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Download the new album by Detroit techno legend Moodymann for free
04.18.2012
09:46 pm
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In the worlds of deep house and techno, artists don’t come more revered than Detroit’s Kenny Dixon Jr, aka Moodymann. Releasing records for almost two decades now, his music has attracted a devoted, almost cult-like fan base.

This is due largely to his unique sound, a blend of minimalist Detroit soul with spaced out disco, jazz and abstract electronics, not to mention the lashings of found sound, disembodied voices and crowd noise he weaves in and out of his hypnotic and, yes, moody tracks.

But it also has a lot to do with Moodymann the character. Staying true to his Detroit techno roots, Dixon tends to shy away from the press and the music industry at large, and on the rare occasions he does make a pronouncement, his Afro-centric and iconoclastic views can draw criticism. His releases follow the same ideological path, with regular 12"s and albums coming out independently through his umbrella organisation Mahogani Music. Often the only marking to distinguish these releases from an anonymous white label is the recognisable afro-and-shades Moodymann logo.

So it’s a surprise to see him releasing a new 8 track album digitally and for free through the website Scion A/V. Not that these guys don’t know their shit, with past free releases from the likes of Dam Funk, Skream & Benga and The Melvins, but more that Dixon has decided to persue this avenue of free digital releasing at all. Well, the times they are a’changin’. 

If you are new to Moodymann and his work, this might not be the best place to start (I would recommend starting by checking out the sinlge “Joy Pt II” and the album A Silent Introduction) but at the very least this release gives you a taste of his work, and you can always ask for your money back. For the Moodymann fan who has not yet downloaded Picture This, well, what are you waiting for? The download widget for the free release is below, and here is the video for the album’s opening track:

Moodymann “9 Nites 2 Nowhere”
 

 

 

 

Posted by Niall O'Conghaile
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04.18.2012
09:46 pm
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‘Detroit: City On The Move’
06.22.2011
04:40 pm
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The 1965 promotional video Detroit: City On The Move captures the city before everything went to shit.

Since this film was made, Detroit’s population has dropped by more than 60% and the future couldn’t look bleaker. There are some glimmerings of hope though. Artists and entrepreneurs are heading to the city to take advantage of cheap real estate and an atmosphere that is conducive to new ideas and energies. When you’ve got nothing left to lose, people and places will embrace anything that offers even the slenderest thread of hope. Creative people thrive in such conditions. I’d thought about moving to Detroit and buying a house for $8,000. But, it’s just too damn cold.

The film is narrated by then-mayor Jerome P. Cavanaugh with the enthusiasm of a man who has been taking bong hits of carbon monoxide. Maybe he saw what was coming.
 

 
Art can save neighborhoods. The Heidelberg Project is an example of the restorative energy that artists and the creative spirit can bring to a community. Detroit is at the crossroads of an absolutely ugly death or a beautiful re-imagining. It’s time to take the money spent on wars (Iraq, Afghanistan, drugs) and use it to resurrect America’s dying cities. There are people ready and waiting with ideas and dreams to make things happen - people like Tyree Guyton.
 

Posted by Marc Campbell
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06.22.2011
04:40 pm
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High Tech Soul - The Creation of Techno Music
05.09.2011
07:04 pm
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Described as the first documentary film on the creation of Techno Music, High Tech Soul is also an examination of the cultural history of Detroit, its birthplace.

From the race riots of 1967 to the underground party scene of the late 1980s, Detroit’s economic downturn didn’t stop the invention of a new kind of music that brought international attention to its producers and their hometown.

Featuring in-depth interviews with many of the world’s best exponents of the artform, High Tech Soul focuses on the creators of the genre—Juan Atkins, Derrick May, and Kevin Saunderson—and looks at the relationships and personal struggles behind the music. Artists like Richie Hawtin, Jeff Mills, Carl Craig, Eddie Fowlkes and a host of others explain why techno, with its abrasive tones and resonating basslines, could not have come from anywhere but Detroit.

With classic anthems such as Rhythim Is Rhythim’s “Strings of Life” and Inner City’s “Good Life,” High Tech Soul celebrates the pioneers, the promoters and the city that spawned a global phenomenon.

The film features: Juan Atkins, Derrick May, Kevin Saunderson, Eddie (Flashin) Fowlkes, Richie Hawtin, Jeff Mills, John Acquaviva, Carl Cox, Carl Craig, Blake Baxter, Stacey Pullen, Thomas Barnett, Matthew Dear, Anthony “Shake” Shakir, Keith Tucker, Delano Smith, Mike Archer, Derrick Thompson, Mike Clark, Alan Oldham, Laura Gavoor, Himawari, Scan 7, Kenny Larkin, Stacey “Hotwax” Hale, Claus Bachor, Electrifying Mojo, Niko Marks, Barbara Deyo, Dan Sordyl, Sam Valenti, Ron Murphy, George Baker, and Kwame Kilpatrick.

The film’s soundtrack includes: Aux 88, Cybotron, Inner City, Juan Atkins, Mayday, Model 500, Plastikman, Rhythim Is Rhythim, and more.

“Bredow’s cast of alumni—the holy trinity of Atkins, May & Saunderson at the front—fill out this tale with passion, pride and, oddly for music of the future, nostalgia too.”
- Dazed and Confused

‘An enjoyable education into the music, the city and the main players past, present and future.’
-DJ Magazine

‘Defines the myths and the magic of Detroit techno from its beginnings right up to how it has evolved to become High Tech Soul.’
-Derrick May

 

 

Posted by Paul Gallagher
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05.09.2011
07:04 pm
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DETROITROCKSAMPLER: Arch-Drude Julian Cope drops some knowledge on you
12.22.2010
12:34 pm
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Arch-Drude Julian Cope, dropped an appropriately pagan seasonal gift for the world’s music fans when he posted his insanely great DETROITROCKSAMPLER online last month. If you haven’t listened to any of Cope’s various erudite ROCKSAMPLERs, you’re really missing out, because they’re ALL great. What’s not to love about a mixed tape put together by one of the world’s greatest music heads? There is EVERYTHING to love with this new one, I can assure you.

DETROITROCKSAMPLER consists of thirty-eight of the finest slabs of guitar-drenched music to come out of Detroit Rock City from the mid-60s to the late 70s, with all the bands you’d expect to see represented and plenty that you’ll probably be hearing for the first time. The tracklisting features the original 45 version of the MC5’s “Looking at You,” some Alice Cooper, The Amboy Dukes, The Bob Seger System (pictured above), a demo from Mynah Birds (Motown’s integrated rock act with Rick James and Neil Young! (James was incarcerated for deserting the army, breaking the band up), the under-rated Grand Funk Railroad, SRC, Frigid Pink, Iggy and the Stooges, Funkadelic’s “Cosmic Slop,” a Brother Wayne Kramer solo single from 1975, Stooge Ron Asheton’s decidedly un-PC band The New Order, Destroy All Monsters, and a rarity from the sessions for the first Stooges album called “Asthma Attack.” The “liner notes” are, as you might expect, classic Cope. He’s the best and most passionate rock writer since Lester Bangs (there is no close second in the rock prose department, none).

There was a time when gourmet fare like this was available only on expensive import CDs. No more. Now everyone with an Internet can be musically enlightened. What are you waiting for, brothers and sisters? Smoke a joint, crank up the speakers and kick out the jams, motherfuckers.

I love Julian Cope. Long may the Arch-Drude thrive.

Below, The MC5 performing an absolutely furious live version of “Looking at You” in 1970:
 

 
Thank you Chris Campion!

Posted by Richard Metzger
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12.22.2010
12:34 pm
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Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre: The Ruins of Detroit
12.21.2010
03:47 pm
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French photographers Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre have documented the decline and decay of Detroit through its buildings and structures that were once source of civic pride (schools, churches, hotels, stations), but now “stand as monuments to the city’s fall from grace.”

Over the past decades, Detroit has suffered a post-industrial decline far worse than any other American city. The once booming city has seen its population fall from 2.5 million in the 1940s, to just over 1 million today, with 1 in 3 people unemployed.

Marchand and Meffre have published a book of their stunning and quite beautiful photographs. Each plate reveals a hidden history of Detroit, detailing an evolutionary process, where:

Ruins are the visible symbols and landmarks of our societies and their changes, small pieces of history in suspension.

The state of ruin is essentially a temporary situation that happens at some point, the volatile result of change of era and the fall of empires. This fragility, the time elapsed but even so running fast, lead us to watch them one very last time : being dismayed, or admire, making us wondering about the permanence of things.

Photography appeared to us as a modest way to keep a little bit of this ephemeral state.

More images from this collection can be viewed here.
 
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More Ruins of Detroit by Marchand & Meffre, after the jump…
 

READ ON
Posted by Paul Gallagher
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12.21.2010
03:47 pm
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The Ded Dave Show: A show about what zombies do when they are not eating you
12.16.2010
05:51 pm
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The Ded Dave Show is a local TV/webcast comedy show from the Detroit area that’s “about what zombies do when they are not eating you.”

The Ded Dave Show really pushes the envelope of how good an “amateur” production can be. In fact, its very existence goes to show how the line between the two gets erased further with each passing year due to better video equipment finding its way into the hands of eager and talented young filmmakers who don’t feel that they need anyone’s permission to make what they want to make. About the only thing separating “amateur” from “professional” these days seems be getting paid… which can still be an issue of course! Let’s hope Hollywood notices the talents on display here.

In this special Holiday episode—a yearly classic for the entire (Manson) family—join Ded Dave, Bog and a host of undead characters in their X-mas adventures in the land of the dead!

On Christmas night of 2009, The Ded Dave Show aired its very own Holiday special. Broken into two separate segments, the episode began with a gruesome telling of the “true” story of Santa Claus. The second half showed one of The Land of The Dead’s most sacred of ceremonies for Jesus’ birthday, its annual X-Mas Pageant.

 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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12.16.2010
05:51 pm
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Cleveland’s Black Rock Legacy: Purple Image
07.17.2010
07:38 pm
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Today’s resurgence in black rock and Afro-punk has been accompanied by a boosted interest in obscure post-Hendrix black rock from the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, as shown by the rediscovery of Detroit bands like Death and Black Merda.

Elsewhere in the heartland, Cleveland’s late-‘60s soul and R&B scene (a role-call of which can be found in this bio for the Imperial Wonders) also boasted a clutch of guitar-centered rock bands, including the excellently named Purple Image. Rising from the 105th St. & Superior area (which took a big hit during the unrest resulting from the 1968 Granville Shootout), PI traded on a thumping, harder-than-Parliament psychedelic sound fortified by powerful group vocals and the two-guitar attack of Ken Roberts and Frank Smith. Unfortunately Purple Image’s excellent self-titled 1970 debut would be their one and only, becoming a rare black-rock nugget before it was re-released by the UK’s Radioactive label in 2007.

It would take another Midwestern black rocker to pick up the

purple

but that’s another story…
 

 
Get: Purple Image - Purple Image [CD]

 

Posted by Ron Nachmann
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07.17.2010
07:38 pm
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