing could be more mundane and un-blogworthy. It’s been a month nearly free of generating anything, leaving time to indulge in the hedonistic pleasure of being a culture consumer. A rare opportunity to read, watch movies, and listen to music than it is to write, edit video, and compose audio. Also more time for local adventures.

I went walking with friends in Cap de Creu where we found some lost hunting dogs, after managing to reunite them with the owner we were invited to their lodge. It was exactly as you’d expect a rural spanish hunting lodge. A long rustic room with a burning hearth consuming half of one entire wall, animal heads, boar tusks, and antler mounted on every vertical surface, bearded men playing cards while smoking and drinking. Hunters are obliged to wear read when in the field, so they were all clothed head to toe in red, with a few fresh animal corpses laying around, well, it was just fucking weird.

I finally explored the water mines of Can Mas Deu, the sprawling eco-squat in the hills above Barcelona. The building dates from the 14th century, but the mines could be older. They consist of narrow tunnels that shoot horizontally into the hill, barely big enough for a human body to squeeze through. Groundwater collects in the tunnel then flows towards the building. Deepest inside, past many strange insects and some calf-deep water pools is a round vertical shaft, basically it’s like being at the bottom of a well, but sealed on the top, and raining underground. Here it was possible to shimmy up the sides ascend to another level of horizontal shafts. It’s a good place for the antisocial.

Urban Barcelona has begun to reveal her charms again, with the return of The Influencers. This year featuring a delegation from New York’s Black Label Bike club, which was a good excuse to trot out the sound swarm equipment. See video.

The big surprise of this year’s festival was definitely James Acord. He’s spent the better part of his 75 years working to make art that includes nuclear material. It’s a story almost too incredible for re-telling.

After the presentation he was told me that, although now he is now marginally surviving via art sales, for many years he worked night shift stacking tater-tots for a burger chain. I consider myself lucky to have escaped so young from the cum cleanup, animal corpse disposal, and taxi driving jobs that have kept me afloat until I moved to europe.

In Balikpapan, Borneo, the organizers brought the cart gig on a puny motor scooter, weaving through the typical traffic snarls of Southeast Asia. The passenger wore it like a backpack, grasping it over his shoulders, as the driver kept his thumb firmly on the horn button.

In Australia shopping carts so densely litter the streets that in each gig it was as easy as taking a short walk to find one. Normally they could be found in pairs, upside-down and connected by their chain handles to release both their deposit coins, like two insects that died in the act of kissing.

In France the cart was always mounted onstage when I arrived, exactly as it appears on the stage diagram, with a pair of stage technicians asking “it’s okay?” Just the other side of the Pyrenees in Spain the promoters like to leave it until the last possible minute.

In San Francisco & Los Angeles the promoters backed out of the task. In both cities a beautiful, charming, intelligent asian-american girl with a white conversion van volunteered to rob me a cart ¡Viva la patria!

In Seattle the carts are now all painted matte black. MInutes before starting the gig I was backstage choking on the fumes of sliver spray-paint, so it would look more authentic.

In Japan there are almost no american-style shopping carts. Some friends in the Tokyo anarchist scene found one half buried in sand on a remote beach. They dug up this treasure and carried it to the city, where it’s always available for use. On the west coast of the US people collect the pretty glass floats of the japanese fishing fleets, on the east coast of Japan they are reimbursed with this one rusted cage of consumerism.

Mid-performane in Thessaloniki a woman in high heels jumped into the cart to do some kind of greek dance with her arms in the air.

In Moscow a team successfully stole the cart, but the police figured out what was going on and arrested the accomplice who’d made a distraction. The promoter had to pay a bribe to get her out of jail. After the concert they said they’d do it all over again if I return.

Some party pics. Excuse the silly crossfades.

Over the holidays I want to a rural center for Vipassana. I was looking for a reset button, a fasting for the mind, a brain starvation. Ten days without language, tasks, errands, technology (internet!), nonverbal communication, nothing, just meditation. A perfect tool get through years of accumulated debris, the geology of past experiences, to excavate the deeper self. But maybe some of us need stronger tools than our own breath to arrive at nirvana, because for me it was like clawing at permafrost with nothing but my fingernails. I didn’t survive the ten days. Meditation flunky.

Bring on the saffron robes, polyphonic chanting and the crashing of atonal cymbals! If the tibetans, who live simpler and quieter lives, need these trappings to deliver them into profound headspace than I certainly do. Or at least some rosaries to count, or an “om mani padme hum” to repeat, or some kind of trick more than my own feeble respiration.

In the absence of new input the mind turns into a car stereo scanning for stations, jumping every few seconds between bits of memories. The worst racket came from ex’s broadcast, pumping out a thousand watts of noise that reduced most of the other stations to intermittent static. After a few days I realized that I’m not the silent meditative type, and what I crave is a a soundtrack of my choosing, not radio silence, to find internal peace.

All day I looked forward to the evening DVD “talk” from Goenka, the founder of this particular branch of meditation centers. He’s a portly south indian with hair neatly oiled and combed to one side. Even via the awkward delivery of a zero-budget video production he dripped of wisdom and calmness. A woman often sat next to him of similar ripe age, we presume it’s his wife. She never said anything, just stared at the camera, only stirring to itch herself or adjust her sari. From the florescent light and the sweat that gathers on his brow it was obviously shot in India, and it’s hard to imagine him anywhere else… how does a spiritual master look when he’s sitting on the London tube or in the shopping in the pet supplies aisle of a Walmart?

Goenka, the onsite instructor, and the other students all deserve the deepest respect. There’s no doubt this is an effective technique for most who do it, and is completely without the bad odor of newage, cults, or hucksterism.

But If you, like me, are both hyperactive and just went through some intense emotional disasters, then you might want to start more modestly and work your way up to a vipassana.

The last post I made here was in the middle of a police raid of the Bike Bloc’s production site, The Candy Factory, sorry for not updating sooner. It’s been impossible.

Disappointed at not finding some bombs or grappling hooks, the police seized one of the double tall bike chariots, inventing a new danish word that translates as “war bike” to describe it as a weapon. They also took some computers & other items. They didn’t find my laptop because it was hidden under a trick seat (pretty sneaky, no?). Lucky we were behind schedule building the Sound Swarm, or they would have invented a danish word for “terror sound bike” as a pretext for sequestering them.

It was late in the evening when they let us re-enter. We went into the overdrive to get our shit done, stumbling around until four in the morning- cutting, wiring, welding in that totally inefficient way that you work when exhausted. Then it was time to pull my computer out of it’s hiding place and deal with the audio rendering & loading the MP3 players, this took until 7:30am, complicated by the constant power failures that would plunge the buildings into darkness.

It was more than a bit creepy being alone editing audio in an big building in total darkness, bundled up in a a puffy survival suit, my exhales creating great plumes of fog, constantly removing the headphones and looking out the windows to make the police weren’t about to burst in again. At 8am I left for our rendezvous in full white-out blizzard conditions.

Then began one of the hardest feats of endurance I’ve personally experienced. Pulling a heavy steel trailer of loudspeakers across Copenhagen, on a crappy discarded 1-speed bike, after a night without sleep, with neither breakfast nor dinner the night before, in a motherfucking blizzard, while we were stopped multiple times by van-loads of riot police to be searched and harassed en route. It was equal parts torture and bliss, as some combination of the snowstorm, the paranoia, physical exertion, and sleeplessness brought on a personal serenity I’ve rarely known.

Many things happened this day, I’ll describe just one. Faced with no other option to arrive at the site of the COP15 (official name of the Climate Summit), the Sound Swarm turned our speakers up to 11 and invaded a highway in a kamikaze mission directly towards our goal. The traffic came to an abrupt snarl behind us and a pair of motorcycle cops came out of nowhere to make a thin blockade. The gap between the concrete divider and the motorcycle was too small, my sound trailer was ripped off and capsized into the roadway.

We were barely free of this first blockade when some riot vans drove at us head-on, disgorging police. It was all slow motion, a lot like being in a car accident. It was also comedic, we were the protagonists of one of those early video games where the player must navigate through an obstacle course filled with zombies. but instead of an 8-bit theme song, we had distorted megaphones. I collided with one of the zombies, uh, I mean police, and was tackled to the ground. Only 2 lives left! and somehow we did get away. 

From my narrow perspective the week felt like a fusion of Burning Man, the iditarod (or at least the Idiotarad), and the Seattle WTO. I’ve learned some personal lessons on this trip as well. First: duct tape doesn’t function below freezing, nor do cheap MP3 players, nor do my fingers. Second: never, never, never trust a COP.

In Copenhagen we witnessed the world’s biggest ever collective failure, a failure that demonstrated the obsolescence of the nation-state and our precious economic systems. We also witnessed the birth of a new movement. I went to Copenhagen to do whatever I am physically capable to change the outcomes of this summit, so did about a hundred thousand other people. We were pissed off before the Summit. Now we are livid.

This is the uber-issue, the biggest problem that humanity has ever confronted, it’s bigger than nations, bigger than wars, bigger than AIDS, bigger than the black plague, bigger than capitalism vs socialism, and definitely bigger than those worthless corporations that were all “too big to fail.”  Either we keep this planet inhabitable, or is it game over for us & what’s left of earth’s biodiversity. Skeptical? Have a look at some climate models

What does it take to change the way humanity wrecks this planet? Everything. There should be no technique in the toolbox that is off-limits: hunger strikes, green investing, kidnapping, lifestyle changes, petitions, education, art & media, insurrection. If you’ve got a skill than bring it.

We’ve also got to recognize that the burden of responsibility falls on us, that small fraction of the earth’s population that has a plenty to eat, is literate, has a computer, some free time, and some minimum of civil rights. The other 90% are too busy trying to survive. Bad news reader, if you are looking at this or any other blog you are probably disqualified from inaction.

foto: Sound Swarm hatching a plot while hiding in some bushes

The site of the Bike Bloc construction, called the Candy Factory, was just raided by the police. I was peacefully chopping up bikes when they stormed in.

Danish people are generally big, the police are some of their biggest physical examples, add to that cold weather puffy unibody suits and body armor, and they are fucking terrifying. After “processing” and expelling us, they’ve got all our equipment hostage. This includes the Sound Swarm gear: bikes, loudspeakers, my computer and sound files. Let’s hope it’s not collected as evidence. Conspiracy to make noise?

They blocked the whole street with riot vans and even brought along a HazMat team and some other important looking crime-scene style specialists. What an honor! Or a waste!

Basta with the puto cops. There are important issues at stake & I’m tired of being hounded from place to place by a bunch of gorillas with guns.

On December 18, 2008, I played Jakarta, it was the first date of the Dirty Bomb tour. I’ve spent exactly a year touring. Last night it ended definitively and perfectly. For the first time this year my performance wasn’t about planting seeds for future resistance, but throwing some gasoline on an already raging fire.

It was in the middle of the urban autonomous zone of Christiania, in a big-top circus tent, to an over-capacity crowd, directly following a likely public discussion involving Naomi Klein & MIchael Hardt, and directly before a bloc of people slipped away to take some vengeance on the Danish state for all the humiliation they’ve been serving us.

The last portion of the gig people continued to dance while tear gas drifted into the tent, concussion grenades reinforced the beats, and helicopters pounded overhead. It even got a mention in the international news.

The march & action for tomorrow has a consensus agreement of tactics, that there will be no escalation of force or response to police violence. It’s the standard standard civil disobedience code. All the better that the pitched battles like last night happen at other times and places.

Today will be a marathon of preparation and tomorrow action. After last night I’m ready for anything.

It would have been better if all of our efforts to intervene and pressure the Climate Summit this wednesday would have been moot. If the delegates were arriving at a powerful and binding agreement to avert global catastrophe. We could have re-purposed the march & direct actions into a victory parade, given flowers to the police along the way and blown kisses to the suits inside.

Unfortunately my pessimism is confirmed. There’s been plenty of obstructionism and stonewalling by the delegations inside,  of course most of the blame squarely falling on the wealthiest block of nations, it’s our lifestyle that’s fucked up this planet and it’s our responsibility to bring it back from the brink of disaster.

But, unlike most the people I know, I’m not sympathetic to many of the developing nation’s demands either. Inside every hyper-populated developing nation is a (numerically large) class of rich assholes living large. Not to mention that it’s dubious to agree to carbon expansion so they can industrialize following the same erroneous path as the “developed” nations.

So, in the face of faltering summit, likely to have a spineless accord or none at all, and in the local context of total police oppression, my sound intervention seems sadly more appropriate than ever.

In a few days I’ll be arrested. Add me to the 1500 people who already had that pleasure in the last few days of mass pre-emptive arrests. Prisoners are hog-tied and lined up in the street for up to 5 hours, urinating on the themselves and freezing in the sub-zero cold.

Maybe they’ll arrive a miracle agreement in the last few days, maybe the cops will back off and allow some dissent to be heard, maybe hell will freeze over and pigs will fly. I’m still pessimistic, but would LOVE to be wrong.

Despite all this Copenhagen hasn’t been a downer. It’s been an inspiration. Just to see the tremendous number of people who’ve dedicated their lives to this issue, or the nearly hundred thousand who marched 8km in the freezing wind, meet new and old friends, witness the growing movement,  the solidarity, visit the free-town of Christiania. These experiences will keep me warm for the year to come.

I just played last night in Zurich (note: late posting), the promoters are a clever bunch who frame their monthly event as a visit to an imaginary nation in Africa called Tam Tam. The public passes through a border, then seek citizenship at a passport office. Their poly-cultural vision flows against the current of at least 60% of their Swiss compatriots, the ones who just voted for a referendum banning the construction of any new minarets in the entire country. A lot of europeans are paranoid about Islam, and rightly so, since their own religion has withered away. Euro churches are full of tourists clicking fotos, not the faithful or the penitent.

Or maybe their fears stem from the fact that Islam is the most recent upgrade of the Sky God Religion from the mideast, version 3.0. Christianity (v2.0) is soooooo last century, a clunky obsolescent OS that people cling to out of nostalgia or loyalty. Even more hidebound are the users of version 1.0, the old skool, with their austere 8-bit hebrew graphics, always battling with users of version 3.0 about who’s OS is “keeping it real”

On the subject of throwing all the 3rd world muslims out of europe…..  it just happened to my music partner, Nova. Her  Euro (Schengen) visa reached it’s 90-day end. ¡Fuera! back to Indonesia.

It took us four months of constant effort and hundreds of dollars to get her that precious EU visa, she had many a flight or epic train trip to gather the papers: criminal background check, AIDS test, bank account info, medical checkup, job contract, all that supposed to be translated by certified (expensive) translators, notarized, legalized, stamped and sealed by distinct offices scattered across Java.

Our first mistake was to begin with the Spanish embassy, until realizing it’s a nest of corruption. The embassy staff make the process impossible via normal methods, while hustlers directly outside offer guaranteed Spanish tourist visas for $$, obviously splitting the money with the employees on the inside.  We succeeded eventually with the German embassy, it’s better to deal with rigorous officials than the corrupt.

It was worth it the effort. Continuing with the nerdspeak, Nova is Filastine 4.0 (mixing, percussion, video, & now voice). She’ll be sorely missed, both musically and personally.

A triptych that shows the development of a live drum piece.1. studio- hallway next to my kitchen, Poble Nou 2. rehearsal- breakwater of Port of Barcelona 3. live- Kafe Antzokia, Bilbao (footage thanks to StereoZona)

below pic from Kafe Antzokia, Bilbao, also this excellent video at from same