have a ball

ah, college

if you are in the cambridge area this weekend (and can tear yourself away from NESN), you might consider spending some of your sunday at harvard square's oktoberfest. the weather is supposed to be absolutely fine, and the folks planning the fest this year are trying to make it more of a draw by bringing in a bunch of musical acts and expanding the biergarten areas. (really though, they're more like beer-pens, nein?)

me and my riddim-methodist colleague, dj c, will be providing some trinkenmuzik from 3 to 4. i plan to remix a bunch of oktoberfest favorites, while c will no doubt mashitup in his own impeccable way. should be a ball, or two.

for a bit of a preview, allow me to share with you a couple deutschland-inspired ditties i cooked up several years ago when i was studying german and fancying a dissertation on hip-hop in germany (before hip-hop in jamaica suddenly seemed like a much better idea). these don't feature samples of actual oktoberfest muzik, but they do feature samples from a learn-to-speak-german casette i picked up back when i was trying to learn how to sprechen that dastardly difficult tongue.

the first, "ich in munich," employs samples of a guy saying that he doesn't know how to speak german, completely in german of course. progressing through the phrases the tape supplies for struggling speakers, it gets more and more ridiculous as it goes, descending into utter incomprehension despite all the textbook german:

wayne&wax, "ich in munich"

the second, "german drinking song," is more appropriate for the season. i chopped up a bunch of phrases--somewhat archaic ones, i'm told--used for ordering drinks, toasting, and the like, and i pasted them into a downright binge of a track. for backing, i created a woozy little analog romp, complete with the underlying strains of "how dry i am"--a tune forever enshrined in my memory by cartoon depictions of drunkenness. hope you enjoy. (best when taken with a steinful of augustiner--good great bier, if you can get it. unfortunately, i don't think it's easy to come by outside of muenchen.)

wayne&wax, "german drinking song"

prosit!