PS check this out. That there's about 100 hours of my life...
Thursday, November 16, 2006
Pitchfork: end of the year
PS check this out. That there's about 100 hours of my life...
Wednesday, November 01, 2006
Shanty House this Friday
Shanty House - Friday 3rd November 2006, Whitechapel Art Gallery, from 8.00pm
Shanty House brings a range of global urban music to the Whitechapel – from Baile Funk emanating from Brazilian favelas, to Kwaito the house-influenced sounds of South African townships and Desi, fusing traditional Indian music with Bhangra, hip hop, garage and reggae; from the Hip-Hop of the Deep South Crunk, to Jamaica’s dancehall and London’s Grime.
The opening night will include a performances from Tetine, a Soul Jazz signed Brazilian duo fusing baile funk with electroclash. DJs Woebot, Stelfox, Bun-u playing the best in crunk, grime, desi, baile funk, reggaeton, dancehall and hyphy. The night will kick off with a special screening of Resistencia: Hip Hop in Colombia, followed by a Q&A with Director Tom Feiling.
Resistencia: Hip-Hop in Colombia Director: Tom Feiling, 51 min, UK, 2002
Resistencia offers a rare look at the Hip-Hop street subculture in civil war-torn Colombia, while at the same time exploring how traditional Latino music is being infiltrated by rap. Following a summer in the lives of some of Colombia's finest rappers, DJs and break-dancers, the film explores how young Colombians feel about the crisis afflicting their country and the impact it has on their lives. Caught between left wing guerillas and right wing paramilitaries, these youths turn to rap as a way to express their points of view on the realities forced upon them by long-running violence, cultural crisis and the global cocaine trade. Youthful and entertaining, but also angry and enlightening, Resistencia bears witness to how the Hip-Hop culture has a major impact far from the "bling bling" of the U.S. music industry.
Tetine
Eliete Mejorado and Bruno Verner, both native Brazilians who have since relocated to London, created Tetine in São Paulo in 1995 by combining various cultural and artistic currents. Lying at the intersection of performance art, video, and dirty electronica, a Tetine concert comes off as a Latin American version of Fischerspooner, with the raw sounds of baile funk infusing the squelchy beats.
Tetine has also increasingly incorporated the aggressive beats of baile funk into their own more rock-oriented music, which Verner dubs "punk carioca" ... Tetine's forthcoming album, L.I.C.K My Favela (on Slum Dunk Records), draws even more heavily from baile.
DJs Woebot, Stelfox and Bun-U. www.myspace.com/shantyhouse1. "Got any dubstep lads..?" ;-)
Monday, October 30, 2006
Quicktings
“I’m from a place where, there’s only t’ugs
Machines get bussed
Every morning!
Rudeboy…”
Rapid gets classic mournful PAUG bars out of Maxwell D for Ruff Sqwad’s latest Detroity-stringy-grime anthem (as heard on Logan’s show).
Mantis: out now on Keysound.
Post-Diwali, a friend bringing along a kilo of jalebi sweets to eat to make me feel sick. What fiendish culture devised sweets that are pure, sticky, deep fried sugar?!!
Trunk monkey and Riding Dirty.
Jason Burke on the rise of the Taliban . My favourite journalist on the planet.
Hilarious “fuckiit” phone conversations with Kode9. Laughing is good for the soul.
Paul Autonomic’s blog. Much welcomed hub for his writing. God I wish more people wrote (well) about dubstep regularly.
“The Cure and the Cause” – as heard twice in one Friday evening. I headed out to WasteLondon (shudder) only to hear Spoony (!!) drop it in the V&A foyer and DJBoringHouseDJ play it in some DJ bar. Urban and posh London united?
New Dizzee LP. Not heard it yet. I want to though.
FWD>> weeklys: I’m not sure. Mala, needless to say, was fucking sublime the other week. “Learn,” “Bury the Bwoy,” “Crays Cray” remix, “Jah Power Dub,” “City Cycle”. Need I go on?
Dubsta’s Shackleton mix. I can never think of one Skull Disco tune to exchange a relative for, but yet collectively they seem to have generated a body of work too distinctive to ignore. Different, right now, is good.
Other bloggers not blogging much anymore. Magazines going shit/irrelevant/indie I can take, but the blogging massive… please no!
Plastician’s LP: 44.7 minutes long. Less is more!
Dot Alt link Ruff Sqwad. Am feeling Dirty Danger's "Back and Forth" - pure Diz circa 03... i miss them days... *sniff*
Zumpi Hunter by Terror Danjah popping in my inbox. Iliiiiikeit. Just where did Terror go of late?
Amusingly named footballers. First there were the footballers with two first names or surnames, i.e. John Terry and Barrington Belgrave. Frank Lamp-hard is amusingly Ronseal. Then there was of course Dean Windass and Danny Dichoff. Now Watford have a player called Shittu!
Pinch. New day, new IM message from Pinch, “did I send you this one yet?” The boy’s ondisting right now! “One Blood” and “Rise and Fall” get my vote.
Reams and reams of so-so, half baked, unmixed, copycat cloned, ooh-look-I’m-so-fucking-dark-and-hard-and-angry-me-
-what’s-that-mum?-yes-I-know-its-past-my-bedtime halfstep “dubs.” I don’t know whether to shout or cry.
Female vocals. Mary J Blige’s “Be Without You”, Hindi gems by Yeh Kya Hau, Cassie. I need some soaring vocals to purge all the above child’s play.
Female r&b vocals, mournful dubstep (Forensix’ “1st Dynasty”), Hindi Bollywood Gems, Mercston & Ghetto’s “Good Old Days” and Punjabi floorshakers emptying the floor at parties. “Yes the bloke playing 80s cheese will be back, grrr….”
Crunk, Hyphy, Snap. Raw suddenly means mean more.
Making beats. The only thing that can stop me sleeping at night.
Thursday, October 19, 2006
Saturday, September 30, 2006
PRC to LDN
LDN003
A: Dusk “Mantis (Blackdown remix)” [Keysound Recordings]
B: Blackdown “Mantis (VI3 mix) [Keysound Recordings]
(Buy a promo or listen to clips: here)
Throughout the early part of this decade, a single repeated message emerged out of the background noise and hum of daily data. China was growing. Very, very rapidly. While this decade has been dominated by the US’s interaction with the Middle East, few people have daily contact with the region. By contrast, over a period of several years, disproportionate number of friends or contacts began mentioning China. An architect described vast contracts for whole chunks of cities. A new media journalist highlighted the growing Chinese online market. A distance learning expert described the building of tens if not a hundred world class academic institutions. Anyone who followed politics mentioned the possibility that China could grow to superpower status, a welcome counterbalance to American unilateralism. As this decade unfolded the background noise grew into a hum: it was the noise of China growing.
The message wasn’t restricted to academic, mainstream media or architectural routes. It also began appearing through the hardcore continuum too. My passion for Wiley and Jammer’s “Sinogrime” (© Kode 9) experiments, Horsepower and Kode 9’s “Sinodub” excursions, documented here (scroll down to the post 'Fukkaz'), coincided with a time when there was a strong sense to me, as 2step collapsed and drum & base rotted, of the need for new sonic avenues. Around 2003 I suddenly saw a perfect yet lesser trodden path wandering between Missy Elliot’s “Get Ur Freak On,” Timbaland’s “Indian Flute,” Photek’s “Ni Ten Ichi Ru,” the Jammer/NASTY mix CD for Deuce, Loefah’s “Monsoon remix,” Kode 9’s “Fukkaz,” Wiley’s “Shanghai,” Horsepower’s “Sholay” up to Plasticians "Japan" (actually made from Chinese samples) and Forensix’s recent “1st Dynasty” [NB: the “Sino-” prefix was always clumbsily inaccurate, referring to anywhere “East-ish,” be it India, China, Japan, Thailand or more - just no nations bordering the Black Atlantic]
People perceive dubstep as having drifted out of 2step garage, in comparison to grime’s shift, but in those days around the turn of the millennium there was a definite feeling that rejection was as powerful a tool as inclusion, in order to move on. This manifested itself to me a rejection of lots of the sonic clichés surrounding genres persisted with: drum & bass’s Amen tear outs and sickly Rhodes chords, house’s fake warmth and hip hop’s reliance on tired funk/jazz/soul loops. That feeling, of the need to seek out new sonic cornerstones with which to build from, persists to this day.
I was lucky enough, while working at Deuce, to come by a CD of Chinese instrument samples. Loefah once mentioned a sample CD that he and the Mystikz went thirds on that produced a large number of their early classics, “Conference” included. This Chinese sample CD has been similarly central to Dusk and I.
Normally a track by us gets written, by us together, in a fairly similar linear fashion:
Loops>>variations>>arrangement>>mixdown>>mixed master
But we’d long talked about writing music in non-linear ways. About two years ago now, possibly more, Dusk played me a loop he couldn’t finish. It had a great bassline with this sweet Chinese melody. He’d called it “Mantis.” Last summer, while spending time on California’s Pacific rim, I revisited that loop. I added more Chinese instrumentation and darker gongs – and a track began to emerge, but without the original melody. It’s my mix of Mantis, a remix of a track that doesn’t exist, started because of a perfect melody I didn’t even use.
At the beginning of this year Dusk and I sat down and deleted the entire track. Left only with the sounds, we began writing a completely new one together. Out of a remix of a track that didn’t exist came a new collaboration by both of us, “Mantis VIP” (available on my 4Bristol mix, and a track that I do hope to put out properly someday). Then, determined to use that perfect melody, I returned solo to “Mantis VIP,” again deleted the track and began again. The result was “Mantis VI3” – the Sino-signature sound appears at the end. So far removed from Dusk’s original loop, we couldn’t really call it remix. The meandering pathway taken to get there seem somehow pleasing.
Dusk “Mantis (Blackdown remix)” >> Dusk + Blackdown “Mantis VIP” >> Blackdown “Mantis VI3”
The first and last part of the Mantis trilogy will now make up the third release on Keysound. Following on from the first two releases, the artwork (keysights) will reflect our London surroundings, just like the looped keysounds that each of our tracks sit emerged in. A recent digital camera disaster that killed my own camera so, unable to take the artwork shots myself, I recently set off with a friend Simon into the most Chinese part of our surroundings, London’s China Town, for visual inspiration. The following gallery was the result:
"GREATER CHINA" - LDN STYLE
MANTIS: BUG OR BODYBLOW?
It’s also interesting that, long before it was finished, Dusk chose the name “Mantis” for the tune(s). By co-incidence, it turns out there is a Chinese mantis, (Tenodera aridifolia sinensis) and two styles of Chinese martial arts.
Insect: Chinese Mantis
The following is quoted from the Wikipedia entry for the Chinese mantis:
“The Chinese mantis looks like a long and slender praying mantis, with different shades of brown. The adult has a green lateral line down its wing. It is typically larger than most other mantises, growing up to 15 cm (6 inches) in length. Their diet consists of caterpillars, butterflies, wasps, bees, crickets and moths. Like other mantids, they are known to be cannibalistic.”
Martial Arts: Northern Praying Mantis
The following is quoted from the Wikipedia entry for Northern Praying Mantis
“Northern Praying Mantis is a style of Chinese martial arts, sometimes called Shandong Praying Mantis after its province of origin. It was created by Wang Lang and was named after the praying mantis, an insect, the aggressiveness of which inspired the style. Shaolin records document that Wang Lang was one of the 18 masters gathered by the Shaolin Abbot Fu Yu (1203-1275), which dates him and Northern Praying Mantis to the Song Dynasty (960–1279).”
“The mantis is a long and narrow predatory insect. While heavily armoured, it is not built to withstand forces from perpendicular directions. Consequently, its fighting style involves makes use of whip-like/circular motions to deflect direct attacks, which it follows up with precise attacks to the opponent's vital spots. These traits have been subsumed into the Northern Praying Mantis style, under the rubric of "removing something" (blocking to create a gap) and "adding something" (rapid attack).”
“One of the most distinctive features of Northern Praying Mantis is the "praying mantis hook": a hook made of one to three fingers directing force in a whip-like manner. The hook may be used to divert force (blocking) or to attack critical spots (eyes, face, acupuncture points). These are particularly useful in combination, for example using the force imparted from a block to power an attack. So if the enemy punches with the right hand, a Northern Praying Mantis practitioner might hook outwards with the left hand (shifting the body to the left) and use the turning force to attack the enemy's neck with a right hook. Alternately, she might divert downwards with the left hook and rebound with the left wrist stump to jaw/nose/throat.”
There are many styles of Northern Praying Mantis some hard, some soft, some rare, some common, including Seven Star Praying Mantis Boxing and Secret Gate Praying Mantis Boxing. For more information: check Wikipedia.
Martial Arts: Southern Praying Mantis
The following is quoted from the Wikipedia entry.
“Despite its name, the Southern Praying Mantis style of Chinese martial arts is unrelated to the Northern Praying Mantis style. Southern Praying Mantis is instead related most closely to fellow Hakka styles such as Dragon and more distantly to the Fujian family of styles that includes Fujian White Crane, Five Ancestors, and Wing Chun.”
“Southern Praying Mantis is a close range fighting system that places much emphasis on short power techniques and has aspects of both the soft and internal as well as the hard and external. As in other southern styles, the arms are the main weapon, with kicks usually limited to the hip and under.”
“Like Wing Chun and Xingyiquan—other styles created as pure fighting arts—Southern Praying Mantis has relatively no aesthetic value, unlike its northern counterpart and many other styles. Southern Praying Mantis is informed by traditional Chinese medicine.”
“Though the origins of Southern Praying Mantis may be contested, what is indisputable is its association with the Hakka people of inland eastern Guangdong. The traditions … maintain that their respective founders Chow Ah-Nam and Som Dot created their styles after witnessing a praying mantis fight and defeat a bird.”
“However, the traditions of the Chu family branch contend that the name "Southern Praying Mantis" was chosen to conceal from Qing forces its political affiliations by pretending that this esoteric style of Ming loyalists was in fact a regional variant of the popular and widespread Praying Mantis style from Shandong.”
STEVE BARKER’S GUIDE TO THE ENTRY POINTS OF CHINESE MUSIC
A long time supporter of dub and now dubstep, broadcaster/journalist Steve Barker now lives in China. Several months ago, during an email exchange, he recommended an essential compilation The Hugo Masters: An Anthology of Chinese Classical Music. As a music fan, there’s little more satisfying than a recommendation of an entry point into an unknown and exciting field, like say Buzz’ Relics compilation is to Detroit Techno or Metalheadz’ first collection is to drum & bass. So while I wait for Amazon US to deliver my copy of The Hugo Masters, I asked Steve if he’d share a little of what he’s learned about the music of the PRC. This is Steve Barker’s guide to the entry points of Chinese music…
Steve Barker: “A few clues can be offered up to the naïve foreigner about to explore the world of Chinese music which, for pure convenience here, we can split up into traditional, modern interesting stuff and pop. Let's forget the pop which makes up around about 99.8% of what is easily accessible, most of this is 'cantopop', a syrupy Chinese derivative of Western pop originating largely in Hong Kong but now transplanted just about everywhere in Asia. Approaching traditional music the first stumbling block is Peking Opera, usually served up for the tourists, this is culturally dense and totally impenetrable, swerve around it.”
“For the virtually inclined a trip to the excellent site of Hugo records in Hong Kong will yield a stunning treasure house of exotic delights http://www.hugocd.com – I find I can't get this from Beijing at the moment but Amazon stocks plenty of their material. For an overview there are some nice sets but to dive right in go for the historical recordings of ancient Qin music, particularly the stuff from Sichuan. The GuQin (pronounced GooChin) is seven-stringed zither without bridges, the most classical Chinese instrument with over 3000 years of history. It is literally called Qin yet commonly known as "GuQin" where "gu" stands for ancient. Confucius was a master of this instrument.”
“When I first heard this sound I was struck by the similarity to slide guitar from Texas and Mississippi. There's a whole bunch other instruments that can be found described on the many websites covering traditional Chinese music, my only other advice would be go for the solo albums then the sonics can be better appreciated, then move on to group playing.”
“If you are in Beijing then there are two easy options. Don't go to the nearest record store unless you need bootleg Beyonce. Go to Wanfujing, the main shopping street – there's a subway stop there, where you will find the English Language Bookstore, three or four floors up there's an excellent selection of traditional music. Better still is the shop by the gate of the Beijing Music Conservatory, down by the South Second Ring Road, nearest subway stop Fuxingmen.”
“Without spending too much time on modern stuff there a couple of great portals into China, first up is from Laurence Li who's based in Shenzhen near HK, he runs Global Noise Online with lots of links into other sites in-country and its all in English - http://www.chinesenewear.com/gno/ . The other contact is Yan Jun in Beijing who runs an improvisatory music night at the Dos Kolegas Bar in Beijing every Tuesday without fail; it's called Kwanyin Waterland – after the female Buddha. Yan Jun runs the Sub Jam label and you can find him at http://www.subjam.org/ - he's also producer, poet, fixer, journalist and all round good egg - an essential top man.”
“Perhaps the most remarkable purchase I have made whilst in Beijing is a collection of 8 CDs by Sichuan folk music archivist and musician Huan Qing who is currently living in Dali, Yunnan. Compiled by Huan over several years there's Yangtze River Workers' Folk Songs, Ancient Songs of the Hani People, Sichuan Folk Artists, Yunnan Nu and Wa Minority, Yunnan Lisu, Yunnan Naxi Bamboo Flute, Yunnan Yi People, and Tibet Street Musicians. This last one was recorded by Zhang Jian of fm3 and put out on Sublime frequencies http://www.fm3buddhamachine.com. You pay around 15 quid for this stunning selection from the Sugar Jar Workstation in
Dashanzi-798 Art District. Good luck!"
Steve Barker - BBC/On The Wire (www.onthewire.uk.com) and the Wire (dub column).
CHINA: FRIEND OR FOE?
“China has a population of 1.3 billion people: one quarter of humankind is Chinese.”
-- Hugo De Burgh, “China: Friend or Foe?” (Icon). Buy it here.
The final piece in the confluence of Sino-influences in my life came with the impulse buy of Hugo De Burgh’s primer “China: Friend or Foe.” The fact was, despite all this hype about China, I knew very little about the vast country and have little opportunity to visit it in the foreseeable future. De Burgh’s book was a revelation, so I’d like to share selected quotes from it:
Internal geography
“Chinese provinces are as large as European countries, often with larger populations, and with histories and languages distinct from their neighbours’. Canton Province (Guangdong, adjoining Hong Kong) has 79 million people, Xinjiang is the size of Western Europe with a population of 19 million, and Sichuan has 87 million.”
Geopolitics
“China is recognised as a rising power. It is establishing itself as an important factor for most countries. Yet this does not amount to a challenge to US dominance, because it is constrained by its poverty, domestic discontent, geopolitical vulnerability, dependence on foreign resources, and its leaders’ beliefs about China’s history and its relations with foreign powers over the last 150 years. How the world reacts to China’s rise may do more to determine its influence than China’s rise itself.”
Language
“While the written language can be used by all Chinese, the spoken languages can vary as greatly as do European languages. Over 70 per cent of the population, living north of the Yangtze and in certain north-western parts of southern provinces, speak a form of Mandarin (Putonghua), albeit with local dialects. By contrast, the languages of South China are mutually incomprehensible. They include the Wu languages of Shanghai, Xiang in central and southern Hunan, Gan in Jiangxi, Northern and Southern Min in Fujian, Yue (including Cantonese) in Canton Province and part of Guangxi, and Hakka, the language of various people scattered in various parts of China. Standard Putonghua (Mandarin) … is always that of administration.”
“The Chinese written language unites all Chinese; until recently, it was used in common with linguistically quite different Japanese, Koreans and Vietnamese too, since it is ideographic rather than alphabetic. What that means for practical purposes is that even when people cannot understand each other’s speech, they can communicate in writing, writing which each will pronounce completely differently. In theory, any spoken language such as English might be written in Chinese, though, as with Japanese, it would need to acquire grammatical particles and the ideographs would be given an English sound.”
Armed forces
“The People’s Republic of China (PRC) has frontiers 136,700 miles long, and its coastline measures 111,850 miles. The PRC is contiguous with fourteen countries, with three of which – India, Vietnam and USSR – it has had military clashes with in the last 50 years… Western military experts believe that, not withstanding [recent] advances, China probably does not have the capability to succeed in an attack on Taiwan [the Republic of China], let alone challenge the USA… The USA spends nearly eight times [on defence] what China does.”
Human Rights
“People are still subject to an approach to human beings learned from the Soviet Union in the 1930s by a Party which, in its pursuit of total power, abandoned all civilised values.”
Media
“Conventional media can be divided into three types: first, the core Party and government organs, such as the People’s Daily or New China News Agency; second, those still closely controlled by the Party and State, but not the core, such as the China Economic Times; and finally, those that are technically ‘fringe’ and completely dependent upon the market, yet may – as with the influential Caijing, a bi-weekly journal, or the Xin Jing Bao – be leading media. The fringe media are not as closely watched as their counterparts in the other categories of media and therefore have more leeway. Government organs still retain ultimate ownership of probably all media operations and can shut them down at will.”
Central Government
“Foreign observers of government have often been convinced either that China is about to disintegrate because the centre cannot control the desire of the localities to do their own thing, or that China’s economic growth is making the Chinese State so powerful that it poses a mighty threat to the rest of the world. The first fails to take account of the centre’s ability both to hold on to key powers and to renew its institutions such that it could keep authority over the regions, while the second diminishes or ignores the problems with which the centre has to contend, and which lessen its ability to exert central power.”
Nationalism
“By tradition, China thought of itself as the centre of world civilisation; thus, defeat by foreign powers [including England] in the 19th century, and subjection to their rules and demands for territory or resources, were seen as humiliating violations. As awareness of China’s relative under-development grew, pride in Confucian civilisation gave way to an angry resentment against both that civilisation and against ‘the West’ (including Japan).”
“Until foreigners challenged, defeated and humiliated their country, most Chinese believed that China was the only civilisation. Today it is common to find people that consider China surrounded by enemies, selectively interpreting the history of the past 200 years in order to present their country as unique, not so much as civilisation but as victim. Observers argue that this is a very important component of modern Chinese identity, of nationalism, and a political factor of great power.”
Economy
“[China] is an economy of peasants freed from their chains…[and they] work crazily. With their labour and much ingenuity, China has become a leading force in many sectors from nothing… It has the fastest-growing economy and is expected to have surpassed Japan by 2020, re-establishing the centrality of China in Asia, and to have surpassed the USA by 2039.”
“The cumulative results of these [economic] changes have included and overall improvement in living standards; it is generally thought that 400 million people have been lifted out of poverty”
“Fifty thousand miles of three-lane highway were under construction in 2005, the size of the entire US interstate network; whereas these works too 40 years in the US, China plans their completion in five. Twenty-six Chinese cities are installing underground railways. There are 30 nuclear power stations on order.”
Arts
“Everywhere in China you come across pockets of the diverse and immensely rich culture – of music, the plastic arts, calligraphy, theatre, shadow puppetry, story-telling or whatever – that the foreign travellers used to dilate upon in wonder when they visited in the early years of the 20th century. But today there are, it seems, but pockets.
“Young students that sell xun [a kind of traditional flute that the author has encountered being sold] prove that culture is not just for the old, but to be honest, their contemporaries are more likely to be in a club sweating … to the sound of the electronic production of some dance music company in Los Angeles. The Cultural Revolution ripped traditional culture out of the lives of several generations; the government has been too preoccupied to shore it up, and commercial interests have provided globalised substitutes for mass consumption. In clothing, music and appreciation of the arts, things Chinese are for the elite.”
Religion
“The government is proud of the greater freedom afforded to religion since the 1980s, and points to Article 36 of the Constitution, which stipulates: ‘Citizens of the People’s Republic of China enjoy freedom of religious belief.’ There are thought to be about 250 million Taoists, 100 million Buddhists and around 30 million Christians.”
“On 25 April 1999, the government began to persecute a then little-known ‘way’ called Falungong, when 10,000 of its followers assembled to protest against a dismissive press article. This movement of practitioners of exercises traditionally associated with Taoism and of believers in a mixture of ideas both Christian and Buddhist, had until then been tolerated to the extent that many people in responsible positions had been happy to be associated with it, even though its leader was based in the USA. It was the demonstration that Falungong could mobilise so many people, without the security services being aware of its operations, that shocked the government into repression.”
Globalisation
“Transnational corporations claim that they are ‘glocal’ rather than local, that they respond to, and fit in with, local cultures. Nevertheless, to observers they are engaged in attempting a cultural transformation of China, deploying ‘a worldwide system of image-saturated information technologies to attract customers, including children.’ Among the results is the prevalence of commercially marketed celebrations … [that] all provide opportunities for spending and diminish the specialness of traditional Chinese festivals. Whereas in rural Cantonese society, celebrations of longevity were important features of family life, they are now being superseded by celebrations of youth.”
Agriculture
“Marketisation [has reduced] government interference in many ways: traditional markets have re-emerged, prices have been largely deregulated, and peasants will not in future be required to produce crops as stipulated by the government in its attempt at food self-sufficiency. Most of China’s peasants had been producing crops which are much more successfully produced in land-rich countries, such as the UK and USA with their large farms and fewer farmers. Where China has the advantage over them is in the production of people-intensive crops such as fruit and vegetables, flowers and plants… The corollary of this is that China now imports huge quantities of grains, particularly from the USA, which it must pay for in the export of people-intensive products, particularly to South East Asia. While these policies are showing signs of working, the gap between the urban and rural areas has continued to widen (in 2003, average urban income was over three times rural), causing dissatisfaction.”
Rural China/Urban China
“Even after the colossal changes which have turned China into the world’s workshop, over 60 per cent of its people still live in the countryside… That is around 900 million people. Although Deng Xiaoping’s first reforms helped improve conditions greatly, the limitations of the initial privatisation have become apparent. Local officials have begun to act like the wicked landlords of communist fiction, expropriating peasant land and leasing it or selling it to benefit themselves. At the same time, these ‘landlords’ exploit the peasantry with innumerable different local taxes, or demand unpaid labour in lieu of tax. Revolts have become common…”
© Hugo De Burgh 2006
Wednesday, September 27, 2006
Wednesday, September 20, 2006
Wednesday, August 23, 2006
Feelin funky?
New Pitchfork column from me on funky house v grime and the return of El-B. That there column took about two weeks to write, trus. What with the epic packaging for The Roots of Dubstep - you'll know what I mean when you see it - it's been a busy month.
As for the photo above? El-B and Loefah in the booth at FWD>>. Lets call it "Martin's Moment II" (hold tight Infinite), the best FWD>> booth co-incidence since Wiley and Mala DMZ.
Next month my column will be co-written by Chantelle Fiddy and, back from retirement, Gutta. My normal drivel will be resumed in October. Also check Bleep/Road for Keysound 002. Watch this space for news on Keysound 003... this time there will be no long ting.
Sunday, August 13, 2006
EXCLUSIVE: Mary Anne Hobbs Warrior Dubz
Mary Anne Hobbs’ Dubstep Warz show early this January left an unmistakable impression on the dubstep scene, bringing the bubbling scene to the boil and serving it up to a hungry audience. Ten months on, Mary Anne here exclusively unveils the logical extension of her show, a compilation of her own recipe. Check the tracklist and an in depth interview below.
Mary Anne Hobbs Warrior Dubz (Planet Mu)
Milanese Vs Virus Syndicate – ‘Dead Man Walking’
Benga – ‘Music Box’
Andy Stott – ‘Black’
Amit – ‘Too Many Freedoms’
Digital Mystikz feat. Spen G – ‘Anti-War Dub’
JME (Wiley beat) – ‘Pence’
Burial – ‘Versus’
Plastician feat Shizzle, Fresh & Napper – ‘Cha Vocal’
The Bug feat Flowdan – ‘Jah War’
Terror Danjah feat Mz Bratt & Bruza – ‘Give It To Em’
Spor – ‘Hydra’
Loefah feat Sgt Pokes – ‘Mud VIP’
DJ Distance & Crazy D – ‘Worries Again’
Kode 9 & Spaceape – ‘Kingstown (vocal)’
Blackdown: Are you ever personally able to comprehend the reach and impact having a BBC Radio 1 show brings?
Mary Anne Hobbs: My feeling about the show is that it’s a bridge I build between a global audience so tenacious and hungry... and the pioneering artists and producers I adore.
In my minds eye, that bridge looks like it’s made from dirty rope stretched across some devastating crevasse in the Amazon jungle… other times, it looks like a heavenly constellation built out of burning stars … and then again, it can often look like a crazy twisted Dr Seuss cartoon.
I always get a rush from e-mail and MySpace messages from places like Greenland and Brazil, Chilli and Israel. That people in such far-flung locations have even stumbled upon the show, let alone taken time out to tell me how much it means to them, that makes my heart burst. Our regular listeners come in so many shapes... there’s a barber’s shop in New York that pipes a stream to their customers every day. A Royal Navy ship’s crew stationed up in the Arctic at the North Pole. A blind boy and his guide dog Murphy who haven’t missed a show in 7 years… the actor David Hyde Pierce who played Niles Crane in the TV sitcom Frazier, he’s a regular... so is Loefah.
On-line forums are so important to me… DJ Distance put a post up at dubstep forum about the Breezeblock Dubstep Warz special back in January. Five days after that show went to air there were 20,000 hits on the thread and 28 pages of responses from people saying it had changed their lives forever... 8 months on, I still get e-mail from all over the world about that show every day.
B: In many ways the music and media industries are ‘a man’s world’. How does this affect you personally and do you think this will ever change?
MAH: Why should gender matter? Surely a person should be judged solely on their ability to do a job... Passion, commitment, degrees of knowledge and the drive to deliver something genuinely valuable as a professional, lie deep within the fabric of an individual character, and as I see it, have nothing at all to do with gender. That said, let me just take a minute to big-up some of the seriously inspirational girls in my world: Sarah & Amy who run FWD>>, Tempa and Ammunition, grime queen Chantelle Fiddy, Melissa Bradshaw from Plan B magazine, Reju Sharma producer of Bobby Friction’s show on the BBC Asian Network, John Peel’s daughters Flossie & Danda and his wife Sheila, Georgie from drumzofthesouth and my riot-gals Steph, Leah, Charlotte Gemma and Sarah, DMZ simply do not have a party without ‘em up in the place ;)
B: Judging by the selection on your show you’re pretty eclectic in your selection within a remit of dark, underground music. Is this a deliberate policy to avoid a narrow, purist agenda?
MAH: Here, I would quote Woody Allen from the film Annie Hall: “A relationship, I think, is like a shark… it has to constantly move forward or it dies”... and Artist Damian Hurst is the only man I know who’s done anything real with a dead shark. The Breezeblock has been 8 years on-air... The core axis is made up of dark electronic music in all forms, but it’s a show that exists without boundaries or prejudices of any kind. I spend almost all my time just looking for something total elemental. Something that will leave us all slack-jawed and drooling.
John Peel is my greatest hero. His playlist was boundless. I simply do not know how he found the time for all the writing he did, the DJing, TV, Radio 4 and World Service broadcasting and to raise four incredible children simultaneously. I can’t remember listening to a single show of John’s without hearing the most extraordinary and arresting pieces music he’d found, the like of which I will never encounter again. In this life or the next.
B: You’ve got a background in metal as well as underground urban/electronic music. Are these strands just different parts of your (musical) life or do you see some kind of core overlap or correlation between what appeals to you about them?
MAH: Remember, I am the girl who was so profoundly influenced by a snap shot of Metallica, I sold all my worldly goods one afternoon and bought a one-way ticket to the West Coast of America, where I lived in a garden shed for a year and went to investigate...
Seriously though, the ghetto spirit and energy that drives a truly brilliant piece of music will touch you at the same emotional level…no matter what genre that artist may operate in.
I guess there are very obvious parallels between, say for example, metal and dark drum & bass. Mike Davies who hosts the Radio 1 Rock Show and punk show the Lock Up would agree with me. He has also been Fabio & Grooverider’s producer at Radio 1 for 5 years!
DJ Distance and Jamie Vex’d are big metal fans too, and you can hear those influences, principally a storm-chasers sense of drama, twisted into their work…
There are also artists who are masters of drawing down the concentrated power of metal... compressing, warping and pressurising it, and then re-applying it in other musical fields. Mike Patton’s work, for example, with Fantomas, Mr Bungle, Tomohawk, Bjork and Exceutioners never fails to leave me breathless... I would love to hear him do something with Burial.
B: I’m currently in love with Cassie’s “Me & U” (Badboy). What’s the most overtly poppy track you’ve truly loved – perhaps even from the playlist – yet haven’t played on your show and why?
MAH: This week: Pharrell & Kanye West - ‘Number One’ (Virgin)... a proper honey-dripper... so very sweet... I’m toying with playing on the Breezeblock it right now... I’d love to hear Darqwan remix it...
B: People just take it as a given now that you can’t hear an instrumental tune like Digital Mystikz’ “Anti War Dub” played on, say, the breakfast show. The Radio 1 playlist meetings have a massive influence on UK mainstream music sales. Can you ever envision a time when the playlist would be consistently open to underground/independent, instrumental or non-PR backed music?
MAH: The playlist is always open to crossover tunes… Last year, for the Breezeblock it was Pendulum - underground drum & bass producers who delivered an instrumental titled ‘Slam’ on the Breakbeat Kaos label. Radio 1 playlisting happened after 18 months consistent support from me (admittedly for earlier and much darker beats), also from Fabio & Grooverider and latterly Zane Lowe… and, crucially, after Pendulum came with a pop record with a hook as big as Brazil.
B: One of your other passions seems to be motorcycling, surely a sport who’s key drug is speed, um... in the velocity sense of course. Dubstep, grime, alt hip hop etc – many of the styles you play on your show eschew any sense of ‘rushing.’ Is momentum important to you, both musically and physically?
MAH: That’s a very astute question... I’m a thrill seeker for real. I ran away to London at 18 to live on a car park in a bus with a hard rock band… moved into a shed in Hollywood to write about the dark underbelly of the LA scene at 21... chased down Ice-T at the height of the ‘Cop Killer’ controversy for NME, when he feared assassination. Moved undercover in Soho sex clubs and with drug dealers to the stars for Loaded magazine. Filmed with warrior biker gangs in Russia, Japan, USA and India for my TV show ‘Mary Anne’s Bikes’ which was broadcast to 120 million people worldwide by the BBC... and in 2006 I build the Breezeblock for Radio 1... I say, charge at your dreams and never look back.
B: For music headz, the power a truly great piece of music can have on you is profound. Do you think it’s possible to maintain this engagement with music throughout your whole life?
MAH: Yes... what is life without music? To me it would be as melancholy and meaningless as the Shipping Forecast…
B: Given they’re culturally very different, what do you think about the interaction between the grime and electronica scenes?
MAH: Very healthy. Check Virus Syndicate’s new night ‘Grunk’ up at Herbal on the third Thursday every month. You’ll find electronic heathens such as Cursor Minor on the same stage as the Manchester grime kru. Skepta and JME missed their slot with Plastician up at the Tyke night at Rhythm Factory just recently, so they got up to spit with Vex’d instead - devastating set... The FWD>> kru are creating real opportunities every week now for the grime and dubstep scenes to move in harmony... The Bug and Flowdan have just recorded a dazzling exclusive for my new album ‘Warrior Dubz’ titled ‘Jah War'... and my boy Plastician is coming loaded with the rudest melt of grime and dubstep to his Radio 1 Residency show...
B: As a BBC broadcaster, is it more important to maintain audience figures or reach a diverse or uncatered-for audience?
MAH: Just had the official new RAJAR listening figures today from Radio 1 and word is we are UP UP UP!! So I’m buzzing, and I hope the management will be too! Even though we are truly global and we continue to grow and to flourish, the degrees of separation between everyone involved with the show, the artists, the fans and myself are so very small, that we feel like a family … that is at the heart of my agenda… it’s a family thing for real.
B: In interviews, do you long for more trivial questions? ;)
MAH: lol! My favourite ice-cream is an old-skool whippy, single cone, no flake ;)
Mary Anne Hobbs’ show moves to a Thursday night 2am-4am on September 28th and it will be simply titled Mary Anne Hobbs. If you can’t listen live you can rewind it any time for one week at www.bbc.co.uk/radio1/maryannehobbs/index.shtml click ‘listen again’
The album ‘Mary Anne Hobbs Warrior Dubz’ is released on the Planet Mu label on October 16th. London launch party and UK to dates to follow. For more info check www.myspace.com/maryannehobbs
Friday, August 11, 2006
Tuesday, August 01, 2006
Primary sources
Back in the day, co-founder of Ammunition promotions, Tempa, Shelflife and Forward>> Neil Joliffe - the man who coined the word 'dubstep' - drew a diagram to explain a little 'istory. Three years on from April 2003 and the page provides a unique document of a time when garage was in flux and dubstep was begining to find its own identity. Recognise.
Thursday, July 20, 2006
No longtings: Lata's out
Dusk and I started talking about this release in September of last year, so it's hardly an impressive performance that it drops on July 20th. I'm really sorry if there's people out there that wanted it before this date.
The background is we had bare technicals with the pressing. Producing vinyl from a .wav isn't a simple process, it's a delicate artform that requires a master craftsman. After four TPs we found one: Jason at Transition, one of the scene's unheralded souljahs.
Truth is we could have put "Lata" out before, but I was adamant that quality vinyl a bit late was better than sub standard vinyl sooner... especially in the long run.
So there we go, lessons learned ("get your sh*t cut at Transition"), job done and all that. Thanks for your patience, I hope it was worth it.
Friday, July 14, 2006
Wednesday, July 12, 2006
Street politics
“David Cameron might have a genuine, genuine passion for young people. He might! I’m not saying he doesn’t, but the overarching principle of the day is, like, ‘let’s just be liberal and get everyone to join our party.’ That’s what I think it is.”
It’s a rare to find highbrow media coverage of street culture that doesn’t make the blood boil, so when it does it needs to be acknowledged. This Monday’s Radio 4 Today program broke from their usual editorial agenda to cover urban regeneration and in the process actually seemed to feature some voices and opinions from people in urban London that are directly involved. About time. How come? David Cameron was talking about ‘hoodies’.
OK so my blood’s boiling again.
Not because Cameron was talking about urban regeneration. But because the rest of the media were calling this speech “hug a hoodie”. Arrrgh.
Nothing illustrates the gulf between those who grow up in underprivileged conditions and those privileged few charged with making change, than the clumsy, offensive way the mainstream media grab the wrong end of some catchphrase stick and then use it to beat people with.
A hoodie is a piece of clothing, little more. Utterly ubiquitous since they came over from US street wear in the ‘80s, people of all walks of life wear them. Recently, of course, in the UK the word “hoodie” contains a class slur. Literally, “hugging a hoodie” means embracing a piece of clothing. Except that the intent of the cringe worthy alliterative media hook-line is to embrace people from marginalised inner city communities, only in the most patronising terms possible.
Nonetheless it’s good, if a little strange, to hear a Tory leader embracing tolerant leftist policies, not least when we have a Labour government that when it finds being tough on crime isn’t working, it recommends being yet tougher on crime, perhaps with a little extra hard punishment thrown in.
The problem is with David Cameron that he seems to have a new policy every week. Only recently he was attacking Radio 1 for playing hip hop. Somehow he seems to think this and his new inner city policy are not contradictory.
Hip hop culture spawned the hoodie. Their history is inseparable like punk and the Mohican. So either Cameron is attacking street culture or he’s hugging it? Which is it? And as for attacking Westwood and, after that, Lethal B, Cameron would be better to listen rather than lash out – these are two men that command respect and have genuine reach within the very communities Cameron is trying to help.
The reality is it’s just another example of a politician putting the cart before the horse when it comes to a culture he and his peers don't understand, yet need to if they’re to make positive change. An item of clothing no more causes anti social behaviour than hip hop or grime music itself causes violence at raves (what grime raves these days?). They are functions of a culture not causes of it.
If Cameron should be bashing any station, given he now cares about street culture, it’s Radio 4. There is no doubt this institution exerts a powerful influence over government and policy making units throughout the UK. There is no doubt that it exerts a powerful influence over the UK, educating and informing the electorate.
But give or take the infrequent inner city viewpoint on Today packages, the station’s cultural agenda remains so woefully narrow - be it bickering about whether to ditch its ancient theme or Melvin “inclusive” Bragg’s pretentious and inaccessible “In Our Time” - that it excludes the very people that could most benefit from its educational output. Does this not widen the divide between the haves and have nots?
LINKS
Podcast: Listen to the Today package from 10.07.06
BBC: David Cameron’s ‘hoodie speech’
The Times: “hug a hoodie”
BBC: Cameron attacks Radio 1 for playing hip hop
The Guardian: Lethal B replies to David Cameron
The Mail on Sunday: David Cameron returns Lethal’s fire
Friday, July 07, 2006
7/7 + 365
I hope we never see the likes of these explosions in London again. I also hope the people of Iraq and other conflicts around the globe find the same peace Londoners enjoy.
I remember 8/7 and 9/7 - to use the nomenclature - well too. They were bright, sunny days. Friday the capital was uncharacteristically quiet, as people stayed at homes and indoors.
Despite the great weather I decided to use the time productively and turned to making beats. Ever since I swapped a copy of Creeper Vol 1 with Kevin Martin for his favorite dancehall riddims of 2004, I'd meant to refix Sizzla's "Obstacles." Frankly it was just gagging for it.
In contrast to the fear and insecurity of 7/7, 8/7 and 9/7 felt strange: it felt good to be alive; the bombs had reminded me of what I had. A lot of this feeling poured out into the Sizzla refix, completed quickly in two days (some kind of record for me). When I hear it I see the bright sunshine again, warming the streets.
I've spent the year wondering what to do with this refix. The original, 30 seconds of which I took for the intro, is on Germaica Records . I have no interest in financially stealing from them or Sizzla himself, so I don't want to bootleg this mix. But equally I like how it came out and how it came about.
So I've decided, a year on, to give it away for free as a 320 kbps MP3 and a .Wav. Take it, share it, play it out if you like it, cut it if you really really like it, but please no bootlegs. Deal?
DOWNLOAD Sizzla 'Obstacles (Blackdown refix)' 320 kbps MP3
DOWNLOAD Sizzla 'Obstacles (Blackdown refix)' .Wav
Sunday, June 25, 2006
Tokyo reflections
Tokyo, by reputation, delivers the greatest possible culture shock. Visiting this vast, incredible megacity last week, it was less shock, more awesome sensory overload. It’s clean, safe, high tech, bright, new, busy and quite unlike anywhere I’ve seen in Europe, North America or Africa.
The longer I live in London, the more cities enthral me. How do they function? Do they function? Are they healthy, happy places? Are they places that produce unique cultures and people that can only exist in cities? Or are they places that produce unique problems? Discovering Tokyo with a mangled body clock, these questions remain – except with a whole new set of possible answers.
A few days after landing, some people who knew far more about these issues met in Vancouver to discuss them. (Check the BBC’s awesome interactive guide to the global megacity growth here for a wider view).
On scale alone, Tokyo is breathtaking. London has around 8 million people, Greater London 12 million – from a vantage point like the London Eye it sprawls as far as the eye can see. Tokyo has 12 million people but Greater Tokyo a staggering 35 million. From a vantage point – the Park Hyatt, Dentsu or Ebisu towers for example – you can’t even see out as far as where the sprawl of endless dormitory towns begins.
In the way that London feels like it has a centre in the West End, there is no one focus to Tokyo. Instead there are perhaps several delocalised major hubs like Shibuya, Shinjuku, bayside area and Ueno. Each of these areas lays claim to being some kind of centre of gravity in part because of some serious skyscraper action.
So much of Tokyo is just up. How do you fit 35 million Greater Tokyo workers into a 12 million Tokyo space? You stack them. From the aforementioned vantage points the skyline is one jagged cluster of clean, 50 story skyscraper after another. One effect is to create a visually incredible landscape, especially by night. This is the city that inspired Ridley Scott to make Bladerunner and its clear why, although personally I couldn’t stop muttering the tanoy announcements saying “Welcome to the Offworld...” from, ahem, Total Recall.
Another tangential effect is that with all the tall buildings Tokyo’s airspace is closed, removing the constant drone of flight path noise pollution you experience in London and any additional Al-Qaeda plane crash paranoia (Japan just pulled its troops out of Iraq which should help).
Talking of paranoia and malevolent urban undercurrents, on first impressions, Tokyo has none. Tokyo is safe. Now to be fair, London is safe. If you know what you’re doing (“yes bro, safe, safe...”) London is fine. Keep your wits about you, don’t act like a dick in the real danger areas (y’know: Ikea store opening nights, Hammersmith high street at Skool Disco chucking out time...) and you’re fine. But still it’s a serious place.
Tokyo is virtually crime free. Drugs are totally taboo. Not that it’s an empirical measurement of anything but the two clubs I went to (Unit and Bullet’s) I saw not the slightest hint of weed or any substance abuse. Talk is that there are fairly large organised crime syndicates in Tokyo, but in civilised fashion they all have respectable offices in the same district. I wandered around Kabukicho, near Shinjuku, which has some sex industry, and it was just as concealed as Soho’s, if not drowned out by a hundred thousand neon lights plus the ear piercing rattle of Pachinko pinball slot machines ( a massively popular game played with hundreds of falling ball bearings) and the shockingly bad Japanese-Euro-pop-trance that accompanies it.
The only slightly gully place I got into in an entire week of exploring was Shomben Yokocho (aka "Piss Alley") not far from Kabukicho. Ducking behind Shinjuku station tracks, I found myself in a tiny alley full of exposed, tangled dusty wiring. Sunlight dripped through the narrow passage to the sky. To either side were tens of tiny thin bars, each no more than three metres deep and one wide, stacked one after another in this twisty alley. Some were closed off by curtains, others had grills where bartenders cooked yakitori over tiny charcoal fires; all were full of locals. It was the only place as a 6’6” conspicuous gaijin (foreigner) I didn’t feel welcome in a whole week in Tokyo. So yes, 35 million people and pretty much no drugs, litter or crime? It’s nuts.
One anecdote relayed to me describes perfectly both the safety of the city and the cause of it – Japanese society. Travelling home on an otherwise rammed underground train, one seat was strangely left empty. On closer inspection someone had dropped their wallet. But not only did no one steal it, everyone was too polite to touch the wallet, for fear of being accused of stealing it.
Japanese society is a wonder. Ex-pat residents in Tokyo say even six months of contact with it reveals only the surface. It’s deeply, deeply reverent. “Face” is everything. Public humiliation the ultimate punishment. The Japanese bow, not shake hands, (though amusingly when I first met Masamitsu, the club promoter who booked me, it was the international garage ‘yesbruv’ handshake we used hehe). But you don’t just bow when you first meet people. Hotel staff will bow every time you enter the front door. Shop staff don’t bow, they sing ‘welcome’ to you! In busy department stores (the Japanese are obsessed with massive department stores like Tokyu and Seibu) where scores of people enter and leave a given area, the chorus of ultra high pitch ‘welcomes’ becomes overwhelming.
One massive difference between London and Tokyo, is the racial mix. Even when you head out to suburbia or provincial UK towns, you’re aware of London’s rich melting pot. Tokyo has none of this. 99.9% of the people you see on the street seem to be Japanese nationals. Watching tens of thousands of people, if not more, flood towards you on the subway or at Shibuya crossing, you see one or two black people a day. The only concentration of any note of black faces is in Roppongi, the expat nightclub district, where you can see them working for the clubs on the streets trying to entice punters (pretty much everywhere else, from the markets of Ameyoko-Cho to Asakusa, if anyone speaks to you on the streets its to be friendly, not to give you the hard sell Europeans are so used to at home or abroad in places like Africa).
In relation to the black guys who work Roppongi crossing, residents explain that parts of Japanese society can be fairly racist, and that this is some of the only work black people in Tokyo can get. Certainly the Japanese are very nationalistic, but it’s hard to work out if the suggestion of racism is true without spending extensive time in Tokyo. On the issue of nationalism it would be interesting to know more about the details of the Japanese-North Korean-Chinese relations, given the suggestions of pre-emptive strikes by the US on North Korean missile tests going on while I was there. (Remind me where a pre-emptive strike stops and an unprovoked attack on a nation’s sovereign soil starts again?)
Nationalism or not, it’s clear that both Tokyo isn’t the multicultural melting pot London is. It is also well accepted that in Japanese culture, no matter how long you stay there, you’ll always be a gaijin (foreigner). The latter must be pretty depressing for long term immigrants, and hardly what you call cultural integration.
People watching on the incredible tube system was a joy (check a pdf. of the tube map here - this doesn’t even include most of the train networks!). On some clumsy sexual scale, in Japan it’s like there’s been a mass shift to the feminine side. Women are most definitely women: high heels are the norm, as well as petite miniskirts, trainers rare. Men however, standardly don fashion they’d risk ridicule for back in the UK (however much that matters…), the pinnacle of which is the handbag – not man-bag – yes handbag. The buffont 80s rock mullets are worth a mention too, ubiquitous amongst the Japanese men who try and entice girls into the ‘host bars’ of Kabukicho where, in a nice sexual roll reversal from much of Western culture, the men are paid to entertain and serve the women.
How Westerners interact with Japanese sexual politics is interesting. Japanese women, when they get married, largely give up their jobs to serve their husbands. So when they encounter Western men with more egalitarian views on relationships, some jump at the chance. The dynamic produces the phenomenon of the Western male “LBH” (loser back home) who suddenly becomes a sexual magnet abroad. By complete contrast, Western women experience near indifference from Japanese men, given their likely unwillingness to conform to traditional Japanese relationship dynamics.
But to describe Tokyo as all skyscrapers and neon lights, high technology and future culture is to miss half of the city. With its rich heritage and unbroken historical legacy that stretches back on the same location to before 1457, Tokyo – originally known as Edo – is a city of contrasts, both of which are worth absorbing. At the geographic centre is the Imperial Palace, still the residence of the Emperor the longest reigning dynasty in the world and someone who the Japanese, until the end of the Second World War, considered a living deity who could not be seen nor heard.
Nowadays the Emperor has no political powers. Two religions remain: Shinto and Buddhism. In modern Japan religion seems to play more of a social role than one of faith, as people often happily engage with both religion’s key ceremonies throughout their lives. Between the Emperor and the two religions, they provide the city with much of its precious green spaces. New York and Paris have 29 and 26 square metres per resident respectively; Tokyo has just 5.3 – and much of the Emperor’s gardens remain off limits. But the Shinjuku Gyoen garden, the Senso-ji temple and the Meiji-jingu shrine (nr Yoyogi-koen park) all respectively provide peaceful escapes from the sensory overload of modern Japan. They also seemingly provide somewhere for the homeless to rest.
Amid this clean, functioning, safe, drug-free, polite and ever so slightly effeminate but very unique city, I couldn’t help but wonder how my brand of ruffneck dark garage was going to go down. It seemed a very long way from the dark suburban decay of south London dubstep, or the innercity urban rage of east London grime. Will it get lost in translation?
Finding Bullet’s was amusing enough itself. Beginning by walking away from Roppongi, a fairly key club hub, I followed a massive raised freeway (Tokyo is full of these: local traffic at street level, national traffic cruises through 10m above uninterrupted. What traffic jams?) until the din of Roppongi faded. Suddenly it was right down a non-descript residential side-street, left down another until you came to, um, a massive English mock-Georgian terrace house. Yes it was like Regents Park’s Park Crescent, except in Tokyo. Anyway, opposite this was a posh yet slightly sterile bar. Round the back of it, down some concrete steps, was Bullet’s, less a club, more an underground community art space. There were paintings on the loo walls, a budgie in a cage at the bar and there were two beds, one of which had its headboard bolted to the wall. The speakers were in the dark, unlit half: basically it was Plastic People if the art school crowd got to do the decor. If dubstep is to take a hold in Tokyo, it’s in early adopter places like these, so shouts to promoter and DJ Masamitsu and my interpreter for the night, Eric.
Reviewing your own sets is bait, but lets just say playing the new bits I’d cut at Transition (Horsepower’s “Traitor remix”, Mala’s “Learn”, Kode 9’s “Fat Larry remix” and Zombie’s “Memories”) alongside some of my own productions like “Lata” and all parts of the “Mantis” trilogy was, like Tokyo itself, a fucking lot of fun.
Tuesday, June 20, 2006
EXCLUSIVE: The Roots of Dubstep tracklist
Ammunition + Blackdown present... The Roots of Dubstep [Tempa CD]
1. Steve Gurley "Hotboys (dub)" [Allstars]
2. El-B "Express" [Ghost]
3. El-B ft. Juiceman "Buck + Bury [original mix]" [unreleased]
4. Roxy "Breakbeat Science" [Bison]
5. Phuturistix "551 Blues" [Locked On]
6. Horsepower "Gorgon Sound" [Tempa]
7. Horsepower "Classic Deluxe" [Tempa]
8. Benny Ill v DJ Hatcha "Highland Spring" [Tempa]
9. High Planes Drifter (aka Benny Ill) v Goldspot "Sholay" [Tempa]
10. Menta "Snake Charmer" [Road]
11. Artwork "Red" [Big Apple]
12. Benga v Skream "The Judgement" [Big Apple]
13. DJ Abstract "Touch" [Tempa]
14. Digital Mystikz "Pathwayz" [Big Apple]
1. Steve Gurley "Hotboys (dub)" [Allstars]
2. El-B "Express" [Ghost]
3. El-B ft. Juiceman "Buck + Bury [original mix]" [unreleased]
4. Roxy "Breakbeat Science" [Bison]
5. Phuturistix "551 Blues" [Locked On]
6. Horsepower "Gorgon Sound" [Tempa]
7. Horsepower "Classic Deluxe" [Tempa]
8. Benny Ill v DJ Hatcha "Highland Spring" [Tempa]
9. High Planes Drifter (aka Benny Ill) v Goldspot "Sholay" [Tempa]
10. Menta "Snake Charmer" [Road]
11. Artwork "Red" [Big Apple]
12. Benga v Skream "The Judgement" [Big Apple]
13. DJ Abstract "Touch" [Tempa]
14. Digital Mystikz "Pathwayz" [Big Apple]
Monday, June 12, 2006
Tuesday, June 06, 2006
Saturday, June 03, 2006
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