Filastine Frequency

here are images from the performance
i was joined by cello: Amelie Bouard, mouth: mc Subzero Permafrost

fotos by Orianomada, except 1 by Maik

later I’ll post video

(forgot to post this because it’s so damn forgettable)

Buraka Som Sistema are exactly what i expected, and those expectations were high. They only disappointed when stooping to pandering stunts, at one point inviting a pre-selected group of talentless cute girls from the audience to flood the stage. These few moments aside it was phenomenally good. The big surprise for me this year was Gaslamp Killer, a deejay from LA that ups the stakes. Local resident and friend Cardopusher was great as always, and deserving of any good things that come his way. Omar Suleyman less interesting live than on his lofi cassettes, but still enchanting. Mulatu Astatke also excellent. Beyond that nothing memorable. But a festival with even one good artist is unusual, so half a dozen is stellar programming.

The sideshow of Sonar is seeing the world’s party people bumbling around the Raval, unable to speak the language, getting lost, sunburned, pickpocketed, and treated rudely but still managing to have a great time. Party people are tough, able to go without sleep for days and have fun in the most punishing of circumstances.

Most depressing part of any festival in Spain is the mountains of garbage generated. The mediterranean nations were taking a siesta when the rest of europe went green. Would be so fucking easy to provide recycling containers, or, adapting to the local custom of throwing everything directly on the ground, have the cleanup crews sort this calf-deep carpet of debris, 90% of which is plastic cup, when they sweep it up.

The streets of Barcelona are always full of pakistani immigrants selling cans of beer, during a festival the business is very heavy. A friend says that it’s possible to see the economy of Pakistan jump up to 1% the day after a large public event in Barcelona (Sonar, Merce, football games) as the foreign wire transfers briefly boost the economy.

I did a number of interviews for tv, radio, and print. Have a peek around if you speak Italian, French, or Spanish. It’d be the death of my street cred to break my exile from the anglo-american hegemony.

While we getting frivolous, peeps in Iran were getting their head’s cracked. Those in power say the (fraudulent) results are simply god’s will. On the contrary I see the hand of god quite clearly hucking a molotov cocktail into the basij headquarters. Or the foot of god acting via this woman below

If you haven’t seen the film Manufactured Landscapes then please find a way. It’s a documentary on the work of photographer Edward Burtynsky. His photos, and this film about them, show many of the unseen processes of the extraction-manufacturing-shipping-waste cycle. It’s a work that smacks you out of frivolity and deep into a meditation the state of things.

At one point the film follows him to the shipbreaking yards of Chittagong, Bangladesh. It reminded me to dig up by own photos of this same place, taken in late 1997, just found them in a shoebox, here they are.

Short explanation in case you never heard of this place: A number of scrap steel companies own pieces of these tidal oceanic mud-flats. The companies bid on obsolete or exhausted cargo ships. The ship are piloted with a skeleton crew to the bay of bengal. At the moment of the monthly high tide they drive ship at top speed towards the coast, going aground in the mud. As the tide recedes the scrap company dispatches an army of desparate men who rip the ship into pieces by hand, using nothing but oxy-acetylene torches and sledge-hammers. The pieces are carried by teams who chant to keep synchronized as they wade through the thigh-high mud and oil sludge.

In Stereofonic Streetscape Blowout from Dirty Bomb you can hear the sound from those two fotos of the tower being ripped from the top of the ship. There is only a short usable bit of recording because I lost my senses and yelled something like “holy fucking shit” over most of it.

After about an hour onsite I was expelled by some security thugs. They didn’t want people documenting the shipbreaking yards because it’s a notorious environmental and labor disaster. For me it also illustrates a larger theme-  about how we make, transport, and discard things, about relative values and hidden costs, about the grand works of man and their undoings.

By way of introduction, Barceloneta is triangle-shaped barrio bordered on one side by the port of Barcelona and on the other by the sea, historic home to fisherman, dockworkers, and other working class families.

The fishing industry is gone, the port has undergone a Miami-style face lift, the beach is mobbed by tourists, but somehow the neighborhood has survived this far maintaining local character and traditions.

A few nights ago they celebrated la fiesta de los coros. People associate via local bars into bands of a few dozen for a weekend of revelry. In short, these gangs and their hired bands parade from their home bar to the other bars to show off, then go away to a hotel out of town for a few days of constant intoxication, then return and parade again. They parade for hours, fueled by some cocktail of drugs, traditionally accompanied by natty brass marching bands, but nowadays there are many backed by brazilian-style batucadas. The gangs terminate their parade around midnight at their home bar, with a bunch of firecrackers and small explosives blowing up overhead, or sometimes a flaming logo, or a street filled with foam or some other trick.

It’s a potlatch style festival, like mardi gras, carnival or even the d.i.y. parts of Burning Man. The participants try to throw the best party, have the best band, show off their costumes, and share some dangerous & impressive fireworks display. Like any good street party it’s chaotic, blurry, auto-organized, and with almost no presence of authority.

These people have somehow weathered a lot of bullshit city plans and gentrification, but the biggest challenge might be arriving just now. There is a new landmark in the neighborhood, the Hotel Vela, a glass skyscraper imitating the sail-shaped hotel in Dubai. It’s plopped right on the coast, 5 stars of ugliness sitting atop a new shopping mall. It’s hard to find someone happy about it. For instance today I got an email invitation to a public action meeting, some excerpts:

S’ha alçat en l’horitzó de la ciutat una torre d’assalt. L’Hotel Vela. L’Hotel Vela culmina l’estratègia del “model Barcelona”: la transformació despòtica d’un territori urbà sotmès a l’interès privat, l’extracció de benefici econòmic, i el control policial que aquestes activitats demanen, amb el recurs a un sentit comú neoliberal que no ignora el mesquí interès quotidià, i la brutal trajectòria.

L’Hotel Vela és un agent de l’extensió d’aquest desert.
(……..)
Alguns volem dinamitar l’Hotel Vela.
(……..)
T’hem afegit a la llista de distribució de la campanya Bomba a l’Hotel Vela…..

It basically says to the the hotel as a tower of assault, the final touch in the ongoing program of converting territory from commons to private for the sake of enriching certain peoples, and brings with it the policing necessary to secure these new private upscale spaces, etc… Later it follows: Some of us are going to dynamite this hotel. Then the bulk of the email which talks about the meeting plans.
And from the end of the message: you are on the mailing list to Bomb the Hotel Vela, if you wish to unsubscribe etc..

It’s one quick solution. Less messy would be to hire David Copperfield to make it simply disappear.

The below foto I took during construction, from the rocks below where I used to sit and practice darbouka. The grafitti has been replaced by a giant “W Hotel” advertisement, and the skeleton now tarted-up with glass. Now I go elsewhere to play my instrument, but am running out of places. 

This building is personal for me in another way. The night of St. Joan 2007 I was explaining my pipe dream of a floating container-ship city to Mireia while sitting in the port. I looked up and realized that in fact we were sitting in the shadow of a cargo ship with the hand-painted name of “Freetown.” Later I found out it was abandoned by a bankrupt Indian shipping company. Soon after I brought out a friend with more arts/government connections to see the ship, but they had closed the entire zone, including public streets. We were turned around and told there’d be no access for a few years. By now Freetown is likely scuttled.

the audio is the base for the live version of B’talla, the video is made by the same barna crew Proletaricratz

note: had trouble uploading this to vimeo so here it is in the youtube. please hit the button “HQ” so it doesn’t look like total shit

The last mini-tour of uk-france-sweden offered plenty of transit time to watch films. Finally got around to finishing two.

By now everybody has seen or heard of Zeitgeist. If you’ve purposely avoided seeing it here is a synopsis. It’s a long downward arc. The film starts great with a debunking of christianity from a fresh angle, citing examples (with low-budget graphics) of how the bible was wholesale cobbled from older folkloric myths and sky-worship. Chapter two jumps without segue to 9/11 conspiracy theory, a story which is far better elaborated in the video Loose Change. Chapter three is an meandering nutcase rant about one-world government that ends with a new-age collage. There you are, watch part one.

R. Kelley’s Trapped in the Closet is simply a masterpiece from start to finish. He can almost be forgiven for his dubious recording career, AND pissing in the mouth’s of teenage girls, for producing such an opus. The Gilgamesh epic poem for our times. Yeah, it’s old, and of course I saw a few of the chapters years ago, but I just finally got ahold of the whole file. Seems like peeps in europe have never heard of it, so I’m now passing it to the advanced anglo-speakers. 

Reminds me about one trip on an overcrowded bus crossing the Atlas mountains in Morocco. This bus was the type with built-in video monitors above the center aisle and shrill loudspeakers above every seat. Most of the journey we were entertained by a long compilation of one of those reality TV cop shows from the late nineties. It was called something like “Real Police Pursuit”, and consisted wholly of violent car chases ranging across the twisted concrete-scape of the Los Angeles freeways, always ending in police beatings of “bad guy” blacks and latinos. It was dubbed into arabic directly on top of the english. A deadpan cairene translator spoke equally the drawl of the mustached cops and the truncated shouts of the pursued. The bus passengers were riveted, the chain-smoking middle-aged men, the veiled women vomiting with motion sickness, the obnoxious playboys in their velour track suits, everybody watched with rapt attention.

Friday I played the Short Circuit festival at the Roundhouse in London, a massive sold-out event, 2k humans. Sounds great, no? Except I was the warmup dj in the small side room. Oops, easily the most boring gig of the this diverse eighty-date tour. Not that I didn’t appreciate it, it’s instructive and humbling to be the smallest fish on the bill sometimes, and there is some intangible value in playing the same venue as did the Doors or Jimi Hendrix. Thanks Sonar! 

At least it brought me to London. Because between the hours of 3-4am I got to talk and have tea with John Jordan. If the plundering corporations of the London Square Mile could murder activists as easily in the UK as they do in Nigeria he’d have a place of honor on their hit list.

Last night, saturday, I played a perfectly relaxing and fun festival in Chartres, France. Afterwards I was taken 20km into the countryside to stay at this massive french manor.

It’s the property of a pianist priest, and has it’s own onsite chapel. Did I mention the collection of chinese percussion instruments? Or that that a river flows under the house?  It’s so fucking amazing that I asked to stay another day, not sure how wise that was now it’s dark and I’m alone in a house with 30 rooms.

Tomorrow my fantasy moment as a feudal ghost baron will dissolve, and I’m back into the maze of metro tunnels, train station platforms, and airport security checks that are the bread of my days.

Last weekends three concerts in southern france went well. All the things I’ve grown to expect from France, delicious stinky cheeses, drives through precious little towns with wooden-shuttered windows, and excellent treatment of artists.

This mini-tour ended at a very special place called Mix’art Myrys.  Their story is this… a collective squatted a building for years in central Toulouse, eventually made a deal with the local government to swap, they left their inner-city space in exchange for a big factory space on the periphery. So many inspiring stories like this in europe, how people have struggled and actually won something from the process.

Fotos are of the bar, the bathroom, and the shipping container that was our hotel room for the night.

This place and these people are just right. Bonus that I was joined onstage by a pair of excellent tribal-fusion belly dancers Nadyka.

mil gracias a Kognitif Krew

please re-post it, blog it, rate it, email it, comment on it, etc, it was a lot of work and we’re keen to get it out there

Yesterday was a disaster, on arrival in bcn I could only see the shitty face of it- the rudeness, the pollution, the tourism, and, over all, the wreckage of my personal life here. Then i realized I hadn’t slept properly in about 72 hours, which was just one long day that covered three-quarters of the distance around the planet. 

I did a hard reset, went to sleep in the afternoon and woke up at 5am today, went to the beach to do some yoga, drink mint tea, and greet the sun. Much better.

Everyone might by now already have it, but the latest album by Daedelus is brilliant. Free of bpm/genre slavery, it’s rambling creativity earns respect even when it (often) strays into styles I don’t like.

The straight line of conventional narrative is too often an elevated expressway permitting no unplanned encounters or necessary detours. It is not how our thoughts travel, nor does it allow us to map the whole world rather than one streamlined trajectory across it.

-Rebecca Solnit, from the preface to Storming the Gates of Paradise

I’m playing in southern France the next 3 nights, in case you live around there.