Welcome to the Videodrome. Today it is a moving pixels edition of Ghetto Palms, featuring 3 new videos (and one audio-stream) from some of my favorite recurring characters. I estimate that each clip has about 30 frames per second. Multiplied by an average of 4 minutes = 7,200 frames x 3 videos = 21,600 images in total. Using the formula that a picture is worth a thousand words, today’s visual presentation clocks in at roughly twenty-one million, six-hundred thousand words—not even counting the actual words I’m typing now—all of which has got to be worth at least one blend. Let the show and tell begin!
First off: new music and a new video from 77Klash. Animator Taagen Swaby scrawled some appropriately nightmarish, dynamic blackboard-jungle graffiti for Klash’s excellent collaboration with Drop the Lime, “Dangerous Nights 11:53,” an anti-nuclear rant posted here a minute ago that had him sounding like Mutabaruka on aggro-meth. At the same time he just hit me with a new-new track called “Bounce” over some acid-y production by Sando Khan, described by 77K as “An up and coming producer from Forth Green.” In some ways it’s totally unlike “Dangerous Nights,” far more club-friendly with a hook that could almost be Spankrock but it’s the same in the sense that it’s the essence of Klash; a synthesis of grimy dagger-dagger Brooklyn dancehall with a Downtown 81 sense of the avant-garde.
Stream: 77Klash, “Bounce” (prod. By Sando Khan)
Crookers f. Poirier and Face T, “Arena”
Next is the new Crookers video for “Arena,” a vehicle for Poirier and his dude Face T that is basically a rockumentary-style shoot of them moving the crowd at Poirier’s Karnival party in Montreal. It is directed by Colin Beaudry and he must be good because it is way more exciting to watch than a bunch of francophone people pogo-ing to lazer-bass sounds on paper. It is well worth watching all the way to the end to catch Face T running through an acapella preview of another tune, “Jumbo,” looking like Jason Bateman and flowing like a Quebecois Baby Cham.
J-Wow, “Klang”
And now for something completely different. With its ambient washes, intelligent drum-and-bass conceits and a decidedly un-klangy flow, “Klang” is in some ways the opposite of what Ghetto Palms is about. As the video indicates it’s less of a CPUs-in-the-jungle globalism and more of a view-from-space globalism. But J-Wow also happens to be Joao from Buraka Som Sistema, ie the driving force behind “Wegue Wegue” and five or so of the other maddest kuduro beats to rave out of my mental Angola. The blissed-out glitchiness of “Klang” feels like the micro-climate of a Thai airport (where it was apparently conceived) than a candongueiro across Luanda but I am so confident that Joao is going to be a factor in the Ghetto Palms sphere that I had to premier his debut joint. If you don’t believe me, look for his next single “O Dedo,” due out on Mad Decent in April.