Strictly 4 My Underground Homo Deep House Thugs: DJ Sprinkles - Midtown 120 Blues

(That's Cosey Fanni Tutti playing cornet towards the end of the track, by the way.)

"fresh" is one of my tracks of the year. tony benn!

Mine too. Such an beautiful thing.

While googling Dave berg recently, I found a cool article terre wrote about him. I know it's childish but I still get off on "wow this artist I love loves this totally unrelated other artist I love" thing

just sent this album to a friend today!

The audacity of the Simon Fisher Turner remix is that (as far as i can tell) he lets the original play from start to finish. completely unedited, and lays his beats straight over the top.

Yes, both the original and the remix have an identical playing time, and I can't discern any tweaks other than Sprinkles adding beats, plus the deepest, most booming/all-enveloping bass I've heard in possibly forever.

sprinkles' vinyl-only insistence is her only flaw

There's even a URL to that effect on the label of the 12" - it points to http://comatonse.com/popup_youtube.html - in which the issue is explained in some detail (as you might expect!)

she isn't vinyl-only. maybe you mean that she is insistent on maintaining her own distribution chain. you can see that as a flaw but she has some well-thought-out arguments for it. xp

lol killing joke more like homo gays

remember a (more expensive than i could afford) flashdrive release of a superlong ambient piece on Terre's website a while back so definitely not vinyl only.

even if she didn't release the most incredible music she would be one of my favourite current writers on music and cultural theory i think

yeah that's how i feel pretty much. i'm not head-over-heels in love with everything she's involved in, but the writing has really stuck with me.

on the other hand, the remix collection that came out a few years ago has really grown on me. when i listen to it i always remember this thread title and think about how appropriate "strictly 4 my underground homo deep house thugs" is as a descriptor for the dj sprinkles stuff.

Does anyone feel like it's a big oversight that Terre does not address the clear financial motive for an artist not to want streaming? Talk about an elephant in the room in those multiple long essays.

wait, you mean to make a living for your work? she mentions it explicitly somewhere i'm pretty sure but i thought it was pretty clear that is where she's coming from.

http://comatonse.com/writings/2013_social_media_content_removal_fail.html

"I do have concerns with file sharing, but they are not about economics, nor authorship rights. Rather, they are about an eradication of any specificity of context and audience that occurs when information is shared through populist models of making all information available to everyone."

seems like addressing it to me

Was gonna say

I guess... maybe I just disagree with the argument

Everyone already knows the financial and copyright arguments for and against. It's actually v interesting how he chooses to reframe the argument.

For what it's worth I used the male pronoun there not out of disrespect nor really carelessness (more like an absence of thinking about it) but I'm aware of using it now, in retrospect. A couple of years ago I was at a seminar where Terre spoke at different points over the weekend that it lasted where he basically stated that male/female pronouns meant very little to him personally, while conceding that they might rightly mean a lot to others, and that he slips between he and she so often that s/he doesn't particularly expect others to "catch up" on that, so to speak. I mean, he's an amazing writer and thinker and I'm paraphrasing wildly and his explanation was much greater but he was basically stating that people might get caught up on that one thing (pronouns) while missing other important aspects. As long as you don't use "he/him" disrespectfully with others, of course.

yeah i thought i remembered him saying that but i was too lazy to search for it and i didn't want to look gauche tbh, thanks for sharing.

I do think, though, that it's a relevant analogue to his concerns about streaming and file sharing - ie people getting caught up on one aspect to the extent that they completely miss another important aspect. If I could remember better I could maybe explain it better but, really, I've rarely read an essay of Terre's where he hasn't said something that's totally done that thing he does, so seemingly casually, where he says - ok we know that but that but I'm more focussed on this other aspect that no one talks about.... I really do think he's one of the best thinkers and communicators in current culture.

I met him after that seminar I mentioned and he was so nice but nice in a completely disarming way, like you went up to him shyly to say "thanks for the talk" and five minutes later you're having a no-bullshit discussion about multiple topics and he was always interested and made you feel like anything you said was worthwhile.

He's truly a hero of mine.

Did she like being a d.j.? Was it fun? “That’s kind of inconsequential for me,” she said. What, I asked, if I used a different word—fulfilling, rewarding, interesting? “These are all horrible words, just, like, meaningless words,” she replied, “or they have the wrong meaning. They all lead towards this desire to identify cultural producers, media producers, musicians, artists, as these fulfilled people who are somehow outside of the standard agonies of labor production. You know—they ‘enjoy what they do.’ If you’re in any of these fields, and you complain about your job, people say, ‘What are you talking about? You do it because you love it, right?’ If you’re a computer programmer, and you say, ‘I fucking hate my job,’ nobody’s going to interrogate you on that. For me, this idea of job-hating as economic critique is really necessary in the media industries.”

from the new yorker link upthread, stuck with me.

She raised her eyebrows and gestured to me. “Writing, too,” she said. “You know: these are industries that rely on volunteerism. They rely on people agreeing to do things for little to no money just to ‘get out there.’ There is the worst kind of economic exploitation going on around these industries that supposedly represent the people who are the most liberated and in harmony between what they do and how they survive. This is a real irony that has to be exploded, immediately. That’s why I’m totally uninterested in the language of optimism and fulfillment and all of this fucking, you know, capitalist bullshit. It’s like, No. This world fucking sucks. Work sucks. It’s O.K. to admit that. We need to admit that to get to the better conversations, right?”

Still, must be a pretty sweet gig, right? ;)

maybe, but "creative" work has become more proletarianized for sure, and the extent to which that's relative and plastic and changing is worth interrogating.

Because I enjoyed "Shishapangma" so much (never having totally "got" TT/Sprinkles before), I splashed out £££ on the two Fresh Insight 12" EPs, and DAMN it was money well spent. Sonically, they're immaculate - that BASS! - and I can't think of any other recent vinyl purchases that sound quite so fine. But what really fascinates/thrills me is the way that the Tony Benn speech on "Fresh" sits so perfectly on/around the beat throughout. Either there's been some very skilful editing, or - and this seems more likely - there's an instinctive rhythm to Benn's speech pattern that the track has amplified. Either way, it's extraordinary.

was v much looking to dj sprinkles in london on new year's day, but left feeling completely alienated by the most str8 boi dancefloor i've seen in years

Mike, I think that it's micro-edited to make the occasional word fall a bit better but I suspect that they hear a speech of a particular rhythm and pace and decide to make a track around it rather than seek out speeches and make them fit.

For whatever reason neither of the Fresh Insights 12"s have ~clicked~ for me, even though I luvvvvv pretty much everything TT does, and (well, I've never really listened to Mark Fell qua Mark Fell, but I luvvvv SND). The idea of combining the former's play on house signifiers with the latter's bleeding edge sound design, set to things like Arthur Scargill speeches, is theoretically maybe the best record to ever be made, but I haven't felt it (maybe I just need to not listen to low-res samples on laptop speakers?).

But thanks for pointing out Shishapangma, for which I ordered it a couple of days ago.

i'm giving queerifications & ruins a go on a new little onkyo cd micro system i got, haven't had something like that in a while, and wow it's really surprising me. all the elements that sounded like a mess to me before are clicking into place, it's really idiosyncratic and complex... and like i'm finally feeling "woah that is a bonkers beat" to a dj sprinkles track. shamefully i've never owned midtown 120 blues on cd. i think i need to rectify that.

its really expensive :(

Q&R is one of those releases which, like, you know it's amazing but kind of take that for granted (like, "well of course a collection of DJ Sprinkles remixes is gonna be awesome"), and then you listen to it again and think "hey wait actually this really is some of the most amazing music ever devised."

Midtown 120 Blues has been issued on CD three times and it always goes out of print really quickly (was lucky enough to get a copy of the 2012 version). One of my favourite albums of all time. I completely missed out on Q&R though and that's going for £40+ now.

Wow, I'm glad I bought those two records when they came out... Haven't really seen prices go so up for recent(ish) CDs, beyond the FAX label catalogue.

Looks like you can still get a copy of the Kami-Sakunobe House Explosion album on Discogs for a decent price, I'd recommend acquiring it while you still can, it's almost as good as Midtown 120.

Comatonse has both Midtown 120 and Queerifications for reasonable prices btw

DJ Sprinkles is in Glasgow in a couple of weeks, 14th August at Berkeley Suite - is anyone going? Jed?

Yes, Kraków, fancy a mini fap before? Will arrange on Facebook.

I'll probably be going even though it's a Sunday. I saw her at Subculture a few years ago and she was terrific

I'm also hoping that fap means something different in this context from what it usually means

Ha! It's an old school Ilx term for a meet up of ilxors. It stands for fancy a pint?

Paolo, fancy a pint?

Jeez, just looked up what fap means outside of Ilx.

Yeah OK. ILX Deep House Thug meetup!

That would be great jed. I'm keen to go, but my club experience is basically nil, so I'll definitely need encouragement and friendly faces!

Terrific. We can arrange shortly before then!

Took the plunge, ticket bought!

Great! The Berkeley has an upstairs bar and sit down area which is pretty chill.

I think Mr and Mrs Arika might be going too?

Yeah, it would be nice to see them too if they are. I'll drop them a line.