We are really really happy to share with you a new video that has been created for a remix of a track we made in collaboration with Indigenous Resistance. The video for This Land Is Not For Sale (We Shall Witness The Day Babylon Falls Remix) illustrates the insidious land grab of farmland that is currently happening on a global basis, mostly in developing countries.

The intensity of the mix is captured by the video created by Earth Ritual which you can watch below. Whether it is in Mexico or in Ethiopia, large corporations are in cahoots with local governments; who sell them large tracts of lands at below market value for commercial farms. In the process, their own governments are kicking off the original occupants and farmers of the land.  Many are indigenous peoples, whose rights to their land go back before there were governments, corporations, or the thought that the land could be for sale.  It is so obvious, these monolithic corporations and governments consider the indigenous “unimportant” and therefore disposable.

This track and the accompanying video celebrate the resistance that hard fought against these wrong-headed and unjust actions. The video itself was created within a process accompanied by different folks across the globe who gave crucial insights for  the creator, Earth Ritual; these included Alberto Caballo, Tape Dave, Sistah Dub, Chefe Camomilla and The Ghost.

You can buy the release on iTunes by visiting this link

Published in the Guardian
When the film La Haine was released in 1995, it sent shockwaves through French society with its gritty portrayal of urban youth in the bleak suburbs of Paris. Seventeen years later, the film is to be screened in Tottenham, north London, where the UK riots began in summer 2011.

Screened by the interactive company Future Cinema, the film will be shown on the eve of the London mayoral election and is intended to reopen debate about the causes of the riots while reaching out to young people on the Broadwater Farm estate, said founder Fabien Riggall.

“We believe cinema is a really powerful medium that is universal and should be available to everyone. This estate, and the most disadvantaged estates around the country, are full of creative and bright young people and we believe that showing a film of such power could inspire them to make a real difference.”

It is new territory for the company, creator of Secret Cinema, whose previous interactive film experiences have seen children splattered with splurge guns during Bugsy Malone and lovers romanced by Brief Encounter.

“If 400 kids from this estate see this film and at least some of them can be inspired to go away and create their own that would be fantastic,” said Riggall. Future Cinema has also commissioned six films from the estate, with the winning film to be shown before the screening of Mathieu Kassovitz’s La Haine.

The film – which charts a day in the life of three characters in the Paris suburbs struggling against hopelessness and urban blight – aims to attract an audience of 400 residents and will feature a live film score performance from alternative electronica act Asian Dub Foundation.

The event will be free – subsidised by paid-for screenings of the film at the 1930s Troxy venue in east London. Other screenings, organised by local groups, are planned throughout the country on the same night. Future Cinema is also planning a screening in Saint Denis, a disadvantaged suburb of Paris – on the eve of the second round of the French presidential election.

It could be the start of a “positive revolution” on the estate, according to 26-year-old Isaac Densu, a film-maker and resident of Broadwater Farm who has been brought on board by Future Cinema. “A lot of the problems you see in La Haine are the same problems faced by the people on this estate and I think it will be a great way to get people to reflect. Telling people is different to showing them and by screening the film I think people will find their own route, rather than being told what to do.”

The company will have a office on the estate and hopes to continue showing films as a social enterprise. Densu has big ambitions. “We’re showing La Haine first to get people in but it would be great to show Grand Hotel, Jules et Jim or classics like Casablanca,” he said. “Lots of people around here just go to work and come back to the estate – that is their reality. I want to show people there are all kinds of worlds out there.”

The event will be organised, policed and run by the community, according to Future Cinema. “We don’t want to impose this on Broadwater Farm – everything we do will come through the people we employ,” said Riggall.

Future Cinema has been in discussions with Haringey council and local police to ensure safety at the event. Densu said involving local community leaders in security would reduce the risk of unrest and hoped the film screening could challenge people’s perception of the estate. “After the riots people think there is no humanity here, like we breed nasty people, and that’s just not the case. Nothing like this ever happens on Broadwater Farm so it is a chance to say something positive about the area,” he said.

In La Haine, the character Vinz, played by Vincent Cassel, repeatedly sees a cow wandering through his estate, and one of Riggall’s wilder schemes involves bringing a friendly bovine on holiday to Broadwater Farm. “It’s a bloody brilliant idea,” said Densu. “I doubt anyone on the estate will have seen a cow since a school trip. People build their own sense of reality and disengage with mainstream society – for me bringing a cow here shakes that notion and says, no, your reality can change.”

Asian Dub Foundation don’t just play chords, notes and beats. They play feelings: of injustice and rage, righteousness and people power. Their ability to articulate the voice of the oppressed — through a fusion of rock, reggae, bhangra, electronica and rap — has made them one of the world’s greatest live acts.

No matter that the lyrics of tunes such as History of Now, the title track from their current ninth studio album, get lost in the mix. ADF’s sentiments are visceral. They hit you in the gut.

We want to collaborate with YOU!

We are thrilled to announce the release of a new mobile app that will enable our fans to collaborate with us on one of our future songs.

Initially available for Android users, the app enables you to record and share sound samples, as well as providing you with all the latest ADF news.

We will go through all the samples that are submitted and select as many as possible for use on a future track. Share a sample of something that inspires you; it could be anything from birdsong in a forest, the sound of waves on the beach, a car engine or even your housemate whistling. Whatever it is that inspires you in your daily life we want you to share it.

Over the years our fans have given us so much, and now we want to join together to create something with YOU. We will be going through all the samples that are submitted and selecting ones to feature on tune that we will produce.

To download the app, follow this link to the Android store. Happy sampling!

Terms & conditions:
* The maximum sample length allowed is 20 seconds.
* Copyrighted sound recordings will not be accepted as samples.
* You must have an account on SoundCloud in order to share samples with us.
* There is no limit to how many samples you can submit.
* Samples will be accepted until June 2012. Users will be notified if their sample has been selected

As a sign of appreciation for your ongoing support, we are giving away a free download of “Where’s All the Money Gone?” (Romay Remix). We hope you enjoy it.

2011 has been a busy year so far, with the release of the new album in February preceded by tours in India, Japan and Europe. We are currently getting ready for some shows in France in October and November, and are close to confirming further tours for South America and India.

All our upcoming shows are listed here.
Highlights so far this year have included our opening show at the Brighton Festival, playing at Fujirock (just a few months after narrowly missing the earthquake), our first ever tour to India, and our many shows across Europe. Being on the road and playing out keeps us all inspired, and we are looking forward to the journey ahead.

If you haven’t already seen it, please take a look at this excellent video that Jimmy Cauty produced for our last single, A New London Eye.

Asian Dub Foundation have been raging against the machinery of oppression and injustice for so long, it is sometimes easy to forget that this multicultural British crew are also one of the most musically inventive, explosively exciting live bands on the planet.

During their 15 years together, ADF’s fusion of punk rock, electronic beats, reggae, bhangra and hip-hop has attracted many famous fans, from Primal Scream to Radiohead, Sinead O’Connor to Chuck D, all former touring partners and studio collaborators. Meanwhile, this ever-evolving collective continue to expand their agenda, dabbling in soundtracks and operas while taking their fiery mix of music and social activism to far-flung places where conventional western rock bands rarely tour: Morocco, India, Cuba and the shanty towns of Brazil.

ADF’s ninth studio album, The History of Now, plays down their club-friendly dancefloor roots and foregrounds their current strength as a muscular, multi-layered, red-blooded rock’n'roll band. According to the guitarist Steve “Chandrasonic” Savale, the album is only marginally political, touching on themes of technology, social networking, native land rights and financial crisis. But that didn’t stop amateur filmmakers from using the title track to soundtrack footage of the Egyptian street protests in unofficial YouTube clips.

“The song isn’t about that, but musically it just works perfectly,” Savale grins. “It is quite aggressive with a sort of punky, north African feel. The lyrics aren’t necessarily connected with that at all, but music can be reinterpreted by events. A great musician is kind of an unintentional sociologist. If you are an artist observing what is going on in the world, and you let that flow through your art, you might even end up predicting events.”

Music and politics have always been inextricably linked for Asian Dub Foundation. They recorded a stirring single and campaigned intensely for the release of Satpal Ram, a British man jailed in 1987 for killing a racist attacker in self-defence, then helped him find work when he was finally paroled. Other ADF songs have touched on British imperialism in India, domestic violence, asylum laws and police brutality. But Savale insists the band’s reputation as angry radicals is too lazy and limiting, overlooking their broad musical and lyrical range.

“There are only two tracks on the new album that I would say are directly attached to an issue,” he insists. “One is Where’s All the Money Gone? Well, everyone thinks that, so you could call it political but it’s totally universal. The other one is This Land Is Not for Sale, which is about indigenous peoples in Mexico. But the rest of the album is far more universal. Our problem is, we could release an album of one of us cutting our toenails and people would call it political.”

Formed in the mid-1990s, ADF grew out of Community Music, a series of workshops on electronic music held in deprived areas of East London by the group’s co-founders Aniruddha Das and John Pandit, aka Doctor Das and Pandit G. A lifelong political activist who turned down an MBE award from the British government a decade ago, partly because the full name of the award contained the incendiary word “empire”, Das finally left the band in 2008 to concentrate on his own projects. But Savale insists ADF still firmly believe music can be a force for social good, citing as evidence the six-part Al Jazeera series he made in 2009 called Music of Resistance.

“I’m still very much involved,” Savale says, “still connected to groups who are rooted in trying to change their environment, while at the same time making good music as well. But the whole music workshop thing is probably not relevant to us any more because I don’t think it’s that relevant in Britain any more. When we started in the 1990s, it was an unusual thing to do, take a sampler into a youth club. But we’ve been undercut because kids now have a million ways to make music. They can make music on their phone, or their Xbox.”

In 2006, ADF pushed their creative boundaries further by accepting a commission from the English National Opera in London to compose Gaddafi: A Living Myth, a lurid electro-punk musical about the Libyan dictator. Most reviews were mercilessly negative, but Savale insists the experience was personally enriching and educational.

“It was political correctness gone mad, I don’t mind saying that!” he laughs. “It was the worst aspects of multiculturalism. I don’t even like opera! I don’t know anything about it. I can’t read or write music! But I got to go to Libya and Egypt; I met some very strange people, and I had the oddest conversations. I didn’t meet Qaddafi, but I was in a room when he rang. And I met his son, in a huge house with an enormous back garden where he has a Siberian white tiger, a black panther and a whole load of falcons. I had the strangest journey of my life.”

When I first interviewed ADF in the late 1990s, they were fervently campaigning against the rising tide of white racist politicians in East London. In 2011, under the shadow of Iraq and Afghanistan, does the landscape look better or worse to these veteran cultural commentators?

“Obviously, some things are much better. It would be silly to deny that,” Savale nods. “But now Islamophobia has been stirred into the pot; the notion of the enemy within being Muslims has made the whole thing more complex. However naïve it sounds, I’m totally for the post-racial society. I don’t normally agree with anything David Cameron says, but he did make a point that multiculturalism actually breaks people off from each other by incentivising them to keep apart. But then he linked multiculturalism to terrorism, which is just bonkers, without any mention of a war that has killed a few hundred thousand Muslims.”

They may address heavyweight issues, but ADF’s music is essentially a positive celebration of free expression, cultural diversity and people power. Looking at the upheavals in Egypt, Libya and neighbouring countries, Savale cannot help but be naturally optimistic.

“Of course, it depends whether it’s 1989 or 1979 all over again,” he nods. “I’m really hoping it’s 1989. I don’t know whether another Iran could come out of Egypt. I really hope not. But however it goes from now, there is something incredible about all those people from different walks of life actually saying: No! we want something better! There is an undeniable power in that. It is really inspiring.”

BN1 Magazine

Asian Dub Foundation have come a long way since they sprung from a community music project. This is vital protest music for a multi-ethnic 21st century Britain.
They’ve travelled the world playing some of the greatest festivals on the planet and drawing influences from an increasingly diverse range of sources. Their polemic blend of punk, dub, bhangra and electronica takes an uncompromising look at the world around us, whilst pounding the listener with an incredible lyrical stream of consciousness.

Now on their seventh studio album, A History of Now, considered by many to be their best yet, the band come to the Brighton Festival for a very special show this May.

BN1 caught up with guitarist Steve Chandra Savale to find out what’s going on.

BN1: Tell us about A History of Now?

SCS: I don’t know if you’ve seen the cover, it’s an imaginary phone app. You can reduce the whole world into a simple iPhone app, and that’s the history of now. There’s no greater emblem of what is the history of now. These apps (on the sleeve) are slightly witty and slightly satirical. You can alter your whole world just by using an app on your phone. There’s one called Autotune The Masses, where you can get everyone to sing along to your tune. If Simon Cowell had an app that’s what it would do, everyone would be singing a chorus of approval. Cover Up is an app that you can use to destroy dodgy documents before there were even been written, even WikiLeaks can’t stop you lying to the public.

BN1: Yes, everyone sees more focussed on using their personal devices rather than experiencing real life.

SCS: That’s right. The theme of the album is how that is reshaping us. ADF have been around for a long time now and in that time the whole means of interacting with each other has been completely transformed. We wanted to comment on that – the funny side of it, the frightening side of it and even the good side of it also. All the songs are linked in a loose way, and the iPhone app is a symbol of the reality of now. Everyone’s filming themselves now; the whole world is constantly on film. Where’s actual time, where’s actual reality. It’s a funny transformative time.

BN1: It’s definitely an interesting time right now, especially with the events in the Middle East.

SCS: The Arab spring, you could call it, against these old corrupt leaders just continues apace, and that’s fantastic really. No one expected that, but history is always like that. In 1985 when Gorbachev appeared everyone thought there would be peace between Soviet Union and the West, no one expected the whole thing to collapse in a few months.

No one predicted any of this stuff that’s going on in the Middle East. Especially Libya, that took everyone by surprise. He’s (Gaddafi) been welcomed back into the international community, he’s been sold lots of weapons and done lots of nice deals. He’s got his tentacles into all kinds of places and the British have been training him. The world leaders have been left in absolute confusion – they don’t know how to respond.

Some of these people that are being risen up against have been in the West’s pockets for years, but publically the West is saying: “Oh we want people power, we want protest against undemocratic regimes”, but they don’t really. The whole international status quo has been caught with its pants down, which usually happens when people get together and decide they want change. It’s a pretty awe-inspiring force.

BN1: How about Egypt? Many people regard social networking as being responsible for the revolution there.

SCS: Of course, but I don’t think people should get carried away with that. It speeds up communication no doubt, but that’s like saying the Cuban revolution was created because of the telephone. You’ve got to have that collective willpower in the first place. Facebook and Twitter didn’t create these revolutions; they just facilitated them in an unprecedented way.

BN1: So what led to you composing an alternate score to La Haine? (A famous French film about immigrants in Paris.)

SCS: When I was ten years old I got taken to the Rank film studios to see a live tracking of a Hammer horror film. I sat in there and it was the best thing I’d ever seen. The film was called The Ghoul or something. The conductor was watching this film and gauging the pace of the orchestra against the onscreen action. It’s something that stayed with me. That process doesn’t really happen any longer, the score isn’t recorded live in front of a screen any more.

Years on there were a couple of things that jogged my memory. There used to be an event at the Rocket in London called “Old Films, New Music” and I made an offhand remark that we’d do a live score to La Haine. We went away for a while and when we returned there was advertising everywhere saying we were performing this at the Barbican that night. We did it anyway and actually ended up doing it about 20 times all over the world, it’s one of the best things we’ve done.

The Battle of Algiers (a film about insurgency in 1950s Algiers) was something that the Brighton Festival (in 2004) asked us to do, but we turned them down the first time. The thing about La Haine is that it doesn’t really have a score. But Algiers has an incredible score by Ennio Morricone, so we had doubts about replacing that. But in the end we agreed and did the score with re-interpretations of the original. The day we performed it at Brighton Dome was the same day that the pictures of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib involving British soldiers came out, so it was really appropriate.

BN1: I guess that what happens when you desensitise people so they kill easier, maybe they lose part of their morality as well.

SCS: That’s what counter-insurgency wars always do to people. That’s what happens when you release the dogs of war, and people always end up shocked and surprised. It’s always going to be brutal and the human race, especially those in the West, are desensitised and they need to grow up, they need to realise what it means to go to war.

BN1: Isn’t that what democracy is all about? Paying people to go to war and do your violence for you.

SCS: Absolutely, but I think that after Iraq people realised what a war really means. What devastation it really causes.

In Libya, reality wise, you could make a case for it. You’ve someone that’s running a country through use of extreme force. It’s a pretty clear case for some kind of military action. But in practice no-one knows what the actual mission is. No-one knows who is involved or who is in charge. On top of that nobody truly trusts the competency of the people doing the bombing.

BN1: Is there any films that you’d like to score in the future?

SCS: Just any film I’ve ever liked in an ideal world.

BN1: Such as?

SCS: Well, I’ve just seen the Coen Brothers take on True Grit – that was pretty good. I must admit I like films that are in the vein of La Haine actually. Like Mesrine and A Prophet. The French are really good at doing street level films, they’re brilliant at it.

Mesrine is a true story, with Vincent Cassel, about someone who blurred the distinction between criminal and revolutionary in the 70s. It’s a great action film, but it features a very interesting character. He was the most wanted man in France. At one point he escaped from prison three times.

BN1: How do you think the Internet has changed the music industry?

SCS: It’s completely changed it beyond recognition. It’s completely changed the relationship between the musician, the record company and the consumer. For the consumer it’s a revolution in their favour, no doubt. As a consumer anything I want I don’t have to search for it anymore. If I knew that a certain band was going to be on TV back in time, I’d be waiting for a week for it. None of that now, that’s all gone. Now I can just go to YouTube and watch a clip over and over again. Anything that comes into my mind I can just get it, it’s actually fantastic. But the big problem is that the free aspect of it, in fact not just the free aspect of – it’s the deals that have been done that screw musicians.

Think of Spotify, it’s a wonderful service for the consumer, but we don’t get paid anything of that, virtually nothing. Lady Gaga had 10 million hits from one song and got paid £110. The payback for musicians from any streaming service is minimal. I think people need to be made aware of that, it’s grossly unfair.

We’ve gone back to a situation where artists got paid virtually nothing. Nobody got paid for their records until the sixties when album began to sell in huge amounts, so then people like the Beatles and the Stones were able to negotiate very high royalty deals. Recorded music started in about 1911 and only by the late 60s did bands start to get rewarded for their records. Now in this decade that’s started to decline, so only for about 30 years of the entire history of recorded have music artists have got properly paid.

To get someone to buy an album now, you’ve got to give them free live tickets, gold chips, picnic hampers or champagne bottles with a bow round their necks. It has changed for the consumer – they’ve never had it so good – but not for musicians.

But then I can reflect on it because I saw a different side of it. I started in the days when you had advances and tour supports and things like that. Younger musicians are not going to listen to a whinging old band about a thing like this, they’re just going to get on with it, and good luck to them.

BN1: What would your best piece of advice for an aspiring musician?

SCS: When most people discuss music now they very rarely talk about music. Like we’ve done, we haven’t talked about sound or trends in music. People mostly talk about the relationship between the musician, the fans, the record company and the Internet. That’s all we talk about.

My advice would be focus on the music and focus on doing something that’ll blow everybody away. Forget marketing, forget formatting and forget compromising. Let’s have some people out there that really need to do what they do, rather than it being a lifestyle choice, or because you’ve got some famous father who can fund you.

I’m not against anybody that wants to do music, but I do think it’s a problem when you find that 60% of the people in the charts have been privately educated. That, I think, is horrific. Nothing against people from private education doing it, of course not, but nobody likes the idea of social mobility in music closing up. It shouldn’t be that you make it in music because you had a good private education and your parents are high up in the entertainment industry, or they can fund you. That’s not good for anybody; it’s not good for music. Music has been a great leveller since the 60s onwards.

I would say to people please don’t be put off if you haven’t got contacts in the industry or someone who can fund you, there are ways you know. If you need to say something through music then that’s got to be your focus. Get back to the fundamentals of why you’re doing what you’re doing.

Are you in it for a sponsor, are you doing it because you want to get rich? Or no, you’re doing it because you can’t do anything else, you need to do it. That’s what we need more of in music, we need people who are inescapably driven to say their piece.

BN1: How big a fan of music do you need to be to do what you do?

SCS: I listen to a lot of music all the time, but I’m not your average music listener. I’ve had a lot of opportunity due to the nature of the band to search out things that are not so in your face.

I did a series for Al Jazeera which took me over to Mali, Mozambique and Brazil to find out about new and fascinating music with an amazing social context. So my journey through music has taken me to a lot of places and thankfully I’ve experienced music in a very different way from how most people experience it.

Although, the most amazing way to experience music, for me, is to play it live on stage. That’s when music really happens for me. Or it’s when I end up in a place completely off the map, hearing music that’s also completely off the map.

It goes with being in the kind of group that I am; we bring so many different musical styles together and in the process incorporate and discover some very unusual ones. And also ways of doing music that are very different. Such as going to the favelas and meeting this group called Afroreggae who have set up these amazing workshops. Or going to Mali and working with revolutionary nomads whose music is incredible, but they’re living in an environment which is absolutely nothing like yours or mine.

I think music is something that’s not the centre of their lives. For a lot of people here it’s really very important though and that’s the great thing about this country. But that’s still different from it being your living and your entire life, that’s a completely different experience.

BN1: What music have you been listening to recently then?

SCS: I like tracks from Riz MC’s album “Microscope”. He’s better known as an actor, he was in Four Lions. What he does is really interesting; he incorporated a theatre show with the album. Also Nathan Flutebox Lee and the Clinic, he’s a beatbox flute player and his new EP’s really good. They’re my two favourite things from London definitely.

BN1: What’s your Brighton show going to be like?

SCS: There will be stuff from the latest album, but we’ll be doing a spread of stuff going back to the first release. Fortress Europe will be in there, probably Rebel Warrior. We are getting most of the people off of the album to appear. It should be a pretty good show.

Inspired by the ongoing struggle in Burma and surrounded by a plethora of very special guests, Asian Dub Foundation will be well and truly smashing it up at Brighton Festival with a special one-off event on the 7th May.

FairTunes is a UK based music and radio charity dedicated to harnessing the power of music to help improve people’s lives.

A staunch supporter from the start, Chandrasonic hosted the official launch event in London in 2009, rousing all present with his experiences of how music has helped people in deprived areas of the world. FairTunes work with aspiring artists and producers from underprivileged backgrounds to provide training, equipment and facilities they would not normally get access to. To date they have built three music studios in Colombia. One of our studios is based in El Salado, a small village that suffered terrible massacres at the hands of the paramilitaries in 2001. The FairTunes studio is now host to Radio El Salado and has provided a platform for the people to speak about their experiences and also to celebrate the present as well as the future. Their  Studio Live project in Algeria is based in the Sahawari refugee camps, and together with partner charity Sandblast, FairTunes will soon enable the first recordings of live music in the camps for 35 years.

This April, FairTunes is launching their first collaborative radio show between Colombia and the UK. ‘The Alliance’ will be broadcast monthly in English and Spanish through their website and feature discussions on issues affecting youth in both countries, music produced in their very own studios, and the latest sounds from the UK, Latin America and beyond. The possibilities of what we can achieve through music and radio are limitless. If you would like to donate (however small) or would like more info please visit their website www.fairtunes.org

You can also like them on Facebook, follow us on Twitter @fairtunes or subscribe to their YouTube channel.

Lea este poste en español aquí

Even though Colombia has a large indigenous population and most of its population have some indigenous ancestry, recognition of indigenous rights is still a protracted struggle not receiving sufficient media coverage. Chandrasonic connected with IR and went to the mural where they discussed some of the issues facing indigenous people and black people in Colombia. When we played the debut concert in Bogota a to a super enthusiatic crowd, Chandrasonic dedicated one of the songs to the “Minga Indigenia”.

The 3 walls of the mural are interpretations and inspired by songs from the “IR25 Dubversive” album. If you look carefully under the name “Galdino” you will see written “la terra no es en vienta”  translated this means  “the land is not for sale “,  a rallying cry used in the land struggle in Atenco, Mexico and by many indigenous peoples and activists in various parts of the world. It is also a direct reference to the track of the same name that we did with Indigenous Resistance which features on our new album, with the inclusion of Dr Das, Kerieva and Ramjac. Some of these different mixes will be available on a forthcoming release ” IR26 The Land is Not For Sale /ivere”.

One year on from our trip to Colombia and with world events shifting fast, the struggle of the Minga Indigenia remains one very close to our hearts.