I'm a DJ, nightlife producer, and the Director of Music Programming at Conduit Labs where I oversee creative partnerships with labels and talent and work on a little Facebook app called Music Pets.
Check on me at djfucci.com
I follow:
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Souls of Mischief ‘93 ‘Til Infinity
Opening arms to the smooth vibes of Summer ‘10
Tags: Billy Dee Williams
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LCD Soundsystem I Can Change
I was so excited when my DJ partner Brian Blackout landed us some tickets to LCD Soundsystem’s recently added fourth show at NYC’s Terminal Five. I was late in the game to realize how completely amazing the latest record was (after its release I spent a few disinterested weeks before getting around to listening to it, thanks to my underground/outsider “it’s just getting too much hype” residual self-image). Plus I had my associations- hearing them play at opening night of London’s now-defunct The Key and being turned off by their infamous decibel level, or feeling ruffled by the harsh urgency of their mid 00s disco-punky singles (Get Innocuous/Daft Punk Is Playing At My House/Disco Infiltrator).
Musically, I’m not really a fan of noise. Or rough takes. In broadstroke sweeping terms I like pop: polished, produced things. This is why I don’t listen to much punk or indie rock, and prefer the Beatles to the Stones. But over the years LCD’s backbone/brain/multi-instrumentalist DFA guru James Murphy has smoothed out, (at least production-wise: see Someone Great or the entire 45:33 album) and with the recent This Is Happening I’m officially back on board.
For me, most relevant to this (or any) moment are the feelings evoked with the record. With a matured voice Murphy sweetly delivers the anthemic inspirational messages we party folks rely on him for—urging nightlifers to let loose, encouraging hook-ups and silliness (“People who need people to the back of the bus!”), being real about the pitfalls of partying alongside it’s capacity to save your soul.
Murphy talks a lot about intimacy and miscommunication on my two favorite tracks Home and I Can Change, referencing the need for human connection and personal growth (“No one opens up when you scream and shout.”) Maybe it’s the famed power of his hulking aggression, but Murphy has this genius way of celebrating living without seeming cloying or stilted. Each track speaks to a greater experience of living up to potential (“Forget a terrible year …love and rock are bigger things”) and even the love songs emote beyond boy-meets-girl vanilla conventions—they connote that greater kind of love, a love of people or music or the mere opportunity to feel something that huge, and the drive and inspiration to keep pushing that feeling to grow.
Blackout and I listened to album together on our drive down to Philly this weekend (to play Robotique at KFN-highly recommended), and he astutely remarked that in some ways Murphy might be the new Morrissey, because he writes about universal themes in a way we can all identify with. Maybe that’s why I’m so enamored? And thus I conclude with the following:
“And love is a curse, shoved in a hearse, love is an open book to a verse of your bad poetry …and this is coming from me.”
Tags: LCD Soundsystem Robotique Morrissey James Murphy This is Happening Brian Blackout Robotique Kung Fu Necktie
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Dusty Trails Fool For A Country Tune
(a contemplative student from the city, living in beautiful Amherst, considering life circa 1999)
Women in Music and Media Panelists
Last Friday I went to up to the Pioneer Valley to speak at Smith College for the Women in Music & Media Panel. Northampton is an old stomping ground from my days at UMass Amherst where I studied Social Thought/Political Economy/Women’s Studies (hippie) so it was exciting to lay tracks there again, this time with some cred and a reasonable haircut.
I spoke about my wearying emergence from the non-profit world to the rocky testoste-road of DJing, my current position (as the only full-time female employee) at Conduit Labs, and our main product Music Pets, which currently has ~400,000 female users under the age of 18 (all of whom have access to my social network profiles).
I had a lot to say about ethics and social media—How do we negotiate the private and public spheres of social networking? How do the realities of earning a living impact the way we use our networks?—but a lot more to learn, and I felt really fortunate to share the room with a five other kick-ass panelists.
On the panel were two of my Willie Mae Rock Camp cohorts-panel moderator Mindy Abovitz and Rock Camp founder Ingrid Hu Dahl. Mindy is an Audio Engineer at East Village Radio and the Creator/Editor-in-Chief of the glossy female drummer-centric Tom Tom Magazine, and Ingrid is the Editor-in-Chief of mutlimedia journal Youth Media Reporter and a member of Rad Pony. I met Tianna Kennedy, a pirate radio activist who coordinated the building and navigating of rafts from Slovefnia across the Adriatic Sea to Venice, and chatted with public radio reporters Ann Heppermann and Sally Herships, who produce and write for NPR (This American Life and All Things Considered, respectively) and WNYC’s Studio 360. Check out Ann’s rad new project Mapping Main Street, where she documents over 10,000 Main Streets across the U.S.
Small groups after the panel.
DJing in a Smith dining hall.
Big thanks to WOZQ’s Hanna Cristina for organizing the weekend and Jake Alper for taking photos.
Tags: Conduit Labs East Village Radio Ingrid Hu Dahl Mapping Main Street Mindy Abovitz Music Pets Rad Pony Sally Herships Smith College Tianna Kennedy Tom Tom Magazine Wille Mae Rock Camp Ann Hepperman
Six weeks to live is a temporary name. I started this blog around the same time that I broke my toe (middle, right foot), which will take about six weeks to heal. I feel less on top of my game but several people have suggested that I may get some sympathy ass out of it. We’ll see.
Tags: broken toe sympathy ass
Permalink (2 notes) | Reblogged from takingclaireofbusiness
From takingclaireofbusiness who is kind of awesome. Check out her garden variety of thought-provoking images.
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Tones on Tail, Twist
This week I’ve been listening to a lot of Tones on Tail.
As a teen I had a dailiance with the gothic subculture: less clunky/more Victorian, pre-Manson, Siouxsie Sioux-style goth. Emerging in the decline of The Cure’s heyday I did witness the birth of Nine Inch Nails in appropriate garb—crushed velvet dresses, striped tights, black lipstick. I wasn’t a full-time goth or anything; I spent just as much energy considering/dressing the parts of punk and mod and grunge, but the prescripted goth lifestyle of pessimism and bleak isolation felt most appropriate during my high school years. But like everything from that period, the goth concept grew to feeling dated and immature, and as an adult I wrote off most of the music as bland and predictable with its calculated but ultimately aimless moodiness.
So here I am, knocking on 30 and revisiting my record collection when I come across this Vertigo/4AD/Polygram/Beggars Banquet compilation. Familiar tracks from ABC and Big Country thrown in with a few Darkwave songs like Tones on Tail’s Twist and Gene Loves Jezebel’s Always A Flame. These cuts are dark but also airy, with undertones of Rockabilly and Surf—more like a nighttime drive than a dungeon romp. The record plays in the background on a Sunday afternoon, another Sunday of hungover/shame housecleaning, and it feels completely appropriate. It’s keeping me moving but also speaks to that place of torture I feel bent over a bathtub, scrubbing Sterilite containers that will soon be repurposed and refilled with more of the necessary objects you acquire as a single person living alone.
I keep talking about “really living”, like really feeling something (whether good or bad or confusing), and how in *this modern life* the experience of true emotional significance is often just as relevant as the essence of the feelings themselves. Something about Tones on Tail is capturing that complexity for me; the intensity of some of my current feelings …longing mixed with aging but without resignation. Adjustment, perseverance, wherewithal. The wisdom of knowing that things will change, and frustration that I have only some control over when.
I recommend Happiness, Lions, Rain, and Twist, all on their retrospective compilation Everything.
Tags: Tones on Tail Gothic Gene Loves Jezebel
So, this is my first real post. Yeah!
I’m killing it tonight at Santo’s Party House for Choice Cu*ts (I was not consulted in the naming of this event), where we’ll have a 7-LADY STRONG DJ BATTLE. You can read on below so I won’t say much more about this, except that Lady Gaga’s Telephone video is streaming on a loop all night, and there will be sandwiches available in homage.
Also, thank you to all of the supporters of my daytime gig Conduit Labs- our main product, Facebook application Music Pets, just hit over 1 million users! So I’m very pleased these days and smiling a lot.
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GIGS COMING UP:
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Choice Cu*ts @ Santos Party House
Saturday March 27
SEVEN DJ’s back-to-back
Gaga’s new video screening all night
FREE sandwiches!
DJs (in set order)
Drea
Scruff McGruff
Mila Monster
Fucci (1AM sharp!)
Nasty
Roze Royce
96 Lafayette Street
All trains to Canal
Hit me for my highly limited list
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Hey Rumor Queen- Benefit for LBGT Center Youth
April 10th 10PM @ Public Assembly
Amber Valentine, DJ Tanner, Me & More
70 North 6th Street
Brooklyn, New York
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Women in Music panel & performances
April 16th 8PM @ Smith College
TBD
Northampton, Massachusetts 01060
Woman in Music panel & performances for Radio Awareness Week.
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Wooly Bully @ The Basement
April 17th 11PM
21 center st
Northampton, Massachusetts
soul, r&b, garage, fuzzy, funky good times
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NRG play Robotique
April 30th 10PM @ Kung Fu Neck Tie
1248 North Front St.
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Slammin’ rare disco at one of the top-notch parties of Philly.
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