Perceive its beauty, acknowledge its grace
Shabaka, Kamasi Washington, Andre 3000, Carole King, Orquesta Akokan, How can we save nightlife from collapse, Somewhere in Detroit..
Hello all, here’s the newest edition of my newsletter, and what has been piquing my interest, in the last weeks.
♩AOTM: With the added bonus of the featuring UK artists like Floating Points, Lianne La Havas, Moses Sumney, Saul Williams, the new age titan Laraaji & rapper ELUCID (1/2 of Armand Hammer) Comet is Coming main man Shabaka Hutchings' latest cosmic transmission and his debut solo album on Impulse! is my pick of the month. [Spotify]
♩👀 I was floored by this beautiful collaboration between Kamasi Washington and Andre 3000 for the upcoming KW album in May! The visuals are fantastic too.. Please watch & listen! [Youtube]
♩Amazing orchestral Japanese soul from 70s. “The follow-up compilation to Time Capsule’s Nippon Acid Folk, Nippon Psychedelic Soul takes myriad pathways into the tripped-out undergrowth of 1970s Japan.” [Compiled by Time Capsule]
… and just by luck, the YT algo god gave me this mix of 70s Japanese soul and funk mix after posting about this album on social media.
👀 I think the art of shooting concert videos might be dying with a lot of good things of the last century. This candid footage put me on a Carole King tip. Corazooon, mi corazon!
It clearly reminds me one of the best concert settings/performances/moments ever of Carly Simon singing “You're So Vain”. Why is this intimacy not replicable anymore for mega-artists? [Youtube]
♩👀 Modern Cuban combo, Orquesta Akokan takes Rosalia & J. Balvin's reggaeton hit Con Altura into a more vintage latin big band jazz territory. The video is great too. Vintage but fresh just like most of the stuff released on Daptone Records. [Youtube]
♩Undomondo Discover Weekly: New playlist has 15 radio friendly & danceable songs, mostly from this year, covering world music, jazz, indie dance, reggae, disco and more, featuring artists like Shay Hazan, Donny McCaslin, Prince Fatty, BALTHVS, Tipa Tipo, Orions Belte, Pambikallio and more.
📖 Three important pieces about the changing economic landscape of music festivals, ticket prices and the collapse of smaller venues:
📖 Music Festivals: Prices for Festival Tickets Outpaced Inflation in the Last Decade [Finance Buzz]
A one-day ticket for the initial version of Glastonbury in 1970 cost just £1, while tickets for this year’s version of the festival will run fans £71 per day. That’s an increase of 7,000% over a 54-year period.
📖 How can we save British nightlife from collapse? Look to Germany – and its football by Gilles Peterson [The Guardian]
The reality is that we live in a system where globally recognised names dominate the space and, albeit unwittingly, remove oxygen from those coming up. It is a bit like football. In the UK money has gone in at the top, resulting in the Premier League being the most lucrative in the world (with all the export value that brings); yet outside the elite clubs there is a real struggle to nurture and maintain grassroots clubs, as is often reported. Meanwhile in Germany there is a much more established practice of community ownership, with the 50+1 rule ensuring that the club’s members always own a majority stake. It may be that the Bundesliga is less “valuable” than the Premier League in monetary terms – but it makes it a more sustainable environment for the wider good of the game and places local communities at the heart of its financial stability.
📖 The Long, Slow Death of Urban Nightlife [Bloomberg Citylab]
A wave of closures in recent years add weight to the charge of a city-after-dark in decline. Between the onset of Covid in March 2020 and December 2023, some 13,800 UK nighttime businesses including clubs, bars and restaurants shut, about 3,000 of which were in the Greater London region, according to the Night Time Industries Association.
👀 I think being mid 40s = so far gone to be relevant to even be able to LARP about getting today’s pop landscape, and this is deeply American cultural codes, so I’d have a harder time anyway, but I’ve been seriously thinking about this for some time and in fact I might have coined a useful term about it? Could this music/scene/the state of pop we’re living in be called “memetic emo?”. Cos, this is what looks like a gender fluid prom opera would look like if everyone in it were extremely relevant memetic warriors on the Internet. I won’t say I like the music but I can get why it appeals to todays Dopamine Nation, and I like watching how the dynamics between them unfold, and reading the comments feel like ..
So if you’re 40ish like me and want to have a controlled snapshot of what’s mega-relevant these days, or what your kids will be listening to or hating in a few years, skim through this guilty pleasure.
📖 Chinese Micro-Dramas Surge as Creatives Refine Genre and Companies Lure Name Talent [Variety]
A nod to Ted Gioia’s The State of the Culture 2024. Which is an essential read, if you are into today’s culture & music.
“The mini-drama series is the industry’s response to the new mode of viewing enabled by portable devices such as mobile phones,” said Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh, dean of arts and director of the Centre for Film and Creative Industries at Lingnan University. “Miniaturization of the interface entails miniaturization of the product. We can call it TikTokization.”
👀 Somewhere in Detroit. [Youtube] : Short documentary about Detroit Techno origins and Underground Resistance.
👀 Wise words on DJ’ing from Mr. Dave Clarke. [Youtube]
"It's just like the performance is more important than the music so we're sort of in a strange era of where there are way too many people that call themselves DJs and I'm sort of embarrassed to be a DJ"
♩Good news, there's a new High on Fire album out and there's a Turkish folk influenced bağlama song in there too. This video of Jeff Matz explains why. I've always thought the Anatolian saz/bağlama of say Neşet Ertaş had a heavy quality! GMTA!
😢 RIP MC Conrad: A moment before publishing this edition, saw that my fave Jungle MC, of LTJ Bukem & MC Conrad fame among others has passed away. Here’s an unpublished interview over at Marcus Barnes’ blog.
I’ve heard people say over the years, “I’m not a fan of MCs, but Conrad, he’s a different class”. After hearing of his death, I sat down and watched this video from 2002, and I was totally enchanted by his ability to connect with the music so effortlessly.
That’s all for this edition. Thank you for reading! Please share with any of your friends that may be interested.