In the Company of Men - Regarding the Jams of Others: Summer Reading Playlist (Mix 1)
Last night, I read that Paris Hilton is launching her career as a professional DJ. Needless to say, I had a “Come to Jesus” moment with myself and decided if she can DJ, I can certainly learn to do it. So last night, I made my first ever DJ mix. Because I’m a total nerd and project oriented, I am giving myself a ‘concept’ to work with to keep my DJ efforts disciplined and educational. This first mix isn’t perfect - I’m still learning to work on my transitions and seamless beat matching, etc. I should probably stick with one genre to keep things easy but where’s the fun in that?
The concept?
Introducing “Summer Reading Playlists,” in which I teach myself how to DJ by making mixes for the books of my summer reading. Mix One, “Regarding the Jams of Others” is based on the journals Susan Sontag kept in her teens and twenties. The book is Reborn and it’s pretty great. Sontag was a sharp, snarky, and brilliant budding lesbo in her youth. You get insight into her thoughts on motherhood and marriage. Weirder still is that the journal is edited by her son, who is mentioned quite a bit in the journals.
Some of the artists in the mix include: Thunderheist, Body Language, Flying Lotus Burial, Nicolas Jaar, Portishead, Rhye, Delorean, Holy Ghost!, and Toro y Moi
And my favorite Missy Elliot song ever is on it too (“Let Me Fix My Weave”)
I’ll post a full track list in a few days. The mix can be downloaded directly from the my Soundcloud page in case you’re interested. Hopefully others will get some entertainment out of my “educational” summer project. For a first stab, it’s not all that bad. The second half is smoother than the first half but I gotta start somewhere, right? Someone, somewhere, might even think it’s kinda good. Either way, it’s an experiment in learning something new!
Playlist below (Screenshot)
86 Plays
![The Exploit [Working Instrumental Draft] - In the Company of Men [C.Dennaoui]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m2jxqtbn501qb9oun_1334545303_cover.jpg)
In the Company of Men [C.Dennaoui] - The Exploit [Working Instrumental Draft]
Working draft of a new instrumental. Feedback welcome.
Production Notes:
DAW: Logic Studio 9
Keys = Customized Synth Patch from Logic Library
Bass = Electric Bass recorded through Midi Interface
Guitar = Hagstrom Viking RexTone Recorded Through Midi Interface; Modeling done directly in Logic
Drums= Drum loops re-worked and edited in Logic [Only part of the song not actually written and played by me]
379 Plays
Part Two of my Judy Butler, Deep [Minimal?] House track. This is just an instrumental mix. Still working on making Judy Butler’s lecture work without being overkill.
Production notes: Logic,
Synths, bass and guitar parts by C.Dennaoui
I ran my Hagstrom Viking Rex Tone through a Line 6 M13 Stompbox Modeler which is the best $400 dollars I have dropped in a long time.
318 Plays
My pal Rosi, who supplied the vocals on the song “Little”, posted a final mix of one of her songs to Soundcloud today. The track, “1 to 5,” consists of her vocals layered, overdubbed using a looper. I think some kind of vinyl plugin was used on the final mix. Maybe it’s the iZotope Vinyl plugin, which is free and used by folks like Toro y Moi? Hard to say.
Either way, give the song some love; it’s a really lovely track.
395 Plays
I decided to rework a song from forever ago. Not a perfect draft but much better than it was in the Fall. I wrote the song with two other women, Carley and Rosi. Due to logistics, our project (International Women) unfortunately ended sooner than I wished it had. Here’s the one thing we managed to do before Rosi headed back to London to make sweet beats and songs using a looper!
Note: Vox supplied by Carley Mostar and Rosi Croom of Autumn Music; Cello by Carley Mostar
Lyrics written by all of us
Music and Production by Me
367 Plays
If Facebook had been invented in 1995. Note: you’ll need Netscape to properly load this video.
![The Problems of the Commons Are Here [Zizek at Zuccotti Park, 10/10/11] - In the Company of LeXo](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lwqu0gUwZl1qb9oun_1324789951_cover.jpg)
In the Company of LeXo - The Problems of the Commons Are Here [Zizek at Zuccotti Park, 10/10/11]
LeXo, a Paris based electronic band, and I have spent the better part of 8 weeks ‘remixing’ and re-situating Slavoj Zizek’s Occupy Wall Street speech as an electronic music track. We are currently working on a more in depth write-up of our process working across countries, continents, DAWs as two strangers who have never met but connected in the realms of musical taste and political ideology. Expect a more formal post about that in the next week or so. In the meantime, enjoy the Zizek remix. Spread the word and share feedback. This is our attempt to reimagine how something like the Zizek speech can experienced and shared.
#occupychristmas
P.S. I drew the cover art/portrait of Zizek in case you’re interested.
Click through for more information about LeXo’s work or my own.
364 Plays
![1) The screenshot is a sample of my Top 50 Favorite Songs from 2011. It’s a Spotify playlist so it does not include all of my favorite obscure tunes/remixes from the last year. The playlist can be heard here
2) It was at Annicka’s urging that I did this. Listen to her list because it’s better.
3) It skews toward electronic and dance music. [BIG SHOCKER THERE]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lwj4imgpia1qb9ouno1_500.png)
1) The screenshot is a sample of my Top 50 Favorite Songs from 2011. It’s a Spotify playlist so it does not include all of my favorite obscure tunes/remixes from the last year. The playlist can be heard here
2) It was at Annicka’s urging that I did this. Listen to her list because it’s better.
3) It skews toward electronic and dance music. [BIG SHOCKER THERE]
RE: On Beauty, Which Really Does Not Have to Be Dull
Although I agree with
“Most music lovers carry around some shred of a very powerful myth that says the opposite, that pleasant music can never really be where the meaningful ideas are.” This sentence in Abede’s post really struck me as a strange observation. Perhaps I run in very limited circles but I’ve never known anyone to say anything close to the statement above. Here defining what constitutes pleasant music might be useful. For example, I find Burial’s music incredibly pleasant but someone may find Skrillex’s music more pleasant to listen to instead. The stylistic difference between Burial and Skrillex is massive but I think it boils down to restraint versus excess. I assume pleasant music for Adebe is music that demonstrates some kind of restraint or almost minimalistic quality, as his examples of Cocteau Twins, The Mountain Goats and The Chap generally suggest. But I’m not sure, as he does not define it in his essay.
I favor (read: huge bias) music that demonstrates restraint. For me, restraint typically, but not always, suggests a higher level of sophistication, thought and attentiveness by the producer or songwriter. Subtraction and absence can create interesting spaces for communication, affect and contemplation. Conversely, excess tends to obliterate those spaces in almost an imperialist, colonial like fashion: excess (read: over-production) can result in kind of hand-holding between the artists and the listener, as if to say that everything is important so that nothing is actually important.
Saying more with less is hard. Saying something interesting and thoughtful with less is an art. That being said, there are times where I react to all of the minimalist, restrained music I listen to and actively seek out something more maximalist in its approach. If anything, this is exactly why I love Florence and the Machine. A song like “Cosmic Love” is so massive, so epic and grand that it borders on obscenity. And in a way, it is obscene because it is so big. It’s brave in its boldness, in its willingness to be grand because it knows it has to be: an Aphex Twin style piano ballad would be kind of a let down for a song about love that’s as massive as the goddamn cosmos. And yet, the excess affords some breathing room for you, the listener, to consider your own thoughts on ‘cosmic love’ or at least appreciate Flo’s magnificent pipes. So maybe this means I am more of a hypocrite than biased. Or both.
Those who have read my blog for awhile know that I have a real love and deep appreciation for Foucault’s essay “Of Other Spaces.” He discusses (and defines) heterotopias as place-less spaces that engender alternative modes of being or knowledge production. They allow for re-imagination which may or may not be political in nature. Lately I’ve been thinking about how music can act as a heterotopia in Foucault’s framework, especially as it relates to the music I write. On some level, music as a contemplative space is a bit self-evident insofar as people often discuss their personal relationship to a song or music in terms of evocation (e.g., “this song makes me feel x” or “I think about y differently because of this band”). But usually that kind of contemplation has its roots in something personal and emotional and often in relation to universal experiences of love or grief. Not a judgment per se but rather an observation. Restraint in music creates enough breathing room for this level of contemplation because there is less competition between sounds, beats, ideas and feelings. You can hear yourself think and feel.
A few years ago I went through a phase where I started combining my love of critical theory with the art I made. I tried to use the art I made as a way of explicitly explaining the theory through the medium of fine art in almost a pedagogical sense. Part of it was an exploration of how to resituate theory and part of it was about making theory accessible in different ways. Sometimes this was successful and sometimes it was not. Now I find myself wanting to do the same thing with music. While I won’t go into the project too much, I’ve started working on something that begins to scratch at the surface of this a bit.
A few months ago I wrote a post-dub song that sampled Zizek discussing the nature of love, which a few folks seemed to appreciate. As a result of that experiment, I ended up connected with another critical theory and electronic music loving producer based in Paris. Over the past 6 or so weeks, we’ve been ‘remixing’ Zizek’s Occupy Wall Street speech. The process has been really fantastic on a lot of levels. Our project initially started as an attempt to turn the speech into a protest jam for the club kids and evolved into something more like sound art. We realized that as much as we wanted to create something dancey, the ideas Zizek was communicating were being lost to the dance music. So it became about, I think, creating music that created space for both Zizek’s ideas to be resituated but also creating something like a heterotopia for the listener.
We’re in the process of wrapping up the mix, creating cover art, etc for the track. We’re also drafting a statement about it and deciding on what kind of political life we’d like it to have. So in the coming weeks, you’ll probably hear more about the track. I can’t say if I think it’s successful or not because on some level I don’t think that it’s my place to make that call. But maybe, just maybe, the end product will be a solid effort to articulate that space between politics, ideas, beauty and sounds.
In the Company of Men - Brachiopod
In an effort to help me grieve the death of my friend John, I wrote this song in his honor. It’s my way of paying tribute to our friendship and what he meant to me. When we were in high school, he endured countless after school phone calls during which I demoed songs I wrote. He’s one of six people in the world who has a copy of the first album of electronic music I wrote, back when I thought I was DJ Shadow/Roni Size or some shit. I don’t even have a copy of that album anymore.
It seemed only appropriate that I write a song in his memory, a song that managed to capture some of the things I loved about him and some of the things he loved. In a sense, this is less of a “song” and more of an experiment in creating an aural memento mori.
The song contains reworked bass and guitar parts from a song we wrote when were sixteen, a sample from one of his favorite Erykah Badu songs, and a lecture about brachiopods. Brachiopods were among his favorite fossils. More importantly, I wanted to create something beautiful and full of warmth, not some funerary dirge set to a house beat. I wanted to write John something as fierce as he was but only managed something pretty and nerdy. I guess this will have to do. Fierce electronica has never been my forte.
The song is available for download [click the link]. John’s family has asked that donations be made to the Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance- Metropolitan Detroit (www.dbsa-metrodetroit.org) in his honor. The song is available for download on a sliding scale. All sales/donations made from the song will go to the Depression and Biopolar Support Alliance in honor of John and out of respect for his family.
If you’re inclined to make a donation, I’d greatly appreciate it.
And yes, the photo is of John.
_______
Samples used in this song:
Erykah Badu’s “Bag Lady”
“Introduction to Brachiopods” by @flyingscience [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJaMlVwHsxI]
515 Plays
I won’t spend too much time writing about how absolutely stunning INNI (the new Sigur Ros concert documentary) is. Sigur Ros is a band that is difficult to categorize but almost everything they’ve ever written, especially the () album, straddles the edges of chaos, despair and hope. To listen to them live is to be blown wide open; I become porous when I listen to them, as if opening myself to something bigger, something better. So if you can’t see them in person, watch INNI. And if you have seen them in person, watch INNI anyway. The performance of “Untitled 8” at the end of the film is just epic, like make you want to give up on making music forever epic. I’d hate them for being a perfect band if Jonsi weren’t so damn magical. He’s like a unicorn and no one can hate a unicorn.
Dennaoui - Untitled_II
I spent the better part of this evening revisiting some of the electronic instrumentals I wrote several years ago. Similar to stumbling upon your high school journal full of bad poetry, listening to old songs is like opening up a sketchbook of sorts: sometimes I have moments where I think “Oh, I might actually have talent” and other times I think “What the fuck is going on here?”
And then I found this song, which started as a joke and never evolved into anything else. When I finished writing it, my first thought was “This could be in a GE commercial.” Six years have passed and I still think the same damn thing.
30 Plays
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Modern & Im/material Things
I'm Christina Dennaoui. Sometimes I wax philosophical on culture in the digital age. I have an interest in social media, cultural studies, electronic music, critical theory, middle eastern politics, ethnographic research and digital anthropology. I make beats. I drink bourbon. I'm a nice lady, so you should talk to me.
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