ZZK has been one of our favorite record labels since we were first hipped to the whole ‘cumbia digital’ thing back in 2008, thanks to a handful of blogs, international tours, and Jace Clayton’s super dope feature in the FADER. Often combining centuries-old traditional instrumentation with quirky synthesizers, extra helpings of low-end, and a general atmosphere of dubwise mysticism, the style has matured and coalesced immensely since the label’s inception.

Hip web kids from Germany to Japan have been catching the ZZK bug, but the focus isn’t just on international audiences. ZZK Club parties in Buenos Aires showcase the record label’s artists and affiliates, booking everything from reggaeton-inflected pop and champeta to ambient new-age music and performance art. The label just partnered up with Waxploitation Records to release the ‘Future Sounds of Buenos Aires,’ compilation, perhaps their strongest release to date. The comp features the likes of Chancha via Circuito (check @jawnita’s Cluster piece from last year), Super Gauchin, Fauna, y más over the course of 12 tracks.

Check out the teaser for this new release and grab a copy here. Look out for Argentinian cumbia wizards touring through your town this year.

Translation by Harry Sato and Maro Kariya. Words by Cluster editor Stefan Nickum.

On any given Tumblr day, you may find yourself peering into the bedroom setting of some teen girl’s selfie, watching homemade BDSM videos, or simply marveling that yet another kitty .GIF is impossibly, inexplicably funny (you’ll probably re-blog it anyways). Tumblr worlds are numerous- seemingly infinite- and yet become woven together through visual communication, creating small worlds of intersecting tastes in fashion, music, sex, spirituality, etc.

Scrolling down the Tumblr galaxy recently, I stumbled on the style samples of Shibuya fashion boutique and online store Radd Lounge, where I discovered what might be the fashion manifestation of my Tumblr network—Oakland Raiders gear obsessives SpaceGhostPurrp and his Raider Klan, A$AP Rocky collabs with New York streetwear brand Black Scale, ying yangs, gothic spiritual symbols, and the cartoon Adidas sneakers by L.A. designer Jeremy Scott.

Inspired largely by underground American rap and R&B, and the personal styles of Radd Lounge’s favorite artists, the shop’s aesthetic looks like their favorite music sounds. As inheritors of the Japanese fashion subculture visual kei (system), where punk and metal musicians would perform in elaborate Victorian dresses styled with punk hair cuts and knee-high pleather boots, Radd Lounge represents a next wave in visual kei, where looks are a composite of favorite Internet sub-genres and the independent designers who best reflect them.

But even more than the evolution of visual kei in Japanese fashion, Radd Lounge’s aesthetic mirrors a very specific matrix of visual and musical experiences, a shifting cluster of sights and sounds residing in small Internet cosystems. Taken literally, Radd Lounge is a visual system that maps these underworlds over the real-life body, making brief and delightfully chaotic sense of Internet subcultures that tumble down a sensory rabbit hole and show no signs of stopping.

For a movement with the tendency to name its day of action hashtag-style (see: N17, M1), Occupy Wall Street has generated quite an impressive volume of printed ephemera.  In the seasons following the destruction of the movement’s encampment in downtown Manhattan, we’ve seen scores of printed OWS-inspired projects appear in the city; they’re stacked in cafes, on subway platforms and friends’ kitchen tables, even held above May Day marchers’ heads in place of cardboard signs.  Which should come as no surprise, really, given the combination of pamphleteering’s historic role in dissident movements and New York’s particular (if breathless) community of internet-age print enthusiasts.

With such a vast network of printed materials affiliated with Occupy popping up all over — some projects conceived of as outreach tools, some continuations of tactical conversations happening on the ground, others still connected to the movement only in their parallel interests—we’ve decided to bring you an occupied version of Rags We Love. Following are just a few examples of what’s we’re digging on lately.

Occuprint has a knack for creating work that falls somewhere in the space between outreach, education, and straight-up visual propaganda;  Strike/Occupy finds a nice balance between all of it.  Folded into the broadsheet’s eight kaleidoscopic pages are several of the group’s signature posters; they range from more traditional visions of the people’s uprising—silhouetted-fist-in-the-air style—to a panel of insurrectionary lolcats. The paper also packs in candy-colored excerpts from eleven books narrating various historic strikes: Paris 1968, The Russian Revolution, the Oaxaca teacher’s strike of 2006, and the American railroad strike of 1877 all make appearances.

 Metroccupied — “inspired by the Trojan Horse,” as per its twitter bio — riffs on the Metro in the grand tradition of such culture-jamming legends as the YES Men’s fake New York Times of 2008.  In an unmistakable parody of the slim daily’s overblown headlines and infographic-happy design, Metroccupied packs its premier four-page issue with rabble-rousing fake classified and bleak mock ads.

According to one member of the Metroccupied team, “there’s a whole bunch of print media coming out of Occupy…but it all has a certain cerebral feel about it.  We wanted to do something not so heavy, something with a digestible, punchy sense of humor.”  Certainly conceived as an outwardly-facing piece of media, the project was originally an offshoot of the Outreach Working Group.

Metroccupied’s first run sent 5,000 copies throughout the city on Tax Day, all distributed by volunteers in cheap orange hunting jackets standing shoulder-to-shoulder with employees of the original Metro. The group hopes to print at least 10,000 editions of their next eight-page issue, and is currently fundraising and holding open meetings.

IndigNación found its genesis in OWS’s spanish-language General Assembly as early as October.  The paper, which printed its first edition of 25,000 just in time for May Day, was distributed entirely by hand.  “We didn’t want to drop off stacks just for people to take them,” an editor told me. “We just want people to talk to each other: talk to your neighbors, talk to your family members, to the people at the corner store.”

At the centerfold, a neon-green squid (perhaps a nod to Matt Taibbi’s oft-appropriated analogy) encircles the globe in a multi-tentacled death grip.  Bright chunks of text delineate the ways in which Wall Street’s interests have affected Latin American countries, from Monsanto’s hold on Argentinian farmland to Newmont Mining in Peru.  More than just providing information on local Occupy issues to New York’s spanish-speaking community, IndigNación seeks to “broaden the conversation as to what Latin American struggles look like, and make connections between the different waves of immigration in this country,” the same editor told me.

So it isn’t expressly Occupy-affiliated, but I picked up this broadsheet at Occucopy, a lovely and cluttered office space where  piles of Occupy’s various buttons and fliers are created by a worker-owned cooperative.  The paper is actually the printed extension of 596 Acres, a public education project named after the volume of public lands left unclaimed in Brooklyn.  The map is expressly productive; the flip side outlines steps towards leasing said land for general community use.  Though 596 Acres seeks to appropriate land through pretty bureaucratic legal means, its graphic content aligns itself pretty overtly with the politics of reclamation central to Occupy’s attempts to, uh, use public space.

The jauntily tri-colored, N+1-affiliated Occupy! Gazette is compiled by a faction of New York’s left-leaning literary magazine editors, and printed on paper so large as to require a serious sit-down if you plan on perusing it. Portable it’s not, but the Gazette strikes a sweet spot between work commissioned through the editors’ own network of literary hip kids and what must be a relentless combing of the Internet for unpublished blog posts and Facebook rants. With an eye towards a national Occupy, the paper contains missives from the short-lived San Fransisco commune and Occupy Philly alongside more scholarly, historically-minded essays on consensus and religion in regards to the movement.   Currently in its fourth edition, the publication is designed  by Dan O. Williams of N+1 with two distinct typefaces that ramble across each page, stopping just short of bleeding into each other and giving the impression of several conversations going on at once.

Tidal was first introduced to me by a friend as the Direct Action Working Group’s theory magazine.  The editors tell me that their “supporting cast’ includes members of other groups like Kitchen and Healthcare, but the cover image for issue number 2 (Spring is Coming), taken on the “re-occupation” attempt of D17, represents the alliance pretty overtly. The first few pages of each issue are dedicated to the “Communiqué,” a collaboratively-penned missive; this one follows a universal “you” through a meditation on the absurdity of the social contract from inside a jail cell.

 “We want to break down so many boundaries and binaries, and with Tidal one of the separations we took aim at is the idea that theory should be separate from strategy and theory and strategy should be separate from action,” one anonymous editor told me.  With an emphasis on work that speaks from within the movement, articles in Tidal push towards a more nuanced, expansive understanding of the defining themes of Occupy.  The latest issue includes an essay by Judith Butler on the politics of “The Demand,” and a send-up of the movement’s preoccupation with media spin.

Tidal is currently working on a national distribution strategy for 100,000 copies of the next issue; it can currently be found at Blustockings, the Yippie Cafe, and at any action or march.

molly o. is a contributing editor for Cluster Mag.

Referencing the R&B of Jagged Edge, Southern rap production circa 2004, and dubstep’s finer moments–Gamble may never catch his breath from a track that helped define a new era of sonic intersection. Thankfully, Gamble and his Night Slugs cohorts have little interest in pleasing the same crowd that witnessed the “Wut” rinseathon, and adhere instead to the principles of progress and futurism. Released yesterday, Gamble’s third EP, “Club Rez,” is a defiant, sophisticated piece of club music that will have cyborgs fucking like our parents did to Prince.

In town last week to play New York’s famed H.A.M. party (check our H.A.M. feature here) Cluster fam Tyrone Palmer sat down with the man like Girl Unit, where the two talked about the record, the movement of regional club scenes, and 3D cover art.

So, let’s start with your new EP Club Rez (Night Slugs). It’s been well over a year since you released your last single “Wut,”  - which was a massive hit – what’s the reason for the long break in between releases?

It’s weird, honestly [Club Rez] is the first thing that I’ve made with the knowledge that people were going to hear it. I’d made [Wut, IRL, etc.] just in my bedroom, not really thinking that it would go anywhere. Now it’s like, I play loads and I know what people think of my music… it’s that awareness of it that is quite a lot to cope with, especially when you had this real freedom before. I knew that when it was time to do something else I wanted to do it in much better quality, so I purchased lots of hardware and drum machines and synths and stuff – I really wanted to do it big, with all hardware so that the quality of it was much more improved. And then, also, it was just a case of really not wanting to box myself in with that one release [“Wut”]. I could’ve done a follow up with a similar thing, but I really didn’t want to try and outdo it.

If you had to describe what your aesthetic or approach to making tracks is, generally, how would you sum it up?

I suppose I just have this almost literal response to the things that I hear across the board, I listen to producers and their signature styles and that kind of thing, and there are certain parts of it that I just want to transplant in a different context. It’s like the first track on my EP, called “Ensemble,” it’s all done on a LINN drum – the old Prince drum – with a shit ton of effects on it, but at the same time I wanted to show a grimier, darker side of it. It’s kind of like that but it’s much more club ready and it has a darker feel to it. I suppose my overall aesthetic though is very much that, it’s like a reinterpretation of popular styles.

In the year and a half since “Wut” came out there’s been a lot going on in dance music in general, but specifically the Night Slugs universe – Fade to Mind has emerged as a major presence,  etc. I’m curious if there’s one record you’ve heard since “Wut”’s release that made you go “damn, I wish I thought of that!”?

[laughs] Um… I think all of the shit that Nguzunguzu have been doing is unbelievable. They have managed to bring such an amazing, organic quality to what they do, and you can really feel where it comes from when you’re with them. Their whole aesthetic is very all-encompassing, they live in this incredible sort of palace in Los Angeles, they go on desert hikes and that sort of thing. You can really feel them absorbing everything that really comes with that. Also, the forthcoming Jam City album is unbelievable. He’s able to somehow re-contextualize these really harsh sounds and make them beautiful.

A recurring theme of our discussion so far has been your return to more club-centric music, so I’m curious about your history as a club kid. What was the era that you really got into club music – were you into 2-Step, Jungle? Who were you listening to when you first started producing?

When I first really started getting into electronic music was actually around the same time that I started producing. I’ve always been into old-school electro stuff, and there was a bunch of stuff that came out of The Netherlands and Detroit, and it kind of had a revival here in New York in the early 2000s.

Like, electro-clash?

Kind of, yeah – but not the bad side of that shit [laughs], the shit that they were taking stuff from like Dopplereffekt, Drexciya, just that kind of icy sound that was really minimal, 808 shit. And then also the ghetto-tech stuff like DJ Assault, DJ Godfather, all of those guys. It was thanks to electro-clash that someone like me, who was out in the suburbs, discovered all of this stuff from The Netherlands and Detroit and that kind of thing. That’s what really started me off on producing first of all, just these kind of minimal, robot rhythms with these tracks that I was like “I can make this myself” [laughs]. When I first moved to London I couldn’t really find a niche to get into, then I met Bok Bok and those guys. They were DJing but it was with all of these different influences, they were looking at that old stuff like Drexciya and Dopplereffekt, but they were also looking at 2-Step and grime and making those connections. Bok Bok and his girlfriend used to do a duo together where they’d just do these mixes, and they were really good – that kind of inspired me, so I reached out to him and started doing a couple of podcasts for his blog that he was doing at the time, and it kind of just picked up from there.

Interesting, thinking about UK Club scene – from the outside it seems pretty monolithic, particularly compared to here where everything is so fractured and regional– Jersey club is different from Baltimore or Philly, etc. – is that the case in the UK?

We have little pockets, not in the same way that it is regional in the U.S. If you go up north there are little scenes like bassline, drum and bass – it’s such a small country that it all spreads so quickly. Honestly, what’s small about it with the Night Slugs stuff is that we’re taking the things that are regional in the United States and bringing them to the UK, that’s still niche in the UK in general but we’ve found that we’ve been able to carry that stuff across and contextualize it for a UK audience.

Since you mentioned that you guys like to take bits and pieces from US regional sounds, I’m curious as to whether or not you guys are ever weary or apprehensive about taking parts of those sounds – because a lot of people have faced criticism for doing that.

It’s a weird thing, we never wanted to copy anything directly, it’s more just a case of – first of all, we’ve been playing that kind of stuff (juke, etc.) forever. I used to listen to juke tracks on Imeem , which was like this old pre-Myspace thing – I used to find so much good shit through that, I found old crunk shit, juke, and jersey club back in the day. I don’t really read message boards at all, but I remember at the time when I released IRL it was very much a period of people discussing the moral implications of taking and re-appropriating a musical style from somewhere else. At the time UK funky was around, and it was turning a bit more techy – people were really borrowing the more avant-garde tech-house sounding tracks that were emerging into the UK funky scene, and I was just looking at the relationship between that kind of music and juke  and thinking like “Well, I like this rhythm but let me slow it down.” But I never wanted to make a really obvious reference. You hear some stuff that UK and European producers are making and it’s just like, this reference is too obvious. I do encourage this kind of conversation, I think it’s important. If you’re a producer and you just want to do things so literally, it’s not helping. It’s not helping you to take such a literal reference, if you want to take something from somewhere it has to be more obscure, more of a feeling. We have a good relationship with DJ Rashad and DJ Spinn, and when I sent DJ Rashad “IRL” he loved it! And on the original video the top comment is still “This is the future of music” by DJ Rashad..

Let’s talk a bit about the visual aesthetic of Night Slugs – that has been a very important part of you guys’ success and branding in a sense. I noticed that the art for Club Rez is totally different from any previous Night Slugs art, was that intentional?

Yeah, it was quite a conscious decision. We wanted to make it HD. The same thing with the Jam City artwork [for his forthcoming album Classical Curves] that’s proper 3D. He [Bok Bok] wanted to do something that had the same feeling of all of the other art pieces, and in fact he drew up the artwork as a 3D, and it was just through conversation that were we like “hold on, why don’t we start incorporating a different method to this.”  It’s become ubiquitous for the label, but that’s kind of the ethos of the label in the first place, they’ve never stayed with just one thing for too long.  With the Jam City thing they were going to do a photograph at first, then they actually decided that doing it in this kind of hyper-real 3D way is so much more in keeping with the previous artworks because it’s kind of representative of another world. Even if they carry on doing 3D stuff it’s still going to have that slightly alien feel that the previous artworks have had.

Recently a lot of club producers have been making tracks for artists – Brenmar is working with Nina Sky, Kingdom has worked with Naomi Allen, Helix with Flirta D, Nguzunguzu has some tracks on the Lei1f album, etc. Is that something you plan on doing?

I did one thing, um… I wasn’t really happy with it [laughs]. I went into the studio with [a popular artist] for one thing, and we tried to do a couple of tracks together, but I’m personally not ready to do that yet. We recorded the vocals, I carried on mixing them and tried to arrange them, and I just wasn’t happy with it. And the thought that more people would hear that than anything else I made was just like… I could be throwing away a really big opportunity right now, but my focus has always been on making the best stuff I can possibly make and this is not it. Before I start with artists I really do want to be amazing and have that The-Dream style talent where he just comes in and he plays something and then he goes shopping [laughs]. That’s honestly what I want to attain before I start putting things out at that level.  I guess my experience with that artist just helped me re-evaluate – it’s not a race. I really have to feel comfortable with what I’m doing.

Are we going to have to wait another year-and-a-half for the next EP?

No, no, no [laughs]. I’ve already written a lot of stuff. The nicest thing after doing [Club Rez] is that now the pressure is off. I’ve already got a bunch of stuff done. The next thing is really, I want to get in touch with vocalists and making stuff that’s referencing pop music, R&B and hip-hop constantly. I’m just ready to do that with even more conviction, but still keeping it club-ready and in line with the aesthetic of the label as well. I’m really happy with the label, I’ve never released anything on another label, and I don’t think I could really, because we just understand each other so well. They’re very integral in that I’ll send them a bunch of stuff, and they’ll say “I think this goes with this or this goes with this,” and I wouldn’t have made that meta-connection. It’s kind of through discussing things with them that we’re able to present things the way they’ve been presented. Otherwise I’d have like six tracks in the same style. I’m really glad I’m with those guys, they really help me stay eclectic as possible.

I’ve always been curious what it would sound like for a Japanese lady living in England to sing Buju Banton over abstract rhythm and bass mutations. Thank goodness, then, for Kiki Hitomi, who has been releasing these fascinating DIY mashups- pairing her own far out vocals with jacked beats- in preparation for the release of her “web installation” later this month that will feature the whole collection in mixtape format.

The singer re-versions tunes from the likes of Grime MC Flowdan, dancehall badman Buju Banton and art rockers Velvet Underground, fusing her own warped, ethereal vocal styles with hardcore bass music. You may know Kiki Hitomi as one third of England’s post-apocalyptic digi-dub outfit King Midas Sound and frequent collaborator of artists like The Bug, Starkey, and Hype Williams. You can check out all of the tracks leading up to the release of her mixtape on Soundcloud, but we’ve corralled the highlights for you.

“It was like, seeing myself in rule of a kingdom and setting up armies of sexual—amongst other sins—immoral solders to kill innocent people. I know it sounds crazy but that’s the best way I could put it.”

Zipper Z., who wrote this this piece about Jamaican radio celebrities Twins of Twins for Cluster Mag in November, just published a fantastic article about the religious transformation of Dancehall music’s indie darling, dancer, DJ and entertainer Skerrit Bwoy. You may remember Skerrit Bwoy from the very naughty and extremely uncomfortable Wareheim-directed music video for Major Lazer mega hit, “Pon de Floor,” where he introduced white people across the world to the acrobatic extremes of simulated sex known as “daggering.” I know you remember the first time you saw Skerrit jump off of that step ladder, pants around his ankles, and dive into some lady’s wide open nether regions and you were all, like, “oh fuck!”

Anyways, as Zipper Z. puts it, he has recently decided to “put down the dagger, and pick up the cross,” renouncing years of athletic Satan worship, deleting everything on his hard drive, and starting over. We already lost Mr. Vegas to the Lord somewhere in 2009 (just kidding, his Christian music is still dope), and it looks like Skerrit is the next to convert. Anyways, read the article here.

Photos by Wills Glasspiegel.

It’s important to Traxman—known by day as Cornelius Ferguson—that we set the record straight once and for all on Chicago’s international exports du jour, juke and footwork. While audiences abroad have eagerly devoured the few compilations, Youtube videos, magazine features and gigs IRL, the story of juke and footwork and its relationship to a long history of music and dance in Chicago remains to be told. There is no one better to tell this story than Traxman himself– not only one of the scene’s OGs and a central figure in Rashad and Spinn’s GhettoTeknitianz collective, but a historian with an unrivaled knowledge of Chicago dance music history.

“If people got their education- that’s why I do a lot of these interviews- then they’d know it comes from house music. It’s all house music. We’re here in Chicago and and sometimes people just don’t understand that this is house music at it’s its best- it just got younger.”

Even the associated dance style, known as footwork, is an evolution of an art form that’s been thriving in Chicago’s underground since house music was called house music. “Footwork is just a part of the style of juke. It was a part of ghetto house, and it was a part of even regular house music. However they’re doing it now it’s still footworking and there are different interpretations of it.” The light-speed, syncopated kinetic energy that is so central to the dance moves and rhythms of juke and footwork now reflects the constant evolution of a form that knows very few boundaries.

It’s really experimental, like, ‘I’m doing this, and maybe it might work.’ We’re just taking big chances.”

Da Mind of Traxman is the first internationally-distributed full-length album to come from the city’s Ghetto Teknitianz collective, who are juggernauts in a scene where producers might make twenty-five tracks in a day, but rarely share them outside of the very local context of recorded mixes, footwork battles, and dance parties.

Juke and footwork as we know them now have been bubbling in the hood with very little international media spotlight since the early 2000s, and for the last decade the sound has circulated among a small and intensely loyal regional audience in only a handful of local venues. With this in mind, it’s not surprising that the Tekz’ first release of this scope—a collection of juke and footwork tracks out of context, intended for an international audience—– comes not direct from Chicago but via an experimental record label based about 80 miles Southeast of London; Planet Mu.

In the Chi the music finds a home amongst the small handful of dance parties and weekly or monthly footwork battles held in whatever Southside and Westside venues they can get their hands on—Battlegroundz is on Sundays at an empty storefront on 87th street, and T.U.F.F is a roving competition that has lived in an elementary school gymnasium and a daycare. Footwork battles provide a physical, palpable, and localized social milieu, and more so than other styles of electronic music, the social element is inextricable from the beats themselves. After wrapping a session in the studio, Traxman says, “we always go to the dancers to see how they react to it.”

One of the most important points to understand about this is that there would be no footwork beats without the footworkers. The DJs and the dancers- often one in the same- are tethered in a feedback loop, co-determining each other’s developments and playing to each other’s needs. DJ Rashad’s “Ghost” is specifically designed to accommodate the dance move of the same name, calling out members four of the city’s coldest footworkers by name- “Poo, AG, Que, Lightbulb.” Another Rashad production commands “dribble to the left, dribble to the left, dribble to the right, dribble to the right.” And sure, lots of songs demand specific dance moves. The difference here is that only a few people can pull these ones off with their dignity and/or spinal column intact.

Juke producer and fellow GhettoTeknitian DJ Spinn told me in an interview last summer that even if without the Pitchfork writeups and Euro tours, the Tekz would still be doing the same thing back home- making beats, hosting battles, constantly and competitively pushing the limits of the form. “We were always competitive,” says Traxman. “We get together in the studio and we’re like, ‘Yo, I got something for your ass!’ Rashad would play like ten bangers, I’d be like, ‘Ugghh,’ and then I go home and I make twenty-five of my own and Rashad will be like ‘Ugghh. Where you’d get that sample from?’”

Chicago’s ghetto house tracks weren’t always as fast and furious as we know them now– it was when dancers started pushing producers to step it up that artists like Traxman and the GhettoTeknitianz collective he represents began cranking the beat-per-minute and twisting rhythms into insane, human-pretzel inducing syncopations. This competitive attitude and the three-way dialogue between feet, ears and fingers are the forces behind the scene’s constant flux and evolution.

Traxman has been DJing for 31 years. Do the math and you’ll begin to understand how many successive waves of Chicago house music the man has seen as the sound has fallen in an out of favor on the international stage. “The same thing happened 25 years ago when they did the Love Fest in Europe,” he says. “Everyone that was doing all the music here started to fly over there- and I’m not saying change is bad; change is good- but I was always taught to keep one foot international and one foot in your neighborhood. Keep your ear to the streets.”

It’s clear that Traxman does just that, and The Mind of Traxman showcases his attention to diverse cultural references. Across eighteen tracks, the album seamlessly integrates everything from crunchy power chords to Kalimba melodies, classic jazz and Motown joints, acid synth lines and Israeli pop music from the 80s. He brings this whole constellation of histories and places together without gimmick. “I always looked at sampling as an art, you know, growing up listening to a lot of hip hop– that’s what did it.”

Frenetic, paranoid toms, sharp high hats, and aggressive snares arranged with architectural precision float over these layers of found sound while massive, gigantic pulses of sub bass radiate from underneath. Taunts, commands, obscenities, and vocal non sequiturs- “conquer that bitch,” “bussas goin’ wild,” “listen all you motherfuckers”- counterpoint jazzy chord progressions for a strange, disorienting effect. Am I getting serenaded by smoky keys or being verbally abused? Who knows. These unlikely juxtapositions of smooth and rough textures- the sexy, hypnotic sounds of Mccoy Tyner or Earth Wind and Fire going up against raw 808 beats and and vocal recordings spliced into near indecipherable micro-rhythms- are a large part of what makes Traxman’s sound so compelling.

Ferguson’s encyclopedic mind and eccentric approach to the art of sampling show in his deft manipulation of sonic obscurities ripped to digital from the floor-to-ceiling stacks of vinyl he stores in his basement. “I know where every record is. My brother X Ray helped me kick it off in the mid-90s, because he had the biggest, neatest record collection. I’d be hanging out with him and be thinking, ‘damn, my records look junky,’ so I just started to organize everything. Then I worked at two record shops. I worked at Barney’s and I worked at Out of the Past records. So I did a lot of organizing there. You can give me thousands and thousands of records, you can throw ‘em down, throw ‘em all on the floor, you give me two hours and I will organize everything. It’s like, ‘this is country, this is rock, this is funk and soul, this is jazz.’ I’ll go by alphabetical order in two hours.”

His massive, impeccably organized record collection is renowned throughout Chicago, and he’s never stopped collecting. “I love coming out to New York cuz there’s certain records I can find. If I go to Europe, or if I’m here, if I’m in a hick town, I need go to a record shop. Take me to a record store. I need to go to an old mom and pop’s record store. Take me to a garage sale. I need to find records.”

Whereas contemporaries throughout the long history of Chicago house music drew deep from the canon of disco, funk, and soul jams, Traxchanged the game sampling J-Pop and movie soundtracks. If you ask the younger crop of juke and footwork purveyors about their forbearers, they’ll tell you that Traxman and RP Boo- the OGs of that ghetto house ish- revolutionized the sound with their deep crates and fantastic references; now everything is up for grabs. Traxman’s seminal footworking composition, “Hold It”, places the theme from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho front-and- amidst sparse, slamming MPC beats and an endlessly looped mantra ‘hold it… hold it…’ One track from the Mind ofTraxman, Going Wild featuring AG and Rashad, pitches down Israeli songstress Ofra Haza’s 1988 single ‘Im Nin’Alu,’ balancing an unrelenting rhythm with a weightless middle-eastern vocal element.

How does a form like the juke/footwork continuum (juke being the more party-oriented, less abstract cousin of the eccentric footwork music made for battles) translate when plucked from this intensely local scene and brought to a global audience with no understanding of context- historically or culturally? “Respect to Machinedrum, [Planet Mu owner] Mike Paradinas. I love what they’re doing. They’re pushing our music to the forefront, and somebody’s got to do it. Somebody.” It’s up to the educators- the privileged middlemen- to lead their listeners on that paths towards enlightenment, and Traxman is happy to drop the history and the context to get you better acquainted. “I’m here to educate the kids that are doing the footwork tracks and the juke tracks- and the people all around the world- letting them know, this is where it came from.”

Feature image by Stacy Lanyon

When we left #MayDay Will Yam, Molly O., and Max had separated and were wandering around the Free School in Madison Square Park when a lively march passed by.  They all joined and reconvened in Union Square for the concert.  You can see Part 1 here.

Some of the .Gifs are large files, so give the page a few seconds to load.  

We split off onto Broadway at the Flatiron building and marched down the street, brushing up against cops on scooters trying to push us back onto the sidewalk.  There were so many scooters that once back on the side of the road, the police were themselves disrupting traffic on Broadway.  At one point an officer, number Badge ID 8150-something, got off his scooter grabbed a woman who refused to move.  He threw her off the road, and everyone started shouting “shame!” and his badge number.

Protestors made their way into Union Square while Santa Claus broke his strike to make sure cops weren’t being naughty.

I think her sign said, “Social Justice Is Fabulous!”

Meanwhile, Molly ran into our friend Chris, who was looking fabulous in his pink-and-gold-sequin bloc getup.

And I ran into a Maypole.  This is where Max and Kaye found me: walking around in a circle holding a ribbon with words about economic injustice.  The sign on the top read, “all our grievances are connected,” which was meant to start a discussion about intersectionality.

Hundreds of people had gathered at the stage on the south side of Union Square park, where speakers gave rousing monologues of support, often ending in chants of “¡sí, se puede!” Several musicians gave performances of roughly fifteen minutes each–among them Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine with a Guitarmy of 100-strong.  People estimated several thousand were in the park.  Our friend Oscar attached a camera to a bunch of balloons to get an aerial shot, which can be seen floating above the crowd..

Backstage, #OWS activist @DiceyTroop caught up with Das Racist hype-man Dap.

It was strange that on #MayDay the concert had security and a “backstage” area, but I walked through the press tent without any credentials.  I learned later that unions had bottom-lined the concert, so the backstage, security, and the like came from them.  Still, nobody said anything about me being there. Some organizers tried to keep a path clear to the stage, but guitarists, speakers, journalists, and security guards crowded the tiny space alongside Union Square South.  As the Guitarmy finished up, Vee and Dap waited for Heems.

And Lakutis kept rubbing his butt on a railing.

Heems showed up a few minutes later with producer and longtime friend Mike Finito, and after a few technical difficulties, Das Racist performed “Michael Jackson” and “Rainbow in the Dark.”

Everybody was psyched.

Especially this girl.

The beat cut out towards the end of “Rainbow in the Dark,” either from a technical difficulty or the sound guy was confused, but Vee finished his verse.  Everybody yelled along the last two lines, “Don’t trust the white-faced man like Geronimo/We tried to go to Amsterdam, they threw us in Guantanamo.”

Next was Dan Deacon, who, in his short set, made people form a giant circle and start a dance competition.  Audience members participated with synchronized hand motions. I got these dudes uptwinkling–using the “affirmative” or “I feel good about this/agree” hand motion used at #OWS General Assembly meetings.

Immortal Technique came on soon after, and I got hungry and went looking for the kitchen, which I was apparently nearby but I never found it.  That was when my phone died.  Molly, in the crowd, got this baby boomer reluctantly bumping along to Immortal’s set.

The concert ended, Max and Kaye had gone, but Molly and I met up along with some friends and sat for a bit on a ledge on the East side of Union Square.  After the concert ended, we watched as marchers bled out of the park, turning onto Broadway.

There were an estimated 30,000 people marching south to the Financial District.  Rumors circulated that the march stretched all the way to Canal Street when the last marchers left Union Square.  And you could feel it, too: the police, normally surrounding small marches in riot gear, were far behind us. Everybody was cheering and drumming while Broadway residents leaned out their windows to cheer or watch.  Molly O.’s phone died too shortly after taking this last .gif below, but we were out long after dark.  Four rows of police, including officers on horseback, guarded the entrance to Wall Street behind some barricades.  Marchers instead moved into 55 Water Street between HQ’s of Standard & Poor, and J.P. Morgan & Chase, where they held a GA.  Police allowed the crowd to stay until 10:00 PM, until we were forced to disperse.  Members of Occupy Faith and Veterans for Peace elected to stay at 55 Water and be arrested as a form of peaceful protest, while everybody else formed a march and made their way up to Zucotti.  That was when we ate some Halal food and boarded the train back home to Brooklyn.

So, we either need more iPhones or more battery packs because we don’t have any gifs of what happened after dark.  But, if possible, I’d love to do a 3rd part.  If you’re still reading this and have .gifs of your own or video clips that could be turn into .gifs, please let us know!  In the meantime, I have an assload of more .gifs from the day.  I’ll be posting them on our tumblr over the next few days.

Will Klein (sometimes Yam) is a writer, illustrator, yoga instructor, and consumer living in Brooklyn, NY.

Molly o. is a contributing Editor at Cluster Mag.

We woke up on May Day 2012 just after people started gathering at Madison Square Park.  It was humid and raining, and blankets were cozy.  Once out of bed, we made coffee and checked our Twitter feeds for anything with:

We’re using new hashtags #M1NYC & #NYCGS for today’s actions. Let’s get these trending! #OWS #M1GS #MayDay

— Occupy Wall Street (@OccupyWallStNYC) May 1, 2012

Livestream on one laptop monitor, Tweetdeck on the other, we sipped coffee and packed for the day ahead.  We got to Bryant park shortly before noon and saw this lady:

There was a brass band playing on the west side of the park by the fountain, and the giant Statue of Liberty puppet often seen at #OWS marches starting flipping a shit.

We–Molly o., Max, and I–walked out of the park and along 42nd street where we saw the Wikileaks truck, which promptly pulled away.

Two of those policemen right near the truck started calling, “Sir! Sir!” as I passed.  When I turned around, they were taking pictures of me with their phones.  I got trolled by cops on May Day.

We met up with a March on the corner of 5th.

And yelled our way over to Grand Central.  About this time all our phones beeped with a message from the Celly loop saying there was a massive police presence inside the main terminal.  But we didn’t go inside.

The march became picket outside of a restaurant called the Captial Grille.  Protestors circled slowly from the end of the block and started chanting, “1, 2, 3, 4, do not go through that restaurant door, 5, 6, 7 ,8, because they discriminate,” or something.

We left and made our way to the May Day Free School in Madison Square Park, where we sat in on lectures and teach-ins and drew pictures of cops.  Oh, and the sun came out.

This cop was really impressed.

We looked up from our drawings and noticed a crowd had gathered behind us, complete with a brass band.  The crowd stopped moving, formed a circle, and three people broke into dance.  Molly got this .GIF of some fresh moves.

We split up and walked around for a few minutes longer, weaving in and out of discussion groups on classical political philosophy, mass incarceration, horizontal education, and others.  A faint drumming slowly grew much louder until I could hear voices and shouts coming from the street.  It wasn’t long before a trickle of protestors and police down 5th avenue became a flood.  We ran to join the march. Below, David Graeber is seen asking Tim Pool (Timcast) for updates.

NEXT!  Yelling at cops! Union Square show with shitty GIFs of Das Racist!

Will Klein (sometimes Yam) is a writer, illustrator, yoga instructor, and consumer living in Brooklyn, NY.

Anna Sui                                 vs.                       Alexander Wang

                           Extravagant, Fantasy                                            Grown Up, Precision, Finessed                         

After a grueling first round (which you can see here if you missed it), it’s time to pick the King of New York; such a venerated crown.  I imagine these two women at a party; how each one might hold court in a crowded room.  The woman wearing Anna Sui would float past you—you’d feel caught, for a moment, in a current of silk streaming by. You might remark, “Is that bitch really wearing her grandmother’s muumuu right now?” But you didn’t really mean any shade, because she was having so much fun swirling around in all that luxuriousness.  Though her caftan catches the light just right, the wistfulness of this look frays as the night goes on; the Anna Sui woman talks just a little too loud, stays a little too long.

Enter the woman wearing Alexander Wang. She stomps.  To an untrained eye, “stomp” and “finesse” might seem at to be opposites at first. But they’re not. To stomp is to step precisely, looking exactly how you supposed to look.  Where Anna Sui breezes, Alexander Wang slices.  You probably won’t even get to feel any of that fur; might have to look away from her lacquered legs because you’re too mad.  When the woman in Wang speaks, you don’t overhear a word. In the first round, Alexander Wang scored exactly zero fucks. Here, we have him advancing out of the regional round without adding a single fuck to the board.

We’ve set the bar. Now that you know what it takes to move into the second round, we can take a look at the crop from London Fashion Week and see who has what it takes to advance.

LONDON

Giles                                 vs.                          Emma Wickstead

                    Fairy Tale, Magical                                   Classic, Squeaky-clean, Not Edgy

I was hard pressed to find worthy restraint competitors coming out of London. You know all that punk talent just gets exported to Paris eventually. For the most part Emilia Wickstead’s line was so ready-to-wear it was almost in an Anthropologie bag already. There was a certain melancholy about this particular dress that caught my eye. Maybe it’s the muddied, brooding background that convolutes the classic countryside print.  You are drawn into the landscape—where are those ponies going? But there is no story here. Or edge for that matter: the leather gloves try to toughen up the ensemble before it finally fails at the bows on the shoes.

This is a simple case of Giles outmuscling, and ultimately bodying Wickstead.  The Giles gown epitomizes the potential of wild fashion: I almost cannot believe it as a dress; it’s a dream, or perhaps a nightmare. The concept of the collection was clothes a woman would rescue from her house if it were on fire. Giles Deacon redefined glamour with the proposition, “It’s burning down, and what are you going to take?” –redefined it as urgent and pressing. This dress is still smoldering. Here is where fashion transgresses its own futile utility and becomes about a story, an idea, a need.  I will ignore the terrible styling (the hair is hardly wild enough to send her running screaming from the house) and advance Giles to the next round.

Mary Katrantzou                          vs.                 Johnathan Saunders

Intense, Drama, Sublime, Theater               Prim, Proper, Tailored

No need to beat around the bush—or sculpted hedges. Mary Katrantzou is the best show in town.  Putting possibly the most tremendous print I’ve ever seen against this preppy Johnathan Saunders number is like the time they chained up the goat in the T-Rex pen in Jurassic Park. Johnathan Saunders is snack time right now. Katrantzou emerges wild and hungry as the early favorite to win the whole thing.

Coming up: London’s champion, Paris, and Milan!

-Madge of Honor