Word The Cat

All sorts popping up at the moment: Black Propaganda hosts a video of Spacemen 3’s revolution here serious fuzzzzzed psychadelia. On another Black Propaganda pointer check new Sainkho Namtchylak posts at UBUweb here – best remedy for sore throats going.
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/Rupture hosts an mp3 fest to promote this weekend’s sonic arts festival. Streaming should be available here.
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Not enough unecessary (but interesting) mp3s in your life? check – some // of // these – posts on shortwave radio from WFMU or this history of music from East Germany (DDR).
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Word The Cat favourite Phill Niblock is this month’s WIRE cover-star – Swen provides sonic links here.
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North-east winds dumped sleet, snow, rain and hail on Leeds today, alternating it with sun. This disorientating weather goes well with Exuma (aka McFarlane Anthony McKay aka The Obeah Man) – Vodou folk singer. There’s a full bio here
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This track’s from his self-titled 1970 debut LP. It’s aboout Dambala, a lwa equated with snakes and St. Patrick (in the catholic synthesis/coverstory). The song went on to be covered by Nina Simone…

Exuma – Dambala 7.9mb

As an aside on the general state of media check UK station Channel 4’s ‘Addiction Week‘ – a series of programmes about addiction to a variety of drugs. The flagship show is called ‘Cold Turkey’ and depicts a group of heroin addicts going without drugs for a week. Channel 4 was set up in the early 80s to provide independent (i.e. not state funded like the BBC) programing with a broad social agenda. Last month they did ‘penis week‘. To give some sort of context, plastic surgery programmes have gotten very big in the last couple of years (penis week had penis surgery footage in abundance), including before and after plastic surgery makeover shows. Was it in the 90s medical science started putting cameras inside peoples’ bodies to help diagnosis and conduct surgery? This is no mere diagnosis. A camera is a scalpel. A TV show is an autopsy — as clinical as a public execution.
Anyway, for about 70 years popular music has been addicted to the guitar (which is also like a penis). Here is some live guitar/penis surgery presented for your amusement.

John Fahey is a huge figure in the post-war guitar world. Born in 1939 he came to be associated with a movement called American Primitivism steeped in blues, bluegrass and folk. Albums like Blind Joe Death have been re-issued over and over again. This track is from a live performance in 1998 with Loren Mazzacane Connors.

John Fahey & Loren Connors live at the Hint House 1998 28mb

Interestingly, Wikipedia’s entry on American Primitivism references Tetuzi Akiyama. A Japanese musician clad in cowboy hat and boots. American Primitivism incidently was also strongly influnced by Indian classical tradition among other non-American (what’s American?) influences. Japan’s often considered a mirror for American culture (music, baseball, democracy). This is matched with a ‘Picture of Dorian Gray’-style paranoia of the foreign. Keeping this in mind, quake with terror at Tetuzi Akiyama’s collapsing-building style boogie-woogie.

Tetuzi Akiyama – It’s a Boogie Thing 5.6mb

Another Japanese player of note is Hisato Higuchi. The majority of his 2003 ‘She’ LP is short, sweet, straightforward guitar improvisations. On the final two tracks, however, he re-layers and re-fuzzes them to build these:

Hisato Higuchi – Ghosts Ghost 8.3mb

Hisato Higuchi – Sister Girl 5.3mb

Finally, something from improv elder: London’s Derek Bailey (RIP). Never quite gotten my head round improv in general. Probably because it was birthed in the early 70s, I’ve always thought of it alongiside Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen’s destruction of visual (/audio) pleasure (pleasure, after all being a supremely bourgeois concept motivated towards deception and the promotion of apathy). Music for heads. Does this track want to make you throw yourself in front of a tank, perform vagino/penis surgery on yourself or just consume something more fun? Answers below please.

Derek Bailey & Henry Kaiser – Chrysantehmums 6.5mb

Spring is trying to emerge. It was too warm for a hat and scarf today plus I saw the first bumblebee of the year. Spring means rain. Rain means water.

George Iwer – Water

George Iwer is one of Trinidad’s soca veterans. This track is from last year. The other day I picked up the ‘Lif Up Yuh Leg An Trample’ soca compilation on Honest Jon’s records in the Rough Trade sale. Had my eye on it for a while – it’s quite old now (2004), but has some great tracks. Look for Honest Jon’s online shop here (eventually) for more compilations including Moondog and Malian stuff.

Dawg E Slaughter – Trample

Like Fiji Trinidad has a large Indian merchant class. This bubles up nicely through soca into a genre called Chutney Soca. Here’s an example for the same CD:

Massive Gosine – Chrloo

As you might expect from this, Truth Hurts’ DJ Quik produced hindi-sampling R&B hit ‘Addictive’ was prime for a soca remake. Here with political commentary/(at least)awareness that goes back to Calypsonians like Lord Kitchener:

Bobo & Agony – Soca Taliban

Port of Spain Carnival

Cos all this stuff is quite old, thought I’d also offer some new roots and dancehall —

Anthony Cruz – Informer (Noah)
Idonia – Straight Happiness (Inevitable)

‘Inevitable’ is one of the cheesiest riddims I’ve heard since Buy Out. Watch Idonia too. He had a load of strong tracks last year including this one in which he did for chickens what Lexxus did for monkeys a few years ago (dancehall always keeps up to date on its disease carrying animals).

Idonia – Chicken Head (Galore)

(a lot of text and music at the bottom)
(update with extra track and less bandwidth freeloading)

Leeds is apparently coming up in the world. What this means is the council want to restore Leeds to its ‘glory days’ of being a Victorian commerical centre. This has meant a 10 year plan of attracting big chain-stores to the town centre including a much celebrated branch of Harvey Nicholls (shit, we even have Primark now). However, these days its not enough to create a commercial centre, the council must also create ideal consumers. Success can no longer be measured in economic terms alone, but must also take place culturally. The theory is ‘re-generation or ‘genrification’ the practice is the clearance of Little London (prime land near the city centre) to make way for luxury flats. This information via The Common Place:

In March 2002, 54% of Little London and Woodhouse residents on a 67% turnout voted NO to a £35m PFI regeneration scheme that would have seen a third of council homes in Little London demolished and replaced with far less council homes and far more private flats and housing = gentrification of prime city centre land.

For the council, however, the NO vote was the ‘wrong result’. They analysed the results and found that a potential majority existed in support of the PFI scheme in Little London, so they decided to re-ballot Little London by itself – within weeks of the original vote – with the promise that one of the Tower Blocks originally scheduled for demolition
would stay up. This time, 57% voted YES to PFI, but around 46% of residents didn’t vote.

Then nothing happened. Nothing. That was the last time the tenants and residents heard from the council for 3 years. That’s 3 years without proper repairs being done to their houses. Until late 2005, when the Little London Tenants and Residents Association were invited to take part in a new process to take the regeneration scheme forward. Because
of a delay in other Leeds PFI projects, the government decided that the council had to consult tenants and residents again, only this time with a new choice: a bigger PFI programme or a minimal refurbishment option

Guess what? Under the new PFI proposal, the Tower Block that was promised to be saved in the second vote was now once again scheduled for demolition; 450 homes would be demolished, private flats and housing built, and the whole thing wouldn’t be finished until at least 2013.

The main problem with the PFI scheme is that a third of the Little London community will probably be forced to leave their homes forever – this is because the council wants to bring richer families and students into the area in order to ‘regenerate it’.

The Tenants and Residents Association, which represents the entire community, is not against PFI per se, but is against the prospect of demolition of homes, the eviction of a third of the community and the fact that £80m is not going to be enjoyed by those people.

Another wing of the council’s project is the clearance of schoolkids from outside the Corn Exchange. This place has been a battleground for goths and scallies for generations. However in New Leeds is has been decided that young people look untidy and so, under ASBO legislation, the council and police are proposing a dispersal order forbidding more than 2 people to gather there at any time. If more than two people do gather there they can be moved on, if they loiter anywhere else in the city centre they are subject to arrest. The streets are (no longer?) a public space, they are a route by which one moves between sites of consumption. Partisan report and pictures here

Against this background I saw David Broad and Mike Rossiter play at the Grove Inn yesterday.

The Grove is currently hidden away between two newly-built 20 story buildings (one of which is a new office for Eversheds corporate law firm). They’re two lights of Leeds’ flourishing folk scene. Also seek Benjamin Wetherill, Fran Rogers .

Hear David Broad (more to be found here) – lonely folk songs for the space between law firms and hyper-mechanised guitar picking.

David Broad – Pretty Polly 4.1mb

David Broad – John Henry 3.7mb

EXTRA!
David Broad & The Jug Liberation Orchestra – Hava Nagila 6.2mb

hear Mike Rossiter at hismyspace.

Another angle comes from just north of Leeds. Xenis Emputae Travelling Band is the work of one Mr Larkfall. Site-specific improvisations from the Yorkshire countryside. There are many MP3s and buyable CDs available for your perusal here and some bits and pieces below.

Xenis Emputae Travelling Band – Bogle Burn 17.1mb
Xenis Emputae Travelling Band – Thee Gold of a Thousand Mornings (sample)

Xenis Emputae Travelling Band – Holly King 5.8mb