Features

With new album Skeleton, punk tropicalistas Abe Vigoda place fifth-world fever dreams and Los Angeles DIY on the dissecting table, cataloguing the anatomy of a new hybrid music

Juan Velazquez is the guitarist in Abe Vigoda. His speech is peppered with gently self-deprecating tics; “like” and “I don’t know” and “it’s weird” and “that makes no sense” mark out staccato bursts of static in our communication. In response, and with a temperature of 101°, my thoughts cluster only nebulously around the questions that were intended to marshall them, swerve and disperse and gather, like bees. The transatlantic connection on which we are relying seems equally intent on disruption. Odd chirrups echo through vast spaces; at one point, I imagine birds, blossoms and vines issuing from the speakerphone. Over their cheeps, creaks and rustlings I will later pore for meaning, incongruous possibilities presenting themselves in fever both real and imagined, unavoidable lacunae appearing in my grasp of what happened.
(more…)

Kasai All Stars are dancing across the borders.

Mi-Amor has a generous stature and glassy eyes that he holds in steady contact. He smiles and reclines to reflect, leans in to clench his point. He’s spokesperson, vocalist, dancer and guitarist, for Congolese collective, Kasai All Stars, and seems mildly amused at my first enquiry, as to how the group was formed.

He opens his hands to explain. Kasai All Stars cannot be addressed as the group, in the singular.
(more…)

‘Music is about pleasure and fluidity and endless waves of influence’

New York-based DJ, writer and producer Jace Clayton, aka DJ/rupture, has been a leading figure in the documentation and celebration of “non-Western” music ever since his Gold Teeth Thief mix became a viral internet phenomenon in 2001. Indeed, through his mixes, parties, Dutty Artz label, WFMU radio show, and his popular Mudd Up! blog, he has helped widen dance music’s discursive parameters to include everything from autotuned rai pop to cumbia and reggaeton. He has just released his latest collection, the dubstep-focused Uproot.
(more…)

Intellectualise Ohio’s times New Viking at your peril: you’ll find these dudes getting high on scuzz and powering effervescent melodies through the noxious fog og no-budget analogue recording.

Digital smoke and mirrors: it’s the great hoax of rock music circa now. The felt gloves of a dozen studio hands slam padlocks on the noise gates and over-compress recordings until the dynamic range is flattened and watered down to the level of summer festival beer. The kids can’t tell if they’re hearing a low kb/s rip, or if the moss has grown too far into their ears. It’s gotten so that when faced with the music of Times New Viking – three misfits from Columbus, Ohio who have stolen back the pure essence of garage band din from the two-chord archaeologists of this world, in order to sustain
their endless run of 90-second(1) infections that communicate the inherent absurdities of making
art in 2008 – they’ve forgotten their well-worn copies of Alien Lanes and Half Japanese records over there on the shelf. They’ve lost the joy of not making things out.
(more…)