Two years ago at the Kesselhaus in Berlin, we were fully entranced by the eastern Romanian masters of Balkan brass, Fanfare Ciocarlia, who ended their roaring set by descending from the stage and playing nearly an entire 2nd show in the midst of the crowd. Last night Balkan Beat Box spliced that frenzied custom into their intro, beginning their percussive and horned assault from the balcony of The Great American Music Hall, and weaving their way through the crowd. When they finally arrived onstage, Tomer Yusef - rapper, percussionist, and frenzy-conductor - declared, “This is not a live show… this is a party!

So much news pouring through this week, we felt an urgency to just throw out as much updating here as possible… Balkan Beat Box afterparty is Not possible this time around but see ya at the Great American Music Hall show ( which may not be sold out Yet) THIS Saturday. This group is on fire, and the latest album Nu-Med has a kind of global solidarity underpinning that feels like it is the new Clandestinos anthem, adding a brass kick and mediterranean-jacked rap to unify the latest rise of smiling warriors on the march !

(Stills from Alfonso Cuaron’s clip for “The Shock Doctrine”: Watch Here.) Making stops in San Francisco 9/26 and Oakland 9/28 , Naomi Klein is on tour with her latest precision analysis “The Shock Doctrine”. Could anyone still sleep through this fire, after absorbing her assessments of free market feeding time in neo-liberal overdrive over the last four decades?! While we haven’t had a chance to get ahold of the book yet, judging from this incredible collaboration with filmmaker Alfonso Cuaron, and her recent appearance on Democracy Now this is one of the most disturbing and spot-on critiques of the current nightmares we are living through today.

(image by joe sorren) Dearest Art Organisms, the XLt news + praxis letter v.1 from the XL Terrestrials : global citizens re-sourcing overt intelligence and musical insurrections ( Your email was given to us by a defecting Google ad executive, who decided to share your entire search history with the XL Terrestrials before escaping to Caracas. In other words, we have […]

Voice Of Roma, the organization behind the most important Roma and Balkan music festival on the West Coast brings back Yuri Yunakov & his Romani Wedding Band to play at the Croatian American Cultural Center ( 60 Onondaga St., SF, CA ) on Sept. 21st. Performing for the Herdeljezi Festival in Sebastopol in 2006, Yuri […]

“One of my very, very first memories is of my parents’ house in Los Angeles. In the late afternoon, the light would come through windows […]

In Baudrillard’s theories in “Simulacres et Simulation“, he once wrote with both irony and penetrating critique that Disneyland was created so that Americans would think that the world they live in is real. Is it possible that the Burning Man festival has upped the game? Now a version of sandbox liberation has been created […]