I have some photos in this new Japanese Dubstep Guide Book; alongside words by the brilliant Laurent Fintoni! Available on Amazon. (I have no idea what the title characters mean)
“People do meditation to find psychic alignment. That’s why people do psychotherapy and analysis. That’s why people analyze their dreams and make art. That is why many read Tarot cards, cast I Ching, dance, drum, make theater, pry out the poem, and fire up the prayer. That’s why we do all the things we do. It is the work of gathering all the bones together. Then we must sit at the fire and think about which song we will use to sing over the bones, which creation hymn, which re-creation hymn. And the truths we tell will make the song.”
There’s a great musical director inside my head. She gathers tunes without my conscious knowing, playing certain ones at certain times and providing a continuous, changing soundtrack to my changing interior weather system. Sometimes my amateur emo artist self calls on her to illustrate the way I feel (be it good or bad or something else), often to kick it out of my system. Then we rifle through the archives together pulling out songs. Music as detox, music as therapy, music as creation, or re-creation hymns, songs to sing over the bones with. Today, the maestro and I searched for hymns for the leaving of a situation, character and a longer term, annoyingly cyclical part of myself; internal and external predators as Clarissa Pinkola Estes (quoted above) might say. In short it’s a patch that’s ushering in a much needed personal revolution and, like all good revolutions, it needs a soundtrack. Enter Digital Mystikz, whose name is ever more apt in these days of techno-nature; and Mala in particular. I moved through as many of his tunes as I could find on my laptop; allowing the frequencies to penetrate and pull bits of me out like string, a feeling comparable to a recent acupuncture experience. The more I dug, the more I felt relieved; lighter, tweeting (another form of creation hymns perhaps) the tunes that were pulling out the energies that a few years ago, I would’ve stamped into the floor at DMZ at Mass.
Digital Mystikz / @mala_dmz music – nothing compares ; it hits the soul
Despite being reluctant to frequent the pubs and restaurants in the CP triangle (where I work, play, eat, love, give / am given, fight & sometimes fuk myself up) too often, in case the comrades get sick of me, I stayed in Palace last Saturday night; cos the Big Beary Godfather that is Andy Bambino was hosting the Metamono 7″ launch party in his shop and it’s somewhere I’ve never been to at night time and I’d heard that the last one was the boom shizzle and the Metamono guys have been to events at my café and Andy is a café guardian (as well as big beary godfather) and that’s how this community (breathlessly) rolls.
Andy’s a genius, not simply for his capacity to attract people as strange and bewitching as the objects he sells to his world, but also, I’m sure, cos he knows that putting on events and getting people drunk will lead to people wanting some of these strange and bewitching curiosities. (I left with a Metamono badge and a 7″ and have a desire for the bench of red chairs out the front of the shop).
Anyway, here’s the following day’s twitter review:
As the above tweet is so entirely true, I feel it’s only fair to expand on this in the form of :
DRUMZOFTHESOUTH’S
METAMONO MANIFESTO
REMIX
All sound is now available to all musicians everywhere (until they’ve acquired Tinnitus)
Music has become a flaccid shadow of the social power it once was (FLACCID? Music, are you actually gonna take that?)
METAMONO will restrict and limit the sound sources and techniques available to us in order
TO LIBERATE the imagination (How was your weekend? Well, I had a really good space voyage on Saturday actually”)
TO ECHO the struggle society endures (like the echo of an emo artist type drinking testosterone from a bottle…Stelllllaaa-a-a-a Stellaaaaa-a-a-a, Stellaaaaa-a-a-a-a)
Our restraints will be our liberties (The testosterone will later take liberties with a man by telling him to be quiet (mid conversation) just so you can stare at his handsome face. #feminismgonewrong)
Our limitations will be our aesthetic (EVERYBODY’S NOT ACTUALLY ON PILLS PEOPLE, BUT EVERYBODY’S LOSING THEIR SHIT ANYWAY)
We will kick against the pricks (ooh do you want some help with that?!)
METAMONO WILL NEVER
- use a microphone (luddites)
- use digital sound generation or sampling - (u don’t rate hip-hop then fam?)
- use mechanical sound generation (are we really all 30-60+ year olds raving in a furniture shop?)
- use digital sound processing (But seriously how are you doing this?)
- make overdubs (but will put the dub in “so.over.dubstep”)
- be afraid of mono - (Well I aint afraid of glandular fever either which is just as well cos I’m amorous when I’m tipsy)
- remix (*looks around guiltily*)
METAMONO WILL ONLY
- use analogue electronic sound generation (This actually IS the boom shizzle)
- use analogue electronic sound processing (is that what the millions of cables are all about?)
- use digital recording and basic editing when no alternative is available (just when you have me turning my nose up at digital)
- compose and mix simultaneously (& produce the sort of sexy analogue bass a South London bird dreams of)
- build their own or play used instruments (please can you build me a Theremin?)
As part of REMOVALS, a series of events in which THINGS at the Café at Antenna Studios will be subtracted; on Sunday 11th of March, MONEY will be taken away, with alternative forms of value negotiated.In simple terms, this means that if you would like tea, coffee, or cake, you will need to barter – come prepared with things with which to swap them for!!
Items gained by the cafe at the end of the day will be photographed and / or exhibited at the cafe throughout the following week.
REMOVALS is a design research project by Georgina Cook ( Drumzofthesouth / Café @ Antenna Studios) which aims to test and expand on ideas related to transition, adaption and “elimination, by design,” as proposed by the Australian theorist and farmer Tony Fry.
Cafe Thing @ Antenna Studios
Bowyers Yard, Haynes Lane
Crystal Palace, London
SE19 3AN
![Café Session: March 29 [flyer]](http://web.archive.org./web/20130507091932im_/http://drumzofthesouth.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/flyer_29_marchcrop.jpg?w=500)
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