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Ten Cities - a coeval chronicle of internatty club sounds

                                                      

Ten Cities tells a transnational tale of club culture across six decades, 1960-2020, focusing on five European and five African cities: Lagos, Luanda, Berlin, Bristol, Johannesburg, Kiyv, Nairobi, Lisbon, Naples, and Cairo.  Edited by Johannes Hossfeld, Joyce Nyairo and Florian Sievers and published by the art book imprint Spector Books, it weaves together contributions from 20 writers and 19 photographers from those ten cities. 

Release rationale: 

In Africa as well as in Europe, club cultures create free spaces that can function as nocturnal laboratories for societies. Nightclubs are hubs in a complex global network – and at the same time they are manifestations of very local and specific practices. This book tells the story of club music and club cultures from 1960 to the present in ten cities in Africa and Europe: Nairobi, Cairo, Kyiv, Johannesburg, Berlin,Naples, Luanda, Lagos, Bristol, Lisbon. It expands the focus beyond the usual North Atlantic narrative of centres and periphery and instead aims at a coeval narrative. In 21 essays, playlists and photo sequences the book draws intimate portraits of these cities’ subcultures, their transnational flows, as well as the societies from which they evolve and which they, in turn, influence. An urban and political rhythm-analysis from the viewpoint of sound and night. 

                                    

More information about Ten Cities here at the Spector Books website.  

An earlier blogpost of mine about Ten Cities and "xenotronica". 

a bloke, or a beam?

The title seemed wonderfully mysterious.... I used to think, "is it meant to suggest the track is like a beam - a sonic laser beam -  a ray that zaps you and sends you into a voodoo trance?"

Then I thought, "actually perhaps it's a nickname or an alias... 'm'name's Voodoo Ray!'", "that's Voodoo Ray, e's a legend!", "watch out for that Voodoo Ray, a dodgy geezer". 

(Accidental or unconscious echo of  Velvet Underground, "Sister Ray" maybe. Or Suicide, "Mr Ray" )   

Voodoo Ray - a drug dealer,  a "here comes the nice" / "Mr Pharmacist"  kind of personage. Ebeneezer Goode even.    

Voodoo Ray - a shaman. Pagan mystic. 

Voodoo Ray - someone who's done too many trips and gone doolally. A lost-eyed casualty. Bit cracked in the head. Babbles on about cosmic paranoia type stuff.  

The reality is, as everybody knows by now, I'm sure, that the end of the word got cut off the sample. Track should have been called "voodoo rage". And in fact did become "Voodoo Rage" again,  in a drum-and-bass era refix

the source, endlessly amusing on many levels, being this sketch about white Brit bourgeois and their projections onto black music. 

scratchadelikizm