Jesse Rifkin, author of “This Must Be the Place,” interviews me about my experiences in mid-90s Williamsburg, Brooklyn and the bands and scenes I was a part of creating.
Sonorous Present at Getty Center LA 3/16-17
Los Angeles! I’ll be performing at the Getty Center on March 16-17 as part of a beautiful musical project called Sonorous Present, composed and performed by my dear friend, musician/scholar Alex E. Chávez with musical direction by Grammy-award winning producer/musician Quetzal Flores. The event is FREE. Yes FREE. You have to sign up to reserve your tickets HERE.
From the Getty Museum:
“Sounds of LA 2024 launches with an exclusive performance of immersive, poetic music from Alex E. Chávez’s forthcoming album SONOROUS PRESENT. What began as an experimental, collaborative, and improvised performance in Chicago—inspired by the music and poetics of Chávez’s award-winning book Sounds of Crossing—has been subsequently reimagined as a studio album in collaboration with Grammy Award-winning producer Quetzal Flores. SONOROUS PRESENT offers a never-before-heard blend of Mexican and Latin American folk elements with progressive jazz, poetry, dance, field recordings, and ethnographic songwriting that crosses the sunburst surrealism of America's musical and cultural borderlands.”
The main band will be composed of Alex Chávez (pictured below), and members of the group Quetzal. I’ll be doing my horn thing, flying down from the Bay with a few armloads of saxophones and flutes and percussion and getting in where I fit in. The music is so beautiful. It is an honor to be a part of this, and to be part of the maiden voyage of bringing this to the stage and public. Hope to see you there.
I first met Alex in Southeast Austin in 2003 when I was on a roadtrip from Brooklyn to Michoacan. My friend Adrian Quesada, on one of our many runs around the city, took me to his apartment one day to meet him. Little did I know then that I would be relocating two years later to Austin, and that we’d cross paths many times, whether it was a University of Texas grad student circles that he and my wife ran in, double bills with my Ocote Soul Sounds and his Maneja Beto, or guest appearances on album’s by his group Mitote. The friendship lasted after we both left Austin. He continued on to Chicago to teach and start another great musical project, Dos Santos, which I’ve had the pleasure of making cameo appearances. And now this.
Archival Test Pressings available via Ghostnote
I never realized my test pressings (pieces of vinyl sent to you by the record pressing plant to make sure that they got it right and there are no last minute adjustments or flaws in the vinyl pressing process) might be valuable to someone. But to a lot of people, they are. Ghostnote, a platform that specializes in unique music ephemera reached out to me to see what I have in my bins, and if I’d like to make any of it available to the world. I said yes, and put a few of my Ocote Soul Sounds and Antibalas test pressings up. See everything here.
Stranger Sounds: Curated Playlists from Around the World
Over the past few years I have curated over a dozen Spotify playlists for ASME Award winning travel and literary magazine Strangers Guide. Each one has been a deep and profound musical journey into the city, state, country or region covered in each issue. Enjoy.
Oñi Ocan: The Heart of Sweetness
It has been a pleasure to collaborate with my partner Courtney Desiree Morris, finally, on more big art things that put our heads and talents together. Below are shots from Oñi Ocan: The Heart of Sweetness, a multi-modal performance art piece she designed/directed and performed in. The multi-channel video piece and altar installation just went up at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. Below are shots from the performance of the work at Berkeley Art Center. I did live sound and sound design in collaboration with sound artist/scholar SA Smythe.
Oñí Ocan: The Heart of Sweetness (dir. Courtney Desiree Morris, 2023)
live performance programmed for Rabbit Hole (exhibition feat. Courtney Desiree Morris)
Berkeley Art Center, Berkeley, California, USA
Curator: Adrianne Ramsey
all photos © Carla Hernández Ramírez
The Yoruba term oñí ocan is typically applied to initiates of Oshun, the orisha of rivers, freshwaters, sweetness, and everything that makes life worth living. Like all orisha she operates in duality: she is the divine embodiment of abundance, sensuality, fertility/pregnancy, wealth, pleasure and good fortune. She is also an orisha who has experienced grief, disappointment, abandonment, rejection, and loss. Because of this complexity, Oshun is known as a healer who works with honey and cool water to restore the body and bring mental clarity and self-awareness through the use of her mirror. She is also the patron orisha of sex workers and LGBT practitioners. Oñí Ocan is a multimedia performance ritual that focuses on the use of honey as a material and metaphysical healing modality, as well as a way to honor current and former sex workers and pleasure activists. It is composed of a five-channel experimental film as well as live performances of honey rituals.
The Honey Drippers (actors): Arianne Benford, Kendall Benford, Kiara Brown, Monica Canilao, Odaymar Cuesta Kruda, Rachel De Souza Bolden, Ashara Ekundayo, Dillon Gardner, Sura Hertzberg, Ignacia, Alie Jones, Aja Lenae, Janelle Luster, Sam McGinnis, Pi Palomo, Callan Porter-Romero, Kiara Sample, Savannah Shange, Annie Sprinkle, Undine, & Avery Zeus
Support for Oñí Ocan provided by: The Panta Rhea Foundation, The City of Berkeley, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, & the Foundation for Contemporary Art
Film shot on location at Toro y Moi Studios in Oakland, California
Liver performance at the Berkeley Art Center in Berkeley, California
all photos © Carla Hernández Ramírez
New album: Martez "RIVERS" out now on Bandcamp / Streaming 6/15/23
The sound of my life as my family and I experience displacement due to flooding and atmospheric rivers. Travels around the world - some rivers swell as some shrink. Meditations on rain, rivers, and love.
NEW ALBUM: Martez "DRONE POEMS" out 2/17/23
The Drone Poems series represents meditations, feelings and moods expressed through expansive breathy textures. These pieces reflect a radical aesthetic departure from the Lamentos series, which primarily features wind instruments (flutes, saxophones) as the primary engines of sound.
I composed and recorded Behind the Veil and the other pieces on Drone Poems over the summer of 2022 and early 2023 in Oakland and Berkeley, California during what we now call fire season, when a barbecue spark, a misguided bottle rocket, or a random lightning strike can set off a chain of ignitions to poison every breath with smoky air for days on end. Fortunately last year wasn’t that bad, but each day nonetheless began with the anxiety and dread and the question: “Is today gonna be the day?”
The daily news: Russia brutalizing Ukraine, government fuckery, ongoing plagues, colonization of space, schools shot up, cops gone wild, catastrophic storms and everyone stressing about money.
Drone Poems is the effort to bear witness to the world while remaining connected to the eternal.
Thirteen New Songs with Antibalas
Last November we did ten days of writing workshop in New York, played the songs over the past year live at stages across the world, and gathered at Studio G in Brooklyn to record as many of them as were ready.
These recordings will compose the next two Antibalas albums. Expect to hear the first in a few months, around mid-2023.
Summer 2022
Happy belated summer solstice from the Bay Area. I am spending my days parenting, walking the flats and hills of the East Bay, trying to find clean water to my kid to swim, picking stone fruits (plums, loquats, apricots) which are just coming into season, and scoring two big pieces for PBS.
Antibalas continues to bring our new repertoire throughout Europe and North America this summer and we’ll be recording all this for a new album this fall or early next year. There’s a feature on us and our back catalogue in the recent Songlines Magazine June 2022 issue.
Hmm…what else. Reading Joan Didion “Salvador,” B.W. Higman “Jamaican Food”, working on some musical / nature prototypes and a big Fire Wedding collaboration at the end of this month with Earth Lab at UCSC, Annie Sprinkle, Beth Stephens, Guillermo Gomez-Peña, Courtney Desiree Morris and other artists.
Now back to the lab. Love to whoever’s reading this.
My kid and I making music at our friend’s desk.