Albrecht Durer, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe that keeps piling ruin upon ruin and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. — Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History

The end of the year prompts all sorts of rituals of recollection. We’ve once again revolved around the sun, and to prepare us for the celestial rhythms of the next cycle, turning our gaze backwards allows us to reflect on where we’re heading, as if no great distance separated the before from the after. To some remarkable extent, we’re still here, alive on the planet, although we might not be so confident of our stay for much longer. This year, the proliferation of apocalyptic tales, natural disasters, eschatological nightmares, and the perpetual recycling of end of history lamentations have permeated the inclinations of both popular and unpopular culture, especially in music (and film, too, as Hydra’s Jose-Luis Moctezuma relays), spreading its virus through the subterranean fringes, and whatever one might still call the avant-garde.

Perhaps we’ve come to take seriously some of the unnerving considerations proposed by philosopher Ray Brassier, that our impending extinction requires our deepest reflection, one which should reorient our thinking away from the anthropocentric framework of the Copernican Revolution, to regions unbound by the gravitational pull between earth and sun. Enlightenment requires an absolutely unhuman mode of thinking, living, creating. Unhinging ourselves, as Brassier prescribes, would certainly follow to its end the internal logic of what Simon Reynolds recounts in his book published earlier this year, Retromania: Popular music has turned its activities to the past, bewitched by the ruins of history and recordings, disjointed from its temporal circumstances by the internet’s diffusive mode of networking and distributing information. But if the difference between past, present, and future no longer holds in any simplistic chronological order, what then becomes of history, of world-annihilation, without an end in sight?

Mark Fisher, who has written imaginative politico-economic examinations of  music on his blog, K-Punk, suggests in his recent book, Capitalist Realism, that our current obsession with annihilation reflects a stifled awareness that, in our post cold-war malaise where we are frozen by the never ending war on terror, we can no longer even envision an escape from late capitalism–a horizon outside the ever expanding frontiers of the market system in which everything is swallowed. His diagnosis certainly gains some weight from the year’s many events of unrest, from the revolutions invoked by the Arab Spring, and its continuing struggles, the Eurozone’s teetering on the edge of collapse, to the global eruption of physical occupations of the idea of Wall Street. Nevertheless, earlier this year, a Christian radio broadcaster’s warnings of rapture did not come to pass. Twice. But now, the dawn of 2012, and the fabled end of the Mayan calendar, is upon us.

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As for music itself, few releases captivated this year’s disoriented, apocalyptic zeitgeist as well as James Ferraro’s Far Side Virtual. Conceptually daring, alienating, horrifically ordinary and optimistic in the most disturbing way possible–Far Side Virtual is a nearly unlistenable musical theory of the technological dream in which we are all enraptured. Ferraro pulls sonic detritus from iPhone apps, computer start-up noises, ringtones, late 1980s and early ’90s infomercials and commercials, Pixar films, and music scrapped from video games menus and end game sequences. While anchored in references to synth-pop, Far Side‘s virtually encoded soundscape is modified through an Apple laptop with digital beds of drum patterns and glowing, synthetic shine.

At first, I couldn’t quite figure out Ferraro’s stance: sincere, ironic, critical? What I’ve determined, though, is that his intention doesn’t matter much. Ferraro’s artistic talent lies in a phenomenological sensitivity for hyper-realism: the way contemporary, digitally networked technology is altering our way of desiring, connecting, committing. In interviews, he has reported to tap into this hyper-realism in strip malls in Los Angeles, St. Marks in New York, and the global non-space of Starbucks cafes. After listening to the album a few times, just on tinny laptop speakers, I’ve come to find myself exiled to a strange sensation of lost, endless time within an enhanced world, one whose cycles arhythmically (un)balance the rapid production and satisfaction of distributed desire. It’s spontaneous and overwhelming.

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Many music journalists come to understand and listen to Ferraro’s music in terms of the theoretical framework of hypnagogic pop, a concept initiated by The Wire’s David Keenan set to mark the recent emergence of lo-fi rock evoking a nebulous psychological state between being awake and dreaming. Is this space something of the last frontier? Given the kind of anxiety and unrest Ferraro’s work inspires, and the hyper-sterilized space within which it puts into motion its labor, the hypnagogic might just establish the deterritorialized boundaries for a new sort of mobilization. Simon Reynolds sums it up concisely: ”Perhaps the secret idea buried inside hypnagogic pop is that the ’80s never ended. That we’re still living there, subject to that decade’s endless end of History, killing time as we wait for something (seismic, subaltern) to rupture the dream.”

Ferraro wasn’t the only musician this year to harness the kitsch of the dream and remagnetize the tech-utopia of waking life. John Maus, also working within the sphere of 1980s synth-pop, produced an excellent record of romantic solipsism and city-living despair. In short, he wrestles with the Enlightenment myth of our alleged autonomy over our desires, and seeks out his true desire in the most unlikely sonic resonances. Maus named his record We Must Become the Pitiless Censors of Ourselves after the 12th thesis of French philosopher Alain Badiou’s fifteen theses on contemporary art, published in issue 23 of Lacanian Ink:

Since it is sure of its ability to control the entire domain of the visible and the audible via the laws governing commercial circulation and democratic communication, Empire no longer censures anything. All art, and all thought, is ruined when we accept this permission to consume, to communicate and to enjoy. We should become the pitiless censors of ourselves.

Maus, like Ferraro, struggles to pass the threshold, without contamination, into those spaces unheralded, neglected, or forgotten by Empire–post-industrial detritus, everyday noise, abandoned infrastructure, lost time–where the markings, traces, and graffiti of outsider desire thrive. The young hip-hop producer of Dipset fame, Araabmuzik, found the source of his scrawl in the shadow of 1990s trance, some of the most ecstatic, optimistic, and highly marketed music to ever subject millions of alleged Dionysian initiates to the rush of the rave, the utopian reveries of the bass drop. I wrote on Araabmuzik’s record, aptly titled Electronic Dream, in late summer, and still marvel on its way of uncovering the dark, even tragic motivation, of classic Eurodance cheese. The haunted underbelly of trance is revealed through unsettling bass patterns, nearly arhythmic percussion, and a gurgling dose of demonic synthetic keys, all which suffocate the false idols, kitschy optimism, of the source material which he attacks, perverts, and desiccates. An unliving, underground stream awakens.

Any end of the year recap also has to account for the resurgence of the overground stream of raves in 2011. A resurgence which helped a previously unknown emo screamer turned dubstep producer, Scrillex, garner five Grammy nominations, including best new artist. Yes, dubstep has gone mainstream, a sequence launched at the beginning of the year by Britney Spears, and culminated in the easily digestible electronic rhythms of Scrillex (and a dubstep Korn album?). But despite the increasing monotony, and consistently conventional masculinity of the genre, sometimes disparagingly, or lovingly, labeled bro-step, something is left to be said of Scrillex’s bizarre music video for “First of the Year (Equinox).” If we could generalize from its narrative, and the video’s popularity at nearly 30 million views, then I have to say something is disturbing about millions of festival goers across the country identifying with a little girl who resists a pedophile’s advances through the angsty violence of Scrillex’s wobble, wobble, bass. This music doesn’t exactly mirror the utopian trance of Paul Oakenfold’s ’90s, but has mutated in the conditions of depressed times, diagnosing the general disillusionment with, yet attachment to, the dream plaguing a great deal of America’s everyday, middle-class populace.

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Some more unsettling explorations of masculinity come from Los Angeles’s Odd Future collective and Sacramento’s Death Grips. While Scrillex sycophants scorn the figure of the pedophile-like good upholders of resentful ethics, Tyler, the Creator surprisingly found a way to incarnate a kind of moral decrepitude in Goblin that prompted music critics and listeners to wage in ceaseless battles over censorship. Although Tyler fell just as quickly he rose, it seemed like no one from either side of the debate actually listened to his music. Whatever your stance on the moral caliber of his raps, Tyler’s serpent-like nihilism holds up as an antithesis to Alain Badiou’s call for us to become the “pitiless censors” of ourselves: his free reign of desire somehow taps into an illicit territory which resists facile consummation. I credit this to Tyler’s musical schizophrenia more so than any rebellious talent, one whose psychological disintegration produces a multiplicity of contradictory perspectives on a festering decay haunting both our most banal-seeming and repressed desires. Hugely popular R&B saviors, Drake and The Weeknd, on the other hand, promote a kind of self-indulgence and sexual decadence that fits all too perfectly into typologies of capital. Although, I have to admit that I find great, thoughtless pleasure in listening to The Weeknd.

Drummer Zach Hill’s side project, Death Grips, also has just as little remorse for moralists. Their release, Ex Military, sounds like the biological weaponry of Cannibal Ox, deconstructed into feverish noise and maniacal slaps of bass–nightmarish landscapes of sound recalling the destructed bio-mechanical ecologies of dystopian films from the likes of Ridley Scott and George Miller. On “Guillotine,” MC Ride spits raw verses, his voice barking a kind of incomprehensible language, whose tenor joyously approaches the precipice of apocalyptic implosion. Music, even sound, becomes dehumanized, embodying to the extreme Ray Brassier’s concept of “the unlife”. The specter of Brassier, implied in its extreme nihilism, haunts a number of releases, this year. Another brilliant record from Hype Williams, One Nation, begins with pure morbidness: a gruff voice appears from the shadows in an untitled track over sparse dub rhythms and swirling John Carpenter synth lines, insisting on the need for the living to face up to mortality: “but of course everyone dies, and you will too.” The record heeds this wisdom, playing with the fleeting character of recycled sounds from UK bass, as if they are all about to wisp away as soon as they appear.

One of the most evocative listens of the year, Kuedo’s Severant invokes the lost paradise of Scott’s Blade Runner with a recharged urgency. “Vectoral,” in particular, beautifully echoes Vangelis’s soundtrack, reframing the synthetic pulse within footwork rhythms, programmed breakdowns, and drum machine gusts of digitally-manufactured liquid wind. More than a few musicians found inspiration in the frenetic, tinny grooves bubbling up from the hoods of South and West Chicago in the form of footwork. Descending from the same sort of post-industrial depressed economies that brought about Detroit techno and ghetto-tech bootlegs, footwork sounds strangely like UK drum n’ bass or grime, as if the Black Atlantic diaspora of electronic rhythms cyphered towards synchronic destinations despite their regional dislocation. DJ Rashad’s Just a Taste EP booms with poly-percussive rhythms that shift abruptly in winding drum patterns while vocal cuts dissolve into looped beats of flittering noise. A good introduction to footwork is the second volume of Bangs & Works on Planet Mu, a compilation tracing the grooves in their constant ascension, without any final horizon in sight–after all, this is music essentially made for the dance floor.

What Kuedo’s Severant does best is guide desire to take pleasure in loss, transforming nostalgia into renewal–invigorating the shadowed wastelands perhaps once formed and shaped by Empire, but since forgotten, thrown into the gutter to rot and decay. The two releases of the year which I keep coming back to, Laurel Halo’s Hour Logic EP and Oneohtrix Point Never’s Replica, conjure a kind of mournful alienation that bridges the apocalyptic character of melancholia with an ecstatic resoluteness. While Laurel Halo prefers a symbiosis between percussion and ambient fluxes pushing bio-engineered corpse of techno to new heights of potency, Oneohtrix’s alchemy consists in the sounds of analogue ambient–flooded synth melodies, electric surges, and sparse piano keys–eerily unbounded in a ghostly absence of percussion.

From turning our gaze backwards, and recycling lost time, a new music is emerging: hyper-real, intensely emotional, richly theoretical, outside anachronistic sentiments for the acoustic or authentic–slowly paving way for the impending rupture to come.

The fear of closure will often lead toward interminable beginnings. In music composition, this fear can paralyze the composer and block rhythmic currents from ever reaching their sea; but in some musicians, the same fear can engender a kind of fruitful decay, a withering of petals whose downward fall can sometimes form seductive geometries. Hydra’s Michael Krimper stresses the latter symptom in his recent evaluation of the music of the Bay Area-based group, the Soft Moon:

Songs by the Soft Moon often begin in full throttle, as if they’ve already begun. They move forward carried by the sheer propulsive gravity of their engineered drum patterns — driving their gutted vehicles according to shapes and zigzags, towards endings that dissolve, break in static, submerge into chaos, or collapse abruptly as if the frequency on the radio has just changed or connection suddenly lost. Despite whatever glimmer of hope or flicker of light is carved out by the oscillating guitar strums and the burning synthetic melodies, the songs never find their way out of claustrophobia.

To read the full article, visit the San Francisco Bay Guardian. The Soft Moon just released the Total Decay EP on October 31st.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GlTxrlkKzyI

It’s been nearly a month since I saw Drive in the theaters, and like many others, I still can’t get the soundtrack out of my head. In this case, though, it’s a good thing. Few films have soundtracks that attract so much attention, that take music as absolutely essential to the imagery itself. I’ll brave treason here and argue that not even John Carpenter’s haunted scores have the audience coming out of Halloween whispering in hushed tones about how the music captivated and terrified, and at the same time produced frenetic streams of pleasure.

It’s a wonder why the music works so well. It’s fused into the expressive substance of the film, rather than just gracing the surface or compelling audience reaction by brute force–the acts of anticipation and relief exploited to no end by more typical renditions of Hollywood cinema. Instead, the music of Drive expertly signifies and exemplifies and produces the emotional narrative immanent in the film, circulating themes of loss, mourning, nostalgia, alienation, and the horrible acts of romance and violence provoked by the abyssal mechanisms of lonely uprootedness in the gutless, sprawling metropolis.

Synthetic keys indulge the neon lights of Los Angeles, as Ryan Gosling’s unnamed character drives through the streets to the rhythm of a festering drum machine in the absolute isolation, and full metallic enclosure, of his vehicle. As the driver awakes from solipsism, inspired by a growing love of his neighbor, the too cute Irene (played wonderfully by Carey Mulligan), as well as her son, the music follows the driver, flows outwards from his solipsism, and saturates the hallways of their concrete apartment building, pouring into the open air of the theater.

You can already hear the inward and outwards tensions in the music, too–the open, warming synthetic melodies curdled upon the axis of the cold and claustrophobic, motorik drum programming. The music quite directly references certain forms of sonic expression that reached an apex in early 1980s synth-pop (often subsumed under a certain strand of dark or cold wave), which stemmed from Krafterk’s experimentations in the ’70s on the nebulous limits dividing man and machine. In recent days, the genre has seen a bit of a revival, from the explosion of DIY lo-fi electronics to the computer programmed minimal disco-funk of labels like Italians Do It Better or the glimmering sheen of Euro club hits from Ed Banger, like Kavinsky’s burning seducer “Nightcall.”

References of cinematic genre also shoot backwards, escalating the abyssal feeling of loss and the glimmer of recovery, never to be redeemed. So here we are, or go, to a Los Angeles of the 1980s, ’50s, a nearly timeless place recorded on reel of the noir and the car film. I hear/see Repo Man from the auspicious year of 1984 (a surely post-apocalyptic as well as post-punk Southwest America, a dystopian land, a promised land of tragedy, like any noir or Pacific Coast drive), and this Juicy Bananas’ track, “Bad Man,” surfaces.

Johnny Jewel of Desire and Chromatics features two sonic centerpieces in Drive: “Under Your Spell” and “Tick of the Clock,” which both evoke the emotional wakening of the protagonist from a mechanic to a lover, and finally, a mass murderer induced by romance–or perhaps a “hero,” according to an NPR interview with director Nicolas Winding Refn. Jewel’s musical partnership with Refn goes back to Bronson in which “Digital Versicolor” from Jewel’s third group, Glass Candy, played a crucial role in instigating the emotional narrative of the film. (I’ve also added a couple of Jewel’s personal sketches of scenes from Drive, which he used to motivate his musical imagery.)

Jewel was initially asked to complete the whole soundtrack for Drive, but for a variety of mysterious business-related reasons his project was shelved and given over to Cliff Martinez, who nonetheless executed a beautiful score oscillating between the hypnotic and erotic. It doesn’t quite stand on its own, though, as few soundtracks do when you listen to them outside of the theater in pure abstraction. But I’m hedging bets that the axed Jewel project, allegedly titled Symmetry and scheduled for release at some point in the near future, will discover the subtle alchemy to ride the noir pathos of hope, loss, and despair underwritten by the film itself.

Until that release, I’ve compiled a few songs which might work in parallel with Drive, a bit of historical formation to the sounds of synth-pop geared by the rhythms and isolation of the car, some contemporary renditions, and a bit of the more propulsive side of the progeny as well.

Kraftwerk “Man Maschine”

Glass Candy “Computer Love”

Chromatics “In the City”

Kavinsky “Pacific Coast Highway”

The Normal “Warm Leatherette”

An altar of rave flyers.

I never liked trance. Still don’t. But in the 1990s you couldn’t escape it. As a teenager I would go to Project Blowed hiphop shows in Los Angeles and still return to a car covered with flyers for Paul Oakenfold concerts. When I was in middle school, it was practically a rite of passage into the seemingly defiant world of drugs and music to end up at whatever crowded rave in some abandoned lot in who knows what part of the sprawling desert. I’m still not sure how I was coaxed more times than I care to admit to stay up past sunrise listening to droning rhythms and squeaky cartoonish hooks (you know, those anime girly choruses about seduction, or ecstatic intoxication, or rowing a boat down the river of your mind). I even threw my hands in the air to endless synth drops and watched white dudes with dreads, dressed in puffy army pants and neon candy-colored regalia, dance in circles around themselves, light sticks in tow.

If you can relate at all to my trance-inflected background then you might enjoy a surprising musical experiment from hiphop producer and tinkerer Araabmuzik. And if you were born in another era, or have absorbed some of the trance revival in today’s pop, you might still be interested in Araab’s unlikely strategy for reimagining this horribly mawkish genre of dance music.

Araabmuzik quickly rose in the rap production circuit making beats for the likes of Dipset and Busta Rhyhmes. But for his debut record, Electronic Dream, Araab reoriented his chops from boom bap to the emotive formulas underpinning trance. He took some of the most memorable and cheesiest trance records from the 1990s, deconstructed them in a drum pad, overlaid the surface textures with shattered noise, grime, even more bass, and then reconfigured the rhythms into beats that sound like southern drum programming curdled with dub-step wobble on hyperdrive.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXxhjM_O09M

The effect of Araab’s technique is exhilarating. Those campy angelic hooks, e.g., Fall in love with music/ Fall in love with dance/ Fall in love with anything/ That makes you want romance in “Golden Touch,” all of sudden sound not just fresh but provocative, as if the formula of the cliche has been spun into a musical element with rejuvenated spiritual vitality.

Those same campy romantic melodies that make up the architecture of trance hit hard in completely unexpected ways when drowned with Araab’s aggressive off-syncopated percussion and siren synth loops. In “Underground Stream,” a sampled voice culled from a late night T.V. horror film broadcast provides insight on the technique:

“If an initiate can perfect the great work from death and putrefaction, he will have a chance at eternal gold on the underground stream.”

Appropriating cheese and investing it with new life is taking off in other music circles too. A couple months ago I interviewed Sabo on the rise of Moombahton, a new musical genre inspired by slowing down Dutch House to the pulse of the reggaeton. What becomes of conventional club rhythms when pitched down, rearranged, and recalibrated through the work of computer bricolage is nothing short of stunning. We may have finally discovered tools beyond irony to re-compass our desires.

There’s also a whole undercurrent of lo-fi indie rock explicitly channeling late night television circa the early ’90s, or new age meditation tapes, or unabashedly diving into ’80s synth pop a la John Maus without the slightest shame. Maus agrees that something musically interesting can happen when you take pop more seriously than it takes itself.

I’d suggest that David Lynch’s Twin Peaks is the model and articulated foundation for precisely this sort of technique for appropriating cheese. For Twin Peaks, Lynch adopted the rigid formula of soap opera television and pivoted the pop algorithm around ghosts, haunting spirits, absence–a horrible violence at the core of our narratives of American telos and happiness (the dream). In much the same way, Araabmuzik and these other pop bricoleurs stir our listening dispositions to the fantasies of desire that permeate our subconscious. The underbelly of teenage trance romance is exposed as deformed and mutilated, yet lovely to listen to in its unadulterated form. I’ll stand by one learned lesson: Cheese tastes so much better when you can digest the funk.

I heard the news of Gil Scott-Heron’s death while visiting friends in New York. We spent much of our evenings waxing intoxicated under the violet canopy of early mornings, yelling and laughing, talking The Watts Prophets and Melvin Van Peebles, bumping jazz and hip-hop, falling silent and being silent, listening to Jamie xx’s remix record of Scott-Heron’s latest and last effort, I’m New Here. Our own peculiar brand of mourning.

Over cartons of dumplings, we entertained alleged causes of death. Weakness stirred by drugs? Complications from HIV? Exhaustion? I saw Scott-Heron perform in San Francisco two years ago, I professed, and he warned us not to trust the many rumors circulating about his ill health. Was it just a strategy for the satirist to protect himself?

But then a year afterward, the New Yorker published Alec Wilkinson’s haunting profile of Scott-Heron’s struggle with crack. He smoked openly in front of the reporter. His body was thin and twisted, his face gaunt, and his voice, once a sweet baritone, now battered and gruff.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7c3wRzUUjs

Scott-Heron took no credit for the album on XL Recordings, the brainchild of former UK rave producer Richard Russell. He may have wanted to give Russell due credit for organizing the deeply evocative record, pairing Scott-Heron’s gravelly lyrics over sparse beats and menacing bass; but even so, he would neglect to mention that many of those recorded words were indeed his own–a collage of poems culled from his early 1970s book, The Vulture, captured asides in the studio, covers of blues and fettered demons that he made his own, that were his own.

In a radio interview last year on BBC, host Mark Coles attempted to address the subject of Scott-Heron’s personal trials. Scott-Heron interrupted, “Very few things have been autobiographical that have been included in my work … If you do a good job on a song and convince people of it, they’ll attach it to your biography as though it’s actually something that’s part of your life instead of a good acting job…. And so we’ve made a lot of characters come to life for people, because they needed them to come to life.”

At one point during those drunken evenings, during the first humid wisps of summer in America, Edgar wondered why Scott-Heron didn’t own it. He could have owned it; whether he suffered from HIV, or became a victim of the crack epidemic that still plagues  our inner cities, or however he might have spiraled down the caverns of his own troubled soul.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=_b2F-XX0Ol0

It’s reasonable to wonder why the bluesologist infamous for tapping into spiritual and political unrest, known for “The Bottle” and “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” and “Angel Dust,” remembered still for his masterpiece recording in 1974, Winter in America, didn’t openly reckon with his transfiguration into the protagonist of his own cautionary tales. And maybe we would have listened. Maybe the time had come that we would have paid attention to Scott-Heron, again. That he would not be just another black musician, poet, shaman, political defiant, visionary, tossed to the history books or the hip-hop samples, the category of dead before they’re dead, and then when they’re really dead, we can finally remember again.

Greg Tate wrote for the Village Voice of the spells of ruin, momentary rejuvenation, and ghostly disappearance of Scott-Heron. He was wiped away in prison, became a drugged hermit in his Harlem apartment, showed mere glimmers of life as a passerby in the New York subway. Tate saw Scott-Heron locked in the all-too-familiar story of American musicians ”who’d figured it all out by puberty and were maybe too clever and intoxicated on their own Rimbaudean airs to ever give up the call of the wild.” He was caught in a gyre of self-destruction and renewal, as we sat by idly, just hoping he would find his way out of the tragic cycle. Whereas white musicians like Bob Dylan and Keith Richards mustered popular support for their healing and peace of mind, black musicians like Hendrix and Scott-Heron and James Brown vanish to the wayside.

Strangely, Scott-Heron prophesied it all in his songs. He spoke and sung seemingly from a distance, sketching out the horrors and demons that haunted a scourged American dream. But he always implicated himself, quietly and sometimes secretly, in these songs. In “The Bottle,” he sang, “If you ever come looking for me/ You know where I’m bound to be — in a bottle. / If you see some brother looking like a goner/ It’s gonna be me.” Scott-Heron spun private confession into the appearance of political protest.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOUMvjw9RlA

Many of Scott-Heron’s older songs now feel more damning, fresher and more troubling than before. He sings of the sick redemption found in drugs in “Home is Where the Hatred is,” and revisits the pain of being uprooted, of not finding a place of rest, and of not coming from a place of settled warmth, in “Home.”

Stand as far away from me as you can and ask me why
Hang on to your rosary beads
Close your eyes to watch me die
You keep saying, kick it, quit it, kick it, quit it
God, but did you ever try
To turn your sick soul inside out
So that the world, so that the world
Can watch you die

“Because I always feel like running,” Scott-Heron intones on his latest, “Not away, because there is no such place/ Because if there was, I would have found it by now.”

Still from the music video for Britney Spears' "Till the World Ends"

Just a month ago, the new Britney Spears’ album Femme Fatale dropped to surprisingly rave reviews, even from reputable sources. While I can’t say I’ve listened to the whole record, I’ll confirm that at least one single stands up to Slate writer Jody Rosen’s high praise. I must also admit that “Till the World Ends” is currently on heavy rotation.

A thunderous four-to-the-floor Euro house beat underpins Spears’ lustful croons about, yes, dancing ’til the world ends–dramatic synth crescendos and all. Silence. Another crescendo, muted at first. Louder. Louder. Hair Swinging. Water floods out of the pipes. And the drop! Maybe the last drop of forever ever! This is apocalyptic pop music at its finest bubblegum sheen.

Who knew that elaborate fashion/dance spectacles would take place in the sewers underneath Los Angeles as downtown skyscrapers are struck by the fires of revelation? Or wayward asteroids? Doesn’t Britney look sort of dead in the face in the music video?

www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzU9OrZlKb8

Spears is certainly not the first to take up such a seductive subject as the dance party at the end of time. Prince may have jumped off the whole theme with a song that has reached the apex of pop legacy, “1999.” Since, Daft Punk movingly recharged the urgency of the apocalyptic rave with “One More Time,” and many underground acts have followed suit–maybe even films too. So I ask myself, and you as well, dear reader: What does waxing lyrical about the end of time bring to the dance floor?

www.youtube.com/watch?v=pnuijDieOvY

Allow me to speculate with a somewhat grandiose theory. Time works differently on the dance floor. There’s multiple levels to this. I’ll start with the body in motion. Rhythmic music intoxicates the body, setting it into the groove. The groove has no beginning or end. We tap into the groove; it has always been there. The groove disturbs our sense of mechanical time, thrusting our limbs into repetitive patterns which play on cyclical themes.

The way bodies move to rhythm overflows, stretching outwards, towards no determinate horizon. Psychologists have come to call this experience, where the body is completely absorbed in its activity, flow. You don’t have to dance physically on the floor in order for the groove to come into play. As Lee Scratch Perry says, the groove can motivate a mental dance. The club, or the dance floor, must establish the right conditions for bodies, or minds, in flow.

In recent decades the club has become a space of relief from everyday mechanical time, the sort of time that can be measured and put to the clock, divided into segments and distributed in wages. The time of the dance floor can’t be quantified; it breathes and unfolds in waves of energy. The mechanized clock organizes the goals of labor and pushes forward human activity towards completion. Dance instigates no completion. The play of dance falls forward towards no goal in sight besides its own internal movement, constantly fulfilled while opening towards further fulfillment.

So what does the lyrical gesture towards the end of days add to the temporality of dance? I’ll take some choice cuts from Prince’s “1999″ to illustrate the three essential, interrelated elements.

1) Urgency: “Yeah, everybody’s got a bomb/ We could all die any day/ But before I’ll let that happen/ I’ll dance my life away.”

2) Necessity: “War is all around us/ My mind says prepare to fight/ So if I gotta die/ I’m gonna listen 2 my body tonight.”

And the song ends with:

3) Eternity: “Yeah, 1999/ Don’t cha wanna go/ Don’t cha wanna go/ We could all die any day/ I don’t wanna die/ I’d rather dance.”

Although Prince admits he was dreaming when he wrote “1999,” he hardly takes an idealistic stance on the temporality of dance, what we might also call “party time.” “But life is just a party/ And parties weren’t meant to last,” he sings in the opening verse. So we could even add an understanding of finitude–that we dance in the face of the vulnerability of life and death–as the fourth essential element which binds necessity, eternity, and urgency into a whole.

Vulnerability not only increases the stakes of the party (because we would thereby acknowledge the great abyss or inevitable negation that haunts our waking life, our surrounding world, and the earth’s longevity) but also amounts to producing the paradox of eternity in time, an eternity incarnate in the flesh of the dance floor. Other artists have similarly represented these rapturous traits of the dance.

"Oberon, Titania and Puck with Fairies Dancing" -- William Blake

Strange enough, on the eve of 2001, in that apocalyptic world post-Prince’s “1999,” I found myself glued to the television watching Daft Punk’s “One More Time” on repeat. After I got lifted to new heights of intoxication on some Cali herb, the video of celebration at the end of time felt so important and resonant that I wanted aliens to come down and give us one last chance to party to bass pummeling synth-funk before they evaporated the entire earth.

What Daft Punk captures in this song, that Prince just might have glossed over lyrically, is how the temporality of partying not only stretches to infinity but also liberates: “One more time/ Music’s got me feelin so free/ We gonna celebrate/ Celebrate and dance so free.” On loop.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGBhQbmPwH8

I’m sad to say that I don’t think Britney replicates the sublime effects of Daft Punk’s and Prince’s party time songs. There’s far worse out there, though. I’ll even give you one. Jay Sean and Nicki Minaj get the scorched earth award for the worst apocalyptic dance song ever created with last year’s “2012.”

There may be more legitimately Dionysian a-pop-alyptic songs out there on different wavelengths or buried under vaults of Barbara Streisand records. So get up to the celebratory dance sonics of the apocalypse! And we’ve got to hope that some gifted musician will take up the challenge again.

John Maus at the Victory Grill

One might call John Maus‘s live performance at the Victory Grill “unbelievable.” And so we did. Maus wailed and shook on the stage, grappling with his microphone like he was trying to strangle it, occasionally screaming not into the microphone, but away from it, out over the heads of the crowd, into the void.

None of this would be so strange were it not for the fact that Maus stood alone on the stage, nary an instrument in sight. Even a guitar hanging from Maus’s neck would have made him more comprehensible, more mundane. We likened him to a drunken karaoke performer, seeing teary renditions of “Don’t Stop Believing” from our pasts reflected in the sincerity and abandon of his stage presence. But a karaoke performer fully gripped in the throws of rapturous intoxication. . . who has come, alas, to the desperate and final realization that he is truly alone in the world.

The maudlin aspects of Maus’s performance were made even more apparent by the Lynchian setting. The venue was dimly lit by red overhead lights; Maus performed on a low, bare stage before a set of bedraggled velvet curtains; teenagers ringed him on two tiers of torn diner seats; out front the restaurant — an old jazz/blues establishment that has maintained in the neighborhood since the sunset of World War II — served catfish sandwiches and strawberry cake.

Maus’s music is reminiscent of that of Gary Wilson. But where Wilson’s eccentric spirit manifested itself in the form of schizophrenic, voyeuristic songs, Maus’s lyrics center on the tried and true themes of love and solitude. When Wilson does sing about loneliness, it’s more of a despair-ridden solipsism than a pained enchantment with love loss. Maus’s music is an earnest cry of desperation; a distant groan of unrequited love; a spell of ceaseless wandering and homelessness; a scream into the ghostly neon-lit night.

Maus yelped in awe and chanted over programmed motorik rhythms and synthetic harmonies, an unsettling combination of sounds he once honed as a member of Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti.

***

The Soft Moon and Shabazz Palaces at Klub Krucial

Whereas John Maus’s screams were uncontrolled and sometimes animal in nature, The Soft Moon‘s Luis Vasquez screamed methodically, then distorted the percussive quality of his voice into the cipher of an echo chamber.

It was our second time seeing The Soft Moon, and we are prepared now to say that Vasquez has his live show down to a science. The visuals, which were projected onto a huge empty wall behind the band, reflected the sparse geometric structures of the post-punk beats and the muted lightness-upon-darkness of the synthesized melodies. It was as if the video for “Circles” came alive on the set.

The venue in which we saw the Moon is usually a dingy hiphop dance club, but in the daytime, the dusty mirrors and grime and the torn-apart carpets made it look like a genuine 80s new wave joint. Some real tech-noir kind of steez. We’re still waiting for The Soft Moon to play “When It’s Over” live — a track maybe a bit too despondent for most in a live setting, but without a doubt the one song that launches the listener into the prime emotional desolation at the heart of The Soft Moon’s catalogue.

Unfortunately for Shabazz Palaces, the whole fitting-right-into-the-environment thing didn’t work out for them so smoothly. Technical difficulties cut Butterfly’s partner off from his mic and electronic drum kit; all we could hear from him was the minimal bongo rhythm over the crunchy low end bass charged off of the MPC. At times Butterfly shifted from the vital frustration and anger of the inner city Shabazz Palaces anthems to the spacey slam poetry anachronisms endemic to his Digable Planets days. This had us thinking: We’d really like to hear El-P in his prime remix Blowout Comb; on a second thought, that’s what Shabazz sounds like at its best.

Dominique Young Unique, taking it to the streets

Not that there weren’t some killer female MCs in town at the time. We stumbled quite accidentally upon a set by Dominique Young Unique, to our delight. How else can we say it: She rocked the crowd flawlessly. The two white guys backing her up on beats and instrumentals — a long-haired metalhead and a computer programmer from the UK — also rocked it, albeit in their own nerdy way. At one point the metalhead picked up his synth keyboard and got down like Dam-Funk keytar style.

Musically, Dominique reminds us of Thunderheist but with her hood pass intact. Girl raps rapid-fire style with a 15 year-old’s bravado over video game electro noise. This recipe could easily become cheesy but Dominique channels a bit more of the charisma and longevity of a Roxanne Shante than an Amanda Blank. (Although big ups to Amanda Blank when she sings over Eli Escobar’s nu-disco, but not so much when she raps.)

Dominique Young Unique — who is from Tampa, Florida — was recently taken under the wing of another Florida act of similar tendencies: Yo Majesty. You can definitely hear the Miami bass and Freestyle influences merged with Salt -n-Pepa “Push It” antics, which never gets tired as long as you play the game with correctness. Although the limited emotional range of this kind of electro can hold talent back, Dominique’s sharp swagger was made both more impressive and more emotionally rich by how much innocent fun she was visibly having on stage. Others agree. We also caught the tail end of an act at Beauty Bar with Yo Majesty’s Shunda K on the mic and Austin’s own DJ Orion on the turntables; girl still knows how to work the crowd.

***

Das Racist at the ND

And of course many hiphop acts at SXSW did not fall into the easy categories of a black/white divide. Take Das Racist, for example, repping hard for the Brown when we saw them perform at the ND and galavant about town the rest of the weekend (playing a total of something like 15 shows in 2 days).

The three gentlemen of Das Racist mostly yelled their songs (sometimes in a falsetto), punctuating them with funny effeminate dance displays and a shrill pterodactyl sound Mike was particularly fond of. Their set at the ND was something like a cross between a rap show and a stand-up act, featuring one liners like “yo that was SHOE-icide. Cause his feet were KILLIN it.”

This extra entertainment was much appreciated by our Hydra heads; unlike other acts that spent a half hour tinkering with mic volumes, Das Racist displayed an utter disregard for detailed sound engineering, although this came at the expense of their ability to communicate their music’s best attribute: their clever lyrics and wordplay.

Addendum: We would see Das Racist again, this time while meandering around an after-hours party they were headlining. Out of nowhere Heems and some scrapper began to brawl it out on the street outside of the club, Heems’s air freshener chain bouncing to-and-fro, his wifebeater pulled over his chest, revealing a spacious underbelly. Actually it wasn’t much of a scrapper; just looked like a normal kid who was standing in line to see Das Racist. He probably didn’t even know who (or what) hit him.

***

Jamie xx and SBTRKT at Barcelona

To reconnect with the first part of our dispatch, we’re still trying to work through some thoughts regarding the massive influx of UK electronic sounds to American dance floors. Mexicans with Guns impressed us with the sense that the programmed percussive swing of American digitalism quite directly mirrors England’s syncopated but slightly off kilter dance records. This latter scene was showcased at South by Southwest by UK garage producer SBTRKT and a sprawling DJ set by Jamie xx.

SBTRKT has an ear for the forward pulse of 2-step as well as the bubbling synthetic melodies and soulful croons of garage. These tunes sound amazing on a sound system crafted for the low end, and we were getting a heavy dose of it at Barcelona. If dubstep might have grown a bit tiresome within its own wobble wobble fold, we have it to thank  not only for importing the sonic trajectory of the UK into the US, but also for its help spawning all those fragmented mutations of uptempo dance music in England — from future garage to funky to dubbage and whatever else is on the rise.

The authenticity of the British club experience in Barcelona actually made it difficult for particular Hydra writers to focus on the music. Certain of us (Adri) were mostly trying to dodge the insane coked-out British girls that filled the club in their “frocks” whilst thrashing about arrythmically. But from what we did hear, Jamie xx spiraled from American sources of dance tunes to the UK takeovers, and back and forth through the dialectic. His selections spanned Chicago ghetto-tech, deep house, as well as grime/club tunes, genres of dance music that mesh seamlessly yet complement each other’s patterns of intensity. The ferociousness of the bass and warmness of both the synth keys and vocals fit easily into our SXSW thematic of swag/vulnerability.

***

James Blake at the Fader Fort

Shortly after Cass McComb‘s solid — but rather unremarkable — set at the Fader Fort, fellow crooner James Blake took the stage. A blonde fangirl with a large backpack informed us in an offended and authoritative tone that we should all be as excited as she was for Blake’s impending appearance. Once the man of the hour did appear, we were struck by the similarity of his appearance and sincere delivery to that of  pop icon Justin Bieber. Quipped Adri: I’m waiting for Bieber to pull a James Blake. Responded Mike: You mean James Blake to pull a Bieber.

Jokes aside, (and seriously though, Bieber really channels Michael Jackson on “Runaway Love“) Blake performed his tender, skeletal dub-step lamentations with polished, graceful aplomb, adding some cool musical refreshment to an otherwise sweltering afternoon. Blake’s tunes show that the structural framework of dance music — when dissected, retextured, and rearranged — can offer quite a bit of inspiration and emotional fodder for a singer-songwriter. And along with stateside groups like Gayngs, Blake proves that there is something to be sonically salvaged from the soft-rock side of the 1980s.

***

Los Rakas, Dave Nada, and Toy Selectah at Frank

Oaktown boys Los Rakas also repped the brown and the raka, adding a latin infusion to SXSW to counterbalance Fader’s shutout. To our surprise, we found them performing at local restaurant Frank, where we also saw fav DJs Dave Nada and Toy Selectah. Dave Nada’s expert drops kept us engaged and the floor moving, as did the mad stylings and intricate transitions of Toy Selectah on the clocks.

Most exciting was the way that Los Rakas and Toy Selectah chose to combine the energy of traditionally-inflected live vocals and call-and-response with the spinning of sophisticated beats.  After a week straight of all-day shows and all-night partying, our Hydra correspondents needed a concentrated dose of that freshness in order to stay awake.

Fans perch on fences and dumpsters, hoping to see Odd Future play SXSW (photo: Hydra)

From Lil B to Justin Vernon, John Maus to Odd Future, James Blake to Cass McCombs – this year’s South by Southwest synthesized vulnerability with bravado, youth with history. Hydra writers Mike Krimper and Adri Wong did a few rounds about town, making sure to catch our favorite artists in live action. Our photos and field notes.

Odd Future at the Scoot Inn

After an hour and a half in the sun, we began to bond with the 18 and over crowd assembled outside the Scoot Inn to see Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All and Tyler the Creator, the pack’s rapidly rising star. These young hooligans proved to be the group’s true fans; they scaled the surrounding fence, dumpsters, and trees to catch a peek inside Thrasher’s 21+ showcase, and they persisted in these efforts even when confronted by angry metalhead security staff that launched a volley of beer cans at their heads.  But fans outside were rewarded when Tyler sauntered right by them — followed by the thoroughly swagged-out Odd Future crew — inspiring a horde of teenagers to tear through Scoot’s metal fence and storm the crowd.

Needless to say, Odd Future tore it up. They moshed the stage and launched their skinny bodies off speakers and rooftops to crowd surf, breaking one audience member’s nose in the process (Tyler issued hasty apology: “I don’t wanna get sued!”). Their performance oscillated between ferocious rants and child-like asides, all layered over guzzled Madlib-sounding programming, slowed down to a Nyquil-intoxicated drone. The combined violence/tenderness of Odd Future’s music surpasses any formula for rap thus far devised: the extremes of Eminem confessions and Wu-Tang mafioso hanging on edge. These kids were a SXSW favorite for many and are surely about to make heavy noise beyond their Los Angeles skater affiliates, hustlers, business whores, bloggers, and groupies.

Perhaps it was their vibrant but ebbing youth, or the feeling that they were on the cusp of breaking through, but the sprinkling of Odd Future’s appearances throughout our week made us feel like we were living a historical moment.

Later that night we would see the Golf Wang again, in a surprise performance at the Fader Fort. For a second time, we were alerted to the impending performance when we noticed a tie-dye shirt and hiked-up pair of gym socks bowleggedly swaggering by us, the very reincarnation of Hunter S. Thompson himself.

***

Lil B, Spoek Mathambo, Deyarmond Edison, and Diddy at the Fader Fort

Odd Future’s California compatriot in swag, Lil B, managed to beckon the largest cohorts of any Fader Fort act, yet he seemed to disperse it just as quickly.

Even before Lil B made it on stage, he had already determined the composition of the audience for his forerunning acts. But the kids ready to go dumb and rap fanatics waiting for the former Pack member couldn’t handle the performances of Khaira Arby (too world music) or  Spoek Mathambo (too out of this world). Mathambo played an amazing set to a dead-eyed crowd that was sadly more excited about watching Kanye West dance to township tech than listening to it. But Mathambo, undeterred, leapfrogged energetically about the stage with a lone saxophonist for accompaniment, opening bravely with a rather avant-garde jam about blood diamonds.

Equally ignored was Justin Vernon (of Bon Iver) and college band DeYarmond Edison. “Who is Justin Vernon?” asked one member of Based God’s base. “A balding middle aged white man from Wisconsin,” responded an irritated Bon Iver fan, unsuccessfully searching for an opening in the crowd. A spirited and lengthy rendition of Carol King’s “You’ve Got a Friend” served only to heighten the sense of absurdity at the Fort.

Finally, after a raucous introduction by P Diddy, cooking dance and all, Lil B, dressed in fatigues and shades, took the stage.  To the disappointment of the crowd, which was  waiting for B to mercilessly ride his pretty bitch flow, Lil B poured his heart out onstage with a sprawling set of Youtube confessionals and spiritual revelations before muddling into swag-worthy rhythms. Mike was feeling it even if no one else was — that’s why he came to see Lil B, to get learned on the #rare cosmic greasings of the Based God himself.  After all, dude admits he doesn’t even know if he’s a rapper anymore. “Rapper artist” maybe?  His words, not ours.

Lil B was emphatic about his cross-genre status, referencing obscure indie rockers and insisting that his music was not hiphop — it was, in his words, “ambient rap” (not to be confused with “ambien rap?”). What other kind of music could rapper artists make? But after a well-received rendition of “Wonton Soup“, the Based God also informed us that we were listening to the next 30 years of rap music. So it was particularly ironic when Diddy, not one to miss an opportunity to bask in the applause of a thoroughly intoxicated audience, jumped on stage again at Lil B’s departure and stole the show with renditions of his Wiz Khalifa verse and B.I.G. classics.

***

Friends of Friends at Barcelona

Bay Area DJ Shlohmo was among Lil B’s fans, as we discovered during his set at Barcelona, a venue that provided us with an air-conditioned, electronic/dub retreat during the high overhead sunlight hours of rock-centric SXSW.

Shlohmo’s live performance had improved significantly since we last saw it, a few moons back when his debut record Shlohmoshun dropped and dude was still busy “Hotboxin the Cockpit.” Even the whiteboy-dance he put on as he spun a track of Lil B’s pretty bitch flow was charming.  That song, full of brazen obscenities, also signified the dividing line between the aggressively virtuosic first act of Shlohmo’s set and the softer, gentler sound of his second act.

In the second half of his set, Shlohmo showcased music from his new EP Places and sung unabashedly into a mic that distorted his voice so that he sounded like a sultry ingenue, or a sprite. This approach — one that has greatly expanded the emotional range of his tunes — seems to take influence from lo-fi beats and a healthy history of R&B electronics.

Before Shlohmo, we saw a set by Low Limit, who some in the audience knew primarily as half of musical duo Lazer Sword. His music was reminiscent of Hood Internet — who we’d seen play earlier that week at the Mohawk – but much more precise on the buttons. The superior sounds could also be attributed to Low Limit’s movement away from strictly glitch/hyphy remixes into the more unchartered waters of funky/house and all that upper tempo range of grimey club music that doesn’t shy away from warm synthetic melodies. Which is not to say that a solid mashup of Passion Pit and Juvenile couldn’t get our toes-a-tappin’ and our booties groovin’.

The following set by Mexicans with Guns was — in a word — adventurous. Donning a mask that transformed him from the average amiable San Antonian to a formidable DJ, Mr. Ernest Gonzalez traversed the globe to find a variety of funky dance and latin beats, displaying for us his consummate talent at pulling out the rhythmic essence of any genre, be it traditional or club. And holding it down for lo Mexicano from cumbia to Cypress Hill, which drove our TexMex crowd absolutely wild.

Paraiso (Mexicans with Guns Remix) by mexicanswithguns

***

Stay tuned for part 2: Jamie XX, Salva, James Blake, John Maus, The Soft Moon, Das Racist, Shabazz Palaces, and more.

Last year, South African musician Spoek Mathambo flipped Joy Division’s “She Lost Control” into a disorienting pastiche of dubstep, new wave, and South African electronics on his excellent debut long-player, Mshini Wam. Spoek traded the female interest of Joy Division’s original for a frenetic meditation on the concept of “Control” itself. In fact the whole record spins elusively around the interplay of control and resistance, organization and disintegration, creation and destruction. Spoek himself baptized the record as a foray into “Township Tech.” Coagulated terms like “darkwave township house” have also been passed around. These cascading words, reminiscent of Hydra’s own worldtown moniker, quite precisely suggest the outline of Mshini: Syrupy synth chords meander along fragmented bass lines and gurgling wobbles. It echoes the deep soulfulness of Chicago House and the interlaced poly-percussive wirings of UK Funky. But this shit is purely South African, hungry and pressing. Spoek, together with photographer Pieter Hugo–who also documented Nigeria’s burgeoning film industry in Nollywood–and cinematographer Michael Cleary, just dropped the video for “Control.” Who knew township occultism and gangs of South African kids shared something of the pulse of post-punk dirges?

Fellow writer Adri Wong recently asked me whether an African musician can be afro-futurist. After all, the central origin story, or so it seems, of afro-futurism stems from a sci-fi nightmare at the heart of America’s own genesis as a nation. A people is abducted from their homeland and taken to an alien, new world, where they are forced into exploitative manual labor. Generations pass, languages are unlearned and new ones adopted; values distorted, transformed, and re-modified, lives divided and interwoven, new forms of life invented. Blackness solidifies, dissolves, and refigures itself.

Afro-futurism is the dream of a distant homeland, one no longer home, and a prophetic liberation, set somewhere in the purple glow of the horizon. Does the same narrative apply to peoples recovering from generations of colonialism? Third-world countries competing in globalizing markets? All nomadic peoples of the Diaspora in its multiple forms and aberrations?

In recent years, an embryonic pulse for dance music, rap, and experiments on the boundaries of conventional genres has erupted in South Africa. Last year’s Shangaan Electro compilation on Honest Jon’s tracked the skittering mutations of 1990s Kwaito into a rapid gurgling discharge of digital sounds that strangely parallels the footwork and juke movements in South Side Chicago. Sometimes a Shangaan song is just a Kwaito record played at 45 RPM.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXE6_j1N7o8

2010 was also a big year for the white South African group Die Antwoord. The crew stormed the blogosphere and indie dance parties with their elaborate agitprop performances, lyrical extravagances, and an onslaught of music videos seductive enough to terrorize your subconscious. What is so striking about Die Antwoord is how the group evokes such a global sound, ideas, and emotions from an essentially local focus on South African concerns and heritage. Their latest experiment “Evil Boy” centers around the story of a boy who refuses to obey his tribe’s gruesome right of passage into manhood: self-circumcision.

Still less on the mass radar, but no less innovative, is an emerging movement of new dance music from South Africa which informs Spoek Mathambo’s stylings, but stretches far beyond in boundary and scope. Inspired by synth swirling Chicago House and recent blips of UK Funky, just as well as dub and poly-percussive funk, South African producers and musicians are forming a new pattern of rhythm and electronics. The music not only thrives in local clubs, streets, and parties, but also circulates in roaming taxi sound systems throughout Johannesburg, Cape Town, and Gabrouw, among other townships.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=0l5-zQlgoEE

One of South Africa’s most promising up and comers is Mujava whose “Township Funk” received mad play on Rinse FM a couple years back, and inspired remixes from the likes of Skream and Ikonika. A good place to start, to sink into a vortex of music of which I barely was able to scratch the surface while researching for this article, is courtesy of London-via-South Africa producer Gerv, part of the group LV (Factmag interview here), who scrambled together this OKZharp mix early last year.

These tunes, strangely enough, sound like they could just as easily be coming out of densely populated immigrant neighborhoods in East London, as if the trajectories of underground dance music in SA and London traveled side-by-side into the flittering dark spheres of broken down rhythm-and-melody house. But once again, the global arises from the absolutely local, transmitted in a digital haze, intravenously through the coiled wires of the network. A glimpse of the township can be heard.

I’m convinced that Hydra associate Ms. Adri Wong has it right: We’ve entered the sonic era of World Town and there’s no turning back. Audible exchanges flow across the seas; tongue, tool, string, and wires coagulate into one organic/mechanical beast; the noises of third-world industrialization dance against the backdrop of folk song and lore; music travels and digitizes and globalizes from bedroom to studio to the Internet, and returns to the roots of the town to raise the idol of the bass to the sound system. World Town is here. It’s now. And shit is live. Last week I spoke to NY-via-Oakland producer and DJ Chief Boima, who just beat-conducted the ferocious Banana Clipz EP (free download) with Oro 11 of Bersa Discos on their Ghetto Bassquake upstart and blog. I asked him some questions about his upcoming work with Bay Area’s rising Panamanian duo, Los Rakas, whether he finds any merit in the idea of tropical bass, and how to make sense of the new sounds emerging from the African Diaspora everywhere from the Americas to the UK.

Hydra Dun said that you do with instrumentals what Los Rakas does with lyrics. Do you see similarities in your respective styles? Your backgrounds and influences?

Chief Boima Well, when I first came across Los Rakas I had just come back from Panama, and I was on this high from hearing all the big carnaval tunes and the mix of sounds that reflected my musical and cultural background, but in a Spanish-speaking world. I grew up on the stuff that a lot of Panamanians grew up on, zouk, dancehall, soca, etc. So I was at the SF Carnaval and I heard Panamanian reggae but with this Bay Area flavor to it. (Check my initial reaction here, and I had been posting stuff like this.) I identified with what they were doing immediately.

Also, my father is from Sierra Leone, and I grew up with West African cultural influences, so I try to incorporate that musically into my electronic and hip-hop beats. I feel like Los Rakas do the same thing with Panama, and what Dun said is a great compliment.

H Dun also mentioned a future EP coming up. What’s your process working with Los Rakas? What are some of your thoughts on this upcoming EP?

CB Well I linked up with Rico and Dun after not seeing them for maybe a year. I had given Rico some instrumentals and I never had gotten the chance to record on them. At that point I had a little studio set up in my spot in Oakland, so I invited them down to work on stuff. I think it was a real natural collaboration because we knocked out a lot of different stuff in like 6 months. They would come over and just freestyle or write. A lot of songs came out through different processes. Like one song they gave me an a capella and I constructed a beat around it. Other songs, I played them the beat and they’d just start writing to it, and we’d record. This would all happen after work and on weekends, so it was cool because the sessions were real compact but productive. I’m real excited about the EP. I think the material is strong and unique, so I can’t wait to see the reception.

H “Tropical” or “tropical bass” seems to be the new term which has emerged to cover the range of new electronic music informed by both American and Afro-Latin styles of music, and their many convergences and hybrids. Do you see yourself as part of this tropical movement? Would you trace its form or define it differently?

CB I get the name tropical bass, but I see it akin to a label like world music that’s just kind of vague. I think the styles that are included under the genre are diverse musically, but they share similarities in the production process that is informed by increased access to technology and information across the world. It’s also really related to urban environments, like hip-hop and house were in their beginning stages. So I see all this music as a kind of continuum of hip-hop and electronic music from Detroit and Chicago. I see myself as part of that production process, more than a musical genre.

The genres I enjoy and work with are informed by their local environments and have names like hip-hop, dancehall, coupe decale, house, soca, and kuduro. They come out of specific regions, and their environments inform the music. A lot of the most popular rhythms are related to Africa and its diaspora, people who are generally scattered around the tropics. So that’s why people use tropical, but I wouldn’t necessarily describe myself or anyone else that way. It doesn’t really work anymore when you get [sounds like] Balani in Mali, or UK Funky, which are not tropical [in setting], but are still informed by the same aesthetics and production processes.

H Do you try to digitize or transfer Afro-Latin/Caribbean folk sounds, genres, or ideas into electronic form?

CB Yes, but I don’t explicitly set that as a goal. I add in all my influences, which are informed by growing up in the Midwest and spending time on the West Coast as much as “folk” music. I was into hip-hop and electronic music growing up, and my older relatives would get down to music that was recorded by live instruments. I love those older tunes, they make me nostalgic, and make me feel connected to my culture, so I wanted to bring the feelings that I have when I hear them to a contemporary club space.

H Our sense of place is now more amorphous than it was maybe thirty years ago. The Internet has in many ways uprooted us, and with regards to music, given us access to all sorts of folk genres, sonic forms of indigenous culture, traditional sounds and instruments, beforehand only accessible perhaps by being there or coming into contact with someone who was indeed there. To what extent do you think the open source availability of the Internet influences the way you channel folk forms of music and older sonic traditions in your production? In what way does place or region (whether the Bay, Cuba, NY, or online places, even the temperate range of tropical) inform your music?

CB I think the Internet has facilitated interactions and dialogue, but you can’t overlook things like increased immigration and traveling. A New York Times article recently said that New York is as diverse as it’s ever been. It claims that NY has more people born in other countries living there than ever before. The whole United States is changing. Europe is changing. The feedback loop to global centers of production in the “South” is super influential. International travel is becoming cheaper, so it’s easier to see the whole world. I think we’re going to reach an energy crisis in the near future where all that will be curbed a little, and the Internet will keep those interactions going, but we’re really living at the apex of an empire, just like the Romans, and the Ottomans, and the Greeks were super diverse civilizations informed by cultures from all over the world. So the Internet is just our current means of achieving those interactions. It takes the place of the role that sailors and desert caravans and conquerors had before. It’s just faster, and totalizing across the globe.

I travel a lot, and I have a diverse cultural background with multiple influences. That puts me in a certain position of influence because of my experience, but someone who has never traveled can have the same influences because I post about it on the Internet. But that doesn’t mean that it’s a new thing. Cotton and sugar comes from India. Potatoes come from Peru. Coffee comes from Ethiopia. These are things that are fundamental to our cultural identity today, but we don’t necessarily think about them as coming from other places. I feel like these things seep into everyday life, and they become a part of wherever they end up whether NY, London, Rio, Kampala, etc. But when they get to those places I think they change. In other words, environment’s influence is fundamental and if you listen hard you can tell the difference.

[Cross-posted from SFB]