Hey all, short notice – I will be showing some new work tonight at the Bring Your Own Beamer show that is part of Transmission L.A. (curated by Mike D). There is a whole grip of LA artists taking part, it should be awesome.

Unfortunately, since Diplo is playing a show at MOCA at the same time, you need a ticket to get in. And those tickets are sold out.

Hope to see you there. But I’ll get some pics just in case

BYOB MOCA LA
Sat May 5 2012
7-10pm
at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA
152 N Central Ave Los Angeles CA 90013

Hey all, greetings from Los Angeles.

I will be doing a guest set tonight on KCHUNG, broadcasting on 1630AM straight out of Chinatown. DJ Egroeg was kind enough to extend an invite to his program CDS Digest, which airs from 9-11pm.
I’ve been working in the trippy ethnic Disneyland that is LA’s Chinatown since I relocated here late last year, and I’ve heard many good things about it’s little homegrown basement-level AM transmitter, nestled in amongst the first generation tchotchke distros and second wave art galleries.

I’m excited to spend my first time DJing out here at a noteworthy local institution, plus my record collection arrived on it’s pallet only a few weeks ago, meaning its high time for some cathartic release.

Stream KCHUNG here.

—— UPDATE ——–
download the archived show here

things:

Volume Pops Pro – Jeff Sisson’s amazing solution/adaptation/plugin for the universal volume pop shame problem

Champale Podcast – Back when, I introduced Willy and Marko to each other, in part because they were my go-to guys for finding out about new raps. Now they do an amazing, overly analytical rap podcast together with great guests, just in time for me to have moved out of New York and absorb their comedy, wisdom, and slaps via iTunes. If only I could so deftly curate my other friends into personal broadcasting about our common interests I’d be set…

DJ Filetype SWF live on Awesome New Place – A 2+ hour DJ set consisting entirely of embedded flash music on websites, mixed in real time in tabs in Chrome by DJ Filetype SWF aka Joel Holmberg live on my radio show. Legendary & groundbreaking

Free Music Archive and Vimeo team up – When I started volunteering at WFMU, one of the first things I worked on was the Free Music Archive, and once Jason Sigel explained the aims of the project to me, one of the first things that I thought was that a big archive of Creative Commons music could be a huge boon for the always-growing world of online video content, as the UMC takedowns have become all too familiar across YouTube. I told Jason I knew some people at Vimeo, made some introductions, and wrote a few blog posts. I’m not very involved with the FMA any more but I’m really happy to see that an idea I set into motion has come to fruition.

Jamming with Critter and Guitari and Javelin and other friends at the Experimental Television Center (RIP). I wish that there was something for me to link to, but nothing has been digitized.

VHX.tv goes public [beta] – Jamie Wilkinson &co launch best site to watch online video, imho. I have talked to Jamie for a few years as different iterations of this project have been in the works, from like “wouldn’t it be cool if there was a website that…” to the super-slick-yet-I-guess-not-even-finished site they have today.

My show ‘New Age Problems’ at The Pigeon Wing in London – super fun, and with enough lead time that I got to make a variety of new pieces, it all came out looking pretty good. Was great to spend some time in London and see some old friends, catch some great weather, and show at an art gallery that also included a free bed and kitchen.

Helping mount Cory Arcangel’s show Pro Tools at the Whitney Museum – lots of hard work, but super fun! Proud to have worked on something so high profile in NY before I left.

Seeing Christian Marclay’s The Clock – sat and watched for like 2 hours, totally awesome work.

Bicycling around western Massachusetts in september, so beautiful.

music:

• Win Win – Interleave (XXXChange’s 1993 Mix) [feat. Alexis Taylor of Hot Chip]
• Peaking Lights – All The Sun That Shines:
• Harald Grosskopf – Synthesist (reissue)
  La Big Vic – Musica
  Bay Area Retrograde (BART) Vol. 1
• Dog Leather – Troll Spray:
  George Kush (aka Mister A*OK) – A Few Tunes, Chopped Not Slopped
• Javelin – Canyon Candy:
• Jim Jones – Believe in Magic (Prod. by Girl Talk)
  Lupe Fiasco – Out of My Head Instrumental (with hook) (feat. Trey Songz, Prod. by Miykal Snoddy) (look ma, no Lupe)
  Dntel – Enya Mixes
  Addison Groove – Minutes of Funk
  Soulja Boy – Welcome to my City, 1UP
• YC – Racks (so unintelligible so good):
  DJ Exotica Sage Presents: Blood Orange Home Recordings Mixtape
• Riff Raff – Larry Bird:
• (p.s. from 2010 but still great: Edward Larry Gordon – Celestial Vibration)

video finds:

• Ratboy Genius!! so epic, homemade 3d animation song cycle.. knock knock
• illest goo pick up machine
• Ray getting dickered on a snowmobile, canada!
• epic whistled rendition of Georgia On My Mind on a 90s talk show
• Russian motorcycle punk rock band, en route
• Prophetic 1995 Student Internet PSA (w/ pulsing techno)
• Madison the five year old makeup guru
• Chip Torres – Te Voy a Dar un Byte
• mariachi band serenades whale, whale poops
• lazy sunday aciiiiid trax w/ jammies & cat
• “El Mejor video de internet” I think this is some old guys with a flat tire getting down to Lorna’s Papi Chulo
• … see also Papi Chulo performed in urdu by Younis Jani, sick
• freestyle canoeing to Lady in Red by Christopher Cross, no big deal
• Phil Thomas Katt – I’ve Never Been Alive “This Was The First Music Video Shot Entirely in a Hurricane and it Includes Some Cool Storm Footage.” great home recording ballad found during the blue balls that was Hurricaine Irene
• compilation of Japanese commercials 1980 – 1992 that used music from Yellow Magic Orchestra
• Mannie Fresh speaking at Redbull Music Academy, hosted by blogger Andrew Noz (amazing story about Mystikal getting out of jail and not knowing what YouTube was)
• 39 Second Space Painting
• Divine Rags Ad – pimpin’ low production values
• Real Scenes: Detroit – a nice 20 min short about the Detroit Techno scene in Resident Advisor’s Real Scenes series
• phantom of the flopera
• Greg Barris standup reel 2/23/11 funny!
• minimal composer Roberto Cacciapaglia’s Ann Steel concept project being performed on Italian TV in the 70s
• Hennessey Youngman killin it with Art Thoughtz – this series was the jumpoff this year!
• Intense second life style animation w/ home-dubbed misheard lyrics, freaky

broadcasts/podcasts/related

• Title TK w/ Danny Goldman live at the Whitney Museum
• Traxman guest set on the Math and Science show on WNYU
• Men in Blazers
• …impossible to pick just one moment from The Best Show, but the Shout! Network lineup for the fall was a particular highlight, had the whole family laughing on a long car ride.

RIP:

• Martin Rushent
• Altered Zones
• Experimental Television Center

I will be returning to my one-time digs at WNYU tonight for a special Quiet Storm episode of A Downtown Affair, tonight from 10:30pm – 1am, hosted by my longtime discofriends Tackleberry & Mike McGill.

Tune in to 89.1fm in the tri-state area, or the web stream anywhere else.

Though ADA has a rock solid disco / boogie / modern soul format, we were inspired to do this 100% slow jams episode in part by the last time I was on the show, when Tackleberry, Mike, myself, and our other discofriend Josh Dunn hit a collective nerve when we pulled out all our mellow jams and ballads for a collaborative last set. Review my mix Wine Coolers from 2009 for more context for tonight, and certainly we’ll hear some tracks that are on the perpetually-forestalled follow up to that one.

Sit back and relax.

UPDATE: The archived show is here, or direct download; Part 1, Part 2.

Stream | Download

When Josh Dunn came to do a guest set last year on Awesome New Place, he pulled Manual Gottsching’s E2-E4 (1984) out of the record library walls, and recounted to me how Finland’s DJ Anonymous used the record to pre-heat parties, letting Side B play out it’s proto-techno while he set up his second turntable, went to the bathroom, smoked a cigarette, got a drink, and settled into the booth for the rest of the evening.

Learning more about Gottsching was the real genesis of this mix, the impetus to finally listen to Ash Ra Tempel and the nucleus of other mainstay Krautrock bands that I had known were influential, but beyond that, hadn’t really known at all. After a glut of Kraut downloading and record library perusing, I definitely gravitated towards the albums like Zuckerzeit (1974) and Music von Harmonia (1974) that pivoted from the noodling rock band format towards synths, pop, and the ‘Kosmische’ vibe.

When I interviewed Ashra percussionist Harald Grosskopf and his collaborator Axel Heilhecker on Awesome New Place, right out the gate they name checked Mickey Hart and spoke about how kosmische musik was essentially their generation’s attempt at complete, formless, utopian free expression. But the 90s saw their albums reissued on CD with ‘New Age Music!’ stickers on the shrink and their honest hopes for enlightenment redirected towards the mass market for self improvement via a number of vaguely spiritual consumption practices; diets, mellow breathing exercises, Enya soundscapes, pastoral meditation retreats, candles, crystals, rainforest/ocean sounds sleeping aids, etc.

On this mix the co-opting continues, of course, and that now nostalgic 90s pallet of synth pads, slow beats, and reverb is being used by young musicians like Maxmillian Dunbar to conflate memories of New Age and House sounds. The kosmischen probably chose simple loops and patterns in part because synths weren’t exactly plug-and-play back then, but their minimal, pianissimo, electronic compositions became an important touchstone for both modern composers like Arp and the stripped down thumps and clicks of Detroit and acid techno. Germany also had a vibrant, cassette-distributed home recording culture in the late 70s and early 80s, bootlegged and collected early on the the Kassettentäter LP series. That tape hiss has cropped up again with artists like Peaking Lights, Autre Neu Veut and YOU. taking advantage of a splintered record industry and home computer recording technology to press weird, small run releases with tiny, questionably profitable record labels.

The internet’s connectivity has flattened music in a way. A new track could have been made five minutes ago, and is only five minutes away from minting a new niche, when it’ll get Liked up into the iCloud and neatly filed one click away from the YouTube rip it was sampled from. Conversely, Grosskopf recorded his recently-reissued Synthesist LP (1980) alone, at a friend’s house in the woods, in a deep meditative state. It seems difficult to try to make one’s own music (or any art, really) these days instead of getting caught up in the process of watching, organizing, and sampling media. But when I interviewed Clams Casino, he reminded me that the internet has also made us profoundly alone. His sound isn’t the heads nodding in the studio, its the glacial crawl of you and a computer in a bedroom, lost in the reverb settings just to keep from getting bored.

Artwork by Bobby Houlihan (thanks dude).
Thanks also to Bobby, George, Johnny, Marty, Cory, Bryce, Jacob, and the WFMU New Bin for all the music tips on this one.

Tracklist:
# Artist – Song (Year Label)

1. Orchestral Manoeuvers in the Dark – Almost (1980 Dindisc)
2. YOU. – Loose Joint (2010 Blind Prophet)
3. Lebkuchen – Der Blaue Traum (reissued 2002 no label)
4. Cluster – Heiße Lippen (1974 Brain)
5. Bitchin Bajas – Zone 2 (2010 Important)
6. Peaking Lights – All The Sun That Shines (2011 Not Not Fun)
7. Harmonia – Watussi (1974 Brain)
8. Arp – St Tropez (2007 Smalltown Supersound)
9. Maxmillion Dunbar – Original Soundtrack Flutes (2010 Ramp)
10. Clams Casino – All I Need (Instrumental) (2010 no label)
11. Silk Flowers – Small Fortune (2009 Post Present Medium)
12. Sexual Harrassment – If I Gave You A Party (1983 Heat)
13. Le Car – Audiofile 10 (reissued 2002 Ersatz Audio)
14. Baron Zen – At The Mall (PBW Remix) (2007 Stones Throw)
15. LA Vampires meets Zola Jesus – Bone Is Bloodstone (2010 Not Not Fun)
16. P.D. – Progressive Disco I (1980 Wahrnehmungen)
17. Alan Shearer – Sons of the Snake (reissued 2008 Permanent Vacation)
18. CH-Rom – Never-Ending Love Transmission (2011 no label)
19. Autre Ne Veut – Demoneyez (2010 Olde English Spelling Bee)
20. Jan Hammer – Night Talk (1987 MCA)
21. Suzanne Ciani – Love In the Waves (1982 Atlantic)

Pictures from my show New Age Problems at The Pigeon wing are up here. The show is up til May 28th and the gallery is open Fri – Sun, 12 – 5.