Bonus Sample: The Music of the Conspirituality Podcast
Derek steps back from conspiracies and wellness this week to discuss something very healing and personal to him: music. Specifically, how music has shaped his career, as well as the story behind the music you hear every week on this podcast. Show NotesEarthRise SoundSystem on SpotifyEarthrise SoundSystem vs Nina Simone: Come YeBole 2 HarlemPete KuzmaGlobal Beat Fusion: The History of the Future of Music
-- -- --Support us on PatreonPre-order Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat: America | Canada Follow us on Instagram | Twitter: Derek | Matthew | JulianOriginal music by EarthRise SoundSystem
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Thank you.
It's been a heavy few weeks.
A heavy few years, we know, but the last few weeks have been something else.
And so I found myself spending more time in record shops, thumbing through vinyl, new releases, 50s-era jazz, extensive world music sections, African music, an incredibly large Eastern European section in a spot just two blocks from my new home.
And while I did purchase a few new gems for my collection, just being in a music store has a calming effect on me.
You don't always need to spend money to have a healing experience.
And I know that turning to music in the face of overwhelming despair seems futile, but in reality, it's the place I go to recharge, to find inspiration, sometimes to reflect and even escape, even for the length of a song that carries you away.
My career began in music, music writing specifically.
The very first article I published in 1993 was On Rage Against the Machine, and I spent a long stretch of my life working in music as a writer, editor, event producer, DJ, and studio producer.
In fact, most of the music you hear on this podcast is the work of myself and David Shomer, aka Duke Mushroom, or as he's now known, Tete Bero.
He goes by many names when he's producing.
But our artist name that we release three albums and four EPs under, and what you hear on this pod, is Earthrise Sound System.
If you've come across our music before, it's probably in a yoga studio.
And it's likely this song that we cut with our old friend Morley.
I'm actually recording this on July 4th, as on the day this is released, I will be traveling overseas, as it happens in Portugal.
and And I just received news that six people at least have been shot in yet another mass shooting in Highland Park, just outside of Chicago.
So I know, again, music will be here for me, but I hope you'll excuse me for avoiding conspiracies and wellness for this bonus episode to talk about the meaning and the background of a few of the songs you hear every week or on many weeks on this podcast.
I first stumbled into international music after randomly purchasing a copy of Night Song, which was a collaborative album between the Canadian guitarist and producer Michael Brook and the great Qawwali singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan while I was in college.
During that time, and for a few years after, I freelanced as a music critic, predominantly covering rock, hip-hop, and electronica.
But a good friend landed a gig as the publicist for Putumayo World Music, and he started feeding me albums by Habib Kwate and Ricardo Lembo.
My interest grew quickly when, in 2001, I landed a job as an editor for the now-defunct World Music Magazine Rhythm, which became known as Global Rhythm while I worked there.
It was later bought by Relix and persisted for a few years before finally going by the wayside.
Unfortunately, America does not have a robust network for international music, which I feel has always been a problem, but it's kind of indicative of our culture.
But for two and a half years, I got to cover every genre of music in the world, got to travel extensively to festivals all over, and I talked to hundreds of artists from every corner of the planet during that time.
And my role there resulted in my first book, which was published in 2005, called Global Beat Fusion, The History of the Future of Music.
At that time, I was deeply immersed in the South Asian music scene in New York City.
I had a weekly residency with tabla player and DJ Kirsch Kalle in the Lower East Side at a bar called Kush.
And I often had the honor of performing at turntables on the Hudson at the Frying Pan, my good friend Nicodemus's party.
And with my own collective, known as Globesonic, and that was myself, Fabian Alsultani, and Bill Bragan, we had residencies at New Blue, SOBs, and Drome, and we supported dozens of artists passing through town at all sorts of venues.
And I often joke that it took a Muslim, a Jew, and an atheist to bring the music of everywhere to America, but I'm forever grateful that I got to perform with these guys for over a decade of my life.
At the risk of sounding simplistic, music really does bring out the best in everyone.
For 10 summers, we held Globesonic on the Hudson, which was held on a New York City pier on the Upper West Side, a little ironically right below Trump's condo building.
We sometimes got noise complaints.
I wonder who was calling those in.
But we got to spin the best music on the planet for upwards of 5,000 people from everywhere and anywhere.
And I tried to capture that feeling in Global Beat Fusion.
So for context, Just to explain why I started performing and then producing the music that I do and have, here's a passage from the beginning of that book.
There's an evolution occurring that's so subtle many will miss it.
It's a slow infusion consuming a world's history within minutes.
It touches the sacred while rooted in profanity.
The perfect melding of organic constructions and digital abductions.
All over the planet DJs and producers are taking elements of their culture's traditional music and splicing it into electronic songs.
Some record live musicians and process the elements into computer programs, while others create entire albums of sampled music from pre-recorded CDs.
And these musicians are not limited by their personal heritage.
With the rapid expansion of technology, one can layer seemingly disparate instruments, such as Mali's kamale and gone, Turkey's darbuka, and Sweden's nyckelharpa, into one track, and more interestingly, make it sound amazing.
As media studies scholar Marshall McLuhan wrote, the transformations of technology have the character of organic evolution because all technologies are extensions of our physical being.
What we create out of our exterior surroundings is representative of what occurs inside of us, in turn a mirror image of the world we live within.
The global village goes digital.
This is Global Beat Fusion, where borders are erased with mouse clicks and the planet, the universe as some believe, is no longer limited by time or space.
Sonic, craftsmen, and women configure new music by combining folk traditions with modern instrumentation.
The result is not only a thrust into the musically possible, it is the creation of a world mythology where rituals occur in the dance clubs and iPods of hip explorers.
As we'll see, the music humans create and the rituals we partake in cannot be separated.
They are of one and the same process.
This digital evolution is an evolution to the established, albeit crumbling, structures, a fact quickly noticed by the habits and downfalls of the recording industry at large.
Change is imminent.
In the confines of churches and record labels alike, restructuring is overdue.
Danger lies only in clinging to old ideas, and American philosophy is currently primed for deconstruction.
It's time the country truly joined the rest of the world.
The groundbreaking of electronic rituals is altering not only how we create and experience music, it also serves as a bridge to understanding each other.
I know, it's very wide-eyed and hopeful, but in some ways I still feel that way.
Obviously that passage is a bit dated, it's almost 20 years old when I first started writing in 2003, but that's just the technology, the sentiment remains the same.
