Crashpop is an intersection of contemporary art, music, photography, robots, YouTube, graffiti, technology and net.art with politics, psychology, journalism and the can-do spirit of the DIY spiderweb.
I don't usually post music here, despite running a world music program by the same name, but since I'm not doing the show and since this is retro electronic music, here you go.
In 1982, Indian electronic musician Charanjit Singh decided to reimagine traditional Indian Ragas in the style of contemporary electronic pop music. The result is explained in the title: "Ten Ragas to a Disco Beat."
Which sounds promising enough in a hokey, disco-kitsch kind of way, except that the music is pure acid, ahead of its time (We'd get that 303 squelch stateside sometime around 1989, unless you were in Detroit).
Check it out below on the blog, or at the link if you're on FB/RSS:
It's so good that I almost don't buy it. The sound quality is kind of too pristine (compare it to other, mainstream Bollywood musical recordings: Disco Dancer's 'homage' to 'Video Killed the Radio Star', for example):
Which is funny, because Charanjit's music could have actually benefited from tape warble; it would have made a pretty sweet chillwave record. As it stands now, the most accurate comparison I've seen is to Aphex Twin's "Analord" series. The melodies do fit in with the standard Raga fare.
There are liner notes in the sleeve, for what it's worth. Props to Bombay Connection Records for the find.
8-bit NYC is a totally zoomable, interactive map of New York City rendered in the style of NES games - personally, I think it most closely resembles the maps of the Dragon Warrior series:
Awesomely, Camper is soliciting funds to Build 15 more cities, including Boston, San Francisco, D.C., London and Paris. (Kyoto, home of NES headquarters, is conspicuously absent). And, if you contribute, you can get a number of various goodies, including the option to name a city for inclusion.
Video Game Cartography The whole thing has got me thinking about video game cartography, guys.
Video games depend on cartography. Essentially, games are designed as maps and performed, by the player, as musical scores. What can video game cartography show us about the world?
There seem to be two categories of video game world maps, provided we begin by eliminating the side-scroller:
A) Video game maps with real-world parallels. B) Video game maps of completely fictitious worlds.
I can't find a rendering for the Japan of "Nobunaga's Ambition" or the China of "Romance of the Three Kingdoms."
Nor can I find any video game that includes a map of the United States, or any continent that isn't Asia. Perhaps this explains a generation of lackluster geography students. These maps don't blink.
I can, however, find Disney World, as rendered by the game "Adventures in the Magic Kingdom" -
Video games of completely fictitious worlds.
This is, by far, the most dominant mapping of video game space.
When Maps are the territory With enough time and effort, someone could put together a visual culture analysis of how video game maps reflect our interactions with the spaces they claim to represent.
Korzybski writes, "The map is not the territory," but for the sake of video games, the map IS the territory. Neil Gaiman writes, "One describes a tale best by telling the tale. You see? The way one describes a story, to oneself or the world, is by telling the story. It is a balancing act and it is a dream. The more accurate the map, the more it resembles the territory. The most accurate map possible would be the territory, and thus would be perfectly accurate and perfectly useless. The tale is the map that is the territory."
The maps of video games are the most accurate maps possible, because the map and the territory are the same when you're playing. Notably, renderings of game maps (often included in the boxes or sold in strategy guides) aren't interactive, so they are less useful than the actual game map. The game, itself, is "perfectly accurate and perfectly useless." Maybe you get your character killed in the process of figuring out the space you occupy in the game. C'est la vie.
Perhaps an academic study of the visual culture of video game cartography would find that a generation raised on an interactive fantasyland of playable maps - maps which are the territory - ended up with an instinctively different concept of real vs. virtual and organic vs. synthetic interactions. An 8-bit induced 'fallacy of misplaced concreteness.'
No question that 'simulations of interactions' can now be treated the same way 'in-flesh interactions' are treated: See Twitter, Facebook and flame wars. Growing up with the world of the primal map - where our bodies sit motionless while our minds and screens explore caves, shoot aliens, fight dragons, unify Japan and spur real, physical and psychological responses - has left us in a limbo where the real world and its simulation are no longer separated. The map is the territory, and the screen is where the action is.
Here's a music video from 1987, part of the Peter Timar's music-video-as-cinema project, Moziklip, which was like Pink Floyd's "The Wall" if every song on "The Wall" was performed by a random Hungarian new wave bands and curated by the director. I like this one (above) in particular because of it's cynicism about revolution in the Soviet states, which I am writing a secret thesis about.
Guys, I've been thinking about the prevalence of Casio keyboards in contemporary African cassette culture and in the Middle East.
It's something you don't hear in America's presentations of 'world music', like the Putomayo releases. You know, the little cardboard, biodegradable cases with cartoonish looking drawings of people in a cafe that spell "Mexico" with a chili pepper.
According to the Putumayo Web site, “the label has become known primarily for its upbeat and melodic compilations of great international music characterized by the company's motto: 'guaranteed to make you feel good!'”
Getting Americans to enjoy that stuff means they need to leave the hand claps at home, despite that the synthesizer's affordability and flexibility have made it a standard for folk musicians around the world. But the Casio isn't just an annoying handclap-making machine. In a digital culture, it's the new washboard. And this is the new (Western) folk music:
But heard in 'folk music' from other cultures - cultures that we usually associate with poverty - it's also evidence of globalization, and Putomayo releases give white folks a satisfying mirage of 'uncorrupted peoples' whose cultures haven't been 'tainted' by the West. Because that would be too 'real'.
The Casio hand clap is the bastard child of Western culture, a sonic baby so disfigured and inauthentic that we have literally banished it to foreign lands. And reminding Westerners of its existence informs us of the hand clap's infection of these cultures, which brings our romanticism of 'the simple poor folks' to a messy, sloppy halt.
The Putumayo problem keeps true folk movements away from representation, presenting a tranquil, peaceful music at odds with the reality of global politics. After all, a lot of these countries are war zones. Why would they be listening to music that is “guaranteed to make you feel good?”
(The irony of a Palestinian Hip-Hop group subverting footage from middle-class "weed-rap" Snoop Dogg concerts is great).
The Putumayo approach to world music presents the most uncomplicated version of any culture's sound, often recorded in European studios by immigrants, or even second-generation immigrants, of the culture it claims to present. African music, as heard through a Putumayo release, will include a number of talking drums, a marimba and a group chant and, for whatever reason, some European flair to water it down. The end effect is an admittedly sentimental, pleasant and uncomplicated music that is simplified enough for Westerners to consider safe, but exotic enough to consider 'authentic.'
This form of world music is the aural equivalent of Binyavanga Wainana's ironic advice to Western writers in Africa that “African characters should be colourful, exotic, larger than life but empty inside, with no dialogue, no conflicts or resolutions in their stories, no depth or quirks to confuse the cause.”
On a Putumayo release, you will not hear, for example, the quirks of second-hand '80s Casio keyboard tones, including hand claps, that are all over the underground folk cassettes of Africa. Or in Middle Eastern dance music:
The Casio is grating to the American ear; the sound of a chintzy toy instrument. When it becomes an influence on folk traditions in the developing world, the '80s Casiotone hand clap smashes the mundane realities of globalization into the exotic fantasy of the 'other'. The '80s Casiotone hand clap in a folk song is a moment of distinct rupture between Putumayo's mission “to make you feel good!” and the reality the troubling power relationship Western culture imposes.
Greg Barz, an assistant professor of ethnomusicology at Vanderbilt University, says that libraries often rely on archiving releases from labels such as Putumayo, which are often produced in European studios, rather than seeking out and archiving cassettes available in Africa of actual African musicians.
“It would be like us only collecting people who covered other people's music, which is ridiculous to even think about,” he told the Vanderbilt Community Register. “But when it comes to other people's cultures we very often will only trust interpretations rather than going to the source.”
Barz notes that “cassettes are the reality of everyday music in Africa,” and a number of online resources are dedicated to making digital copies of the music available online and (as you can see) YouTube. This has opened up a kind of globalism feedback loop, as American indie rock bands have picked up on sounds of the African underground and translated them into American rock. Vampire Weekend, which borrows heavily from JuJu and Highlife music from Northwestern Africa, has even been covered by a Malawi immigrant to England, Esau Mwamwaya, and the American band's frontman performed on a song written by Mwamwaya, bringing the cycle of globalism to its completion.
In the New Yorker's review of musician Maya Arulpragasam, a.k.a MIA, whose music is a global pastiche incorporating the hip-hop of UK street culture with the droning siren-music of her native Sri Lanka, Sasha Frere-Jones writes: “It’s a voice from a place where kids throw rocks at tanks, where people pull down walls with their bare hands. It could be the sound of a carnival, or a riot.”
Not sure what that means on a global scale, guys. But it seems to me like Putumayo is making CD's that let us ignore Western interaction with other cultures, and sells a dream that this process isn't taking place.
This globalization is already here - and irreversible - so there's no reason to assume that a folk tradition wrapped in fake amber is any more 'authentic' than a folk tradition infected with Casio synths and drum machines hand claps. But one offers us a genuine insight into the world, and the other one just preserves a series of Western myths.
Kelefa Sanneh: Often with a subgenre that’s like a noisier version of X – often X is a black music, and the noisier version involves white people. Very recently that could be, adding noise to jungle. But we can go back and talk about distortion and amps. We can talk about rock abstracting itself from blues.
Bidoun: Post-punk abstracting itself from funk.
KS: Right. And often the impulse to make something noisier is to make it less black.
This Japanese video game, Taiko no Tatsujin 2 for the Wii, is like "Guitar Hero" with a Taiko drum. If that weren't enough to post about, it also includes a track specifically written by 8-bit/Chiptune Electro musicians YMCK. I especially appreciate the animals doing the pogo at the 1:53 mark.
