Producer Eric Copeland’s credentials as an equilibrium usurper are rock-solid: Just check his work with Black Dice and Terrestrial Tones. So it’s no shock that his solo debut, Hermaphrodite, similarly conjures magic mushroom-y miasmas of ill frequencies and distorted symphonies of (dis)turbulence. Hermaphrodite is an apt name: It’s impossible to pinpoint definitively any generic or stylistic category for this music. Its amorphousness and elusiveness are what make the disc a uniquely dumbfounding listen. While much of Hermaphrodite boasts atmospheres and textures that make The Residents sound tame, some moments of levity surface above the psychosis-inducing psychedelia and grotesque ethnic forgeries: “Green Burrito” and “Spacehead” offer relatively sanguine respites, but Hermaphrodite is strictly for the headwrong.
Various Shir Khan: Maximize!
Here Berlin’s DJ-about-town Shir Khan presents a whopping 44-track selection over two mix CDs, one carefully blended and one chopped together. Think of every possible form of house- or electro-based party music from Berlin mashed together and you’re pretty much on target for Khan’s sound. The first CD features his own blends, where synths buzz, robo-drums beat, and hands (or 808s) clap along to shouted choruses by folks like Edu K and The Go! Team. The second CD turns it up a bit with some great baile funk courtesy of Man Recordings and the twitch-house remixes of Switch and Jesse Rose. Nothing too crazy or groundbreaking here, but a solid party from start to finish.
Sam Sparro “Black & Gold”
Sam Sparro and Steve Spacek have a lot in common–at least when it comes to producing intergalactic soul. Sparro’s deployment of gritty synths and Marc Ronson-esque vocal harmonies are the perfect compliment to his heavy, nu-electro-inspired percussion. Taken from the Black & Gold EP, the single of the same name will win over moms and partygoers alike.
Le Loup The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations’ Millennium General Assembly
With so much indie rock these days sounding like, well, other indie rock, it’s refreshing to hear an LP like Le Loup’s The Throne. The Washington, DC eight-piece’s debut drifts through folk experimentation and electronic pop with a level of emotion, intellect, and sincerity that seems increasingly hard to come by. Based conceptually in the work of both Dante and outsider artist James Hampton, The Throne exhibits how pop can be both highly emotive and intellectually abstruse, how the human voice can be the loneliest or most commanding of instruments, and how the smallest melody can somehow become a revolutionary statement. Ultimately, The Throne reminds us why we call musicians “artists” in the first place.
My Paris By Fafi
France’s graffiti queen, Fafi on eating well and shopping right in the City of Lights.
1. Le Tambour
41 rue Montmartre, 2nd
m° Sentier
If you want an after-party steak or mussels, or if you want to join all the night birds of the neighborhood in sharing one more cognac, this is the place–it never closes.
2. Hoa Hung
14 bis rue Louis Bonnet, 19th
m° Belleville
The cheapest sandwich place in Paris–Vietnamese ones, with coriander, cucumber, carrot, and perhaps chicken. After visiting the fruit-and-vegetable market on Boulevard de Belleville, it’s the best way to fill your belly.
3. Fifi Chachnil
231 rue St. Honoré, 1st
m° Tuileries
Hey, guys! Instead of asking our best friend what to give us for our birthday, this is what we want! The finest Fifties-inspired lingerie, only for pin-ups.
4. Potemkine
30 rue Beaurepaire, 10th
m° Jacques Bonsergent
A major spot for those who collect indie movies or dream about having Robby the Robot at home.
5. Culotte
7 rue Mahler, 4th
m° Saint Paul
A cute shop with jewels and DIY clothes. Visit when you’re hanging out around rue des Rosiers in the Jewish quarter.
6. Menza
53 rue Jean-Pierre Timbaud, 11th
m° Parmentier
The best restaurant next to our house. It has everything you want when it comes to great food and cool prices. Be careful: it’s packed every evening.
7. Harry’s Bar
5 rue Daunou, 2nd
m° Opéra, 4 Septembre
If you are feeling homesick and want to get an alcoholic slap in the face, this is your place. No music, white-apron waiters–I just love it, except for those who still think smoking cigars is sexy.
8. Toraya
10 rue St. Florentin, 1st
m° Concorde
Not everyone is able to appreciate red bean sweets, but this is best place in town to have a dessert and yummy green tea with chocolate on top. Each pastry comes with a poetic nickname. Have a laugh reading the menu while other customers are seriously trying to learn the Japanese way…
9. Le Marché des Enfants Rouges
39 rue de Bretagne, 3rd
m° Filles du Calvaire
A hidden, covered marketplace where you’ll find the best cecina sandwiches, plus a Moroccan traiteur and nice sunny terraces. Close your eyes, you’re in the south of France!
10. Zef
15 rue Debelleyme, 3rd
m° Saint-Sébastien-Froissart
My favorite kids’ brand. A little bit posh but cute as hell…
The History of French House Sound
Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter wasn’t wearing a mask when he played a rave in rural Wisconsin, bundled in a varsity jacket, back in 1996. He was just a French guy with puffy hair jacking Chicago tracks… in the middle of nowhere. The event was a techno camp-out called Even Further. It was a big deal that Daft Punk was there, because Bangalter had come all the way from France, but it didn’t seem like a revelation. It was just Chicago through a different lens.
A decade later, the story of Daft Punk and French house has been told at least a billion times. But what every retelling gets wrong is that this music wasn’t just a mélange of filter effects, space disco, and rock ’n’ roll grafted onto house and techno–at least, not exclusively. The story of French house is about the ways in which imitation can become something new, and about the French “touch.” It’s something Philippe Zdar from Cassius refers to as panache, which roughly translates to “style”–France’s not-so-secret weapon.
Paris didn’t jump headfirst into acid house like London had in 1988. In fact, it wasn’t until 1991 that guys like Zdar started going to raves. “The music from Detroit was like punk to us. The music that our parents loved, we hated,” says Zdar. “Space disco was the stuff our parents loved. We didn’t want to hear that kind of French music.”
Before raves, Zdar was making hip-hop with his friend Hubert Blanc-Francard (Boom Bass). However, once the techno bug bit, their attention shifted. Zdar and Blanc-Francard formed La Funk Mob, releasing a handful of influential early ’90s breakbeat tracks–most notably “Ravers Suck Our Sound” (Mo’ Wax)–in ’94. Zdar also teamed with Etienne de Crécy to form Motorbass; their 1996 “Pansoul” (Different) record was a classic example of never-been-to-Detroit idealism. “In the early days, we were into techno, and that’s it. We were trying to be Detroit,” says Zdar.
Around the same time as Pansoul’s release, a couple new kids emerged in the growing scene. “I was hosting a show at [Radio FG] when I first met Daft Punk,” recalls Jerome Viger-Kohler, co-founder of the legendary Paris dance night Respect. “At first I was like, ‘Who is this guy?’ when I saw Guy-Manuel [de Homem-Christo]. He was kind of a young rocker, really shy. This was back in the day when everyone was wearing trainers and jeans.”
Viger-Kohler was just a radio station intern at the time, but that was about to change. Along with Fred Agostini and a little help from Pedro Winter [Busy P of Ed Banger], he started Respect at Queen, a Parisian gay club. “It was October 1996, and Daft Punk played the first party,” says Viger-Kohler. “Six times they played for us–every time there was a key moment, they were there for it.”
Respect’s first three parties were a huge success, and the night quickly became the focal point for French Touch. “It was like a tornado. Virgin in France had just signed Air and Daft Punk,” says Viger-Kohler. “Then we did the [Respect is Burning] compilation with Astralwerks… When we played at the first summer of P.S. 1’s Warm Up in New York, there was no money, and all the DJs played for free. But we loved it.”
French Touch had moved closer to Chicago than Detroit; the disco, funk, and house elements grew more refined. By the summer of 1998, the scene produced two global juggernauts: Cassius’ “1999” (Virgin/Astralwerks) and Stardust’s “Music Sounds Better With You” (Roulé). The songs were inescapable–Stardust even managed to crack the U.S. Billboard Charts at #69. “The response was so crazy… it was like, ‘Oh, la la la’”, says Gildas Loaec, co-owner of Kitsuné and former manager of Bangalter’s Roulé label. “We used to joke that the reason [Stardust] was so big was that people were hearing the lyrics as “music sounds better with E.”
The success was a blessing and a curse. “Suddenly, everyone was trying to be Daft Punk or Cassius or Air,” recalls Zdar. “I remember going to a record store, listening to 200 records, and all of them were shit. [French Touch] became a recipe, and it got too easy–just like punk.”
“We were bored of the sound and crowd by 1999,” says Viger-Kohler. “After a while, [the people at Respect] came to the club expecting filter house.”
The scene’s golden period was over, but the mark had already been made. Now the lid was blown off France’s electronic music scene, and its humble house and techno copies had grown into something else entirely. “It wasn’t some big marketing plan,” says Viger-Kohler. “I am sure the first Motorbass album was just those guys doing crazy, spontaneous music while they were on Ecstasy. It was the same thing for us. It wasn’t about making it big. We just wanted to make it beautiful.”
Paris’ Youths Rock the Mic
The first time the dilapidated French suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois made worldwide news in 2005, it was for a cultural moment more offbeat and innocuous than anything else. That July, the city became home to the first Beurger King restaurant, a fast-food chain that serves meat according to Islamic halal tradition (the name references Beur, a slang term for second-generation North Africans living in France). The waitresses even wore traditional headscarves. Building on the success of Mecca Cola, another French product geared towards the country’s large Muslim community, it seemed like an unlikely story of cultural adaptation and perhaps integration.
Two years later, integration is the last word that comes to mind when one thinks of the city. In October of 2005, angry French rioters made worldwide headlines by demonstrating the true extent of their country’s social divide. Spurred on by the death of two teenagers–both electrocuted in a power station in Clichy-sous-Bois where they hid while evading police–angry residents of the immigrant-heavy, working-class French suburbs, or banlieues, erupted, starting 20 straight days of violence and rioting. The country declared a state of emergency, but the damage was already done–integration and social tensions in France now have a dark new symbol.
Visions of angry, disorderly youth have been a wedge issue in French politics since, and a reoccurring fear for those who see poor immigrants as an impediment to social integration. But sensationalizing politicians rarely, if ever, get to the root of the problem.
“What you call ‘the riots’ were grossly exaggerated and were nowhere near as bad as they were portrayed on TV,” says French-Algerian pop star Rachid Taha. “Remember that it was just before the elections, and these ‘riots’ allowed certain politicians to take a position that would attract the voters they were chasing.”
The real voices of this disenfranchised portion of French youth can be heard via the country’s massive, longstanding hip-hop scene. There has been plenty of talk from politicians, who act as if the social tensions revealed by the riots are like a guillotine hanging over France’s head, ready to cleave the fragile Fifth Republic in two. And there have also been plenty of self-serving condemnations of hip-hop by politicians in France, who say blunt language on many releases inflames current tensions. French legislators have repeatedly ordered the country’s justice ministry to prosecute rappers under hate-crime legislation, especially after a successful case against Suprême NTM (NTM being short for nic ta mère or “fuck your mother”) in the mid-’90s.
Mostly teenagers and twenty-somethings whose parents immigrated from the Arabic world (including many former French colonies), these residents of the disconnected suburbs that ring the City of Light and other French metropolises live in areas that can sometimes register unemployment levels of 40 percent. It’s a living situation ripe for despair, disenfranchised youth, and expressive, aggressive hardcore hip-hop.
“The problem of the youth from the suburban ghettos is not an immigrant problem but more of a social problem,” says Nawal, a Comorian-born musician who now resides in France. “We are confused between problems of the new generation and an immigration problem. The kids who burned the cars are French. Sure, their parents came from a foreign country, but most were born in France. They express their anger being born in the ghettos and living in areas that are seedy, run-down, depressing, without color and without hopes. They’re angry at feeling like they have no future.”
Home to the world’s second-largest hip-hop market, France has been turning out homegrown MCs like Disiz la Peste and Senegal-born superstar MC Solaar since the ’80s and the rise of Sidney, a Parisian DJ who started the influential Rapper Dapper Snapper show at the dawn of the hip-hop era. It was soon recognized as a perfect platform to voice rage and despair over the social inequality and lack of opportunity that plagues the banlieues, and soon hardcore French rap took shape. Similar in subject matter to American gangsta rap, crime dramas, resentment at social inequality, and anti-police screeds appear often.
While the suburbs are often portrayed as drab and filled with housing projects, there is a cultural vitality and variety to this melting pot of immigrants from Africa, the Middle East, and elsewhere. It can be heard in rhymes composed in verlan, an invented and somewhat inverted slang language of the French ghettos.
Hip-hop has also provided an important outlet for social protest, social reflection, and perhaps social change. Much of this anger and tension finds its way into French hip-hop. Le Havre-based rapper Medine whose introspective 2006 record was called Jihad: The Greatest Struggle is Within Yourself, wrote an editorial for Time magazine right after the riots, asking the question, “How Much More French Can I Be?” Good question. And until it’s addressed, it’s impossible to know if France can live up to the old slogan of liberty, equality, and fraternity.
Podcast: Glitch Mob
For this very special edition of theXLR8R DJ Podcast DJ Series, we wrangled up Los Angeles-based Glitch Mob for a glimpse at the new world of electro-infused hip-hop. Grabbing unreleased and forthcoming tracks from the likes of edIT, Clipse, The Grouch, Ooah, and even a rare Dre and Snoop remix, these mobsters have turned an out intricately woven, chopped-up glitch haven on this exclusive mix.
Download this podcast using iTunes, or with an RSS reader of your choice.
Tracklisting
1. Ooah “Tuesday Again” (Interchill Records)
2. edIT “Straight Heat” (Alpha Pup Records)
3. Boreta & Eprom “The Good, The Bad, The Squishy” (Unreleased)
4. Dr Dre & Snoop Dogg “The Next Episode” (Kraddy Remix Instrumental) (Refiner Records)/Mr. Vegas “Under Mi Sensi” (Acapella)
5. edIT “The Sirens” (Alpha Pup Records)
6. Boreta & Eprom “Psyphy feat. Mc Epcot” (Unreleased)
7. Ooah “Stomp The Yard” (Muti Music)
8. Lupe Fiasco “I Gotcha” (Kraddy Remix) (Refiner Records)
9. Boreta “Lobegrinder” (Glitch Mob Unlimited)
10. The Grouch “Artsy (edIT Remix)” (Alpha Pup)
11. Clipse “Mr. Me Too (a.k.a. Jalapeno Body Poppers) (Ooah Remix)” (Unreleased)
12. BlackStar “Bright As The Stars (a.k.a. Mos Beautiful) (Kraddy Remix)” (Refiner Records)
Podcast 17: The Glitch Mob
For this very special edition of the XLR8R Podcast Exclusive Mix Series, we wrangled up Los Angeles-based Glitch Mob for a glimpse at the new world of electro-infused hip-hop. Grabbing unreleased and forthcoming tracks from the likes of edIT, Boreta, Ooah, and Kraddy, these mobsters have turned out an intricately woven, chopped-up glitch haven on this bangin’ mix.
Subscribe to this podcast: iTunes or mp3 format. For help, click here.
Tracklisting
1. Ooah “Tuesday Again” (Interchill Records)
2. edIT “Straight Heat” (Alpha Pup Records)
3. Boreta & Eprom “The Good, The Bad, The Squishy” (Unreleased)
4. Dr Dre & Snoop Dogg “The Next Episode” (Kraddy Remix Instrumental) (Refiner Records)/Mr. Vegas “Under Mi Sensi” (Acapella)
5. edIT “The Sirens” (Alpha Pup Records)
6. Boreta & Eprom “Psyphy feat. Mc Epcot” (Unreleased)
7. Ooah “Stomp The Yard” (Muti Music)
8. Lupe Fiasco “I Gotcha” (Kraddy Remix) (Refiner Records)
9. Boreta “Lobegrinder” (Glitch Mob Unlimited)
10. The Grouch “Artsy (edIT Remix)” (Alpha Pup)
11. Clipse “Mr. Me Too (a.k.a. Jalapeno Body Poppers) (Ooah Remix)” (Unreleased)
12. BlackStar “Bright As The Stars (a.k.a. Mos Beautiful) (Kraddy Remix)” (Refiner Records)
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Dread In Control
He was a friend of The Clash and the first Jamaican disc jockey to use sound effects and vocal drops between songs. Now, Michael Campbell (a.k.a. “the original” Mikey Dread) has gone on record in an exclusive Bad Gals radio podcast to clear up rumors about his life, his music, and a copycat DJ with a similar name.
Campbell, known as “the Dread at the Controls,” has worked with producers like Treasure Isle’s Lee “Scratch” Perry and Adrian “On-U Sound” Sherwood, and contributed to The Clash’s Sandinista! album. He released Life Is a Stage in 2007 and has remained active on the live front, completing multiple North American and European tours. He also hosts his own podcast–a throwback to his days at the Jamaican Broadcasting Company (JBC).
Bad Gals podcast host Mama ASID (born RE Ausetkmt) is the site’s “present ruling queen” who, in addition to conducting phone interviews with her guests, edits the webcasts and provides fresh content on her site, including conscious updates on world events. Her interview with Mikey Dread covers plenty of ground, from his radio days through recording, and his current dispute with the similarly named DJ Mikey Dread from Channel One sound system, in the U.K. Mama ASID delves into a plethora of other topics, including the origins of Campbell’s music.
“Mikey tells the story of how one of his biggest hits, ‘Barber Saloon,’ is actually a studio out take,” reports Mama ASID. “Yes, he was just making noise for the producer to tune the mic and riddim, and it was so comical that [Studio One’s] Clement ‘Sir Coxsone’ Dodd decided it would be a novelty release; becoming Mike Dread’s first number one hit on the world charts.”
In other recent updates, ASID paid tribute to Jamaican deejay great Johnny Ringo and provided news on the Jena Six trial. As serious about her politics as her reggae music, ASID states, “Our podcasts are the Warrior Sound. We are constantly in production on interviews with global newsmakers and artists of all kinds.”
