Raz Mesinai garnered international attention in the early ‘90s as half of the duo Sub Dub, in the context of Brooklyn’s so-called “Illbient” scene. But by that time, the Jerusalem-born composer and audio libertine already had over a decade behind him as a bedroom producer, at first busting out b-boy beats for break-dancers before starting to cross more experimental circuits. (More…)
A decade after they announced the shutdown of their Portland-based dubwise label BSI Records, Ezra Ereckson and his visual-artist wife Tracy Harrison are back in the record game, having just put out “Freedom Fighter” by the Disciples, the tenth release on their recently activated artisan-dub label ZamZam Sounds. (More…)
As a composer in the post-dub era, Jerusalem-born and New York-raised Raz Mesinai has spent the past 25 years burrowing under the surface realms of genre and song format to find a reverberant sonic space of his own. With Tunnel Vision (Tzadik), his filmmaking debut, Mesinai takes that burrowing to another level by tying together the praxes of tunneling, sound composition and non-linear narrative. (More…)
Besides their release this year in beautifully packaged vinyl editions, and use of Mediterranean field recordings, Mutamassik’s album Rekkez, and Savage Republic’s Varvakios LP, don’t seem to have a lot in common. However, both come from an aesthetic of fatalistic, yet rebellious, sonic energy, fuelled by an urgency to burst into a future weighed down by ancient history. (More…)
“These headphones stand for peace, love and togetherness,” reads the product description for the Redemption Song on-ear headphones on the website for House of Marley, the official merchandise company for the Bob Marley brand. (More…)
By now, you may have heard about the “racist art cake” incident at an event celebrating the 75th birthday of the Swedish Artists Organization at the Moderna Museet. During the event, Swedish Culture Minister Lena Adelsohn Liljeroth was invited to cut the first piece of a cake designed by biracial African-Swedish artist Makode Aj Linde that was part of a five-cake installation. (More…)
“Can eight people from different worlds in the same city really define what it means to be British in 2012?” That bit of hokum sets the scene for Make Bradford British, a two-episode reality TV series recently aired on Channel 4 that shows that when it comes to mediating racial and cultural conflict, there’s still room for sweet but superficial fluff. (More…)
Without a doubt, this period of global unrest is the most mediated in history—and only due to the rise of a global digital grassroots citizens media movement. Now that virtually every mobile phone is a camera, and most camcorders have become affordable, every protest seems to have its own crew filming itself. (More…)
In their guises as 2manydjs and Soulwax, Belgian brothers and prolific audio/visual bricoleurs David and Stephen Dewaele set the standard for this century’s digital cut-up pop media scene. Nowhere is this more evident than in Hardcore or Die, their impressive visual take on that most unruly of 20th-century analog pop genres, ’80s American and European hardcore punk. (More…)
Occupy Wall Street has demonstrated that the late Gil-Scot Heron’s 1970 assertion, “the revolution will not be televised,” has been rendered a cliché. Indeed, this revolution is highly televised, and not just live 24/7 on Global Revolution. (More…)
Although it’s been subsumed in the news by the more explosive revolts in the region, Iran’s Green movement provided its own blueprint for how to take it to the man—or imam—a couple of years ago. Its currently nebulous and undulant nature may provide the model for how to make a movement last until victory. (More…)