Tuesday, April 4, 2023 by DJ Uncertain
LM Listening with Nicholas Weltyk
- Linda Perhacs, Chimacum Rain
- Orlando
- David Motion and Sally Potter, Eye To Eye
- Saika, Desktop 2022.03.09 - 12.28.16.02
- Snow Strippers, Its A Dream
- 1ove1etter.exe, 完美角色體驗 (eMILY gLASS Rem!x)
- ronan, avril lavigne - bite me (ronan's teenage fantasy mix)
- Bootleg Baby, F00L 2016 @Rapallo
- gabe gill, pillowcase
- Le Makeup, AtarashiKarada_LMmix.wav
- SoundWorld's Guestbook, i love you forever
- Terrace House
- Yon Eta, Bliss
- rensgo, MTG - Beat Lindo
- Junior H, Nunca Tristes Siempre Locos
- Pontiac Streator, i could show you
- We have the same problems
- Ludovic, Loin Du Ciel
- spookybands, stone to turn (jacob vallen)
- Aeoi, Binding
- Dviance, Strolling Around
- hayden kolb, Helpless
- Chief Keef, Make Me Mad
- Gundam Wing: Endless Waltz
- Beach sounds
- The Legend of Dragoon
- drew playland, Motherfucker
- CLIP, hate this
- forest runaways, Fleeting Frozen Heart (Xxtarlit⚸ - forest runaways edit)
- We have no solutions
- Hegira Moya, Your system is may be destroyed
Listen on MPR ----->
Friday, March 3, 2023 by DJ Uncertain #art #music #performance
The Winner Takes It All
Throughout the past 60 years, The Eurovision Song Contest has mapped out a soft focus, sequinned version of the trials and shifting dynamics that have faced Europe — via boycotts, voting alliances and winning lyrics. The contest is primarily about the songs, but also about soft politics and the drama of nationhood; the myth and reality of the economic, social and political conglomerate called Europe. In May 2020, the Eurovision Song Contest had been cancelled for the first time in its history. As a gesture to fill the void of this absence, The Winner Takes It All presents a programme of audio artworks that make use of or pay homage to the pop song as a politically and socially potent medium. These works make use of the nostalgia, schmalz and escapism of pop music, lyrics that can say both everything and nothing, catchy hooks and ear-worm choruses. They repurpose these qualities to express social and personal anxieties: depending on your level of listening, you can dance along to them or get pulled into their underlying social critiques — or both at the same time. Featuring works by Gabriella Hirst, Rowland Hill, Larisa Crunțeanu and Rosa Johan Uddoh. Gabriella Hirst’s work ’Siren Song’ was co-written and produced by MajiKer. Larisa Crunteau's work ‘A Small Insignificant Love’ was co-written and produced by Electric Brother.
Listen on➚ mpr -->
Friday, March 3, 2023 by DJ Uncertain
Free Cash presents Welfare to Artwork: The Dole, social benefits, and how subculture was made
FREE CASH February 2020 was a 17 hour takeover on Cashmere Radio in Berlin, broadcast live from their studios in Lichtenberg from 4pm on the 28th of February to 9am on the 29th. It was organised by Ruth Angel Edwards and Adam Gallagher ft: Emily Pope, Freya Field Donovan, Angelicaa, Eleni Polou, Cole Denyer, Sidsel Hansen, Harman Bains, Buried Zine, Chloee Maugile, Erica Scourti, Hannah Stewart, DJ actually existing DJ, Conrad Pack, Hannah Taverner, Charles Verni & more
Then Ruth and Adam started making Welfare to Artwork, co-broadcast between MPR and Wysing Broadcasts (we’re the only ones with the full series) looking at the relationship between the welfare state and art making in Britain, starting in the 70’s all the way through to the 90’s / 00’s & interviewed cabaret voltaire’s Stephen Mallinder, KLF, Alannah Currie amongst others
The original free cash > ➚https://freecash.zone/
Listen to the MPR series here: ➚ep 1, ➚ep 2, ➚ep 3, ➚ep 4, ➚ep 5,
More from ➚Ruth
More from ➚Adam
Friday, March 3, 2023 by Montez Press Radio #music
Asian Dance Hybrids in the Archipelago of Kitsch
Asian Dance Hybrids in the Archipelago of Kitsch
According to Ted Gioia, old music is ➚killing new music. And honestly, when was the last time you heard anything genuinely new? Pop has largely succumbed to the algorithm, while underground music’s youth-driven cutting edge relies on supercharged kitsch, eclectic cultural references thrown into a blender, bass-boosted, and presented as a kaleidoscope of genres suffixed with “-core,” a signifier reduced to its expression of an endlessly reproducible ideal type. When it’s not rediscovering the cultural relics of the past, pop now mines the musical diversity to be found in the global margins. The most prominent currents energizing dance music today come from marginalized Black and Afro-Latin communities, from funk carioca in the favelas of Brazil to Jersey club in the housing projects of Brick City. Amapiano, Afrobeats, neoperreo; these genres have begun to capture the Western pop music imagination in recent years, genres which themselves arose out of an endless refashioning of Western musical forms in the periphery.
According to Adorno, kitsch is the “precipitate of devalued forms and empty ornaments from a formal world that has become remote from its immediate context”; for Greenberg, kitsch “has gone on a triumphal tour of the world, crowding out and defacing native cultures in one colonial country after another, so that it is now by way of becoming a universal culture, the first universal culture ever beheld.” This was back in the mid-20th century. We haven’t yet reached that universal culture, though some might argue in that direction; rather, it is now the kitsch of the global majority that is returning to a culturally beleaguered West. Perhaps this is merely another phase in the cycles of global cultural circulation, a refrain of the 1920s advent of recorded music and the scramble to inscribe the world’s sounds onto shellac.
Of course, the world is not so easily explained by the pithy universalisms of Adorno or Greenberg. This segment is instead concerned with the particular. Inspired by dance music collective Eastern Margins, this segment probes the connections we might draw between the manifestations of kitsch in different localities in Asia. These Asian forms have their own unique connotations, histories, and links to subcultural identities, often working class, marginalized, or vulgar. Like Egyptian mahraganat, Brazilian funk carioca, Balkan turbo-folk, and other mass musics, they have also often been subject to varying degrees of criminalization and censorship as well as subsumption into narratives of the nation.
In the Philippines, it’s budots—both a genre rife with potty humor and a “form of self-expression: ‘Ka-budots pud nimo uy (You’re so budots),’” according to ➚Jay Rosas. Taiwanese might call it taike, a nebulous descriptor that connotes a sort of betel nut-chewing bumpkin that has at different points in history been reclaimed for underground rock, dance clubs, and electrified ➚Taiost temple processions. In Bollywood cinema it’s the tapori who gyrates to lewd music; in Vietnam, the scourge of trẻ trâu gesticulating at loud clubs blasting vinahouse. The elite in Sinophone Southeast Asia might turn their nose at manyao and the drug-peddling gangsters they associate with the genre. And in South Korea, the spectre of ppong-tchak haunts the underground, a genre once denounced for its Japanese flavor but now speaks to an ineffable feeling of folk Koreanness; ➚according to Lee Junhee, lecturer at Sungkonghoe University, “the word ppong is often associated with subcultures, kitsch-like elements in korea, cultural elements and factors that are hardly associated with ‘luxury’ or ‘high class’ but rather, intentionally used to express vulgarity.” It’s the Korean gaksuli performer cracking sexual jokes and mooning the audience, the manyao musician hocking a loogie before the beat drops, the taike spirit of making a track whose only lyrics are “gan ni niang”—fuck your mom.
These forms have yet to be subsumed within the broader fabric of Western popular music, though the efforts of underground musicians in the diaspora have begun to lift the veil. Eastern Margins aimed to “reclaim these sounds - to showcase them in their pure emotional glory” in their compilation album Redline Legends, arguing their case as a form of experimentalism in Asian mass culture; Eternal Dragonz showcased the spirit of ppong in their mixtape ➚Cola-Tek Autobahn, mixed by Seesea and DJ Yesyes. This process of reclaiming elides a palimpsest of overlapping differences within Asian nations and regions within those nations; budots itself is a sound from the periphery of the periphery, pitted against Manila-centrism in the Philippines that has since been touted as Pinoy-field dance music. If according to Adorno, all kitsch is ideology, then what is the ideology that might be teased from this musical kitsch and its “reclaiming”?
In September last year, Boiler Room had its latest Seoul edition. One DJ stood out in particular: sporting an umbrella hat, oversized iron scissors (yeot-kawi, typically wielded as a percussive instrument by Korean candy peddlers to attract customers), and a T-shirt emblazoned with the word jeulgeobda - to be joyful. That word certainly described the crowd at the site, packed to the brim with overjoyed dancers sweating it out to ppong-tchak and K-pop. But online, the set was polarizing—a largely foreign audience clutched their pearls in horror at the kitschy, bad music that had infiltrated their precious purveyor of cool. Some native Koreans were even apologizing. While the reaction of a chin-scratching devotee to the temple of Berghain might be predictable, the embarrassment of Korean viewers is a fascinating case study of the hegemony of subcultural capital.
In the language of business techno, to describe a techno track as “hypnotic” is often meant as a compliment. But the bouncy bass of vinahouse and the incessant high-pitched squeal of budots induce a hypnotism of their own. What’s the difference, then, between the hypnotism of minimal techno and the hypnotism of these regional forms? This segment explores the dialectic between popular and avant-garde, mainstream and underground, cringe and cool, in the Asian archipelago of kitsch.
- James Gui
Listen to hours of it on MPR ➚ here
--->
In ‘Asian Dance Hybrids in the Archipelago of Kitsch’, music writer, researcher, and DJ, James Gui ➚@zkgui , has curated 12 hours of dusty, betel-nut chewing, bass boosted, hyper-pop’d (before gen z did it) music from across working class Asia with a group of young artists working within the genres.
From ➚@therealhojo in Taiwan we hear the spirit of ‘taike’ through mandopop, a slur-cum-genre referring to pre-1949 islanders, bumpkins, and then stimulant-fueled underground music scenes.
From ➚@supershelhiel in Malaysia, Manyao is Mandopop on ecstasy- the sickly sweetness of Chinese ballads hypercharged with trance synth stabs and high-octane kicks. heard today with a global mix of Indonesian funkot, UK garage, and homegrown hyperpop.
Then ➚@_lushlata_ gives us Bollywood bass and other sounds from the margins of the Indian subcontinent with a blend of UK dubstep, jungle, drum and bass.
➚@obese.dogma777 in The Philipines we get Budots with all its high-pitched, sliding synths, vulgar vocal chops. This is one of the first electronic genres in the region that came to national prominence recently as high-profile politicians, including Rodrigo Duterte, have used it for nefarious viral political campaigns.
From ➚@_n_x_p and ➚@puppy_ri0t, we get Vinahouse the bouncy, bass-heavy club genre that is ubiquitous in Vietnam’s urban soundscape.
Then from Korea the Future Kwankwang Medley crew gives us the hyper-kpop’d Ppong chat revival, a dance music genre once associated with the elderly, typically heard at highway rest stops, flea markets, or daytime dance halls called cola-teks. Ppong and its ethos can now be heard in basement venues across Seoul. ➚@future_kwankwang_madly
If Greenberg's kitsch “has gone on a triumphal tour of the world, crowding out and defacing native cultures in one colonial country after another, so that it is now by way of becoming a universal culture”, this is the kitsch that remains at the edges, consuming, misinterpreting, and resisting a universal culture, for whom the promise of an efficient, modern and globalized future never came– kitsch’s last stand when absolutely everything is kitsch.
-Tom
Tuesday, February 14, 2023 by DJ Uncertain
Anton Van Dalen and His Pigeons
Back in January '22, Anton Van Dalen joined us on MPR for an episode of Dena Yago's show New York Conversations. In this episode, Yago and Van Dalen discuss his art and his pigeons, which he has raised, bred, and flown on Avenue A since 1971. Born in Amstelveen, Holland in 1938, Anton van Dalen emigrated to the US and settled in the East Village in 1966, where he continues to live and work. Van Dalen, who first learned to rear the birds at the age of 12, is one of the few remaining pigeon keepers in Lower Manhattan.
Since then, we've enjoyed more of Anton's work at PPOW where his show, ➚Doves: Where They Live and Work, was up until the end of January '23, followed by a screening at Anthology of the documentary Anton: Circling Home about Van Dalen's "lifelong commitment to exposing inequality amidst the societal influences of technology, war, and capitalism with his personal and artistic dedication to the lives of the white pigeons who have lived on his East Village roof" since the '70s.
Keep an eye out for more on Anton Van Dalen next month when we'll be hearing from Morgan Schmidt-Feng, Katy Swailes, and Dennis Mohr, the producers of Anton. In the meantime, you can watch the film in its entirety ➚here and listen to his New York Conversation ➚here.
Self-portrait with Pigeon Coop facing South, 2014.
Thursday, February 2, 2023 by DJ Uncertain #readings #art #poetry
reading WHITNEY CLAFLIN: FOOD & SPIRITS
CLEAR PAPER
Do you ever see your friends
so happy
that all you can do
is very suddenly imagine them dead
and how sad that time will be.
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For Nick Irvin's ➚Song Cycle No. 5, Whitney Claflin reads from her new book of poems "Food & Spirits". Recorded on October 8th, 2022 at Loong Mah with musical accompaniment by Maggie Lee.
Thursday, February 2, 2023 by DJ Uncertain #poetry
Lung City
Live from the studio with the kids from under the bridge. Listen to it all ➚here
➚CleoWalksThroughGlass, ➚Thanks God, ➚Golden_Guaps, ➚Pink Lüng, ➚Yakilina