Joel Schalit

Dubstep Democracy

With the exception of albums such as Kode 9 and the Spaceape’s Memories of the Future, and Dusk and Blackdown’s Margins Music, dubstep is not known to be political. Reflective of its contexts, like Burial’s debut, certainly, but a protest idiom, like punk, well, no.

Recast as a soundtrack to an anti-government demo, it starts to make more sense. Not that Skream was hired to DJ the event. Nonetheless, this unintentional collage, of a protest flyer, pasted over a gig poster, makes us hear British politics a bit differently.

Soho, March 10th.

Rock the Space Bar

The Elders of Zion have been quiet for the last three years. I’ve been the culprit, as I’ve had to focus on writing Israel vs. Utopia. With the exception of Basra Memorial Orchestra,  our contribution to the fourth edition of Fifteen Sounds of the War on the Poor (2009), we haven’t issued anything new since our Twilight War EP in December 2006.

On Friday, however, the Elders published their first DJ mix in Zeek. Longtime fans of Turkish psychedelia, we pieced together a forty minute jam, featuring our favorite tracks by artists such as Erkin Koray, Mogollar, and 3 Hürel. The audio is hosted by Soundcloud. You can listen to the mix on this page, or download an MP3 directly.

Found Sound

Two weeks ago, I stumbled upon several boxes of LPs sitting in front of a house across the street. Containing everything from Glenn Gould’s rendition of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, to first edition Elvis Presley and Carl Perkins records and post-WWII electronic and musique concrète recordings like these,  was one of the best and most thoughtfully curated record collections I’d ever seen.

Most of the albums turned out to be in perfect condition, as though they’d sat in their sleeves for the last forty years without ever having once been played. I wondered who could have amassed such a library, without leaving as much as a thumb print on any of these discs. Then, it began to drizzle. That’s when I made up my mind to redeem these recordings, and carry them all home.

The Liberal Arts

   
Ron Nachmann is an Israeli-American journalist based in San Francisco. A close friend and colleague, we’ve worked together at a number of different periodicals, including Tikkun, where Ron served as music editor. Now a contributor to Zeek, his latest article, a review of Tom Segev’s 1967: Israel, the War and the Year That Transformed the Middle East, was published in the December issue. It’s not only a marvelous piece of writing on an incredibly complex and politically loaded book. Ron’s essay is an excellent introduction to the politics of writing about Israeli history.

The appropriately-titled Continuity has finally arrived. A CD/DVD by the Tokyo-based, Polish sound artist Zbigniew Karkowski (in collaboration with Japanese videographer Atsuko Nojiri), this unorthodox career retrospective is the last project we signed when I was Asphodel‘s label manager. Already receiving excellent reviews in Europe from publications such as Vital Weekly, given press like this, I have the sneaking suspicion that Continuity will cement Karkowski’s reputation as one of the world’s most forward-thinking electronic musicians.

Just Say Fez

Oh No‘s new American take on Middle Eastern hip-hop is not without similarly single-minded precedents. In terms of actual full-lengths, Mutamassik‘s 2005 LP, Definitive Works, is of equally subversive significance. For anyone familiar with post-war Egyptian pop, from the sampled string sections to the galloping percussion, the influence of Om Kholtum‘s band looms large on this Brooklyn DJ’s debut album.

Listening to Definitive last weekend, like a lot of records of its kind, I was struck by the ways in which Mutamassik almost plays with Western clichés of oriental music. Particularly the popularity of specific types of orchestral arrangements, and belly dance signifiers popular during the early ’60s, when cities like Los Angeles boasted of a number of Arab-themed club bands.

I don’t mean to suggest that this album intentionally stakes out a critical position in relation to these long forgotten artists. However, if you’re hip to the phenomenon (think guitar-driven mini-orchestras with fez-wearing, Arab-American and Armenian band leaders, not shriners), its hard not to place the new engagement with Mideast music in American hip-hop in relationship to them.

I own a number of out-of-print recordings by several of these groups, but they’re hidden somewhere deep inside my office closet. This weekend, I’m going to do some serious excavation work, and slap them straight back onto my turntable. I imagine that I’ll find them a bit more ideologically complex than I did before.

Download Me

Between the fall of 1999 and the summer of 2001, I spent an untold number of hours capturing field recordings of anti-capitalist demonstrators from around the world. Posted to an assortment of websites ranging from Indymedia to the BBC, once I’d start playing a file, I’d record it in real time to a Phillips 765 CD-R dubbing deck.

The best example of these recordings is a montage I pieced together of a demonstration in front of the IMF HQ in Washington DC, in April 2000. Cut and sequenced manually, and then placed over a heavily edited hip-hop percussion track, the song, What’s Your Badge Number?, ended up on the first Elders of Zion record, Dawn Refuses to Rise.

Today, at the request of a listener, a community radio DJ posted the piece to her blog. Click here to read the entry and download the track.

Cultural Imperialism That Works

By now, you’d think that a beats and Bollywood synthesis would be the stuff of nineties cliche. Indeed, it most certainly is. Witness all of the lazily titled ‘Buddha Beat’-style anthologies issued by exotica imprints on the one hand, and the ‘sitar and bass’ records once the province of boutique ethno labels like Outcaste on the other.

Finding a copy of this new Madlib disc for only four bucks, I decided to make the plunge. When this kind of work is done right, absolutely nothing beats it. Luckily, my intuition proved correct. Sampling both film dialogue and music, with Beat Konducta India, the legendary Oxnard DJ takes the idiom in an entirely new direction.

What makes this record work is how it inverts the experience of world music. Instead of making the listener imagine they’re somewhere else, it helps you figure out where you already are. Like my block, where sometimes I can hear Bollywood soundtracks blasting out of an Indian restaurant, while cars idling in front pump out loud hip-hop as they wait for the light to change.

A Canon (of Sorts)

Working feverishly on my next to final chapter, here’s a brief list of the cultural product I’m presently fretting about:

Film

Walk on Water, directed by Eytan Fox (Israel, 2004/US, 2005)
Paradise Now, directed by Hany Abu-Assad (France/Israel/Palestine, 2005)
Munich, directed by Steven Spielberg (US, 2005)

Books

A Little Piece of Ground, by Elizabeth Laird (Macmillan, 2003/Haymarket, 2006)
Palestine, by Joe Sacco (Fantagraphics, 2001)

Music

Magnetic Storm, Smartut Kahol Lavan (CD-R, Boshet, Israel, 2005)
Discography, Dir Yassin ( LP, Alerta Antifascista, Germany, 2006)
Vote Hezbollah, Muslimgauze (Soleilmoon, 1993)

Terminal Preppies

The only known ‘band’ photo: Christal Methodists, SF Weekly cover pic, 1999. Found on an old hard drive yesterday evening.

Back to School Special

For the last three years, I’ve been the owner of a satellite radio. Early adopters, we both installed them in our cars because of the access it gave us to non-American news services and genre-based music channels.  (I was immediately sold on the idea of a 24/7 death metal station.) Given what poor reception the radio received in my twenty year-old Volvo, and how long my commute to work was (an hour and fifteen minutes either way) for the first few months, my new radio was an enormously refreshing change of pace.

Unfortunately, Sirius‘ allure ran out rather quickly. Each one of its channels – even when they weren’t run by the host company, such as the BBC’s World Service – sounded far too disciplined. Everything came across as being so thoroughly programmed that if an announcer so much as made a pronunciation error, you’d fear for their careers. (The word ‘cautious’ always came to mind.) The lack of ads was great, but the absence of spontaneity was even more noticeable.

Perhaps the worst aspect of our Sirius experience was the alternative music station, Left of Center. At times sounding like it was programmed by the editors of London music tabloid NME, the endless repetition of throwaway British bands like Starsailor seemed like a very curious choice given how ill-fitting such groups sound in domestic indie context. What about a band like Spoon? Totally beige, but less obvious. Equally awkward was the fratboy-friendly vibe of Sirius’ reggae station.

Driving our new, satellite radio-free car home today (we couldn’t afford the option), I turned on KUSF and heard an absolutely iconographic, mixed-genre set of electronica, post-punk and hip-hop. Sometimes the DJ spoke too softly. Sometimes he segued a little too quickly. Nevertheless, it sounded like manna had descended from radio heaven. Moving from the great new Zeph and Azeem record to the Slits’ classic New Town, listening to our local college station was like running into a cherished old friend you’d mistakenly assumed dead or disappeared.