Tresillo Rhythm in Global Club Culture

Tresillo Rhythm in Global Club Culture

As part of his excellent System Focus monthly column, Adam Harper looks at how global dance culture is using the tresillo rhythm, the fundamental triplet rhythm where two beats fit in the place of two. It becomes easy to spot once you look for it, and you can hear in much of Cuban and Latin music. Harper looks at how many underground producers have been using this in more non-traditional ways. He looks at its applications in grime, UK funky, experimental/collage, and reggaeton. The entire post is worth a read, and the playlist is really great, but the money quote:

    A simple rhythm bounces back and forth over the once vast Atlantic ocean, ever faster. It begins in Sub-Saharan Africa, but Europeans brutally pull it up by the roots—slaves bring it with them on a long journey to the Caribbean. By the nineteenth century it has become the defining element in the Afro-Cuban dance habanera, which finds its way to New Orleans where it helps form ragtime, then to South America, where it contributes to tango, and to Europe, where it becomes the most famous section of one of the eras most popular operas, Carmen. It also spreads across the Caribbean, Latin America and Africa and back again, and its descendents meet and collaborate, now using recordings and drum machines. Soon it doesnt even need to touch the water. Ricocheting off satellites and barreling down cables, it permeates the information sphere, with space and place just an interesting footnote on a Soundcloud profile.
Che Guevara in Song
June 16, 2015

Che Guevara in Song

Judy is one of if not my favorite voice in Latin music criticism/journalism, and she created an interesting playlist for Rhapsody: Latin songs that pay homage, either directly or in spirit, to Che Guevara. She correctly identifies Che as being more of a pop cultural meme than a revolutionary figure at this point, but it is interesting just how positive most of the tracks are towards the man. Spending nearly a year in Miami, I wouldve guessed that his legacy in music would be a bit more mixed. There are even several albums dedicated specifically to Che.

Dubbin With King Jammy

Dubbin With King Jammy

Jason Gubbels, who has done an admirable job as the world critic over at Rhapsody, highlights the work from one of Jamaicas greatest and generally overlooked producers, King Jammy. As Jason points out, King Jammy has played a great influence on at least two eras of reggae. He was the dub master at King Tubbys studio during the 70s, and then later basically invented dancehall in 1985 with his single for Wayne Smith, "Under Me Sleng Teng." This is a very enjoyable playlist featuring everyone from Black Uhuru to Shabba Ranks.

Musical Diplomacy: Cuban-American Jazz

Musical Diplomacy: Cuban-American Jazz

With diplomatic relationships with Cuba thawing, theres been renewed interest in the music of the Caribbean Island. For this playlist Judy focuses her attention on the direct collaborations between Cuban and American musicians, with the subtext being that though formal diplomatic or financial ties may have been severed during the Castro years, but the cultural exchange between that two nations has continued. Books have been written on the influence of Cuban on American music, particularly on jazz and the music of New Orleans, and this cant be understated. Through much of the antebellum period, New Orleans served as the port of call for slaves ships coming from the Caribbean, and much of what we think of as foundational American music found it antecedent in places like Cuba. This playlist doesnt go back that far, of course, but theres some great stuff on here, from the pre-Castro days of Chico O’Farrill and Nat King Cole, to the modern music of Wynton Marsalis and Arturo O’Farrill.

The Best Rhumba Tracks

The Best Rhumba Tracks

Rumba has been around for over 100 years, and has evolved to encompass many different unique styles. It has it’s genesis in the music that slaves used to play in Cuba, and was popularized in Havana when that city became the center of the cultural universe during prohibition. The flavor of Rumba that famed British DJ Gilles Peterson ethnomusicologist Crispin Robinson collects here is rustic, polyrhythmic and deeply spare and soulful. It’s a pleasure to read these two trade tracks. A note on this playlist: Spotify’s catalog is spare, and some songs have been substituted for other tracks by the artists they selected. We really wanted to bring you a Rumba playlist and this is the best we could do.

Sucessos! Best of Mais Um Discos

Sucessos! Best of Mais Um Discos

Since 2010, Londons DJ Mais Um Gringo—thats Portuguese for "One More Gringo"—has channeled his passion for Brazilian music into Mais Um Discos, a label dedicated to contemporary Brazilian musicians who, in the labels words, "fuse styles, disregard genres, and irritate purists." Their catalog runs the gamut from Graveolas sprightly nova-tropicalia to the loping rhythms and rhymes of Espião and other artists featured on their compilation Daora: Underground Sounds of Urban Brasil. They pay special attention to the deep links between African and Brazilian musical traditions: Poet Arnado Antunes and guitarist Edgard Scandurra team up with the Malian kora legend Toumani Diabaté, while São Paulos Bixiga 70 pay tribute to the spirit of Afrobeat with a distinctly Brazilian twist. Venturing even further afield, Metá Metá project samba through a fuzzy, post-punk lens.

Joe Gibbs Reggae Essentials

Joe Gibbs Reggae Essentials

Joe Gibbs was one of reggae’s great businessmen and ambassadors, and also one of the genre’s great producers. He was responsible for the highly influential African Dub series, introduced Dennis Brown to America, and worked extensively with the great Lee “Scratch” Perry. The write-up to this playlist on FACT provides an excellent detail to all of this, and the playlist itself is a monster. Though one wonders why they limited themselves to so few songs, the chronological order works to its advantage, as you can hear Gibbs’ sound (and, by extension, the sound of reggae in general) evolve from the late-60s throughout the 70s. As a note, some of these songs were not available on Spotify, but we did our best to recreate it.

Ñu-Cumbia: New Sounds from Old, Forbidden Rhythms

Ñu-Cumbia: New Sounds from Old, Forbidden Rhythms

About a decade ago, cumbia experienced a “ñu” makeover. The traditional genre that was once the soundtrack to Latin America’s ghettos bridged the gap between the old and the new, the poor and the rich. Refashioning themselves as ñu-cumbia, a fresh generation of cumbia-thriving musicians and producers replenished this once-marginalized genre by injecting it with an array of riveting sounds, from reggae to EDM to jazz and even balkan. Uruguay’s Campo, who adds tango’s sophistication to the breezy “La Marcha Tropical,” introduces his beats to sound system block parties and South American resorts alike; Bomba Estéreo, the feisty Colombian duo known for igniting global dance floors, inspired Will Smith to start rapping again after a ten-year hiatus in the EDM-tropical “Fiesta (Remix)”; and ZZK Records, Buenos Aires’ pioneering digital cumbia label home to Nicolá Cruz, La Yegros and Fauna, keeps spotlighting this Latin American music explosion, now in an upcoming documentary series. While some setlist-featured musicians maintain the cumbia rhythm in its original güiro and accordion-driven format, others let experimentation lead the way. These are the new sounds of the old forbidden rhythm.

The Best Afro Disco
November 18, 2016

The Best Afro Disco

This post is part of our Disco 101 program, an in-depth series that looks at the far-reaching, decades-long impact of disco. Curious about disco and want to learn more? Go here to sign up. Already signed up and enjoying it? Help us get the word out by sharing it on Facebook, Twitter or just sending your friends this link. They’ll thank you. We thank you.Thanks to a cadre of specialty imprints, as well as guerilla crate diggers like Awesome Tapes From Africa, music fanatics can now explore numerous reissues and compilations that chart the evolution of dance music in post ’60s Africa. It’s from this wealth of archival work that Resident Advisor has constructed “Afro Disco,” a collection of cuts that show how the scorching syncopation of mid-’70s Afrobeat gradually cooled into a purring, disco-inspired repetition by the dawn of the ’80s. Another key change is a heavier reliance on synthesizers and chunka-chunk guitars fed through the kind of coked-out effects that Chic’s Nile Rodgers pioneered. RA’s aesthetic is so tightly focused (big surprise there) that one could easily imagine these tracks being released as their own compilation.

Welcome to Psych 101

Welcome to Psych 101

Psychedelic music emerged in the mid-’60s as a mutant offspring of the British Invasion and American garage rock. But, over the past five decades, it has morphed into so many different forms that its more accurate to describe it as a feeling than a sound. Be it the surrealist pop of The Beatles and Caribou, the brain-melting feedback of Jimi Hendrix and The Jesus and Mary Chain, the dreamy reveries of Slowdive and Tame Impala, or the head-nodding beats of Madvillain and Flying Lotus, psychedelia is hard to pin down—but you’ll know you’re hearing it when you feel your mind altering.In The Dowsers Psych 101 feature, well be exploring the psychedelic sound through a 14-playlist program that breaks down the crucial components of this mesmerizing musical kaleidoscope. This introductory mix provides an overview of what you can expect in your inbox over the next two weeks: the rock n roll radicals, the Afrofuturist freaks, the headiest hip-hoppers, the most adventurous beatmakers, the lava lamp–smashing metalheads. By the end of it, we hope youll see psychedelia less as a hippy-dippy 60s phenomenon and more as an endlessly renewable energy source that is forever fueling boundary-pushing artistry across all genres and eras. For now, we invite you to turn off your mind, relax, and float downstream—and brace yourself for the many weird and wonderful trips to come.

'90S THROWBACKS
Indie Rock Face-Off: Neo vs. ’90s

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Indie Rock Face-Off: Neo vs. ’90s

Headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, figures, images, and figure captions can all be styled after a class is added to the rich text element using the "When inside of" nested selector system.

Indie Rock Face-Off: Neo vs. ’90s

Headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, figures, images, and figure captions can all be styled after a class is added to the rich text element using the "When inside of" nested selector system.