Month: March 2007

3/29/07

I’m severely stressed right now. I am not a promoter, or a booking agent, although I sometimes find myself playing those roles. I don’t like it. I don’t like negotiating fees. I know the realities of my economic situation, but I hate telling an artist I can’t pay them what they think they deserve. I don’t like arranging, hotels, cars, etc. I just like music. I like playing musical recordings for myself and others. I also like seeing live performances and DJs. Unfortunately the musicians and DJs I am interested in will never play Portland unless I bring them. So if I want to see good international cutting-edge musicians and DJs in Portland I find myself playing the role of booking agent and promoter, which as I told you before, is not my cup of tea. It sucks.

We are really excited to bring Tigerstyle to perform for you on Saturday, but it has not been easy. Anjali and I keep telling each other that we never want to do something like this again. A lot of DJs/musicians assume that because we have regular club nights in Portland that we are therefore promoters and booking agents as well. Many DJs/musicians assume that we are interested in booking them because they think they would be a good fit for what they understand of the format of our regular nights. It’s frustrating, because all Anjali and I ever wanted to do is present music to people for their dancing pleasure. If we have a guest that is less time that we have to present music to people, and less money to pay our bills. We are not like many DJs who work high-paying tech jobs during the day and don’t ever have to worry about making money DJing. We need the money from DJing to keep a roof over our heads, etc. At Andaz we only get six hours a month between the two of us to play music for y’all. Only about four of those hours provide the opportuniy to play for a sizable dance floor. That is hardly any time to present the vast quantities of contemporary bhangra and Bollywood we immerse ourselves in, much less the decades of earlier Indian music that we know and love. If we bring a guest in that chops down the amount of time we have even more. Since our time at Atlas is split up between three DJs we each have less than two hours a month to present the whole range of international music that is currently exciting us. I could just stick to ONE of the many genres I am excited about to fill up that time. If we bring a guest to that night we end up with about an hour of time each to present music for the whole month. Hardly suitable to showcase even a slim percentage of all the music I am grooving to in that thirty days.

Sometimes DJs from other cities will approach us saying, “Have me at one of your nights, and I’ll have you at one of mine.” We always tell those people “No” because we are not interested in giving up time at our nights. Sometimes DJs will book us in other cities without any mention of any sort of tit for tat. Unfortunately afterwards if they come asking about playing one of our nights it puts us in a very awkward position. If they had been upfront from the beginning about wanting to play one of our nights in exchange for playing theirs we would have turned them down at the outset. If we have already played their night and only then do they mention their desire to play our night it makes us feel like jerks. Most international DJ nights around the US seem to feature a large cast of different regular and guest DJs. Many parties feature different guests every month. Our parties have never worked that way. Anjali and I tried guests a few times at the very beginning of Andaz, and after realizing how much that didn’t work for our night, we’ve gone four years without any guests. Tigerstyle will be the first. At Atlas we only have a few guest DJs/performers a year (usually if one of the regular three won’t be able to play that night) but that is not the regular format of the night. We all want to play too much to give up what little time we have to play music for you each month.

At Andaz we realized years ago that we would only be interested in bringing guests if they were absolutely stellar international bhangra producers with a live show or DJ set as good as their recordings. We are really confident that Tigerstyle will give you guys something to talk about. We are thrilled to be able to present them to a Portland audience. This is the second time we have tried to make this happen. We are far too aware that Portland will never see this sort of music unless we make it happen. It is frustrating to see that the Tigerstyle show has been completely blacklisted by all the Portland papers (except the Asian Reporter, natch). It is sad that the Portland media shows just how white it is when it ignores a show like this. Much of Portland isn’t exactly xenophobic, so much as just completely ignorant and uninterested in anything outside the world of indie rock or the fads of the national hipster media culture. People diss the magazine Fader for being too much of a hipster rag, but at least they include a lot of Dancehall, Soca, Reggaeton, Funk Carioca, Bhangra etc. features in their magazine. Unlike any paper in Portland, the Fader blog mentioned the Portland show and hyped up the Tigerstyle tour. It is too bad that writers on the other side of the country are more in touch with how important this show is than anyone living and writing in Portland. Portland and its interests are just far too white and predictable for the most part. Thankfully there are plenty of you who don’t fit this stereotype and are up for things outside the same ol’ same ol’ soundtrack. Peace.

IK

3/25/07

Three days, three crazy gigs. Friday Anjali and I DJed a Holi day party for the South Asian Student Association at Reed College. Saturday was a free Anjali and The Kid party at XV, and today was the twice-yearly membership drive edition of our monthly KBOO show. Thank you to everyone who called and and renewed their KBOO membership or became a new member. Double thanks to Fritzman for double-pledging during the same show! Too much. Thanks to all of you we made our goal and sent KBOO a message that the community values the kind of South Asian programming we offer on our show. It is thanks to people like you becoming members that KBOO is the longest-running community radio station in the country!

Friday was the debut of The Incredible Kid and DJ Anjali at Reed College. I used to sneak on to campus to see all sorts of great shows (Stereolab, Versus, etc.) back in the day, and here we were performing on the same stage as Sun Ra did back in the day. Not sure what the students were expecting but we gave them a fair amount of Bollywood sprinkled with some hard bhangra. There was a Nepali guy requesting Panjabi music but I’m not sure I knew exactly what he had in mind. Only after the gig did I realize that I had played mostly older filmi songs from the ’90s and early ‘OOs as opposed to my usual 2004-2007 range. The only request was for recent hit “Beedi” so maybe I should have played more recent. Ah well, people danced, didn’t complain, what more do you want? Kids were covered in colors when we got there so the typical wet, gray Oregon weather didn’t keep people from getting their Holi on. Thank you to Christian for being such a great host and Abhi for guiding our car through the campus.

Saturday was our gig at XV. It’s been a while since we’ve played there and the owner wanted the two of us back. He’s been striving for a more eclectic international music vibe at the club, hosting Gypsymania nights and such. I found a message board post online by the booking agent complaining about this new direction for the club. She wrote about how much better hip-hop does for the club on the weekend. I have played at XV many times both one-offs and regular nights, on my own, and with Anjali. In my experience the people who came to dance were most certainly after the most mainstream overplayed songs imaginable. The booking agent’s post mentioned that an international-themed Satuday night at the club recently had done half the business that a normal hip-hop one would. Knowing that the booking agent wasn’t thrilled about this new direction and that it would probably be her and not the owner who was there most of the night, I was less than thrilled going into the night. Going into a situation where you know you are not wanted is never fun. We loaded in and set up our equipment only to discover that half of our dual CD player had died. One thing people don’t realize is that most international music is not pressed on vinyl. The last vinyl records in India were pressed in 1989. There is some current UK bhangra vinyl available, but the pressing quality is awful, with up to 50 minute sides, when more than 20 is never going to sound good. We usually bring vinyl to our gigs but 90% of our hottest stuff is only available on CD. So if we are hired to play international music it will be a mostly CD set, unless we are playing oldies. Seeing that only one CD deck was working meant that every other song was going to have to be a record, whether we wanted it to be or not. Like I said, 90% of our hottest stuff is only available on CD so I knew it would be a tough night of keeping the dance floor packed while having to spend 50% of the time picking from what few tracks are available on vinyl. To make matters worse it was clear that there were definitely people in attendance who wanted to dance to something very different than what we were presenting.

After having a few people in my face I instantly flashbacked to memories of just how mainstream the taste of many of the dancers there is. Normally we could have played hip-hop for these people all night. However, I knew the XV owner specifically wanted to go in an international as opposed to hip-hop direction (never mind that a lot of what we play is international hip-hop). Because I knew this was his concept, I wouldn’t have felt good playing mainstream hip-hop even if there were requests from the crowd for this sort of stuff. We managed to keep people dancing all night, but I felt like I worked hard enough to earn five times as much money as I did by the end of the gig. As much as DJs will tout the superiority of vinyl (Hey, I love the stuff myself, or I wouldn’t have a house filled to the rafters with it.) the records kept skipping from all the active dancers, while the CDs never did. Even though I had the weight of the needle set as vinyl-destroyingly heavy as possible to try to keep it from jumping out of the groove. Thank you so much to Miko and the Hot Lips crew for being such positive supporters. It really helps to have enthusiastic friends there when you know that much of the crowd and staff at a gig is probably not that into your sound.

Sunday was a long day of work interrupted by our monthly KBOO show. Thanks again to everyone who supported our show. We’ll try to keep it entertaining in the future. Take care ya’ll.

IK

3/11/07

That was one crazy ATLAS night. I feel hung over and I only had a sip of a very spicy Holocene Bloody Mary towards the end of the night. I awoke the morning of the show from a very powerful gig-gone-wrong nightmare. I have these occasionally. I’m DJing at a party, everything is going wrong. No one is there. The equipment is failing. I keep having long stretches of dead air between songs despite all my efforts. I clear whatever few people are there. This one hit me pretty hard. It was centered on Andaz. No one, and I mean no one was there. I thought, “Wow, the party is finally over. After all these years people have moved on.” These dreams never result in a party as disastrous as the nightmare but it still makes me wary the day of the show if I wake up from a scare like that.

Anjali and I were thrilled that the absolutely amazingly knowledgable Jacques (of tribe.net fame) made a trip to Portland to come to ATLAS . . .

3/21/07

So I got hit by the flu and spent a week energy-less at home. During that time I never finished this post. I don’t know how much energy or memory I have at this point to do it justice. I had totally forgotten about the nightmare I had the morning of the show until I went back and re-read my priorly-started post just now. The basics. Jacques came into town and it is always wonderful to have him at a show. It was also great to hang out with him and converse for several hours before the show as well. (Thanks for the fabulous lunch at Typhoon!)

Our friend Jeevan decided to throw her birthday party at Holocene the night of Atlas and there was a large early turn out. I played first shift and halfway through my set there were already quite a fair number of people in the club. I felt bad that it took a while to get a dance floor, and that for a bit it looked like nothing was going to move people off the walls, but people started dancing eventually. Afterwards several people commented on how much they liked my selections, so I have to remember that dancing is not the only measure of the quality of a set. One woman wanted me to write down every song I played and send it to her. I know some DJs keep track of their set lists, but I would only be able to do that if I were writing the songs down as I played them, and when I am frantically searching for what I think will be the perfect next track, “Well, that’s not gonna happen.”

Very quickly the place packed out, and it was a jammed and raging dance party for the rest of the night. Jammed and raging. Hyper energy levels, people dancing on the speakers, etc. My second set was very well received, which felt good. I played a mix of bhangra, kuduro, Bollywood-house, reggaeton, Funk Carioca, and Arabic house. All within an hour. Somehow it all worked and I was able to exit the stage to applause, which was much appreciated. Anjali DJed the last set of the night and played a blast-from-the-past Panjabi Garage set with some Asian R&B tacked on at the end.

That’s all you get. It’s been two weeks and I’m afraid I can’t give you the epic blow-by-blow this time. Believe it or not there have been a number of other posts I wish I could have written. Right now I need to spend every spare minute getting my tax paperwork together and handed over to my accountant. Hope everybody is doing well. See you soon.

IK

We tried to make this happen a while back but now it’s official.  Shit is goin’ down.

I found this image of the Ronettes online and it has been our desktop background at home for a while. Now you get to look at it too. Cheers.

3/13/07

Ugggh. I’m sick again and finding it pretty lame. I’m not devastatingly sick, just enough to have no energy to do anything that needs to be done. Or go to work. Or eat. And I miss eating. I can’t wait to get well enough to devour a massive seven-course Indian feast. Mmmm. I’m still working on my massive FRPG post, so you don’t get that now. I also started a post on the last Atlas. Not sure if I have the energy to finish that right now either. Thanks to everyone who came out. That was one crazy party. Thanks for putting up with my perversity.”Where’s the Party Tonight,” at Atlas? Yeah, who knew where that came from?

One thing I have had the energy to do is spend far too much time on the internet. Searching for CDs of international hip-hop and the like. So frustrating. Hours and hours of banging my head against the screen. Talk about globalization all you want, but most contemporary music in the world is NOT available online. And I should know, because I’ve spent far too much time looking for it. Now I should point out that I don’t do illegal downloading at all. I’m sure that everything is available for free on file-sharing sites, but for those of us who want to purchase music legally there are very few options. I spent forever looking for the Lebanese rapper Rayess Bek with no luck. His website lists the tracks for his new CD but I couldn’t find it online anywhere. I also spent a lot of time on Brazilian websites looking for Funk Carioca only to discover that there was some legislation passed in Brazil so that none of the Brazilian websites are allowed to ship outside the country. Of course I couldn’t find the latest releases anywhere but Brazilian websites.

The amazingly-knowledgeable international music fan Jacques flew in to town to attend the last Atlas. He was kind enough to give me a CD he put together of Dangdut, Malaysian hip-hop, Indonesian hip-hop, and other amazing sounds. Of course you have to travel to that part of the world (like he just did) to get any of it. I know there is no substitute for travelling. Unfortunately a lack of time and money has meant that Anjali and I have had to cancel every hoped-for vacation we wanted to take this Spring. Other than frequent trips to Vancouver, BC we haven’t made it out of the country since our India trip in Spring of 2004. It’s so frustrating. I would love to spend time travelling the world and gathering music, but Portland DJ gigs are only paying enough to pay the rent at this point. Thankfully they are doing that much. Little did you know that the cover charge you pay at the door keeps a roof over my head, but it’s true.

Looking through foreign markets is so much more appealing to me than staring at a screen. I was not raised with computers, and I am certainly ambivalent about all the time I now spend in front of them. Unfortunately if I can’t afford to travel, the internet is my only hope at tracking down contemporary international dance music. As frustrating as it often is. Gotta travel soon. Somehow. Some place sunny, hopefully. With beaches, and beautiful clear water. I think I’ll get well first. Still fantasizing about food . . .

Take care everybody.

IK

3/25/07

When I DJ weddings I tend to use them as an excuse to research and consume massive amounts of music that I think might be appropriate for the gig that I have thus far ignored or neglected in my life. I had very spotty exposure to popular rock music after the 80’s. Basically none since the early ’90s. I have managed to go through life being largely unfamiiar with the Strokes, White Stripes, Hives, Killers, Vines, Jet, My Chemical Romance, Panic at the Disco!, Fall Out Boy, Blink-182, you name it. Much less anything more obscure. I know all the images and all the names from my voracious consumption of music magazines, but I am utterly unfamiliar with their any of their sounds. I was obsessed with indie rock in the early ’90s and then simply stopped being interested or caring about anything rock-related. For an upcoming wedding I have relied on friends and family to catch me up with many of these artists. I spend so much time listening to music that most people in the US have no clue about, that I often have no clue about what most people in the US are listening to. When I do mainstream events such as weddings I feel a real need to have some awareness of popular music. Especially at weddings it is the familiar songs that are a DJ’s bread and butter. The more popular songs I am aware of, the larger my pool of options.

In the 80’s and the very beginning of the ’90s I loved pop-punk music. Bands such as the Descendents, All (Dave Smalley only, please) and Dag Nasty were responsible for a lot of my favorite songs. In college I developed a taste for much darker and more experimental music and left all of the pop stuff alone. I remember I was at a party in the Spring of 1993 and my friends were singing along to early Green Day albums released before they were on a major label. I’d never heard of them and realized that the world of pop-punk had continued rolling right along without me. I felt the same way when I discovered Operation Ivy. (Jawbreaker were also popular with some of my peers that stayed in the scene, but I never checked them out.)

When Green Day and Offspring did hit big many old time fans of punk rock felt a need to distinguish between the music they loved and this new music (many refused to call it punk, or admit any relation) that was dominating MTV and album sales. I liked some of these bands’ songs for the simple reason that they were catchy pop songs. I never bought any of their music but I also didn’t change the channel when their songs came on MTV. However, after these bands’ major label crossover debuts I stopped paying any attention to anything poppy and punky on a mainstream level. Mainly because after that point I no longer watched any television or listened to corporate radio. I did, however, continue to read just about any music magazine that came across my path, so I stayed vaguely aware of the existence of many bands that I had never heard.

Researching music today is a far different thing than what I have experienced over the last thirty years. In the old days I might hear or read about a band and I had to either listen to a friend’s copy, or go buy it myself. I was always interested in music no one around me listened to so my only option was to go buy it. Now anyone can research all sorts of music online with no commitment to buy. I do not get involved in ilegal downloading, but even on a stricty legal level one’s options are astounding. I can simply google a band, or use wikipedia, find their myspace page, listen to some samples, watch some videos on youtube, etc. Kids today might take this for granted but I am aware of just what a new development this is. Without spending a dime I can research any number of bands in a very small window of time through using these online tools. Crazy. I grew up on rummaging around garages, attics, etc. for dusty records so this online music research phenomenon is a very new thing for me.

What I am remembering about myself through this research is how much of a sucker I am for a good uptempo pop song. As if my love for cheezy Bollywood didn’t already confirm this. I am currently loving songs by Blink-182 and New Found Glory (yep, whiney suspect vocals and all) that everyone else may have heard (and hated) a million times. (Maybe after I’ve heard them more than a few times I’ll feel the same way.) I learned that there are a few Strokes songs I think are pretty good. I even discovered how clever the new Fall Out Boy video is.

I am so past caring what is “cool” or not “cool.” (Unfortunately my epic post on FRPGs is taking forever to finish.) I am an old-timer who grew up listening to punk rock and hardcore in the ’80s and yet I feel no need to dismiss top 40 bands who reference these idioms in their music. Punk rock and Hip-hop are similar in that there has always been a great deal of music under their umbrellas, and there have always been people attempting to consecrate a canon and keep it pure. There were always bands or artists wanting to cross-over from within the hip-hop and punk worlds as much as there were also purists trying to excommunicate them. Well I like some hip-hop and some punk and some pop and my listening is not affected by what categories purists wants to stick a song in. I like pop music that works as pop music no matter how much of a sell-out or a poser someone thinks the artist is. Hell, Def Leppard’s “Pyromania” was one of my favorite albums in my early adolescence. (We’ll just ignore “Diehard the Hunter” and “Billy’s Got a Gun.”) That actually leads me to a story about my early attempts to discover punk rock.

My first awareness of punk came in 1982 when I was a sixth grader and the Clash’s “Rock the Casbah” video was playing on MTV. I wasn’t allowed to watch MTV but I caught a glimpse at a friend’s house. One kid told me that if you watched their lips closely you could see that they were really saying “fuck the Casbah.” Around this time my friend Nathan Means told me about some highly-controversial punk band called the Sex Pistols. Now in my mind I tried to think of the naughtiest thing I could that would have people riled up. I imagined a group of sexed-out female Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders with six shooters when I tried to picture the band. In the summer of 1983 I would take various friends to go swimming in the stagnant pools left in a local dried up river. Despite the prevalence of large poisonous snakes in Columbia, Missouri, this somehow seemed like a good idea for cooling off on a hot day. My friend Nathan and I tried to convince my friend Doug Robertson to go one day. He lived near the woods with the dried-up river. He said his mom wouldn’t let him because of all the snakes. Nathan and I had actually never seen any snakes on our swimming trips before, or even worried about the possibility. As we were walking along the riverbed looking for a deep pool that still had water Nathan saw a snake up ahead. I couldn’t see it. He threw a rock at it to show me where it was. Then I could see it, because all three feet of its dark body began slithering towards us rapidly. We ran off screaming. We stopped exhausted after a while only to see another mottled three foot long snake beside us. Aaaaaaah. We kept running and running until I dropped at the edge of a pool only to see another three-foot snake staring at me from inside the shallow pool. Aaaaaaaaaah. We ran all the way to Doug’s house.

We played with his Odyssey computer and Nathan typed in “shit I hate snakes” for the voice simulator to repeat over and over. After a while we started watching MTV. For some reason I was obsessed with finding out what punk was. Every time a video came on (no matter what it was) I would ask, “Is this punk?” Finally Def Leppards’s “Pyromania” video came on and I didn’t care what it was, it was the coolest thing I had ever seen. I was a huge D&D fanatic at the time and the fact that Joe Elliott wielded a broadsword (before it transformed into a guitar) was just too cool. It took me until the end of that Summer when I was visiting my older cousin Carter in Colorado before I could hear it again. In the meantime I just kept singing the phrase “Rock of Ages” over and over because it was the only line I remembered. At my cousin’s I would listen to the album on headphones in the dark after all the parents thought we were asleep. I moved to Portland at the end of that summer and Def Leppard were “over” in Portland. Only unrepentant stoner kids still repped them on their denim. Most kids seemed to be listening only to their older sisters’ and brothers’ music such as the Police, Bowie, the Who, etc. Boring.

At this point I was going to continue on to talk all about punk, hardcore, and high school, but I gotta break off this post for now. I’ll just leave you with the thought of pre-Hysteria Def Leppard. Later.

IK