Ok, I’ve been catching tons of great music while traveling but have not had time to write about it, so rather than try to start at the beginning and do posts on everything, I’ll just give you the whirlwind tour.
We went to the House of Blues Disney location again, this time to catch another of my favorite bands, Aterciopelados (roughly translates as “the velvety ones”). They have a new album out, Rio, and it is quite good. Musically it weaves the electronica experimentation of the last few years with Latin and Caribbean folk styles, going for a sort of musical version of magical realism. As always, the songs are politically engaged, this time largely around water rights in their home country, Colombia. On the songs folks knew like “Baracunatana” and “Bolero Faz,” the whole place knew the words and Andrea Echieverra did not even need to sing. But when she did, she drew notes from way down inside her, “engaging her core” as my artist friend Riti so aptly put it: another candidate for the decibels per pound award. They finished with my favorite, “Luz Azul.” Poke around their site, including the link to the old site, to find lots of their music and videos if you want to give them a listen.
A day later, we joined thousands of marchers in the May Day immigrant rights marches throughout Los Angeles. While I’m here in Kolkata, I intend to edit soundscapes from the protests and even the Venice Beach Drum Circle (maybe not together though), but I’ll save that for another time. There were six or seven different marches this year, altogether about 10-15,000 people came out on the streets, but they couldn’t all get together because each though that either they were being excluded or else they wanted to exclude something they saw as too radical or not radical enough. One sign of unity emerged in the evening, as two groups headed mostly by younger people, the Revolutionary Autonomous Communities and CopWatch LA descended on MacArthur Park and actually managed to cooperatively put on a great event highlighted by RAC’s great documentary on the 2007 May Day police riot at the park — which cost the city 12.85 million bucks in damages — We’re Still Here, We Never Left, followed up by a totally rocking Latino ska band called Ekolekuua that had the park skanking and moshing. Maybe the elders will get it together to cooperate some more next year. I’ll try to add some pix later, but I forgot the camera usb cable so it will have to wait til I get back to Boston.
Speaking of Boston, we caught the Damned in, of all places, Paradise â ‘hey, who let those guys in?’ I’ve been a fan since the seventies, and “Wait til the Blackout” is one of my top five favorite all time songs. They played it, along with most everything else. Captain Sensible was too loud, sloppy and talked way too much, kind of par for the course I guess, but it was loud and great. David Vanian seemed a bit checked outâ¦maybe trying to look goth? Anyway, it was a blast. And we got there just as they started and it hadn’t sold out yet so for some reason, no one was at the door and we got in free! Now that is Paradise. I have the cable for the iPhone, so here’s a blurry pic of the Captain and Vanian to go with the blurry Aterciopelados pic. I won’t go into the controversy over why Rat Scabies left, but the Captain went on a pretty funny rant about it and put in a plug for the book on Scabies’ quest for the Holy Grail.
Now if I could only find time to write about the avant garde guitarist festival last summer in Tokyoâ¦but how about a few new tunes from me instead. Here is a dub thingie with a nice wobbly bass line, L.A. Skank, and another I’m calling “be miner” for now. More rreplay has happened and I’m mixing away in Kolkata so stay tuned there, but first I’ll have to write about my Kolkata musical quest, so stay tuned, though its looking like it be a few days as we’re heading off on a side trip.