pauldbwatkins hip-hop, Music

Dedications III

“Attuned choice by attuned choice, your entire life is a form of self-expression. You exist as a creative being in a creative universe. A singular work of art.”
—Rick Rubin

Dedications III (2024) completes the trilogy I started back in 2013. The album builds on the previous two, continuing to explore the space between poetry/words and music, and the intersections between jazz, hip-hop, and beyond. Additionally, there is a nod to film, with the cover serving as an homage to Saul Bass’s iconic Vertigo poster. Vertigo is a film about mirroring and doubling, as well as obsession—the desire to create the perfect person, a meta-commentary on filmmaking and art, and the impossibility and danger of such an act. 

In large part, Dedications III is about the creative act, an extended homage to the act of being creative. Like the other projects, the album draws from various genres. If you listen closely, you will hear J Dilla, Sun Ra, Thelonious Monk, Ray Barretto, Dead Prez, Miles Davis, among a slew of other voices, sounds, samples, echoes, and cuts. The last two tracks look more outward, remixing Saul Williams’s “Not in Our Name” and ending with a simple mashup of Zeinab Shaath’s 1973 “The Urgent Call of Palestine” with Refaat Alareer’s “If I Must Die,” as read by the legendary actor Brian Cox. Both Shaath’s song and Alareer’s poem changed something in me the first time I heard them, and the message in each remains as urgent as ever.

As with the other two projects, I played most of the drums on an MPC Live, and many of the samples are recorded directly from vinyl. Dedications is a close listening exercise: it is a portal to the past and the future.

The music is FREE and is a not-for-profit creative project (although you can donate to my musical praxis and future projects when downloading). 

Videos:

pauldbwatkins Academic, Film, Video Essay

Vertigo: Cinematic Influence, Pure Cinema, Voyeurism, and the Male Gaze

In this video essay I discuss Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (and its ongoing influence) and his use of pure cinema, as well as voyeurism and the male gaze. I also look at David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive in relation to Vertigo. The end of the video features a remix of the prelude from Vertigo.

Warning: the video features spoilers for both films.

This video is for educational purposes.

pauldbwatkins hip-hop, Music

Portals: Sounds for Tomorrow

“Sound is to people what the sun is to light.” 
—Ornette Coleman 

I am happy to announce a new album!

Portals was made over the summer months of 2020 during the COVID-19 global pandemic. The first track—“Another World”—opens with a sample from the Man Booker Prize-winning Indian novelist Arundhati Roy speaking about the coronavirus pandemic as a portal: “It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.” With systemic injustices more visible than ever, she asks us to use this opportunity to imagine another world. This album is about that possibility, but it is also an album where I looked at music as healing, imagination, creativity, community, and play. 

For me, music has been a sustaining joy during the pandemic. Unlike my previous Dedications projects, I didn’t begin with a sample or style to manipulate, but simply made music that I felt (with a lo-fi hip-hop aesthetic) while trying to have as much fun as I could along the way. Beyond the vocal samples throughout (including Dr. Bonnie Henry, Mr. Rogers, and Totoro), I played much of the album using sample and drum kits (on my MPC Live and Roland SP-404SX) and an Arturia KeyStep controlling a KORG volca fm. Two of the tracks feature my children—“Good Feelin’” and “Lovely Day,” which also features my wife—and are about living in the moment and finding daily happiness. Both “Lovely Day” and “Imagination” were played live and remixed in real time on my SP-404sx. The penultimate track samples from the audiobook of Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Talents and reminds us that not only are we capable of change, but in order to survive we surely must change. The final song features vocal samples from Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, as well as words from John Lewis and Killer Mike. While the context is explicitly American, King’s fierce urgency of now reminds us of the need to resist Canada’s own Anti-Black police violence and Anti-Black racism and Anti-Indigenous racism, which includes the recent deaths of Andrew Loku, Jermaine Carby, and Regis Korchinski-Paquet, among many others. “Now’s the time” to respond to the fierce urgency of this moment. Will we ignore the rupture the pandemic created and return to “normal,” or will we step through the portal into another world? 

The music is FREE and is a not-for-profit creative project (although you can donate to my musical praxis and future projects when downloading).  

Released August 22, 2020. Recorded, produced, mixed, and mastered by Paul db Watkins.  
pauldbwatkins.com

Enjoy!

Warmly,
Paul (DJ Techné)

pauldbwatkins hip-hop, Music, sound poetry

Dedications II

I recently completed a new DJ project/album. Dedications II continues in the spirit of the first album. While the first Dedications project largely explored the space between poetry and music, particularly jazz and jazz-influenced poetry, Dedications II is particularly indebted to the blues and is blue-tinged throughout with a low-fi aesthetic, and a boom-bap poetics. The album mixes, mashes, samples, spins, cuts, signifies, rhapsodizes, poetizes, layers, collages, remixes, breaks, distresses, archives, remakes, reshapes, and re-edits pieces of recorded history to create a sonic audio homage to a host of musicians and styles with a nod to the avant-garde. If you listen closely you will hear J Dilla, Louis Armstrong, Sun Ra, Miles Davis, Ella Fitzgerald, Bessie Smith, Robert Johnson, Howlin’ Wolf, Alice Coltrane, Pauline Oliveros, Ursula K. Le Guin, among a slew of other voices, sounds, samples, echoes, and cuts. At times I added a live-recorded layer of chant/voice, singing bowl, beatbox, or field recordings (especially on the final track). I played most of the drums on an MPC Live, and many of the samples are recorded directly from vinyl. Dedications is an opening and a close listening exercise: it is a portal to the past and the future.

The music is FREE and is a not-for-profit creative project (although you can donate to my musical praxis and future projects when downloading). It is available, here: http://djtechne.bandcamp.com

Recommended for late night listening with headphones.

Warmly,
Paul (DJ Techné)

DJ Techné - Dedications II - back