Domodedovo airport, Moscow, is kept secure by thin security guards topped by comically oversized military hats that cast shadows beyond their shoulders. The women guards wear improbable miniskirts complemented by thigh-high black leather boots with stiletto heals. There is a camouflaged soldier in one corner of the hall with a sagging belly & an equally sagging face. He protects the display of a luxury car that he will never be able to afford. There is a girl in the line with an exaggerated lolita look, sporting braids and denim shorts cut-off so high that you notice more camel-toe than fabric. There are many broad-faced people from central asia with smiles of golden teeth. The hustlers of unofficial taxis have the puffy faces of chronic inebriates. The airport terminal itself is futuristic glass tube; it is both still under construction and already falling apart, bare wires hang and tiles are missing. My mobile phone displays the network name in cyrillic, it could say anything, since I can’t pronounce it. Same with all advertisements, it’s all striving to sell something, but it’s not clear exactly what. Outside there are random gashes in the ground, as if they couldn’t figure out where to put the parking lots and tried a few different spots. A copse of trees survived the development. Airport employees have created an improvised park here with furniture made from stumps. Lovers kiss in a warm spring breeze heavy with diesel fumes. Insects and ants are swarming with the energy of creatures that have waited patiently through the frozen months. Although it is 9pm the sun is high in the sky.
The memo arrived late to my desk: Sevilla is beautiful, the center a tangle of pedestrian streets trimmed in mosaic, interrupted by plazas shaded by ancient trees or the odd Moorish palace. But like anything pretty, it’s suffocated under the gaze of it’s admirers. The Zemos98 festival that invited me was exceptional: it’s rare when festival organizers are radical AND well-funded.
The following night I played in the Casa Invisible of Málaga, one of the finest squats you could imagine. Finer than that. It’s a decrepit urban palace with it’s own lush patio garden. Architecture aside, the ambitious projects they mount socially engaged projects with a detail for arts & aesthetics. Ironic since Málaga is the epicenter of the Costa del Sol, the world’s worst example of mafia-style rightist policies that have bloomed a million concrete tourist bunkers, permanently destroying Spain’s southern coast. Foto: host Carlos in the vestibule of la Casa Invisible.
No visit to Andalucía is possible without a detour to visit cave-dwelling friends in Granada. People so superlative that we should wonder if leaving caves was really a smart move for humanity. Big perk: my host Carolina works at Eshavira, a tiny watering hole and humble venue for many local gitano musicians. Video: sunday nights performance, her name is Ana Cali.
The journey ended with a stomach-churning road up to the Alpujarras. Some 300 tiny white-washed villages scattered through the arid Sierra mountains separating the plains from the Straight of Gibraltar. They were founded by fleeing muslims pushed out of Granada during the final sweep of the reconquista. Many of the pueblos didn’t have road access until the last few years, which made them a useful hiding place for guerillas fighting the fascist armies of Franco. Nowadays they are full of the kind of people who are willing to trade many of the conveniences of modern life for a healthier ecosystem and lots of personal freedom. That’d be your usual collection of hippies, luddite rednecks, weed farmers, and foreign dropout artists. Foto: iron-rich stream, Pórtugos, Alpujarras.
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.
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.
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