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02/18/2012 04:01 AM
http://www.radicalriddims.de/txt-tropicalbass-e.html
expression for this hybrid life in the United Kingdom with reggae influenced banghra. Germany has remained outside this postcolonial dynamic. The only comparable phenomenon can be observed in the emergence of Balkan beats. Its most prominent representative so far has been Shantel, who grew up with East European roots and comes from the electronic club scene. If what came out of transcultural music in the nineties as a whole was still strongly marked by ideas of community, today it is no longer a matter of ethnic authenticity. Multiethnicity has long become a normal and basic component of society. So Shackleton, who is something of an exception in dubstep, uses unselfconscious traces of Arabesque folk music in his apocalyptic subbass tracks. His models include the Turkish saz player Erkan Ogur and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan from Pakistan. This traditional music was known in a time when the devotees of world music saw it as their mission to bring original sounds from far-away lands into western concert halls, to preserve them, and to integrate their artists. Music served as a world language through which foreign regions could be discovered. Since the internet became an embassy, the idea formulated back then of a planetary consciousness sparked by the medium of world music has been outstrippedand at the same time has grown exponentially. Essential qualities of analogue culturebrevity, separations, delayshave given way to immediate and permanent accessibility in the net. The interest in the origins has been dissolved in a celebration of a great juxtaposition. Liberated from nationally coded obligations, sound can now unfold as pure materiality, without calling up stereotypes of distance and the foreign. But they have also become more fleeting. The entire music archive of the planet is now available at the click of a mouse, its contents are continually threatened with marginalization. Musicians in the digital world become archaeologists looking for what got lost. In the case of the New York producer Uproot Andy, his name is his program: he makes folkloric styles like Bachata and Cumbia flourish again, combining them with beats suitable for club culture. With its congotronics series, the label Crammed Discs has also tracked down something that had been hidden. Groups like Konono No. I and Staff Benda Billili from Kinshasa play hypnotic grooves on self-made instruments like the amplified thumb piano Likemb. Even the mainstream has discovered the tropical underground. Beyonc, for instance, has carried on the liaison between Global Ghetto Tech and US pop since the success of the Tamil-British singer M.I.A. by sampling the unofficial theme song of the movement: Pon De Floor, a beat attack with influences from dancehall reggae, Baltimore club, and Kuduro. The track was produced by Major Lazer, the project by Wesley Pentz, who, under the name Diplo, is one of the most well-known representatives of Global Dance Music. In spring 2011, the first Moombahton compilation was released on Diplos label Mad Decent. This most recent development in Worldmusic 2.0 is a post-geographic and post-historic super hybrid, as only the iPod era could produce. Moombahton frees up Cumbia Digital, a readily adaptable genre from the south. A mix of reggaeton and Dutch house: midtempo grooves with heavy kicks, radiating electrostabs, euphoria inducing sound rampsit can be extended in every direction, be is soul, dubstep, or metal. Quite by chance, Moombahton emerged in Washington DC. DJ Dave Nada brought down the tempo of house tracks when he had to play for reggaeton fans. But the sound really took off on the data highways between the US East Coast and the Netherlands. Nada exchanged remixes with Sabo from New York and the Rotterdam based Munchi, a 22-year-old producer of Dominican origin. In the meantime, Boyfriend from Vilnius, Pariss Brodinski or Heartbreak from Charlotte, North Carolina were flooding the net with edits of rap, reggae, and techno. Unlike most genres, then, Moombahton reached a global dimension even before the sound had made it big in any particular location. Another phenomenon that is equally impossible to attribute to any region is the idiosyncratic mix of cyberfunk, dancehall, and Kwaito by Spoek Mathambo from Johannesburg. The duo Schlachthof Bronx from Munich in turn flirts with Bavarian festivity to remix Columbian Cumbia classics and bastardize Caribbean Soca numbers. And the fact that the Baile-Funk-Album, which is currently pointing to a new direction, also comes from Germany is something that would have been inconceivable only a couple of years ago. On Rambazamba, Daniel Haaksman from Berlin not only brings the party sounds from the favelas of Rio de Janeiro to Europe, he also combines the Balkans with the Orient and the Caribbean. In doing so, Haaksman has achieved something for the Global Dance Music like what Daft Punk once did for house with their debut album: a valid benchmark of the best dance music of the timeand this time really Around the World.
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02/18/2012 04:01 AM