Holy Calamity May: Cat's Away Edition

The Gentlemen in Big Digits have been hosting this monthly night of hip hop for years now. This month, they'll all be out of town on tour and are handing the controls over to a group of special guests, including myself. To the dismay of many, I'll be performing as DJ Buttmuscle.

celebrating two years of Imperialisms tonight at River Gods. TONIGHT

Imperialisms returns to River Gods in Central Square tonight but this time it's with gifts. We've been holding down this monthly night of rare foreign language records for two years and we're celebrating by giving away some limited Imperialisms t shirts and Intercontinental stickers. Come by from 9-1am for all the crazy sounds.

If you haven't been, Imperialisms is a monthly dj night that I perform with Angela Sawyer of Weirdo Records, you can find a gallery of all the wonderful fliers that Angela has put together and some of my playlists here
and this months event is on facebook

djing for Group Doueh and Khaira Arby at Oberon TONIGHT!

The Imperialisms duo (me and Angela Sawyer) will be djing tonight at Club Oberon for the Group Doueh/Khaira Arby show. Khaira Arby will be joined by the horn section from Debo Band, should be very exciting. It's co-presented by End of an Empire and Bowery Boston.

tickets: http://www.boweryboston.com/event/47037/

djing at the ICA Boston for The Record: Contemporary Art and Vinyl

hey, I'll be djing for one hour on June 3rd, playing all pre-revolutionary Iranian 45s, as a part of the ICA Boston show "The Record: Contemporary Art and Vinyl"

Imperialisms in April

Carnevale in Venice

I'll be djing at this event at Oberon on April 13th, playing all Italian rock music, opening for The Upper Crust.

Imperialisms at River Gods

Imperialisms in January

Imperialisms is our monthly night of crazy foreign-language records.
At River Gods in Cambridge, as always. I'll be trading sets with Angela Sawyer of Weirdo Records from 9-1am, delicious food until 10pm
Imperialisms on facebook

the Intercontinental on cmj

for real, this time. I was briefly on the front page of the brand new CMJ website. The permanent link to the article is here:
cmj.com/features/2011/01/radio-profile-the-intercontinental-wmbr/

Latin Meets Rock n' Roll number III

Tuesday, December 3rd at the Midway Cafe in Jamaica Plain

Latin Meets Rock n' Roll

happening this Tuesday at the Midway cafe in Jamaica Plain. It's the Boston release party for the Barbes records compilation "The Roots of Chicha volume 2" and I'll be playing a bunch of chicha singles.

The Intercontinental featured in the College Music Journal

the Intercontinental was featured in the September issue of the College Music Journal. A small feature was published in the print journal in an article by Marisa Aveling called "Five Special Specilay Shows" [pdf] and a longer feature appeared online at cmj.com. Here is the basic text from the online version:

Specialty Show Profile: The Intercontinental, WMBR

Jesse Kaminsky, host of The Intercontinental – WMBR’s ‘international’ specialty show
Give us a brief rundown on the history of the show.
I started the Intercontinental in 2006 as a way to explore some of the more
obscure sounds from around the world. I felt like the ‘world village’ idea of a
global culture was the dominant model for foreign music on the radio, and that really left me cold. That mentality seems to be based on the idea of the west as cultural compass and bankroll and felt a lot like the mondo type exhibition without context. I was really interested in tapping into the type of cultural movements that have been happening for centuries independently of the US. The Yugoslavian fascination with mariachi music or Japanese-Cuban music, for instance, produced some really fascinating records, made only for the domestic markets in those countries.

How did you get interested in ‘international’ music in the first place?
Growing up in Arkansas before the internet was a really off the ground, it was
difficult to find anything other than local bands and the current top 40. I was really hungry for something else, though, so I just tried to use every resource to cast a wide net and listened to anything that might possibly be interesting. I would ask every foreign exchange student what they were listening to. I had a lot of weird tape dubs of Yugoslavian ska punk bands in high school. I went to local punk shows in high school but was also trying to find where to order Conlon Nancorrow CDs or whatever music was the farthest from what I already knew, it was all in pretty much the same category for me. I didn’t really focus exclusively on international music until the idea for the show came along, it’s really taken over my life since then.

The music you play comes from almost every country imaginable. How do you source it all?
It can be really difficult to crack into a stream of culture that wasn’t meant for
you, especially if it doesn’t exist anymore or is all in a script that I can’t read.
The internet is great, though, and I’ve found that people can be very helpful with information if they can see that you’re serious about it. I can’t read Farsi so I scanned all my Iranian singles and put them on my website and suddenly people are emailing me from all over the world with translations and history, they’re amazed that someone like me has interest in pre-revolutionary Iranian pop music. There are dealers for anything, though. I do a lot of trial and error purchasing, buying things based on the picture or something. If you buy enough Turkish disco singles you eventually start to figure out what’s good or what to avoid. Once you have a handle on part of it you can do associative things like: if Yugoslavia had such a great newwave/synthpop thing in the 80’s then what about Hungary, or Poland. If you look it up, it’s there!

What’s the weirdest piece of music you’ve ever found and played on your show?
There is some music from the Dagestan region of Russia that’s really singular.
It’s a kind of techno with traditional rhythms and melodies. Drum machines and accordions with reverbed out mcs, totally unlike anything I’ve heard anywhere else. There’s also a really strange Dagestani version of Jimmy Ajaa (the Bappi Lahiri Hindi disco song that MIA covered) that was reworked to be a praise song for Allah that’s a strong contender for weirdest song.
www.jessekaminsky.com/intercontinental

This entry was posted on Monday, October 18th, 2010 at 2:17 pm and is filed under Industry Profiles, Interviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Imperialisms at RIver Gods

It's become a monthly thing at River Gods. Usually the last Tuesday, I join forces with Angela Sawyer of Weirdo Records to present 4 hours of weird foreign music. Much of it comes from the psychedelic 60s/70s but we do stray into genres as disparate as cumbia, new wave, disco, luk thung, garage rock, electro and the like. You can find playlists and past fliers (beautifully designed by Angela) here

the Boston globe just gave us a mention:

The Music of Iran - a guest post on Radio diffusion blog

I wrote this little essay for the mighty music blog radiodiffusion, curated by the gentleman behind, among other things, the Sublime Frequencies compilation of Indian steel guitar soundtrack music called Bollywood Steel Guitar. If you haven't been there before, it's worth thumbing through his vast collection of obscure records from all over the world. My little post, with mp3, can be found here, or you can read the text below. You can view cover scans of most of my Iranian records here:


Information on the popular music of pre-revolutionary Iran is hard to come by if you don’t read Farsi. Most reissues of the music are in Farsi and have little to no liner notes, save for Göhkan Aya’s well researched essay for the Raks Raks Raks compilation released last year on Raks Discos. This is perhaps due in part to the political situation surrounding the music and culture, much of what was recorded prior to the 1978 revolution became illegal with the new regime and was destroyed when found by the police. Performers who had substantial careers prior to the revolution had to flee the country or risk persecution as even the simple act of a woman performing as a soloist became illegal, not to mention the performance of westernized Persian music that had become increasingly popular under the last years of the Shah. Records that you find now from that period in Iran have likely survived many hardships and they almost always show it in one way or another.

Stuart has already covered much of the cultural history of Iran in his previous posts so I’ll leave that for now and say that this track from the singer Pouran. She began singing in 1951 at the age of 18, using the stage name of “Unknown Lady” or “Lady Anonymous Singer, ” depending on how you translate the Farsi. She married her vocal instructor, violinist Abbas Shapouri, and altered her stage name first to “Lady Shapouri, ” then to the simpler “Pouran, ” collaborating with Shapouri for the duration of their seven-year marriage to produce some of her most popular songs. At the height of her career, she was well regarded as an actress and singer, possibly recording as many as 2000 songs, although that’s really an impossible number to confirm. After her divorce, she continued to perform and record, often appearing on Iranian National Radio, until the late 70’s, when the revolution forced her to stop performing and flee the country. She died in 1991 during a visit to Iran and is buried in the Imamzadeh Taaher cemetery in the city of Karaj.

As an example of the difficulty in finding information on this era of recorded music, this line from the Google translation of her Wikipedia page jumped out at me: “Art said his toe in Salt Lady nephew heartsome other is born of that era” in reference to her musical association with her first husband.

Without much of a discography available, I’d guess that this record is from the later part of her career. It’s released on Ahang Rooz, the first and largest of pre-revolutionary Iranian record labels, and has the analog synthesizer sound that seems to have enjoyed some popularity in the later 70’s. The single includes the two songs: “Shahr-e Paeez” (The City of Autumn) and “Ye Roozam Maa Ra Faramoosh Mikoni” (One Day You Will Forget Me).

Thanks to Hamineh, Kourosh and Ramin for their help on this post as well as for all the other information that they’ve helped me with. Any factual errors or misunderstandings are mine.

Catalog number AR-2519 on Ahang Rooz of Iran. No release date listed.


http://radiodiffusion.wordpress.com/2010/02/07/pouran/