City Girls
Mo-Shi-Mo

Despite making a impression with rough-hewn techno records on TAANSTAFL and his own Tallmen imprint, ca relative newcomer to the genre. Arriving in Berlin to continue studying jazz guitar - a craft he'd been learning in New York from legendary jazz musicians Ornette Coleman and Lawrence D. 'Butch' Morris - it was a long night in Berghain that steered him toward electronic music.Mitchell hasn't altogether discarded his jazz learning, having successfully applied for and won a grant from Musicboard Berlin - an organization that allocates state funding for creative music projects - based on a his pitch for a new project in which the Kansas native plans to combine jazz and Delta Blues with the Detroit and Berlin sounds that have shaped his musical outlook as it is today.'Mississippi, Detroit and Berlin share common stories to me because they have all seen, and still see very hard times and they have a strong musical history connected to folk music,' says Mitchell. 'When I listen to John Lee Hooker, I hear Jeff Mills and Robert Hood. One chord, maybe two, one foot pounding on a wood floor, sometimes at around 130 bpm. John Lee Hooker lived in Detroit for an extend period of time, worked for Ford Motor Company and somehow the machine funk that would later inform Drexcyia was already being investigated by Mr. Hooker.'The 'Blues In Roots' series will take the form of three 12s released over the course of 2014, with an organic fusion of Mitchell's Delta Blues-inspired instrumental musicianship and the tough raw techno production he has mastered in his Tallmen.785 guise, creating a sound that traces a natural musical lineage from Berlin & Detroit all the way back to early 20th century southern USA. 'In the south, they had a wood floor and a guitar, in Detroit and Berlin they have synthesizers, samplers and drum machines. That is where these two seemingly divided worlds collided, and gave me the inspiration to make my music rooted in this specific angle.

Debut album by Smagghe & Cross. Music for blind observers. At times, the way the voice skipped intermittently, the recording sounded like an exercise in Uncle Bill's scissors technique but in my defence the mic I was using was hidden. I knew Jean was recording me, he'd asked for an interview after finding my name in one of his black notebooks, Jean didn't know I was recording him. He was tuning into fading echoes and when he thought the tape machine was off he left an echo of his own. "I caused such scenes on the way to and at kindergarten that first day my mother never bothered risking damage to my nascent psyche by making me return. Consequently come first grade my petulance had precluded me fromthe nursery school forged friendships of my new classmates. It's why I've always been an observer. But I've never been an archivist. I never wrote the intimate details down. If you fix them on paper there's a danger of shared ownership. The black notebooks contain coded references, the meaning once obvious now somewhat cryptic. Names, some possibly anagrammatical and numbers, presumably long dead phone lines. There are a few sketches but no photographic evidence of any kind. This to most of the population, with it's need for minute by minute high def validation, sounds like a curse. I, however, feel blessed. Evidence is the enemy. Magick for me is the carp in Herman's monastery pond. Brief flashes of gold as i disturb the murky silt of memory." It's there that one of the only two recordings of Jean's voice comes to an end. Jean has his copy obviously but If I know Jean it's long been lost or destroyed.

Ce nouveau projet prouve que Shin-Ski n’a rien perdu de sa superbe et son oeuvre continue de faire vibrer et voyager. Ses productions, aussi cosmiques qu’exotiques, contribuent à la perpétuelle abolition des frontières de genre.