via ROYALLEGACYGARB

"Ku Kisantu Kikwenda Ko" by Franco in the stream.

Posted by Wills Glasspiegel
wills@greenowl.com

In a pocket of Cairo, Egypt there is an area called "garbage city", home to a community of trash collectors referred to as zabaleen. The zabaleen are an integral part of Cairo's workforce as they tirelessly collect, sift, sort and recycle all the garbage and refuse from the markets and urban pileups of a city that houses more than 18 million people. Pigs are brought in to eat the organic waste and provide a source of income for the zabaleen families. But since the government's decision to kill 300,000 pigs to halt the spread of swine flu, it has very seriously threatened to undercut the lives of the zabaleen. Additionally, the zabaleens are marginalized members of society with high rates of illiteracy and poverty, tethering them to a lifetime of garbage collection.

Presently, garbage is piling up in the streets of Egypt and the zabaleen have started to not take care of the waste. Instead of two-thirds of the waste being fed to the pigs and the rest being recycled, filth just lines neighborhoods. The government tried to hire official companies to come and clean up the trash, but instead these corporations just lined up big green trash bins around the city to no effect.

Recently a non-formal education plan has been started to build literacy skills and offer vocational training at a Recycling School by Ezzat Naem, a son of a garbage collector (http://www.synergos.org/bios/ezzatnaem.htm) perhaps allowing the zabaleen to create innovation and infrastructure for trash.

Posted by Shilpa Nadhan
shilpa.nadhan@gmail.com

via YOKOYAMA

Posted by Wills Glasspiegel
wills@greenowl.com

Tom and George make magic

I first heard Javelin on a mixtape that was lovingly compiled by a friend in Providence in 2007.   Since then, a lot has happened to the band.  As of 2009, they're slated to release music through David Byrne's label, Luaka Bop and through the venerable Canadian label, Thrill Jockey.  Javelin's live show continues to rock -- Tom and George bring out a slew of boom boxes and simulcast the show through the crowd.   After having brunch with the guys in Tom's new Brooklyn pad, I sent them a few questions:

Best thing about being on the road?
George:  We were driving through the middle of nowhere one night in Illinois this summer and a small meteor flew down through the atmosphere and broke apart in front of the van, about 100 yards up the road.
Tom: Swimming holes?  Hot springs?  These have yet to happen but i know they will be the best.  And you get a lot of thinking done on the road

Boom boxes?
T: We are going to destroy them, before they destroy us

You guys just made a great mix of The Very Best's Julia.  What makes a good remix?
G: Knowledge of self and good source material.
T: Stylistic overhauls and weird instincts.

What's the most musical non-musical part of your day?
G: Walking my dog through Prospect Park or biking around on errands. Great melodic ideas come to me and vanish before I get home.
T: Driving my car with the radio off.  Especially on the highway, I end up imitating synthesizer sounds or trying to sing time-stretched vocals, auto-tune, or both.

How has visual art effected the way you make music?
T: Collage definitely corresponds with what we do sonically, and also "fake" art-- forgeries and the like.  Providence has also played a major role in the development of our style, (where the rule of thumb might be summed up as do it all the way, to the hilt, without the extra weight of "seriousness")
G: Music (whether creating it or digesting it) is a very visual thing for me. Right now I keep finding myself trying to make stuff that matches a pattern that VP Records used on their 12" sleeves at one point in the early 90s (below).

What off-the-radar artists should we check out?
T: Yes, karaoke crime (video below).  It's this guy, Holmes Wilson who has figured out the ultimate karaoke set-up where he plays dance remixes of songs (like old Madonna) and has lyrics of those songs while other songs flash by on a projector, and anyone can take the mic.  The crowd gets hype.

How did you guys form?
G: We're cousins from musical families. Our moms are sisters. We grew up making funny tapes together, first on a boombox as kids, then on four-tracks, then on mpcs...  I moved down to Providence after college and that's when Javelin's gestation period began to really take hold.

Favorite piece of "traditional" music?
G: "Ederlezi", a Balkan folk song that sounds incredibly sad but is actually about the arrival of Spring.

What's the future like?
T: Bright and busy.
G: Tours and releases. Keeping busy- my productivity increases as the air temperature decreases. Two limited 12"s out on Thrill Jockey this fall and winter, first full-length on Luaka Bop around March sometime. We're getting on our merchandise grind too.  Gonna have products.

How would you describe your different roles in Javelin?  Is it a secret?
T: On stage, I'm the hype man, but we both do a lot of riffing.
G: We both cover a lot of bases, but on the whole I'd say Tom's on melodies, I'm on rhythms. This isn't always the case, though.  Sometimes we are both.  Also, it's a secret.

What sounds are you using now that have you excited?
G: An Oberheim DX drum machine, a Lowrey organ Tom just bought that has a tape deck in it.  And I'm playing guitar again.

What's the internet done for you music and creative process?
G: It makes me obsess over obscure pieces of gear on ebay, which slows down the creative process a great deal.
T: It makes me appreciate human-to-human information exchange.  But it allows me to send George crappy sketches I record at 3 am before going to bed.  Internet = no filter

Best music in the autumn?
G: Two of my favorite things in the world are Autumn and the music of Arthur Russell. If you put these things together...

Javelin appear live at ZEBULON in Brooklyn with Janka Nabay on October 17th.  
Hear more from them on their MySpace here. 
"Vibrationz" in the stream.

Posted by Wills Glasspiegel
wills@greenowl.com

There’s an abundance of electronic music in Berlin whose obsessive, minute variation on a pounding rhythm often makes this American wonder what people are finding to get so excited about in beats that have about as much soul as a pace-maker. Not true of KREIDLER, the band you’ll want to see when you come here to check out the clubs.

Their secret—like starting off a soup with a good stock—is their live drums. It’s hard to see what could go bad on top of these warm, rich, intelligent and—at the risk of stretching this cooking metaphor—nourishing rhythms that actually energize you to move, rather than extract your participation with a mounting promise only to end it in empty volume. In general this live warmth is what sets their sound apart from other things in the genre—there’s something about it that makes you feel it's aware of you—that the songs are constructed around more than just their own interior logic. As if to prove the point at their most recent show in Berlin, at Prater, they asked hesitantly several times between songs to have the lights up so that they could see the audience. The theater is a great venue visually, but maybe because of its size and seating, was lacking a connection between stage and audience so important to their sound.

Their new album, recorded over a week of live sessions, is available October 5 as a CD and download from Italic records. Listen to them also on Myspace and find them on tour here.

Posted by Catherine Despont, catherine@greenowl.com

More on James Whitney here.
LAPIS screens tonight in NYC at Anthology.

Posted by Wills Glasspiegel
wills@greenowl.com

Posted by Wills Glasspiegel
wills@greenowl.com

WILD YAKS tonight in Brooklyn.
"River May Come" in the stream.

Posted by Wills Glasspiegel
wills@greenowl.com

Brooklyn art-throbs, JAVELIN rock this one all the way home (to your garage, actually).  "Julia" refixed in the stream:

More on it from P4K here.

Posted by Wills Glasspiegel
wills@greenowl.com

More from SheuGHNESSY on her site here.  Hillllllarious.

Posted by Wills Glasspiegel
wills@greenowl.com

Mothership from District 9

During THE VERY BEST's brief visit to NYC this past weekend, Esau and I went and saw District 9 in Brooklyn.   Upon hearing the voices of the actors playing Nigerian gangsters, Esau perked up: "They're speaking my language."  So instead of the Nigerians speaking a Nigerian dialect, Yoruba or Bantu for instance, they speak Chichewa, a language not spoken in South Africa or Nigeria.   Read more about it here.  

"Chalo" (sung in Chichewa) by THE VERY BEST streams below.

Posted by Wills Glasspiegel
wills@greenowl.com

"The threat from climate change is serious, it is urgent, and it is growing,"

Full story via Huffpost
Video of speech via NYtimes

Posted by Wills Glasspiegel
wills@greenowl.com

Full story here from the AV CLUB.
More music and So So Glos tour dates here.

Posted by Wills Glasspiegel
wills@greenowl.com

I want to thank Ben and Wills from GREEN OWL for inviting me to contribute to the site.  More often than not I’ll likely be chiming in about some of the great ambient and experimental music that is coming out at a frighteningly fast pace from different scenes around the country.

Might as well start with the person I’ve been listening to most this year, a guy in his early twenties named Mark McGuire. Despite almost sharing a name with the infamous steroid slugger, he bears a stronger resemblance (physically, at least) to the older brother from Pete & Pete and the music McGuire has made as both a solo artist and as one-third of Emeralds is entirely graceful and transformative.  Usually working with just an electric guitar and some pedals, he’s managed to put out four cds already this year of his own and I’m sure there’s more on the way. Most of them tend to sell out weeks after their release, but as with most things these days, bloggers make sure that everything is preserved online.

I enjoy a 30-minute monochromatic drone as much as anyone, but I’ve been consistently impressed with how McGuire’s songs are always evolving in such engaging ways. You can often find some arpeggios bouncing around the mix, hanging in the air as new layers emerge, ultimately creating a gorgeously enveloping zone. And he’s not afraid to solo, either, though those moments remind me most of Robert Fripp’s records with Brian Eno more than anything.

There’s a lot of people who are cranking out too many tapes, limited edition CDs and LPs—and I like some of them quite a bit. But he’s the only guy out there right now that makes me feel like such a prolific output is entirely necessary.

"A Matter of Time" by Mark McGuire:

Posted by Ned Milligan
mistermilligan@yahoo.com