Archive for the 'bffs' Category

There’s no one in the world like Ricardo Gutierrez, his spirit drips in monome sequence with blinks I’m sure must cue up some incomprehensible beat patterns. For Ricardo’s alter ego, and Lima, Peru’s resident sonic-magician I Am Genko 2012 is a new year with new gear. Last time we checked in with Ricardo we were devastated to hear that his home had been broken into and instruments stolen, he had launched an indiegogo fundraiser along with a sweet video [watch], and we kept our fingers crossed for the best. A few months later, and he’s back!

Now something that we need to understand about Ricardo is that, yes, he is a super rad musician, but even more important, he has a philosophy that anchors his music so that he can take it anywhere he can imagine. I’m sure that philosophy is different for each person with every listen, and that’s one of the sweet joys of listening, but I’d like to take this opportunity to highlight two recently produced videos. This is the first we’ve heard musically from Ricardo in some time, and it’s really incredible to acknowledge his direct attitude with bringing music to the streets, without amplification, interacting directly with his city. Call it a non-instrusive dance party, call it a sweetheart seducing his city streets with sound, call it a group hug… we love everything we see and want [to be doing] more of it. Peek at a second video after the jump, and download I Am Genko’s cover of Yohuna‘s “It’s All Yours” above for the rare opportunity of hearing the man sing. Let this be a lesson: take your music out of the bedroom and into the streets!

It’s obvious that more is better than less in some cases. Sometimes all it takes is one person or entity to make something amazing and it always makes me ecstatic to just talk about out of “the norm” ideas. My friend Geoff Morgan used to fling his paint brush at a blank piece of sheet music and speckle the thing with water color. He would then proceed to write that music into an electronic music program on his computer as if he were that up and comer shredder Jason Becker, who lost feeling in his lower limbs only to lose all ability to play his guitar and friends had to create elaborate eye systems for which Jason could still construct his music. In Geoff’s case he had written a piece of music that merely had the DNA of what a wrist flinging paint sounds like, or what a good blood spatter detective might recover if he ran the information he’d gathered through a music making program in the future. Then there’s always word play and how it takes you down a loophole and back. You lose your mind for a second in the silliness of our language and find an unexplained meaning in the game. I have many a friend who are endowed with this through older generations of friends long gone and so on. Silliness needs a history. The idea to get 100 people together to create a large ambient “G” hum is on the same level as making an iPhone app that lets you discover hidden treasure buried by complete strangers in your local area or cutting vinyl records in half and gluing them back together to hear what they sound like [coughcough]. The idea is almost as elusive when thought up as when it’s finally undertaken. The “G” Hum parade went off without a hitch. I remember initially walking out of Bows & Arrows thinking, “This is too small…” and then two trumpets fired off triumphantly only to be followed by 5 little melodicas and the faint sound of little battery operated keyboards. We had created a Tibetan Buddhist buzz. All this said, people need to engage silly ideas more often. Make some history out of those ideas. If the guys at NASA knew it was this easy to reach outer space they wouldn’t have spent those billions of dollars, they would have accessed the moon via different crafts.

<3,
Daniel Trudeau [aka Pregnant], via Impose