Weekend reading
A couple of interesting articles from the Village Voice for ya... New York musician Victor Axelrod (aka Ticklah, Antibalas, Easy Allstars) rehearses for the launch of his new album... LINK
"Victor Axelrod, the thirtysomething keyboardist, arranger, and engineer who creates reggae music under the handle Ticklah, decides to open the sidewalk grates early. His aptly named Don't Trip studio is tucked beneath a Brooklyn sidewalk in a desolate section of Gowanus: Washing machines double as amp stands, keyboards are stacked like pancakes, drums are stuffed in corners, and a large mixing console holds court among egg crates and pegboards full of patch cords..."
excellent backgrounder on Wax Poetics magazine, on the launch of their new anthology... LINK...
"Reading Wax Poetics, Brooklyn's glossy, reverent, visually immaculate zine dedicated to funk, soul, hip-hop, and the other obsessions of crate-diggers worldwide, is enough to make you wish neither compact discs nor the Internet had ever been invented. That vinyl sounds better is debatable; that vinyl looks better is undeniable. Compared to the woeful postcard dimensions of CD insert art and the laughable thumbnails we now lug around on our iPods, beholding an album cover nowadays, huge and warm and bright and colorful and evocative, is like staring into the face of God..."
"...The best writing in Wax Poetics concerns the collector just as much as the collected: [take] Anthology highlight "Make Checks Payable to Charles Mingus," written by Karl Hagstrom Miller and reprinted from issue no. 1, details the ultimately failed efforts Mingus made to establish his own mail-order record label. As rarely discussed history, it's fascinating, but it's bookended by the surprisingly affecting saga of Karl himself discovering three of those releases in a junk shop in Catskill, New York. He's clear-eyed about his role as a cultural scavenger ("Desperation is the friend of the record collector. Hipness depends on finding a population aggrieved enough to produce good music, suddenly pushed to the point of parting with it") and honest about when money trumps nostalgia: The piece ends when Karl sells all three exorbitantly priced records and buys a laptop..."
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