caravia/music

The American musician Filastine performing as a detainee from Guantanamo. I listened to Filastine live in Tarifa, in the Fadaiat activist meeting, fadaiat.net [fadaiat.net]
Extremely great sound and lyrics!

Shostakovich was a Russian musician and composer and he lived in Russia when Russia was the Sovjet Union. His relation with Stalin was complicated. Nobody could make Art in the country without chose sides in a struggle between the Art as an independent expression of the freedom of the spirit and the use of the Art as a political tool. In Samizdada, an interesting blog, the discussion is passionated and witty.

"I first got into Harry Smith in the mid 90's. It was a different time: The U.S. wasn't an occupying power in the Middle East, the price of gas was reasonable, and people all thought vinyl was going to be obsolete. How different things are today!

I tend to think that Harry Smith was a walking remixologist - his memory, as I'm told was legendary: he'd be able to hear a record that he hadn´t heard in decades and would be able to tell you who made it and when, plus what edition the recording came out of. I like stuff like that.

Many people know Harry for his films - I know him for his record collection. If you look at the way he edited film, you can see that he was really into visual rhythm - everything he did was about sequencing and pacing out a series of edits and imagery. I tend to think that he´s probably one of the first multi-media artists, and in one way or another, the thread that connects him to the 21st century is his fascniation with information of every kind. Clips of newspapers, short films made from the shards of his everyday life, pages culled from his favorite esoteric tomes on magic and illusionism - all were grist for his collage centered vision of how music and film could transform the world. Smith's idea was to apply dj technique to film - he wanted to show that collage could be edited in a way that would speak about myths and the way people can understand the rapidly changing world around themselves from the information they record.

If you look at other people who were using film in the same way, whether it was Andy Warhol with his "Exploding Plastic Inevitable" or even people like early cinematographers like Melies - all can be traced as inspirations for the allegorical connections that Smith used to create masterpieces like "Heaven and Earth Magic." Even more so, one can look to the Joseph Cornell as a precedent - Cornell is well known for the oneiric quality of his art and films. I like to think that Smith took the "dream logic" of free association to another level. Connect the dots, and you realize that his drawings were always meant to be animated to music - you can easily see the linkage between the animations he created and the sounds he used to drive the drawing process. Many have tried, often in vain, to put into words the strange power of Cornell's boxes - toy-like constructions in which playfulness and humour are anchored in profound melancholy. Update the scenario, and you realize that the artform that connects Smith and Cornell is the process of selection - something that Duchamp could have recognized in both of their work. When you see Smith's films, you realize that you've combed through the voluminous diaries that he kept throughout his life in search of his own dreams. What you find are brief flashes of images and short, enigmatic narratives of illumination - the drawn equivalent of Cornell boxes, or the anthology of folk music that was Smith's gift to American civilization."

A blog with rare musical posters from the 50:s and the 60:s. Psychodelical and cool.

The Fader is for me a new discovery, excellent addition to the urban mags born in the counterculture.

""Ghetto palms" is what we used to call those little bamboo-ish looking trees that sprout up in empty lots and the cracks between sidewalk blocks. Sometime last year my Mom sent me clipping from the papers in Detroit that broke down how they're actually a species from China spread here by container ships. Fact: in China it's called Tree of Heaven. Fact: city planners can accurately calculate the length of time a house or city block has been abandoned by the size of the ghetto palms. Ever since then, ailanthus altissima has been taking over the back-lot of my brain like an invasive tree in Brooklyn, too crazy not to be a metaphor for something deep. Some kind of underground ecology--a science of things that grow where they're not supposed to--is about as good a mission statement as any for what I'm trying to do with this column, plus it just had a ring to it. I had a mess of funny but too-literal ones like "Things That Make You Say `Forward'" and "There Will Be Dubs," but abstract and slightly pretentious just felt more, you know, me.

Appropriately the 1st time out is entirely dedicated to 45s from Kingston, which has its share of both ghetto and actual, factual palm trees. This column, like my DJ sets (hell, my life) will be heavily dancehall-influenced, but will dip into other international waters with UK bhangra, Angolan kuduro and whatever fits.
-Edwin "Stats" Houghton "