IG’s Zen Badizm workshop coming to London town Thursday 19th November for a special Broad Casting!

Thanks to nutriot.com for spreading the word about the clip.

I’ll keep this first blog post short as I’ve still got tons to do, but to balance the input from our team of writers and some of our artists (blogs from whom you can find here in Italian for the writers and here in Japanese for the artists) here’s an overview of the first official day, and some bits from the first few days.

The mood has been high since all the artists arrived on monday evening and tuesday morning. I think it’s fair to say that the (so far) beautiful weather, the incredible food (cooked by our resident badman chef/caterer Lisa) and the historical surroundings have a lot to do with helping to elevate the mood of all involved.

The music workshops, where Tayone (from Italy), 2tall/Om Unit (from England) and Tatsuki (from Japan) are working for 3 days creating music that will be used in the final showcase on Saturday June 6th, are taking place in the Teatro San Leonardo, a building that was first a nuns’ covent, some 400 years ago. And as we sat for dinner on the Tuesday evening in the courtyard of the Teatro it somehow felt very appropriate that we would be adding our bit of history to this beautiful place.

I’ve primarily been involved in overseeing the music workshops, as I know all 3 artists personally. They are first and foremost friends, and I am a fan of theirs as much as a friend, and so to see them come together and in the space of 8 or so hours put together an already lenghty amount of music and tracks has been incredible to say the least.

Our original thoughts, as organisers, was that on Saturday the showcase, which will last 2 hours, would be composed of roughly 4 movements, 3 x 30mins of solo (one for each artist) and one collective movement of 30mins. This went out the window by the end of the first day of workshops, with Tayone explaining that he felt much happier doing as much collectively as possible. Jim 2tall and Tatsuki both agreed, and so we decided to move forward with the first hour featuring 2tall and Tatsuki doing solos (being that they are the ‘real’ guests as Tayone lived in Bologna for years) and the second hour (or more) composed of a collective movement which the guys are creating as we speak. And truth be told, this is exactly I’d hoped for originally – the reality was that I know that asking artists to put together a 2h live show is demanding a lot, and rests on a lot of factors, especially people getting on and ‘gelling’ if you will. In the end, my hopes are turning reality it seems, as the guys are more than happy to do as much together as possible, and considering we’re about 1/3 of the way through the music workshops I’d say it’s even fair to think that we’ll have a lot more than one hour of music on our hands by the end.

And so day 2 starts. Today are more music workshops, as well as a seminar/meeting/q&a session between the musicians and music students in the late afternoon. While I sit here at home, coffee-ing it up and overseeing the content output of our event, the musicians have already started and I can’t wait to see what rested minds come up with today. Tiredness set in yesterday towards the end, and as Tayone put it “the more we do, the more we have, but also the more we come up with bits that aren’t as good”. Very true, but as 2tall countered “at the end the more we have, the more we can choose from to make sure it’s outstanding”. And that kinda sums it up for me.

I’ll leave you with a few choice quotes, as well as the amazing news that Bruno Briscik, a famed Italian multi instrumentalist with whom Tayone has collaborated on many occasions, will be joining the 3 artists for a couple of featurings on the evening of Saturday.

Oh and as for the visual art workshops, featuring the amazing talents of Ericailcane, DEM and Will Barras, well I’ve not had the time to see much yet, but you can read about it in our writers blog (Italian only for now) and know that what I have seen and spoken about with them leads me to believe that saturday will be special indeed. The 3 of them, from Italy and the UK, will essentially act as directors/choreographers for the showcase, orchestrating a full live, visual show for the music being made. And so far this show includes Chinese shadows, a black box and some very spooky figurines… Considering we’d originally hoped to have them paint walls during the day, something Ericailcane and DEM are known for, to know that they’ll now be doing something pretty much no one has ever seen them do makes me only feel even better. More pics and words soon come. Stay tuned.

From Bologna, with love (and a hell of a lot of coffee).

Laurent

PS: for those interested, so far the music is ranging from slow beats to house to jazzy hip hop and abstract instrumentals. Will post audio soon as I can.

Quotes:

You try and do an event in Italy and not make it about food!

Me, in response to Mark from Skratchworx’s tweet that Original Cultures was basically just about food.

It’s a pleasure to leave the studio, go to a new country and work with new people. The inspiration is unbelievable!

Tatsuki, at the end of the first day of workshops. With some pistaccio cookies on the side.

It just keeps getting better and better!

Jim 2tall, not sure when he said that though!

Links:
See behind the scenes on our Tumblr – originalcultures.tumblr.com
Catch the daily blogs on our site – originalcultures.org/blogs
Catch us over at Shook Magazine on the daily too – shook.fm
Hear us tweet as we go – twitter.com/og_cultures
And don’t forget to check/add/friend/fan us on the Flickr, Facebook and Myspace.

2tall/Om Unit from the UK, Tatsuki from Japan and Tayone from Italy are the 3 producers who will be working together making music and preparing a live show, while Ericailcane and Dem from Italy will work with Will Barras from the UK on visual arts, including overseeing the concept for and direction of the final showcase. In between all this will be artist workshops, seminars with students, some live painting and other fun bits, check the site for full details.

Spirits are high and everyone is enjoying not just the beautiful weather but also the food, coffee and the Italian way of doing things. Already the idea of the cultural exchange is proving itself with the artists and organisers exchanging stories about their countries, customs and ways of doing things over dinner and exchanging ideas for music and visual elements.

Check the Original Cultures Tumblr blog for on the fly updates and behind the scenes looks at what happens, pretty much as it happens. Follow us on Twitter for more of the same and check back here on Shook for daily updates starting tomorrow until Sunday this week. Also peep our Flickr page and our Twitpic page for photographic updates.

Oh and for the international crew check the Original Cultures site for updates in Italian and Japanese!

Saluti da Bologna ragazzi!

By Mark Fisher (K-Punk)

“In 2006, James Kirby, the man behind the V/Vm record label and The Caretaker, began a download project called The Death of Rave. The tracks have a thin, almost translucent quality, as if they are figments or phantoms of the original, exhilarating sound of rave. When I interviewed Kirby recently, he explained that the project had been initiated to commemorate a certain energy that he believes has disappeared from dance music. (Energy Flash was, of course, the title the critic Simon Reynolds gave to his compendious study of rave music and its progeny.) The question is: were rave and its offshoots jungle and garage just that – a sudden flash of energy that has since dissipated? More worryingly, is the death of rave only one symptom of an overall energy crisis in culture? Are cultural resources running out in the same way as natural resources are?

Those of us who grew up in the decades between the 1960s and the 1990s became accustomed to rapid changes in popular culture. Theorists of future shock such as Alvin Toffler and Marshall McLuhan plausibly claimed that our nervous systems were themselves sped up by these developments, which were driven by the development and proliferation of technologies. Popular artefacts were marked with a technological signature that dated them quite precisely: new technology was clearly audible and visible, so that it would be practically impossible, say, to confuse a film or a record from the early 1960s with one from even half a decade later.

The current decade, however, has been characterised by an abrupt sense of deceleration. A thought experiment makes the point. Imagine going back 15 years in time to play records from the latest dance genres – dubstep, or funky, for example – to a fan of jungle. One can only conclude that they would have been stunned – not by how much things had changed, but by how little things have moved on. Something like jungle was scarcely imaginable in 1989, but dubstep or funky, while by no means pastiches, sound like extrapolations from the matrix of sounds established a decade and a half ago.

Needless to say, it is not that technology has ceased developing. What has happened, however, is that technology has been decalibrated from cultural form. The present moment might in fact be best haracterised by a discrepancy between the onward march of technology and the stalling, stagnation and retardation of culture. We can’t hear technology any more. There has been a gradual disappearance of the sound of technological rupture – such as the irruption of Brian Eno’s analogue synth in the middle of Roxy Music’s “Virginia Plain”, or the cut-and-paste angular alienness of early rave – that pop music once taught us to expect. We still see technology, perhaps, in cinema CGI, but CGI’s role is somewhat paradoxical: its aim is precisely to make itself invisible, and it has been used to finesse an already established model of reality. High-definition television is another example of the same syndrome: we see the same old things, but brighter and glossier.

The principal way in which technology now makes itself felt in culture is of course in the areas of distribution and consumption. Downloading and Web 2.0 have famously led to new ways of accessing culture. But these have tended to be parasitic on old media. The law of Web 2.0 is that everything comes back, whether it be adverts, public information films or long-forgotten TV serials: history happens first as tragedy, then as YouTube. The pop artists who supposedly became successful because of web clamour (Sandi Thom, Arctic Monkeys) turned out to be quaintly archaic in form; in any case, they were pushed through the familiar promotional machinery of big record companies and PR firms. There is peer-to-peer distribution of culture, but little sign of peer-to-peer production.

The best blogs are one exception; they have bypassed the mainstream media, which, for the reasons described by Nick Davies in last year’s Flat Earth News, has become increasingly conservative, dominated by press releases and PR. In general, however, Web 2.0 encourages us to behave like spectators. This is not only because of the endless temptations to look back offered by burgeoning online archives, it is also because, thanks to the ubiquity of recording devices, we find ourselves becoming archivists of our own lives: we never experience live events, because we are too busy recording them.

Yet instantaneous exposure deprives cultures of the time and space in which they can grow. There is as yet no Web 2.0 equivalent of the circuit that sustained UK dance music in the 1990s: the assemblage of dubplates, pirate radio and the dance floor which acted as a laboratory for the development of new sounds. This circuit was still punctuated by particular moments (the club night, the radio broadcast), but, because anything in Web 2.0 can be replayed at any time, its temporality is more diffuse. The tendency seems to be for a kind of networked solipsism, a global system of individuals consuming an increasingly homogeneous culture alone in front of the computer screen or plugged in to iPod headphones.

All of this makes Fredric Jameson’s theories about postmodern culture’s inability to image the present more compelling than ever. As the gap between cultural breaks becomes ever longer and the breaks themselves become ever more modest and slight, it is beginning to look as if the situation might be terminal. Alex Williams, who runs the Splintering Bone Ashes blog, goes so far as to claim that “what we have experienced is merely a blip, perhaps never to be again repeated – 150 or so years of extreme resource bingeing, the equivalent of an epic amphetamine session. What we are already experiencing is little more than the undoubtedly grim ‘comedown’ of the great deceleration.” This might be too bleak. What is certainly clear, however, is that technology will not deliver new forms of culture all on its own.

To read Mark Fisher’s blog click here“

From SoulCulture.co.uk

Muhsinah