B. Hold's blog

"It's About Modernity": A Conversation with Otura Mun

Thu, 07/26/2018 - 7:37am | B. Hold

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Otura Mun (left) gracious sat down with author and host of One Foundation, B. Hold, at World Café Live in Philadelphia on July 15, 2018

Catch ÌFÉ live, Saturday, July 28, 2018, at Freight & Salvage in Berkeley, CA

"I've heard a lot of rappers freestyle over a beat, but I've never heard a beat freestyle over a rapper," Otura Mun tells me with a slight smile, and I shake my head and make some kind of sound from my chest to recognize the innovative spirit beneath this clever quip. We're talking about improvisation, something that many of us don't expect to hear in electronic music. But ÌFÉ, Mun's electronic fusion group based in Puerto Rico, goes well beyond the expectations of genre, technology, and tradition, bringing an otherworldly dimension of play to a modern musical form that often relies heavily on programming.

One Foundation: Curating Around Reggae

Wed, 11/29/2017 - 1:54pm | B. Hold

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One Foundation, Wednesdays 4-5pm on KDRT

November 17, 2017

As Cam and I have been getting ready to start our program, One Foundation, people have been asking us, "So is this a reggae show?" Our answer: No and Yes.

No, in the sense that we'll be playing a wide variety of musical styles from around the globe, especially from the Caribbean, Latin America, and the diasporas of those regions throughout the world. Reggae might be the majority of what we play, but you could say we're "hardly strictly reggae."