The Host Tale

The concept behind the joint-venture consisting of d.b.h and the two turntable wizards Chrisfader and Testa is quite simple: Take a specific genre of music, sample and flip it into danceable beats. 

In the case of their second EP "Dabkeh", named after a popular Mediterranean form of line-dancing, the subject of the musical explorations is the Arab world. The three guys from RLS spent quite some time mining old vinyl or cassettes to create the tracks on this EP, in the hopes of getting some wild Dabkeh moves started on dancefloors worldwide!

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www.restlesslegsyndrome.bandcamp.com/
www.tiefparterrerecords.com 
www.duzzdownsan.com 

Buy at Juno

Restless Leg Syndrome - Dabkeh - 01 Ya Nass

https://www.nts.live/shows/ernesto-chahoud/episodes/beirut-daze-w-ernesto-chahoud-26th-november-2021

Beirut Daze w/ Ernesto chahoud & Radio AlHara 261121

This is a 66 minute audio essay on The Travelling Archive, an archive of field recordings from Bengal, written and presented by singer and writer Moushumi Bhowmik. The essay was written for presentation on Baba Betar, an internet radio, that partnered Chobi Mela International Festival of Photography 2021 and was hosted by Arfun Ahmed. The theme of the festival was Shunyo, which could mean both zero, emptiness or the point from which to start all over again.

In this essay, Moushumi remembers people and places by listening to voices from past and continuing journeys within and around Bengal. Bengal is both a physical space and a space of the mind in this story. Wistfully told, it draws the listener into a very personal field of listening by weaving song with sound and sound with silence. Moushumi sits in her room in Kolkata, and as she talks, recording herself, the night moves towards dawn. Dogs bark, the last trains pass through the station, a plane goes swimming in the sky, people call out, they open and shut doors and windows, while slowly in the dark a map unfurls.

This soundtrack has been mixed by Sabyasachi Pal. 

The voices we hear come in the following sequence:
1. Chobi MelaX team, hawa mithai sellers and others at the Dhanmondi Lake tea stall area. Recorded by Moushumi Bhowmik on a Redmi phone in February 2019
2. Aseer Arman’s song playing through speakers during The Travelling Archive installation at  Abdur Razzaq Biddapeeth, Dhanmondi. Recorded by Moushumi Bhowmik on a Redmi phone in February 2019
3.Barindra Das recorded at Shankar Hotel, Silchar on a PD150 camera by Sudheer Palsane in August 2005
4.Naseema recorded in Dhaka on a Sony minidisc recorder by Moushumi Bhowmik in December 2004.
5.Binoy Roy recording from cassette Pranto Prantarer Lokgaan Volume 8 of series Shikorer Sandhane, produced by Bhromora, Kolkata in 1993.
6.Putul Sarkar recorded in Gouripur, Assam by Sudheer Palsane on a PD150 camera in August 2005.
7.Deben Bhattacharya voice from interview with Aly Zaker for Ekushey TV, Dhaka in February 2001. 
8.Muhammad Safi recorded by Deben Bhattacharya in 1971, released on album Echoes of Bangladesh. (Fremeaux, 2008) 
9.Munda women of Munshigonj, Sundarban, Bangladesh in conversation with Moushumi Bhowmik recorded by Sukanta Majumdar on a Sound Device 633 recorder with a Sennheiser 418 mic in January 2018.
10. Abdul Hamid Jalali and others recorded in his home in Sylhet by Moushumi Bhowmik on a Sony minidisc recorder by Moushumi in December 2004
11.Ranjit recorded in Rajghat Tea Garden, Srimangal, Bangladesh by Moushumi Bhowmik on a Sony minidisc recorder in December 2004. 
12.Naren Hansda and Chapalabala recorded in Jahajpur, Purulia on a Sony minidisc recorder by Sukanta Majumdar in February 2007.
13. Sultana and Jadab Sarkar recorded in Sonai, Cachar, Assam on a PD150 camera by Sudheer Palsane in August 2005.
14. Nityagopal Das Baul song from album Inner Knowledge released by Real World Records in 1997. 
15. Chintamoni recorded by Soumya Chakravarti on a Sony TC D5M cassette recorder in Santiniketan in 1984.
16.Hajera Bibi recorded in Faridpur on a Sony minidisc recorder by Sukanta Majumdar in April 2006.
17. Bhaktadas recorded by Sukanta Majumdar at home on a computer in Kolkata in 2010 (mistakenly remembered as 2009 in the essay).

Songs   Grow  Out  Of  The  Land

This piece is part of a larger project (hebrides-suite.co.uk) that attempts to both explore and communicate something about history and memory related to the Outer Hebrides of Scotland, through sound. It uses a mixture of monologues, field recordings and interviews collected during a number of trips to the Outer Hebrides as well as material from existing oral history archives.

Crofting life on the islands of the Outer Hebrides has always been intimately connected with the sea – as a source of food, myth and legend.

As you travel north from Tarbert, Harris the road climbs up hugging the coast. Rounding the headland and turning inwards towards the wild interior of the northern part of the island there is a view across the bay to a single chimney overlooking the sea at Bunavoneadar, the last vestige of Harris’s lost whaling industry. It was started by Lord Leverhulme a previous owner of Lewis who envisaged a more prosperous future based on fishing rather than crofting.

The whaling station was successfully run by Norwegians employing local people at various times during the twentieth century and finally closed in 1953.

Today, as Seonag McVicar recounts in an interview with Caitriona Maccuish, the main local fishing catches are lobster, crab and shellfish which are mainly sold to the foreign market. Whales can however be spotted around the coast and occasionally one gets washed up on a deserted Hebridean beach.

In 2006, I sat looking through the misty soft rain towards the ruined chimney and listened to a ship motoring into the sea loch below, almost right up to the whaling station, lifting lobster pots. A little further up the road is the spot where on two separate cycle tours from the south to the north of the Outer Hebrides I was defeated by a mixture of horizontal rain and a ferocious headwind and gratefully turned around and headed back towards Tarbert and the gentler south. On one of those journeys I remember the sound of a weaving loom from inside a shed as we passed it on the road.

Where Once Were  Whales includes the voices of  Donald MacSween of Ness and John Maclean from Berneray recorded by Cathy Lane; Seonag McVicar talking about working on fishing boats as part of the Taigh Chearsabhagh oral history archive in Lochmaddy and Curstaidh Mackay reciting a rhyme about food (particularly shellfish) boiling times which was recorded in 1977 by D.A. MacDonald for the School of Scottish Studies. The waulking song ‘Cha Deid Mi Do Dh’Fhear Gun Bhata’ (I’ll Nor Go to a Man without a Boat) was recorded in Benbecula by Alan Lomax in 1954 and tells of the superiority of the skipper of a fishing boat over other men.

Where Once Were Whales (Extract)

Recientemente nos hicimos de un micrófono AMBEO VR de Sennheiser, y obvio que nos salimos a jugar con él a distintos lugares. Aquí algunas pruebas de las grabaciones en Formato B.

Ciudad de Mexico Calle Madero_1

Tre Fontane

As a composer one of the most rewarding activities is teaching people about soundscape composition. In my workshops participants learn about the soundscape and take part in field recording and composition activities. These workshops bring a variety of people together all with an eagerness to learn something new while sharing their own creative experiences. Their own experiences of their sonic environment and connections to place offer the composer a fresh insight into a new place, such as Trafford, Manchester.

This piece is a celebration of cultural diversity, a showcase of creative ideas through the exploration of our sonic environment. The recordings gathered from these activities have been used to create a new soundscape, one in which is inspired by the creative explorations of the participants during the workshops.

I would like to thank all of the participants who attended the workshops and the staff at Seed Studios for making this happen. I would also like to thank Gemma Bass and Gary Farr for inviting me to collaborate with them on this project.

Sowing Seeds

A pumping ghetto tech tinged mix from DJ SPIT (aka @handjobberlin) is sexy hard dance personified. Nasty n groovy bby.

HARD DANCE is going on tour – https://harddance.boilerroom.tv/

HARD DANCE 022 - DJ SPIT

The House in the Woods

Cathy Lane is a composer, sound artist and academic. Some of her  work uses spoken word, field recordings and archive material to explore aspects of our listening relationship with each other and the multiverse.

Where Once Were Whales (Extract)

playingwithwords