Oct 16 Dj Cinnamoon, East at any corner

A couple of days ago I received a terse email that I intended to visit a link “I think you may find interesting”, said. Of course, click, and began a journey that I have not yet returned.

The place I'm visiting, the project-universe that I have caught since, is calledDj Cinnamoon.

Let the amazing… but easy:

Dj Cinnamoon the universe impossible and nonnegotiable a DJ specializing in Cartagena Cassette tapes. Brutal. Tapes, also, largely from a East including Armenians, Jews, Greek, Assyrians Anatol y, among many other. Huge.

Are added here, therefore, much love: el kitsch, the border and the transcultural. And the music, clearly. Items more than enough to make this project an interesting proposal.

But there is more: this is, as I, the easy part. The hard part is explaining why Dj Cinnamoon is different from the other border kitsch musical projects I've seen yet (and include, for example, Cleopatra universe Natacha Atlas).

Dj Cinnamoon adds an element trangresor which is the proposed look with cassette tapes. We step:

There is a mythical and sterile East is east of the spell, of sensuality, magic and the thousand and one nights. And also, other side of the same coin, eastern “the authentic”, the eternal values, tradition, henna tattoos and ancestral wisdom. An east invented for use and enjoyment of the observer. But the East does not exist. And the problem is the myth, but the myth has been installed in the head with reality category. This sensual and magical myth, so remote from ordinary life and real human, has become knowledge base to understand people and lives that are real. When we traveled to Beirut hoping to find authenticity and wisdom and we ran with the cocks we get a disappointment ultraoperadas. Or when we travel to Cairo hoping to find Aladdins and belly dancers and young people encounter alternative hooked to networks, we take another disappointment. We can not look the other in the face and ask who is, of so convinced that we know a priori who should be. We are unable to meet.

Dj Cinnamoon, somehow, myth seems clean. Y, care, his gaze is not neutral, let alone its aesthetic. Ultra pop, descaradamente kitsch, combining hookahs and petrol pumps, neon and pharaohs, enjoys extreme aesthetic expression, but never his look is exotic.

What is the key? Perhaps this: in his explanation of your project in English (Unfortunately, the phrase is lost in the Spanish version), write: “Cassette tapes have a special meaning for me as they are icons in post-industrial working class”.

There is: Cinnamoon DJ understands what many Arabists, escritorxs, intelectualxs, have forgotten: there is no them and us, the other does not exist. A cassette tape at a gas station in the High Atlas can have the same meaning as a cassette tape of a gas station in Aragon. Dj Cinnamoon not buy their tapes trying to find a mystery. He knows that there is no mystery, but life. And life goes from life, not from the movies, or from the myths.

A final example: classification of music. I have fought many times with musical commentators who are unable to classify a disc come from the Arab world as rock! As much as is obviously rock, the name of the musician does not leave. Is the atraviesa: the Other can not rock, because if you do, I do not know what I do.

Dj Cinnamoon should know well what it does, because I do not doubt: Seventies, Pop, y Pop-Folk, and classified under such labels, for example,  ”the heterogeneity of the seventies Iran, the idealized pre-Beirut Lebanon's military destabilization, the key psychedelic reinterpretation of traditional Turkish repertoire and other musical phenomena linked to processes of rural exodus of the time”.

It's that easy. It's unusual.

More info:

www.djcinnamoon.com

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