In the 1950s, a majestic Grande Hotel was built in Beira in the former Portuguese colony Mozambique, as if it were the Côte d´Azur. It was doomed from the start and has now been stripped of everything of value: this film is a portrait of a skeleton and of some of the 3500 people who live there now.
It was once a five-star hotel with 110 spacious rooms, an Olympic swimming pool and a luxury restaurant. It was a Grande Hotel designed as an undulating cake, situated in Beira on the coast of Mozambique and, in all its pomp and circumstance, it represented the haughtiness of colonialism.
Today it is a grey ruin. Over 3500 Mozambiquans have sought refuge between the wide corridors and imposing staircases. Everything of value in the building has been demolished and sold; only the concrete frame remains. Without water or electricity, the inhabitants make the best of the situation. Small enterprises blossom, but there’s also violence and danger.
Lotte Stoops portrayed several of the present inhabitants of the Grande Hotel and in Portugal visited a former guest who still has fond memories of her time in Mozambique. A harrowing yet also fascinating and impressive story of a dream that was doomed to become a nightmare.
Grand Hotel is screening at the International Film Festival Rotterdam.
Amadou & Mariam “The Remixes”Malian duo Amadou & Mariam released a 13-track digital album of remixes on January 11, 2011, exclusively on iTunes. The Remixes collection features favorite singles from their best-selling albums Welcome to Mali and Dimanche à Bamako, along with several new versions, and some previously unreleased mixes, from across their catalog reworked by what Pitchfork calls a “wonderfully random” group of collaborators. Highlights include new versions of the single “Sabali” by Miike Snow and French techno maestro Vitalic; and “Afrika” revisited by Bob Sinclar.
Among the African contributions to the compilation are the township remix of “Ce N’est Pas Bon” by South Africa’s DJ Aero, and a reworking of “Masiteladi” by Mali’s Mo DJ. Two New York bootlegs also make their way onto the album with rising star Theophilus London’s mix of “Sabali” and DJ Sabo’s “Artistiya.” Classics include 2005’s Afrikanz on Marz mix of “Coulibaly” by Ashley Beedle and a version by Akon.
Several tracks from Amadou & Mariam’s back catalog are featured, including “Je Pense à Toi,” from their 1999 album Sou Ni Tilé, the track that first brought the duo to Manu Chao’s attention, and which is reworked here by DJ Alix. To purchase Amadou & Mariam’s Remixes from iTunes, click here.
Amalia “Art Slave”Besides winning the prestigious CMW award and being nominated by the Canadian Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences, Amalia has already performed and shared her electromagnetic pull with the likes of Dr. Lonnie Smith, Maceo Parker, Jazzanova, Saul Williams, Cinematic Orchestra and many more. A unique voice and mind that transcends this space and time, Amalia has also been the secret weapon of numerous underground producers including AD Bourke, Atjazz & Son Of Kick, who all deliver the bonus remixes for this release.
In “Megunica” four friends take a mind-broadening odyssey through Latin America, with acclaimed public artist Blu. With a penchant for drawing and public art, Blu started painting walls around his native Bologna in 2000. His pieces often cover entire sides of building — most recently the Tate Modern. In the fall of 2006, Blu, joined by filmmaker Lorenzo Fonda, and two friends documented an unscripted trip across South and Central America. They entitled the project: Megunica. It’s a combination road trip, cultural exchange, street art exploration, and animated journey designed to stimulate the senses. Blu’s artistic endeavors lead him through MExico, GUatemala, NIcaragua, Costa Rica and Argentina– hence the acronym “Megunica”. With local guides and street artists leading the way, Blu creates his art far from the terrain of the average tourist, but close to the hearts of the people.
In its tenth issue Shook magazine looks at its editors think makes Britain great – the sound systems, the pirate radio stations, the record shops, even its working class clubs in the North. With articles on 25 years of Kiss FM (feat. David Rodigan, Coldcut and Gordon Mack), an exclusive with Milo from the Wild Bunch (the sound system which gave birth to Massive Attack, Tricky and Nellee Hoopeer), Keith Mansfield on the KPM music libraries, Mala, the original digital mystick, Sticky, the producer behind Ms. Dynamite’s Booo! plus a survey of the UK’s record shops featuring recollections from The Raincoats to Kodwo Eshun, Squarepusher; and stories on Lovers Rock, Cymande, this is a guided tour of the UK taking in spots that most other tour guides will drive right past.
Unsound Festival New York starts Wednesday April 6th with Unsound’s largest event to date – the festival’s official opening – at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall.
Official Unsound Festival website
Celebrating the concepts, ideas and joy of creative music in its many forms – from lowbrow to high – Unsound Festival has built a reputation as one of Europe’s most original events pushing boundaries. Through the evolution of a unique and visionary curatorial approach, Unsound Festival has inspired visitors and locals alike in their hometown of Krakow, Poland, since its inception in 2003. Having organized additional events in Prague, Warsaw, Bratislava, Kiev and Minsk, Unsound and their principal organizing group Fundacja Tone looked West for the first time and teamed up with the Polish Cultural Institute in New York and the Goethe-Institute New York to bring a surprise-packed eleven-day festival to New York in February of 2010. In New York and across America, music fans and the press alike embraced Unsound Festival New York as a refreshing addition to the city calendar and quickly realized that Unsound provided a very different model even for New York, where every day can feel like a music festival. Enraptured by what they saw, Urb magazine described Unsound as “scene-shifting” and declared that the festival instantly “cemented its status as one of the most important cultural festivities in New York City.” While Jon Pareles wrote in the New York Times that the Festival “claims a shrewdly amorphous domain: a zone in a virtual Europe (including Eastern Europe and Scandinavia) where electronics; arty, multimedia experiments; chamber-music meticulousness; punk impulses; and D.J. dance beats may all appear amid clouds of noise…this festival’s aesthetic: high-tech, allusive and not to be pinned down.”
Unsound experienced perhaps their most successful Krakow event to date this past October which was praised by Fact Magazine as a festival to be lauded for “its commitment to affording artists of considerable cult and critical renown the opportunity to realize grand projects and perform in grand spaces; to instill a level of trust in these artists that most safety-first festivals are incapable of, or unwilling to, countenance.” Now, with the same passion for the unusual that made them so noticeable, Unsound Festival New York is set to return to New York this coming April 2011.
Working once again with the Polish Cultural Institute in New York and the Goethe-Institut New York, as well as a host of other key partners and sponsors, Fundacja Tone and Unsound are preparing to continue their mission to bring underexposed East European artists to New York and to boldly show yet again the many faces of creative music. As the Village Voice noted in February 2010, “…the purpose of the Unsound Festival is to repel the baseless, spectacle-heavy notion that only a few states in the U.S. and a few countries in Western Europe are capable of making great, weird music that is riveting, outrageous, and thought-provoking.”
Transnational Dubstep is the first major compilation to document the fusion of dubstep and global roots music.
Generation Bass Presents Transnational Dubstep Compilation Promo (Excerpt/Taster Mix) – 1 FEB 2011 by djumb
Transnational Dubstep is the first major compilation to document the fusion of dubstep and global roots music. It has been conceptualized & compiled by co-owner/editor & the driving force behind the Generation Bass blog, DJ UMB in cooperation with Six Degrees Records. The record pulls together some of the most exciting new producers in electronic music who are incorporating sounds from around the planet with the bass bin shaking thump of dubstep.
By utilizing influences from Cumbia to Balkan- Chinese to Indian- Middle Eastern to Japanese- the songs on this unique collection represent the cutting edge vanguard of a whole new electronic sub-genre that is ready to capture the ears and imaginations of listeners world-wide.
DJ Umb and his partner Vincent Koreman (co-owner/editor & founder of the blog) had the arduous task of choosing from over 300 tracks locked inside DJ Umb’s Transnational Dubstep vault. The pair narrowed the tracks down to 30 for licensing and then Umb finalized the selection and sequencing.
It could be one of the many roadside diners in slow, inevitable decay along the less traveled, small town roadways of upstate New York. M. Wells Diner just happens to be in Hunter’s Point, an industrial and rather bleak section of Long Island City. A world apart from the shiny new high-rises of Long Island City’s waterfront and Manhattan.
Welcome to the strange, wonderful world of DJ/remixer/dance music maestro Banco de Gaia (aka Toby Marks) whose work sprang from the hopeful exuberance of British house, the joys of sampling, and the advent of global music.
Now, new listeners unfamiliar with this funky founding father of eclectic electronica can savor nearly two decades of hits, rarities, and remixes on Songs From the Silk Road (Disco Gecko; February 08, 2011). An intro to the vibrant cross-pollination of house and world music, tracks shift from hard-hitting to playful, pulsing to ambient, all guided by a strong, omnivorous ear for powerful beats and delicate filigrees of sound.
Pensive modal harmonies (“Farewell Ferengistan”—named for an obscure Central Asian term for Europeans) alternate with hand drum-heavy dub grooves (“Amber”). Gentle digital pops and glitches (“Big Men Cry”) give way to driving rhythms, stirring vocals, and glittering keyboards (“Last Train to Lhasa”).
But back in the 80s, guitarist and trumpet player Marks hated drum machines. He loved prog rock, experimental jazz, classical, anything—just not synth pop. “But then house happened and changed everything. It opened up a whole new world for me, and I discovered this new machine-made way of making music,” Marks explains. “Combined with the new technology of sampling, I could suddenly have these big Pink Floyd-esque ideas that I could never have executed otherwise.”
After 500 years of exploitation and repression, Latin America is at a turning point in its history: a series of socialist leaders has come to power. Can they satisfy their peoples’ hunger for change?
John Tripp Creative 