It is with enormous sadness that we have learned of the death of Evandro João da Silva, a long-serving coordinator for Brazilian cultural group AfroReggae. Evandro, who was interviewed by Spannered in the favela of Parada de Lucas in 2007, was the victim of a violent mugging in Rio's central district on 18 October 2009. An English-language version of the shocking events surrounding his death can be found here. Our deepest sympathies go out to Evandro's family and friends, and all those who worked alongside him within AfroReggae.

 

(Photo by Simone Marinho)

Message from Filastine:

 

URGENT CALL FOR SOUND COMPOSITIONS
On a topic even more urgent: Climate Chaos

Deadline: December 13, 2009
Public Performance: December 16, in the streets of Copenhagen during the Climate Summit, broadcast from the Sound Swarm, a battery of bicycle-mounted megaphones within the Bike Bloc
Compensation: Air that you can breath & weather that doesn't kill you
Curated by: Filastine

From the 7-18th of December the world's leaders will be in Copenhagen to decide the conditions of this planet's future. Given the suspects & their financial backing, it's nearly impossible we'll be presented with solutions, far more likely we'll see further privatization, enclosure, and commodification of our atmosphere under the alias of carbon trading.

This is your chance to put pressure, speak truth to power, or sonically disrupt, at HIGH VOLUME.

Anything on-topic is welcome: remix the speeches of corporate & government leaders, environmental soundscapes, the sounds of nature or it's undoing, appropriate collages, home-cooked theme songs, subliminal mob-inflaming drones, advertising jingles of the apocalypse

Submission Details:
1. Composition can be of any duration, but there is no guarantee your composition will be broadcast.
2. The loudspeakers do not reproduce frequencies below 500hz. Use a highpass EQ filter. Also, megaphones respond better to longer sounds than short transients. Translation: no bass, no drums.
3. Please submit 5 dual-mono wave files with equal start times. Use the diagram below for conceptualizing space. If you are technically unable to compose and render for 5 channels, submit it anyhow, if it's good I'll make the effort to cut it into multi-channel.
4. Send files via an ftp, yousendit.com, sendthisfile.com, or a similar service to this email: filastine.soundswarm@gmail.com
5. Name the files like this:
1RR_title
2R_title
3C_title
4L_title
5LL_title

This is how we'll try to be arranged in the street, the X's signify non-sound bikes of the bike block.

(Imagine Sarkozy, Wen Jiabao, or Obama here in front of us listening attentively. Or maybe just a load of riot police & TV cameras)

X 5LL X X X X X X X X X X X X X X 1RR X
X X X X X X 4L X X X XX X X 4R X X X X
X X X X X X X X X X 3C X X X X X X X X X X
X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X
X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X
(+ another ~ 1000 bikes)

Move fast. We are just about out of time.

Get in touch if you will be in Copenhagen and want to build or pilot one of the Sound Swarm bikes: filastine.soundswarm@gmail.com

 

-- end message

Laurent Fintoni told us earlier this year he'd started work on a mix with 2tall and Clockwork to document developments across the hip hop spectrum since the turn of the millennium. Well, their Boom Bap Continuum project has finally reached fruition: 200+ tracks, 50+ producers, reduced down to a richly packed 80 minutes. Chronologically traversing production lineage over the past decade, it's a mighty piece of work held together by dope skills, first-rate knowledge and boundless enthusiasm.

 

Followers of Spannered will know something of our propensity for posting pictures of our beloved Lama genus. With gusto therefore we guide you to the organ of lamalink.com (as recently endorsed by the BBC's Have I Got News For You). Its illustrious pages pose such puzzles as 'why it took so long for Argentines to come into their own on the llama scene', and when will you know whether or not you've a proper showstopper on your hands. Vital questions indeed.

> lamalink.com Magazine - latest issue PDF

 

This particular heavy wool Argentine male was among the fine specimens to pique our interest this issue.

 

 

A sure-as-hell sign of Nature's whackjob sense of humour.

It's either a sign of human progress or the end of days. A man known as Justin has started posting his father's random pronouncements on Twitter, and nearly half a million people have found this interesting enough to follow him. His profile reads, "I'm 29. I live with my 73-year-old dad. He is awesome. I just write down shit that he says". But Justin's dad's words really are awesome. Check out these veritable pearls thrown before the swine of the social media sty:

 

 

Although most of the quotes are plain-spoken, acerbic and somehow suspiciously funny (suspicious only because they're so good you wonder if Justin is blessed not so much with a brilliantly funny father, but rather with a gift for sounding like a brilliantly funny 73 year old), his wide-ranging and largely spot-on opinions on topics such as pet care, food preparation, raising children, making drinks, and how to identify a stripper all prove testament to the uniquely engaging environment of the multigenerational family home. You're left amused and touched and oddly nostalgic for days when we all had the opportunity to live with and know our parents better throughout adulthood.

 

 

Read more gems at http://twitter.com/Shitmydadsays