Welcome (Back) To Dada Strain, November 2022

Explaining the disappearance, the return and the purpose. Also: #BklynSounds, paid subscriptions, recent work

Welcome to Dada Strain, a periodical about rhythm, improvisation and community. First off, I want to thank you for subscribing to Dada Strain, and, potentially, for reading. You could have signed up for any content feed in the world, but you’re here with me, and I appreciate it. 

Long-time readers will recognize the “Welcome To” communiques as semi-regular posts updating subscribers on what is going on with Dada Strain. These notes serve two purposes: 

• To inform you about Dada Strain’s gradual developments on this site and elsewhere, a reminder that it aspires to be a continuously developing project born in quarantine but created to serve the Next Times. 

• To simultaneously explain and evaluate Dada Strain’s purpose and values by speaking them into being, confronting the practices shaping society around us, invoking its world-changing and -building aspects, while identifying and pivoting away from its failures, intentionally dreaming up an alternative way of working and being. 

Dada Strain is a multi-disciplinary project for the expression of rhythm, improvisation and community futures; to engage history and myth with clear and cohesive principles; to reflect and forthrightly take part in the world through words, sounds, images and magical powers. It’s also an opportunity to listen, dance and think with equal measures of joy and sorrow. And to move forward.

In this “Welcome To”:

• Why “back”? Where have I been? What’s it for?

• #BklynSounds

• Paid subscription 

• New Work

And as you read, here’s something to listen to, October’s monthly show on The Lot Radio, which features a classic Chill Out set by one of my best musicker friends, Gamall (full playlist here):

Back from where?

It’s been a little over a year since I’ve stopped regularly publishing this newsletter, and the reasons for the interruption were numerous, intertwined. Some of it was due to time management: a lot of energy was spent in creating the Dada Strain Radio series I recently wrote about, and teaching extra courses. Some of it was personal: first I got sick, then my life suffered a succession of debilitating losses (death, illness and depression have, in fact, largely defined my time since December 2021). Some of it has been financial: while I continue to freelance for other spaces focused on storytelling and music (see above - and below), I have not had steady income since losing Pandemic-era Unemployment benefits in 2021, and struggle to balance making ends meet with doing the work I love. Lastly, some of the disappearance can be chalked up to my ambivalence with the nature of this platform, not just the political make-up of its infrastructure and promoted opinions, but the notion that anyone wants to see their in-boxes invaded with what I have to say, maybe even multiple times a week. (For an opinionated writer, I seem to suffer from self-esteem issues—or a deference to humility over self-promotion.)

But then, what’s changed? Why am I starting this up again? Because the stories of Dada Strain Radio were only an outline, and, in many ways, the most obvious one that makes clear how notions of rhythm, improvisation and community are intertwined in music and in society. Listening to new sounds from all over the world, connecting them to patterns of how/why people use music, then seeing how too often this music is covered as surface-level entertainment in modern media (intentionally by its gatekeepers, IMO), leaves no doubt in my mind that Dada Strain and independent outlets like it are greatly needed to show that there’s more to it. To broadcast new stories, promote new storytellers, champion music’s natural place in the social sphere. Whether that means locally, communally or globally; whether that means short recommendations or longer ideas. Utilizing any medium such stories can be told in — sounds, words, visuals, events and any other way that can present the communal musical experience.

#BklynSounds

One of my commitments to elevating local and music community is the result of growing up in New York. Coming of age as an immigrant kid, in love with the city’s music and culture, was truly akin to being raised in a candy store — especially back in the day, when a fake ID (and knowing somebody) really could get a teenager into any club in the city. It also helped that, if you cared to explore what was happening around you, there were media outlets which pointed out where to go, what to do, and gave a perspective on the movement of culture, music, newness. I may have been clueless, but I had public guides. In 2020, when things went still during the pandemic, it struck me that this “local media x community” perspective had been mostly destroyed by a confluence of forces — or hidden inside individual social media feeds. That it was hard to build community outside the insular groups that was already formed.

That’s why, in the summer of 2021, I began writing the ”Bklyn Sounds” column for the late, often lamented Bklyner. It was primarily a weekly guide of what was going on in the borough. This was before the reopening of most corporate venues, when “local” artists, small clubs, galleries, DIY spaces and community events ruled the calendar, havens for those well enough and unafraid to leave home. It was a great way to explore the community’s attempt to recover from disaster, a way to support people trying to build/relaunch new arts infrastructure, to support artists who no longer had regular local Brooklyn/New York outlets to promote their concerts, albums, parties, ideas. The response to “Bklyn Sounds” was overwhelmingly positive, but after a decade of being a great local paper, Bklyner ceased publishing in September 2021; and the closest thing to a replacement, Brooklyn Magazine, felt as basic as so much of today’s mainstream hipster landscape, a gentrified land-grab with no discernible cultural point of view.

Artists, venues and readers asked that I continue Bklyn Sounds after Bklyner’s demise, and I spent some of the past year working to place it at another like-minded publication. To no effect. Yet the need for a regular, DIY music events guide has not subsided: there’s more great stuff going on in Brooklyn (and throughout the city) than ever before. At least in the rhythm+improvisation+community space that is Dada Strain’s primary purview. So the return of Dada Strain will now include a (mostly) weekly events post about goings-on primarily in Brooklyn. I say “primarily” because I think it’s time to take it beyond the 718. The community has always been in other boroughs, with even Manhattan increasingly more interesting (if you know where to look), and Upstate New York hosting small shows, residencies and weekenders that reflect the creative values of musickers and artists I support. So while the feature will continued to be called #BklynSounds, the “Sounds” (and sights) will now be more spread out. And #BklynSounds will not only include lists of events, but full coverage of the borough’s musical corner I subscribe to, with interviews, reviews, profiles and photos essays of local artists, spotlights on local releases, and op-eds about community needs and values. Because in my mind, a support system can’t stop at cheerleading and ticket sales: a point-of-view requires full-bodied engagement.     

And there will be one more change on my end as well:

Paid Subscription

As I’ve said, my ability to do the work has been greatly curtailed by an inability to make financial ends meet. So Dada Strain will now institute a paid subscription tier. I’ve not quite figured out the breakdown of which posts will be paid-only, and which will be free, though I can guarantee that some of Dada Strain will remain free, and it will be wholly so until the turn of the year, while I play around with potential paid models. But the time has come to test whether or not the work I make is worth your hard-earned shekels. I hope so. And if you deem that it is, I thank you deeply for your support. 

Recent Work                              

Thanks also for making it this far— for reading and for following. As always, I want to share with you some of my favorite work outside regular Dada Strain channels. 

For the New York Times, I contributed to “5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Ornette Coleman,” alongside some of my favorite writers and musicians, including Moor Mother, Shabaka Hutchings, Shannon J. Effinger, David Hajdu, Idris Ackamoor and others. It may not surprise you that I wrote not about the great man’s free jazz, but on “Friends and Neighbors” (cause that’s where it’s at).

A couple of reviews of two new Detroit-related albums: Theo Parrish’s excellent DJ-Kicks: Detroit Forward (for Pitchfork) and Waajeed’s magnificent Memoirs of Hi-Tech Jazz (for Bandcamp Daily); both tell stories of the city’s musical past and future, of how rhythm and improvisation engaging community work is, in the city’s Black music circles, actually just creative life.  

One of my favorite books of the year, Dan Charnas’ Dilla Time (more about it soon), inspired an essay for Pioneer Works’ The Broadcast: “In Praise of Musical Mistakes” asks the question of what exactly is a musical mistake, who gets to say so, and how has this dynamic affected 20th century music and society, and what it means going forward.

For my dear friend Sam Valenti’s wonderful Herb Sundays series, I created a playlist and wrote a short essay entitled “Herb Sundays 54: Naturalized Herb,” a tale of music’s role in my immigrant experience, and how in-between-ness has guided my perspective. And still does.

Again, thanks for reading. As always, you can follow Dada Strain day-to-day on Instagram, and (for the moment) Twitter.