Global Bass essay in Boing Boing!

I just wrote an in depth introduction to global bass music for the excellent Boing Boing. What’s global bass?  Well, try this remix of native Canadian dubstep crew A Tribe Called Red, by Monterrey, Mx’s Javier Estrada for a start:

Fire On The Water at Sunnyside, Toronto, August 26th!

So I’m doing a second TheWaves event with my wife/partner Christie Pearson.  The first one was an amazing all night party/installation/event called Night Swim at the Trinity-Bellwoods public pool in Toronto, featuring folks like FM3, Sandro Perri, Windy and Carl and many others.  The second will be an all day party/installation/event at the Sunnyside bathing pavilion on the lakeshore in Toronto on Sunday August 26th.  There’s a website for the event here and an FB event page here.

What is it? TheWaves is about making events/happenings/installations which somehow connect my interest in new/experimental music scenes and Christie’s interests in bathing culture and installation art.  We transform specific spaces so that new kinds of sociality, play, relationships to sound and water can evolve. Part of the fun of it is that we don’t exactly know what will happen.  The events are experimental but populist: anyone can come, and anyone might enjoy it, whatever age or background they’re from.  Basically we think sound and water are fundamental aspects of human life, experience, environment, and we’re interested in celebrating that, and intensifying our relationships to those elements.

If you’ve been to any of the MAMA parties in downtown Toronto, you know that I’m interested in new global bass music.  Fire On The Water has given me an opportunity to invite some of the masters that we learnt about global bass from to play in Toronto.  What is global bass?  It’s electronic dance music emerging in different parts of the world right now. Usually with roots simultaneously in Afrodiasporic dance musics (reggae, funk, house, hiphop, techno) and local traditions (Colombian cumbia, various West African styles).  You can’t necessarily tell where anything is from.  But that’s part of the point.  It’s part of a global conversation in which more and more intense musics evolve. It’s heavy and it’s alive. As philosopher Cornell West put it to one of the MAMAs: “William James is smiling on you when you throw a party!”

Everyone puts it together differently: Venus X’s vicious chopped and screwed style is different from DJ/Rupture’s elegant connections, or Poirier’s soca/dancehall/hiphop rave ups, or Maga Bo’s intense percussion storms.  Myself (I’m probably not going to play tho my MAMA brothers and sisters will be opening the event and perhaps closing it down too), I’m listening to Angolan house, Venezuelan “raptor house”, Traxman and other Footwork stuff from Chicago … if I did play it might sound like this recent mix by our friend DJ Zhao.

Anyway, Sunnyside Pavilion is a gorgeous semi-public space. It was originally imagined and used as a utopian public space by crowds of people in the early part of the twentieth century.  We want to evoke that old dream and imagine it as a new kind of utopian space for the twenty-first C.  It has a lovely upstairs open air dancehall that looks out onto the lake, it’s right on the beach, there’s a huge pool next door, two mysterious pavilions at either end that will have highly psychedelic installations in them. It’s all ages.  It’s free.  It’s a party.  It’s a love letter to the lake.  You should come down …

On WFMU with DJ /rupture, Monday Dec. 27th

I’ll be talking with DJ /rupture a.k.a. Jace Clayton next Monday, December 27th on his WFMU show, from 6-8 p.m.  Jace is one of the finest DJs on this planet or any other, and one of the deepest thinkers about dancehall sounds in the age of globalization.  I’ve learnt a lot from him over the years. In particular, his blog, Mudd Up! is a must read for anyone interested in understanding new global dance sounds. He has some interesting things to say about In Praise of Copying.  Aside from talking about World Music 2.0, the global rise of Autotune, and how to live in a world of copies without originals, I’m going to play some music: expect Kuduro, Logobi, Saharan psychedelia, Ramadanman as well as some clips from other folks’ mixes and some archival hauntings.

Listen to the podcast, in two parts, here.

“Genealogies of Global House” Talk at Double Double Land

I’m participating in the Talking Songs series at the excellent semi outlaw social space Double Double Land, here in downtown Toronto, next Wednesday, along with Adam Litovitz and Alia O’Brien.  Being asked to choose three to five songs and talk about what’s interesting about them is like … dancing about architecture. I know Elvis Costello intended that comment as an insult but dancing is always about architecture … so: if you’re in Toronto, drop by!

Double Double Land, 209 Augusta, TO, Wednesday, September 15, 8 pm

MARCUS BOON talks about “Genealogies of Global House” or “Chopping and Screwing from Terry Riley to DJ Screw” or “The Electric Harpsichord” or …

ALIA O’BRIEN talks about “International Feel: Hard Rock Toward and From the Middle East (1967-1979)”

ADAM LITOVITZ talks about “Osiris of the Shit: Re-evaluating Wu-Tang”