As I mingle with the audience after playing a concert, or chat online about my music, I often find myself explaining the technical ways in which my work is created. I’m not sure if this is due to the fact that I’ve found my vocation as a media technician, or if I am simply less comfortable talking about the philosophy behind my music.
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There wasn’t a day that he wasn’t there. If he wasn’t standing at the bottom of the stairs, leading down from our side of Piazzale Loreto, he’d be in the middle of the tunnel, connecting one side of the square to the other. Whether it was hot or it was cold, the same sock hat was always affixed to his head. Upon reflection, I can’t remember when he wasn’t wearing a down jacket, either. (More…)
Although studded with moments of hectic musical convergence, Kutmah’s The New Error is bookended by passages in which propulsion takes a back seat. On the opening track, a string motif of Middle Eastern provenance twines amid meandering piano chords as Doom articulates a dream of irony-free positivity. Yet the hiss and crackle that suffuse the proceedings keep them at a distance. (More…)
March 30th
Thirty five years ago today, a peaceful general strike by Israeli-Palestinians was met with bullets. Six people were killed and hundreds of others injured or arrested in what became known as Land Day. Two and a half months later, the Soweto uprising began in South Africa, claiming far more lives, but laying down a marker in the struggle against apartheid. The timing of the two revolts melded the stirrings of solidarity consciousness with the Palestinians to apartheid comparisons with South Africa. (More…)
Catherine Hardwicke’s Red Riding Hood is a luscious little gothic fairytale. Taking the “Little Red Riding Hood” story and transposing it onto the social landscape of a small, early American village, the movie manages to give this classic a contemporary flair while also maintaining a sense of gothic romance. (More…)
When the West imagines a more perfect Turkey, it inevitably invokes the figure of Ataturk, irrespective of how undemocratic he was. What matters was his desire to be European, even though Ataturk would still be denied membership to the EU. When the West imagines a more perfect Arab world, it inevitably invokes the figure of Ataturk, irrespective of the fact that he was European, not an Arab. What matters was his embrace of secularism, as a Muslim. Etcetera. Etcetera.
When a German producer receives support from the Goethe Institute to collect field recordings in Africa and forcefully rework them into cutting-edge electronica, difficult questions are bound to come up. Are the musicians he documented being exploited, whether financially or culturally? (More…)
As I approached the door of our apartment building, I noticed an elderly, apron-clad woman was sorting through our garbage. “Ein Auslander!” (“A foreigner”) she derisively exclaimed as she examined the label of an empty bottle of tahina. “Ein Auslander,” the woman repeated to herself, nodding her head as she sniffed its freshly scrubbed interior. (More…)
Don’t let media emphasis on anarchist violence during London’s March 26th demonstrations fool you. The majority of protestors were middle class folks without any pretense to radical chic. There was also a significant number of elementary school children within their ranks. Like these two young kids, giving it to the British Prime Minister in Trafalgar Square.
He sort of looks like Mark Zuckerberg. The paisley, however, is a bit confusing. Karl Marx Strasse, Berlin. February, 2011.
For an astonishing three decades, since he was only thirteen years old, Berkeley native Aaron Cometbus has been publishing the eponymous zine that, more than any other, testifies to the power of low-fi print. With personal touches like his distinctive block-capital hand lettering and bracingly honest assessment of his travels and travails, Cometbus remains a crucial bulwark in the battle against inauthentic living. Reading even a few pages is enough to put the feed-me-now mentality of our technologically oversaturated age in perspective.
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