Ich Bin Keine Maschine

Just posting a few photos from my workmate Niklas’ band Locas in Love at a show in the Altes Pfandhaus in the Südstadt a couple of weeks ago.

The most enjoyable songs for me were ‘Maschine’ (I pretty much like any song with lyrics that confirm or deny being a robot or a machine), and their Julee Cruise – Falling cover version with dramatic ride cymbal flourishes. They also did a cover version of Aphrodite’s Child who are pretty rad.

Cute, aren’t they?

I couldn’t understand most of the patter between songs but it seemed to be stuff about looking for houses in the countryside and banging your head on the ceiling.

If you are based in NYC you can see them play in January at Cake Shop and Union Hall.

Top Game

Pictured: Erik recording Babu’s set for RBMA Radio in the Brewery Studios.

A week or two ago I interviewed Babu, a Filipino-American producer and turntablist best known for his work with Dilated Peoples and the Beat Junkies, who was in town to promote his new album Duck Season Vol 3.

The Beat Junkies released some bangin hip hop mixtapes back in the day that me and my friend Emi-chan loved, informed by an understanding of the breakbeat that stretches into hemispheres and rhythm structures from Clyde Stubblefield and David Matthews to Iranian rare grooves. Along with other crate diggers like Cut Chemist and Egon, they’re like some kind of west coast hip hop intelligentsia.

I’ve always found that crew to be impeccably polite and engaging, but with his buddha-like good looks and stoic expression, Babu has always seemed a bit less approachable than the others. And since I hardly possess nerd-level knowledge of rare funk and soul 45s, I asked my workmate Davide (who used to be editor of Juice) to contribute a few questions for my notebook.

Davide’s questions were pretty much the same as the ones I had scribbled down already: general, open-ended queries about how Babu put together the line up of guest features on the album, and how he saw the state of turntablism nowadays.

On-mic Babu turned out to be as classy and professional an interview subject as you could hope for. He spoke about the challenges of being a producer: how if MCs are working with someone like Dre they’ll automatically bring their top game, but the rest of the time you have to challenge them to step to the plate. (You can hear the recording of the interview soon on RBMA Radio.)

Interviewing renowned crate diggers might not be as hard as I thought – OK, it’s not like we talked about the rarest platters from Sao Paulo’s Galerias, but still, Babu didn’t have to be challenged to give thoughtful, entertaining answers. When you have an album to promote, it’s all part of the game, but it was a pleasure all the same.

Meta-Musto

Three of my favourite scribes contribute columns to New York’s Village Voice newspaper. One of them, Michael Musto, recently wrote a blog post about the passing of Paul Weyrich, in which he posts an outtake of a story he wrote some 14 years ago. He quips: “You can tell how old the story is by my incessant use of the phrase “information highway,” for which I apologize.”

Also, his post about a YMCA member getting his kit off is an amusing titbit. I am now fascinated about the readership demographics of Playgirl.

Across 135th St.

Writer/DJ/crowned sarcasm champ Chairman Mao kindly shared his experiences of last week’s historic election day in the USA, as well as these beautiful photos taken when he, his wife Andréa and son Trevor went to vote in Harlem.

The Chairman wrote: “Tuesday night was amazing. Baby Trevor was asleep so we didn’t hit 125th St. to join in the revelry after Obama’s victory was projected. (History or no history we weren’t waking him – if you ever have a kid you’ll understand; we took him out w/ us in the morning to vote, he did great, but that was enough.) Every car that drove down our block or up & down Lenox was honking, every group of folks who were walking down the street was yelling ‘Obama!’ Like I said since we didn’t venture out our experience was probably like that of others in most parts of NYC – or most blue-friendly cities across the country. We heard from friends who live in Austin TX that the reaction from just looking out the window was very much the same – folks leaning on their car horns, people literally celebrating in the street.

We popped a bottle of Dom P that we kept from when we got married & toasted. Andréa cried early & often during the news coverage – tears of joy, of course. But she was also thinking of her late grandfather, who she was very close with, and how great it would have been for him to have lived to see this. She called her dad – an old Harlemite now living in California – to share the moment.

Finally, America had done the right thing. (The non-white thing.)”

Read the rest of the Chairman’s words in this post I wrote today for the Academy blog, along with some thoughts from Stones Throw artist Aloe Blacc.

Evolution is Televised

(photo by Liam Lynch)

Lisbon’s Buraka Som Sistema will win Best Portuguese Act in tonight’s MTV EMAs. I spoke to João Barbosa aka Lil’ John last night about what Buraka have been up to in the host city of Liverpool. So far, not much, it seems (apart from doing interviews for Portuguese TV stations).

The BSS beatmaker says they’ve been dodging crying fans of German emo band Tokio Hotel (who are staying in the hotel next door), trying to catch Wiley playing a show (“He didn’t show up…typical Wiley”) and accidentally ending up in the red light district (“We ran out of there as fast as we could”). But it’s Liverpool Music Week, and since they’ve now discovered the area with the good clubs, they might still have a few adventures while they’re there. Lil’ John isn’t sure if it’ll be at tonight’s awards ceremony though, where he thinks the locally nominated awards are a bit of a farce. “I’m not really that proud of it.”

Still, even if MTV sux, the nomination is interesting…Too easy to dismiss a sea-change of support as lucky timing. To hear more from Lil’ John on the subject, here is a post I wrote today for the RBMA blog.

Songs of Innocence

As you might have noticed from the overbearing media coverage, some of us in Europe are pretty happy about Obama winning the election. OK, the election night party at local bar Stecken was only attended by 15 people, five of whom (like Frank West from Sin & Soul Records) were actually watching the footage. But I can assure you that plenty of people stayed up all night, snacking on pretzels and drinking herb liqueurs. Or at least until 4am, when CNN called Ohio for Obama and there didn’t seem to be any way for McCain to clinch it.

In the case of my friend Mina von Sneakerberg, she’s probably happy at least partly because she won’t get lectured so much about her home country’s foreign policy so much. Mina, who manages Legowelt’s Strange Life Records, lives in the Netherlands. Once when I went with her to see Mr Wolfers and Alden Tyrell play in Rotterdam, a VJ subjected us to images of Bush interspersed with the McDonalds symbol with a red line through it. McDonalds, unfortunately, doesn’t disappear when Bush goes out of office.

Mina says the Obama victory was good, but she wasn’t 100% re-enthused about American politics. “I’m really stoked, but also really confused and grumpy that we just voted in CA to ban gay marriage. What the fuck: it was finally made legal in May, and now it’s undone.”

Meanwhile, the election has given Germans pause to think about their own voting constituencies. Jan Niklas Jansen (below) plays in local Cologne band Locas in Love. They were recently in NYC to record their new album, for which Niklas is sewing up 250 handmade felt record sleeves. (maybe the majors are in worse financial straits than I thought…). I asked him if he’d talked to any of his American friends yesterday, and he said “They seemed relieved, in part just to have something new to talk about. It’s strange because I’ve never seen people around here affected by politics like that. Being there in September, I was interested to see people care about it so much. Because people here in Germany seem so disaffected, in a way.”

Over in the UK, our friend Tony Nwachukwu is going to play at a victory party at London’s Plastic People club tomorrow night. He says, “I stayed up all night whatching (sic) the results on our good ol’ BBC and as the results were uncovered, the true magnitude of what was about to happen finally kicked in..
London was a great place to be with a lot of people, particularly of colour, with an acute sense of joy and freshness.”

“My son asked me if Obama was good at Parkour. I said he has the potential to be great at most things.”

I guess we’re all pretty ready to drop our cynicism, at least for a few minutes, and the moment of the acceptance speech in Grant Park allowed us to do that. The rhetoric of Obama and his speech writers harked back to America in the 60s and 70s, and not just to the dreams of Martin Luther King, Jr. It seems like back then musicians reacted to their circumstances with a kind of hopefulness that is barely believable these days, despite what Russell Simmons says. There’s obviously a reason why Obama referenced the Sam Cooke song in his acceptance speech, and why I had Aloe Blacc’s version stuck in my head throughout the campaign (I wasn’t the only one). It’s a coincidence that Obama’s campaign strategist is called David Axelrod – but when we drank French champagne last night, it was Songs of Innocence that we ended up listening to.

I’ve always preferred that album to Songs of Experience.

Hey girl, didn’t I meet you somewhere cool before?

Having lived in a big, commerce driven megalopolis before (Tokyo), I am well aware that living in NYC would be all about the hustle. Or as our friend Henri Brisard put it, a “New York State of Grind”. And after two weeks I wouldn’t go to the laundromat without blow-drying my hair first. I would probably end up with high heels surgically glued to my feet, running a black market trade in stolen IV twins.

However, I was just reading about the first edition of this year’s parties at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in Long Island. The gallery itself has been around since ‘71, which means it’s almost 30 years older than the Sony gaming console. The name is still kind of confusing.

As evidenced by announcements on message boards (like the now-defunct CBS.nu) this gallery has been hosting its weekly summer dance-party series, Warm Up Saturdays, for 10 years. They do it in collaboration with MoMa’s Young Architects program. And I don’t know who’s been doing the music programming in recent years but it has been consistently dope: ranging all the way from the charming off-key singer and virtuoso violinist Kelley Polar Quartet, to deep disco and yacht-rock affiliates like DJ Harvey, Lovefingers, Rub-n-Tug and Danny Wang, to glittery dusty techno from people like Juan Atkins, the Juan McLean, and others not called Juan.

This year’s architects were Amale Andraos, 35, and Dan Wood, 40, from Work Architecture Company, and apparently it was something to do with a farm (there were plants in the wooden tubs and a chicken pen).

All of that eco-friendly urban oasis stuff seems behind the point: the genius here is the combo of cardboard-roofed caves where you can crouch seductively on gravel and make a new friend, futuristic blue lily pads with only room for two, a paddling pool and nice music. Could there be a better conceived space for picking up chicks?

Bonus: Download disco mixes at Cool in the Pool radio.

the beach is where you go when you want to be free

Arabian, born K.R. Nazel on June 17, 1965 and raised in the Southern Los Angeles suburb of Compton. A kid whose dad ghost-wrote for Iceberg Slim as well penning “Black Gestapo”.

“The first club we had, it was called The Cave, in the back of an old pet store, and it was like a pet feed store and I was 16 and I had to go get a job. So I had to go to the pet store, but this was no ordinary pet store. This guy sold like 100lb bags of pigeon feed and chicken feed and stuff.”

And so began the sound system that would eventually become the World Class Wreckin’ Cru, redefining the course of West Coast hip hop as we know it.

Arabian Prince’s new anthology was released today on Stones Throw Records. The NWA and electro pioneer, also behind some classic electro records as Professor X, Arabian is pretty rad in real life. When we met him at the Academy in Seattle, the thing I remember most is this headset he would wear all the time. It was like he was in constant communication with a girl he met last week, his manager, Area 51, the CIA, or all at once.

Therefore, I think they could’ve put a picture of present-day Arabian on the cover.

Still, there are some good photos in the CD-insert like the one where he’s wearing leather cuffs.

This comp has some great moments: you’ll find there are certain tracks that you will want to play more than others but it grows on you. The track below, available for download on the Academy site right now, is one of them: all seagulls and synthesisers.

Looks like they’re still low-ridin’ on the West.

Arabian Prince and the Sheiks – Let’s Hit the Beach

Playground Love @ c/o Pop

For anyone in the area who’s not going motorcycle-riding on Saturday, I’m playing at John Harten & Ansorge’s Playground Love marathon. There are monkey bars that spout water and a safe tarmac surface. It’ll be a blast: from today thru Sunday.

As you can see from the schedule below, John and Ansorge are playing at a quarter past infinity, or maybe 100 x 1,000,000 (I’m not so good at Roman numerals).

c/O Pop ist Los!

Today is the first day of the c/o Pop festival here in Cologne.

As I was walking through the Brüsselerplatz I came across the organic ice cream van, which today served me a one-euro cone of mango mint flavour with complimentary c/o Pop wafer!

I don’t think I’ve ever actually eaten an advertisement before.

I asked the guy, whose ice cream van I have only spotted there on one other occasion, if he was always there. I guess that’s what you call a leading question. “Every afternoon,” he replied, “When the weather’s good” And he leaned out of his window to peer up at the grey and overcast sky as a few spikes of rain fell on our heads.

Despite, or perhaps because of the gusts of wind and intermittent patches of blue sky, there was a feeling of excitement in the air all day.

I didn’t ask the ice cream man if he was going to see Gravenhurst or D.A.F. play tonight. I didn’t call him a liar, either.