Author: Ivan Fernandez

Afroxander is the nom de guerre for writer/photographer Ivan Fernandez, based in Southern California.

Capsula: The Best Live Band You Haven’t Seen

Search for Capsula on the internet and you will find stories by music critics who all make the same observation: Capsula puts on a hell of a live show (as anyone who has been to SXSW these past three years can attest to).

Martin Guevara and Ignacio Villarejo of Capsula. Photo by Jay Janner/Austin American-Statesman

The band, featuring vocalist/guitarist Martin Guevara, vocalist/bassist Coni Duchess and drummer Ignacio Villarejo, is a Garage/Psychedelic Rock group based in Bilbao, Spain who came together in 1998 in their hometown of Buenos Aires, Argentina with the intent of following in the footsteps of their favorite musicians of the 60’s and 70’s: David Bowie, The Velvet Underground, The Who, The Rolling Stones, Pescado Rabioso and Manal.

Continue reading “Capsula: The Best Live Band You Haven’t Seen” →

El Aviador Dro: 30+ Years of Spanish Synthesizers

I’ll be out of the country this July and living in Valladolid, Spain where I’ll be improving my Spanish writing and grammar skills at University of Valladolid. I’m going to mark the occasion with a number of posts about Spanish music groups beginning with:

El Aviador Dro y Sus Obreros Especializados (The Aviator Dro and His Specialized Workers, Aviador Dro for short) is an Electronic Pop group from Madrid whose musical style falls somewhere between Kraftwerk’s serious minimalism and DEVO’s deadpan kitsch.

Founding members Servando Carballar and Arturo Lanz fmet in Madrid’s Santamarca Institute in 1976. Carballar formed Punk group Alex y Los Drugos (Alex and The Droogs) in 1978. He later bought an electric organ that same year and created Techno-Pop group Holoplastico. Continue reading “El Aviador Dro: 30+ Years of Spanish Synthesizers” →

Blood, Drugs and Hitmen: Where to find Info. on Organized Crime and Narcotrafficking in Mexico and Latin America

Drug cartels in Mexico who once operated in the shadows announced their entrance into mainstream society with a number of beheadings in 2006 that marked the beginning of a wave of unprecedented violence that still consumes parts of the country. Gun fights in broad daylight occur regularly in parts of Nuevo Leon, Michoacan and Chihuahua. Cartels have also moved on to methods more sadistic than beheadings via vats of acid and even a car bomb or two.

Flag of Los Zetas by cartoonist Jose Hernandez (monerohernandez.com.mx)

Much of Mexico continues to live normally despite the violence in some areas. Traveler extraordinaire Rick Steves celebrated the coming of 2011 in Mexico City with nary a hint of drug-related violence in sight. My relatives in the state of Jalisco continue to live in peace. My friends with families in Juarez, unfortunately, cannot say the same. They have suffered extortion and violence at the hands of cartels and corrupt law enforcement.

Most Mexican news organizations can’t or won’t cover the situation in-depth because of threats and attacks by cartels on their headquarters and journalists. U.S. news organizations can’t or won’t because it’s not in their interest to do so save for lazy, fear-mongering tales of spillover violence and anarchy.

So where do concerned citizens and interested parties turn to for accurate information and comprehensive analysis of events in Mexico? Read on after the jump to find out:

Continue reading “Blood, Drugs and Hitmen: Where to find Info. on Organized Crime and Narcotrafficking in Mexico and Latin America” →

Super Metal Bros.: Metal Tunes Redone via 8-bit

I guess it was only a matter of time until chiptune fanatics remixed/converted Heavy Metal into chiptune/8-bit/bleepity-bloopity songs thanks to a little program called GXSCC, which converts MIDI files into MSX-like WAV files. Drag a MIDI file of Metallica’s “Battery” into the program and you get the following:

More Chipmetal tracks after the jump: Continue reading “Super Metal Bros.: Metal Tunes Redone via 8-bit” →

Ladytron Seduces With New Single “White Elephant”

Gravity The Seducer. Artwork by Neil Krug/Trevor Tarczynski.

I may not be as excited for every new Ladytron release as I was in my college days but I’m always happy to know that the Liverpool quartet continues to create solid electronic-pop music. Case in point, “White Elephant,” their first single off their upcoming fifth LP Gravity The Seducer:

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Name-checking Sole’s Latest Video, “I Think I’m Noam Chomsky”

Lost in the hoopla of Cinco de Mayo was independent hip-hop star Sole‘s video premiere for “I Think I’m Noam Chomsky:”

Sole (real name Tim Holland), a founder of hip-hop label Anticon, recorded the track for his upcoming mixtape Nuclear Winter 2. The track is filled with enough political references to make Zack De La Rocha want to tell this cat to take it easy.

It’s easy to get lost among them all so, after the jump, is a brief explanation of the people, events, etc. mentioned in the video:

Continue reading “Name-checking Sole’s Latest Video, “I Think I’m Noam Chomsky”” →

Nortec Collective’s Bostich + Fussible at CSULA’s Luckman Arts Complex

I was at CSULA this past weekend and caught a performance by Bostich + Fussible. Click the photo below for the slideshow.

From Tijuana con amor. Photo by Ivan Fernandez for LA Weekly

The duo also released a new video the day after:

As Fussible (Pepe Mogt) explains in the video’s description, the video was filmed as a joke. They had their masks and camera in the trunk of their car and shot the video in no more than 15 minutes with less than an hour spent editing it.

No Es El Grito: Cinco de Mayo History Cheat Sheet

Let’s skip past the obvious sombrero/sarape jokes and get straight to the point: far too many people have no clue what Cinco de Mayo is all about nor how it came to be. For the sake of brevity, I present a brief history cheat-sheet on the history and development of the Cinco de Mayo celebration.

From Francine Prose’s article, Savoring Puebla for Smithsonian Magazine:

Like the rest of Mexico, Puebla has had a troubled history marked by war, invasions and revolutions. Several important military confrontations took place there, most famously the Battle of the Fifth of May, Cinco de Mayo, commemorated in a holiday that has assumed great significance for Mexicans living outside their own country. At the battle, which occurred not far from Puebla’s center, on May 5, 1862, the Mexican Army defeated the French with the aid of local troops. Unfortunately, the French returned a year later and smashed the Mexican forces and occupied Mexico until they were defeated by Benito Juárez in 1867.

Artwork depicting the Battle of Puebla. Courtesy of diasdehistoria.com.ar. Artist unknown.

Continue reading “No Es El Grito: Cinco de Mayo History Cheat Sheet” →