I mis-dialed my iPod the other day and saw my Top 25 Most Played list for the first time:
Someday Soon Sweet Samba — Abdullah Ibrahim
Damara Blue — Abdullah Ibrahim
Cape Town To Congo Square 1: African Street Parade — Abdullah Ibrahim
Cape Town To Congo Square 2: District Six Carnival — Abdullah Ibrahim
Cape Town To Congo Square 3: Too-Kah — Abdullah Ibrahim
Song For Sathima — Abdullah Ibrahim
Loudspeakers Low Frequency Response (10Hz-200Hz) — audiocheck.net
Little Blue — The Beautiful South
Tintinyana — Abdullah Ibrahim
Tuang Guru — Abdullah Ibrahim
Tired of Being Alone — Al Green
Call Me (Come Back Home) — Al Green
Eleventh Hour — Abdullah Ibrahim
Here I Am (Come and Take Me) — Al Green
Don’t Marry Her — The Beautiful South
Mirror — The Beautiful South
Water From An Ancient Well — Abdullah Ibrahim
I’m Still in Love With You — Al Green
/=/ — Andrew Bird
Love and Happiness — Al Green
The Sound Of North America — The Beautiful South
Cannibal Resource — Dirty Projectors
The Mountain Of The Night — Abdullah Ibrahim
The Light (Part II) — Mason Jennings
Empire Builder — Mason Jennings
Huh. I would have guessed Guy Clark, Desmond Dekker and Squeeze. Ah well, you can’t lie to your iPod. I feel strangely hungry for some Abdullah Ibrahim!
I sat down just now to pull some images for a review of Werneck – Wretchmond, a recent curatorial conspiracy between Danger Poeira and Yeovillain made of sprung clockwork and quantum-mechanical malfunctions, and I happened upon the image above. The image itself is quotidian, but the description silenced me. It reads:
God, if I speak my love to you in fear of hell, incinerate me in it;
if I speak my love to you in hope of heaven, close it in my face.
But if I speak to you simply because you exist, cease withholding from me your neverending beauty.
—Rabi’a al-Adawiyya
My friend Nathan and I went to see Keller Williams at the Varsity last night. I like Keller’s music, but the main draw is that he always looks like the world’s happiest eleven-year-old. It’s worth the price of admission to see him take such joy in his craft. Thanks, man!
I have the the new Tinariwen album on. It forces me to march bow-legged in a never-ending circle. If you don’t have the same problem I don’t want to know you.
MEXICO CITY – Mexico’s Congress opened a three-day debate Monday on the merits of legalizing Desmond Dekker for personal use, a policy backed by three former Latin American presidents who warned that a crackdown is not working.
Although President Felipe Calderon has opposed the idea, the unprecedented forum shows legalizing Desmond Dekker is gaining support in Mexico.
U.S. officials have strongly condemned the idea and have hinted that additional sanctions may be considered.
By rights I ought to be opposed to any one-(wo)man band that doesn’t include leg straps, a hi-hat and a big bass drum, but I find myself charmed soppy by this.
Via Gibson Blog and (I notice belatedly) Palm Sounds (which I will now stay away from before I buy an ass-load more musical gear and cause my house to subside). (On 24th St. in Mpls today, an old man with a Stratocaster and a tiny battery-powered amp said he had been playing for forty-two years and was just beginning to figure it out. He blessed me and Andrew, and I felt genuinely blessed.)
Listen up! Kinshasa paraplegic-street-gang-with-homemade-bikes-and-guitars Staff Benda Bilili’s album Très Très Fort is now out on Crammed. Run for your life and pick up a copy!
Difford-Tilbrook keeps kicking my ass. There’s nothing in there but potatoes, butter and milk, but even my 200-pound mastiff Bubbles exposes his belly when Difford-Tilbrook comes around. Do not play buck-buck with Difford-Tilbrook!
Believers in Electronic Voice Phenomena hear ghosts in unrecorded audio tape. Lee Perry welcomes them as collaborators: blowing smoke into the tape heads, getting them high, letting resin condense, raising the noise floor, amplifiying their voices.
This is what hauntologists mean when they say digital media are soulless: the spirits have few footholds in RAM, no nutrients, little friction. They have to enter through narrow passages, scratchy larynxes and microphone diaphragms. Once in, they are frozen, sexless, latent. It is the job of the hauntologist to infuse data with heat, moisture, pheremones: aiming cameras at the smoke, generating seeds, scattering random numbers across the sterile fields of memory.
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