I have recently been listening to King midas Sound ” Waiting for You“, a lovely record that at times sounds like Maxinquaye era Tricky meets Burial with gluttonous amounts of bass, and the type of album that could only come out on Hyperdub (quite a year for them).
If you read the music press, you will know that the mind behind the music of King Midas is in fact Kevin Martin, aka the Bug, purveyor of heavy heavy pummeling hardness, I usually have a hard time getting through the Bug albums, but King Midas is rivetting.
Listening to the album had me thinking about Kevin and how only a city like London could create such a musician, in fact in this interview he did for XLR8R magazine he talks about how much London has “shaped his musical world”.
I know Kevin from the late eighties, he had an infamous free noise/ jazz hardcore band called God, and I briefly did film projections for their live shows, relentless car crashes, that kind of Ballardian thing to accompany the bruising big band attack that Kevin orchestrated. I moved onto sunnier climes but I’ve been following his career with interest.
London in the late eighties had everything that would form our musical world, we had all the US noise bands coming over and doing amazing shows, mainly the Butthole Surfers, Swans, the first Sonic youth shows, Big Black, and at the same time On-U sound was at its peak, creating the noise dub alliance that noiseniks could dance to. Warehouse raves were everywhere every weekend, mix this up with groundbreaking shows by Sun Ra at ULU, Ornette Coleman, Glenn Branca and you can see where Kevin’s head was at.
Kevin had a record label for a while, Pathalogical Records, full of sonic nastiness, but there was one fantastic, underrated album that he released by Terminal Cheesecake in 1990 called Angels in Pigtails, the groups most fully-realised album that managed to combine full on rock noise, dubby production and Can-like jamming – highly recommended.

For me, it’s interesting to see how that mixture of jazz experimentation, dub and noise turned out 20 years on. There’s also a King Midas mix containing some of their influences to go with the albums release over at Fact Magazine, get it here.

If you live in Northern America, you may have seen the following documentary already , we here in Europe are not blessed with the availabilty of HBO – nevertheless, I wanted to point to “Bastards Of The Party”, which I recently discovered. We all love fronting imaginary gang-sings with our mates when posing for digital cameras. However, almost nothing do we people outside of the US know about the emergence and social history of the LA gangs. Did you for example know that one of the major LA gangs, the Crips, actually started with a constitution and that the gang name initially stood for “Community Revolutionary Innerparty Service” and was conceived as a communal social service? Or that the so-called LA “gang problem” of the 1980s and 1990s and all the gangster culture so heavily promoted throughout 90s and 00s rap is all rooted in the vacuum that emerged when the 1960s community self-organisation and -defense group named the Black Panther Party was infiltrated by the FBI, its leaders murdered and the party eventually disbanded? If you want to get a bigger picture of LA gang life and its roots, have a look at this insightful documentary by Blood member Cle “Bone” Slon, now an inactive member of the notorious gang. It´s 1.5 hrs in length, but take your time, it´s definitely one of the best documentaries on gang life ever made.

João Brasil, our man from Rio, has recently moved to London to do his MA in Design at the Interactive Media course at Middlesex University. One of his first projects is the giant, custom made MPC that he built, with which he can play Baile Funk through his feet. He used pressure pads and an Ipac board to connect them to my computer using Ableton Live. Wawatch his feet!

Right after my slot at Sinden´s show on Kiss FM, I went to Diesel-U-Music to present new and upcoming heat on Man Recordings, talk a bit about the label, etc.. It´s sort of the 2hr version of my Kiss Fm show. Catch it here:

Daniel Haaksman @ Diesel U-Music-Radio 02/12/09 by Daniel Haaksman / Man Rec

We all love Kuduro and other music coming out of booming Angola these days, but little is known about the decades before Kuduro emerged. The following BBC documentary gives a brief introduction to the first years of Angolan independence – marked by a bloody, civil war, that was shaped by Cold War politics. After seeing this documentary you may hear Batida´s “Bazuka”, in which Angolan civil war veterans talk about their lifes during wartime, with different ears.