this video is a celebration & tribute to black dance, set to an amazing song by Imani Uzuri – visit her website (myspace.com/herholywater) to hear more of her music and purchase songs. the piece was edited by pierrre bennu (yours truly)

After getting past some technical hurdles, working through all of life’s hustles and those things that work their way higher on the ‘to do’ list, there is finally something new on the notradio blog.

The process of me finally getting this music up deals entirely with the act of letting go. I know now that I will never have enough records. I will never know if it’s mixed right or if anyone digs this stuff as much as I do. But I can say finally that it’s done and that’s all I can do. That’s all anyone can ever do. So I’ll be letting these go. Sometimes it will just be a really rare song from someone obscure or undiscovered; sometimes it will be a whole mix tape; sometimes just a remixed song. My goal is to drop at least one a week if not more.

What I grew up listening to and doing is not the norm. And with technology being what it is, the art of DJing as I remember it has become a lost art. People have told me on many occasions that they haven’t really heard anything like that or that they haven’t heard anything like that in a while. They would often ask where they can get a mix tape or when I was spinning next.

I don’t tend to keep regular gigs, so I would usually point them to my site but under the guise of wanting to put out a perfect product, i kept pushing back the deadline for getting my mixes up. I never felt that what I did was quite ‘perfect’ enough to share. Was there an audience for it? And shouldn’t I wait until I got “X” “Y” or “Z” record to do that one mix I’d been thinking about?
Then I stopped doing it for feed back and found a reason to do it for self.

So here it is: perfect. With its occasional glitches, scratchy records, worn needles, slight mess ups, and other things that you totally don’t care about.

I hope you enjoy. See you next week with something new.

)

And right as I’m about to upload a ton of new stuff, my hard drive fails. ALL my digital music was wiped clean.

Losing the things I had on CD was just a minor inconvenience, but what hurts is that I lost unreleased tracks, very rare demos and my entire library of mixes. So as you can imagine I’ve just been getting my head together – trying to get to a place where I even felt safe recording again. So thanks for your feedback and patience. I got tons of fun stuff on the horizon keep an ear here, and thanks again.

I remember the responsibility of not damaging the records because that meant damaging the message. I remember the honor bestowed on the one deemed worthy – and old enough – to touch the equipment. To be the selector was an unspoken rite of passage… the requirement to both move and challenge the crowd.

I will not be the only DJ contributing to the sound, text and art on this site.

Consider me (Pierre Bennu) a curator of this sonic gallery of audio collages. I expect it will transform and mutate into something far less literal than this but until such time I leave you with some older pieces I had laying around to whet your virtual palate.

I’m not going to bore you with music theory or how well I can use my thesaurus. This is more for you to close your eyes to and imagine a smell or a place or a time, perhaps visit a place you’ve never been or doesn’t even exist. This is for artists, dreamers and folks who need a sound put to a moment that they cant hold onto with words. This is something to nod your head to and reminisce; or something that gets you up dancing and sends you on a journey saying “who sings that?” Some of its funny some of it’s obscure but all of its recorded live and done with love…

This is notradio.