DJ Vamanos and ‘Global Ghetto Tech
“The attachment of contemporary art to the “minimal” narrative principle of the catalogue or inventory seems almost a parody of the capitalist world-view, in which the environment is atomized into “items” (a category embracing things and persons, works of art and natural organisms), and in which every item is a commodity — that is a discrete, portable object.“
Susan Sontag: The Aesthetics of Silence, in: Styles of Radical Will, 1969, source: http://www.ubu.com/aspen/aspen5and6/threeEssays.html#sontag
The evidence can be found on techno dancefloors around the world, from Cologne to Berlin, London to Peking—constructed using similar minimal sound-aesthetic strategies and dominating the clubs for almost fifteen years, this parody of the capitalist logic of efficiency, in so far as it was ever intended as such, has long lost its shine. Politely, stiffly, the dancers stay in step but remain alone, their fists punching the monotone, perfunctory beat in the air. Ecstasy is something else.
Help is on hand from what were until recently the furthest reaches of the club world. The fresh sounds are spreading like wildfire via MySpace, hipster blogs and dance music forums: Kuduro from Angola, Kwaito from South Africa, Baile Funk from Brazil or Mambotronic, Reggaeton and Digital Cumbia from Latin America.
All these styles, provisionally grouped under terms like “global ghettotech” or simply “tropical”, solidify the link between regional style elements and the production techniques and beats of Western genres such as techno, house or grime, often with hip-hop- or ragga-inspired vocals. Another similarity exists—they are great at reviving tired dance floors.
One person who recognized this phenomenon early on is the Brixton-based DJ Vamanos. Since first hearing the bass-heavy sound of local producers during extended trips through Latin America in 2004, he has been captivated by the progressive urban dance music of the southern hemisphere. Vamanos brings the sounds to his explosive DJ sets at the DJ and producer duo Radioclit’s monthly Secousse parties at the Notting Hill Arts Club in London.
For over three years he has also been running Ghetto Bassquake, a music blog whose international readership is steadily growing and which today is seen as one of the most cutting-edge online sources for contemporary international club music.
Vamanos shares his enthusiasm for ‘nu-whirled’ music with many others. It is a sound keen to break with the ethno-kitsch clichés and authenticity-babble of the past. “Global musical thinking will be part of what saves us as a species,” reads the MySpace site of Cool Places Radio, which also dedicates itself to promoting global sounds. “We think it’s actually part of a larger shift in musical awareness. Music blogs and new breeds of international-music-focused labels have a lot to do with people opening their ears to music they would’ve dismissed before. If we can expand that acceptance and enthusiasm into all aspects of foreign cultures, we’d truly be living as the global nation we should be. Music is just one of the first smoke signals.”
Meanwhile, the protagonists of various global music scenes are already sampling each other, Angolan kuduro tinkered from the snippets of a Balkan brass band meets kuduro funk from Rio. At least on the Internet the fragmentation of music into commercial units seems to be giving way to an endlessly integrative multiplicity