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DJ Spooky
This nOde last updated January 7th, 2003 and is permanently morphing...
(8 K'an (Lizard) / 17 K'ank'in - 164/260 - 12.19.9.16.4)
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real name: Paul D. Miller
Paul D. Miller, refracted holographic,
spectral projection from another dimension, shapeshifting
Hannuman, Seven Chuen, Elegba, Loki, Heyokehya, inspiring illusion, channeling magic.
Vectors open wide, no influence discrimination, the only limits are the
body and time.
The records are all there, akashically
speaking, cylinders of prehistory, elements of chants, Harry Smith's Folkways
originals, down to deep DC Trouble Funk. Watch him drop ill-science, watch him
bust a little Deleuze. Voodoo
meets Heisenberg and the body is only held together by sympathetic vibration.
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spooky
spooky (sp¡´kê)
adjective
spookier, spookiest
Informal.
1. Suggestive of ghosts
or a ghost; eerie.
2. Easily startled; skittish.
- spook´ily adverb
- spook´iness noun
Emotion, religion and morality:
Religion: Fairy
spooky (adjective)
spooky, spookish, ghostly,
ghoulish
haunted, hagridden
nightmarish, macabre, frightening
weird, uncanny, unearthly,
eldritch, abnormal
eerie, numinous, supernatural,
supernormal
spectral, apparitional,
wraithlike
disembodied, discarnate,
immaterial
ectoplasmic, astral, spiritualistic,
mediumistic, psychical
Other Forms
insubstantial: ghostly,
spectral, spooky
cabbalistic: ghosty, poltergeistish,
spooky
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To me sampling is, in essence, like psychological time
travel. You take the resonances of what was going on at a different time
period, and reach back. That's what I mean, the Burroughs connection.
The same thing with Octavia Butler, sampling has all this resonance
with two areas, no three. One is genetic engineering, where you splice,
and take DNA
samples. That's the obvious reference. The other one's are architecture
and code writing. The rhythms become their own code structure. To
me sample, or when people are dancing,
they're adjusting their bodies to these psychological puleses in the music,
but you can sit down and dance in your head just the same.
A lot of my albums are about reflecting the environment. New York sends different signals to you at all times. The new album is more like what I call virtual theater. The other ones, the rhythms themselves were the theater. A lot of people were like "Oh, there are no vocals on the album", I was like "Yeah, the beats speak for themselves".
To me, djing is a digital exorcism. I been
collecting records for years. It all has a resonance with the entire
culture, when something travels that quickly. It's pretty intense
when you get down to it. I travel a lot, I've dj'ed in Venezuela
and the kids... it's consolidated at a very rapid rate, like most industrial,
electronicized cultures. It's truly Global.. the dress codes are
very similar, the styles of dancing, everything has been streamlined.
There's definately been a massive psychological remix going on.
- dj spooky, that subliminal kid
_Songs Of A Dead Dreamer_ CDbon
Asphodel (1996)
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_Hologrammic Dub_
MP3_Dance
Of The Morlocks_ MP3 (vK)Time
Machine_ based
on the novel by H.G.
Wells_Time
Out Of Joint_ MP3 (vK)"Flow My Blood the DJ Said"
_from Philip K. Dick's _Flow My Tears The Policeman Said__
"The twentieth century
encounter between alphabetic and electronic faces of culture confers on
the printed word a crucial role in staying the return to the Africa within..."
- Marshall
McLuhan - _The Gutenberg Galaxy_
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One of the first bootleggers, in this case one
of the first people to sample music, Lionel Mapleson, used a phonograph
recorder given to him by his close personal friend, Thomas Edison, to record
extracts of his favorite moments from the various operas that played at
New York's Metropolitan Opera house when he was working there during the
years 1901-1903. These recordings of various arias comprise the first
known texts created by the recording medium (all puns intended).
With his recording-phonograph in hand Lionel Mapleson may just have written
himself into history books as the first DJ. His phonograph, to me,
was a new way of data-handling that allowed the mechanical implementation
of a non-sequential form of text, one including associative trails, dynamic
annotations, and cross references a host of characteristics one finds as
common features of computers in our modern hypertext
formatted world. A journalist writes of the experience of listening
to these recordings as being a little something like this:
"The sense is one of listening
from backstage, through a door that keeps opening and closing, to bits
and pieces of performances. The vantage point is at a little distance
from the singers, and they seem to be heard through a certain amount of
backstage clatter; sometimes they move out of line of hearing, and
sometimes the noise obscures the voices. But mostly, they can be
heard quite well enough for the listener to get a very definite sense of
personalities and occasionally of the full impact of virtuosity, that in
terms of the opera house today, is quite beyond the wildest imagination..."
Partioned Subjectivity,
cross-fades, sonic shock-wave
sounds of seismic bass disruption, pitch, tempo, the inertial drag of bass de-tuned,
compressed and pitch-shifted down, drums
pitched upwards and downwards, sound as a unified field of spatial representation
with its own aural logic, ego become a sonic wave form in the chaotic
urban landscape of inner city pressure... these are things that go through my
mind when I make music. On "Songs Of A Dead Dreamer",
it was my intention
to create electronic hybrids (some people still call them songs) that would
create a milieu where a previously interior world could be brought to light
through methods like keyboard mapping (delineating zones of aural speed) and
time stretching words until they become an elemental part of the song etc.
I wanted to create music that would reflect the extreme density of the urban
landscape and the way its geometric regularity contours and configuresperception.
Thus the album was put together like I would put together one of my mixed tapes.
To me, assembly is the invisible language
of our time and DJ'ing is the forefront art form of the late 20th Century.
"Assemblages are passional, they are compositions of desire. Desire has nothing to do with a natural and spontaneous determination; there is no desire by assembling, assembled, engineered desire (agencant, agence, machine). The rationality, the efficiency of an assemblage does not exist without the passions that the assemblage puts into play, without the desires that constitute it as much as it constitutes them..." - Deleuze and Guattari, "Nomadology"
DJ culture - urban youth
culture - is all about recombinant potential. It has as a central
feature a eugenics of the imagination. Each and every source sample
is fragmented and bereft of prior meaning - kind of like a future without
a past. The samples are given meaning only when re-presented in the
assemblage of the mix. In this way the DJ acts as the cybernetic
inheritor of the improvisational tradition of jazz, where various motifs
would be used and recycled by the various musicians of the genre, in this
case, however, the records become the notes. Also there is the repetitive
nature of the music that allows for the unfolding in time of a recursive
spatial arrangement of tones whos parallel can be found in the world of
architecture where structural integrity requires the modular deployment
of building materials to create a building's framework.
Triggered by the sensuous
touch of the DJ's hands guiding the mix, the spectral trace of sounds in
your mind that existed before you heard them, telling your memory
that the mixed feelings you get, the conflicting impulses you feel when
you hear it are impressions
- externalized thoughts that tell you you only know that you have never
felt what you thought you were feeling because you have never really listened
to what you were hearing. The sounds of the ultra futuristic streetsoul
of the urban jungle shimmering at the edge of perception.
"We have also sound houses, where we practice and
demonstrate all sounds and their generation. We have harmonies which
you have not, of quarter sounds and lesser slides of sounds. Divers
instruments of music likewise to you unknown, some sweeter than any you
have; together with bells and rings that are dainty and sweet. We
represent small sounds as great and deep; likewise divers tremblings and
warblings of founds, which in their original are entire. We represent
and imitate all articulate sounds and letters, and the voices of beasts
and birds. We have certain helps which set to the ear do further
the hearing greatly. We have also divers strange and artificial echoes,
reflecting the voice many times, and as it were tossing it; and some
that give back the voice louder than it came, some shriller and some deeper;
yea, some rendering the voice, differing in the letters or articulate sound
from that they receive. We have also means to convey sounds in tubes
and pipes, in strange lines and distances..." - Francis
Bacon - _New Atlantis_
circa 1591 A.D.
sound as an isolated object of reproduction, call
it our collective memory bank, is the focal
point in my work. Like KRS One said a while back, "See how it sound,
a little unrational.." - DJ Spooky
Beats don't lie and sound
is all about flow:
don't push the river. - DJ Spooky
"The basic unit of contemporary art is not the idea, but the analysis of and extension of sensations..." - Susan Sontag
I consider the mixes created
by a DJ to be mood sculptures operating in a recombinant fashion.
Based on the notion that all sonic material can be manipulated with the
same ease that computers now generate composite images, the DJ combines
the musical expression of other musicians with their own and in the process
creates a seamless flow of music. In this light, the sample operates
as a kind of synecdoche - a focal/coordinate points in the dramaturgical
grid of life. Call the mixes and songs generated by the assembly
process of DJ'ing and sequencing etc. the social construction of
memory. This album is a parallel of the Happenings and Conceptual
art events that I have played at and helped put together in NYC over the
last several years. A mix, for me, is a way of providing a rare and
intimate glimpse into the process of cultural production in the late 20th
Century.
Notion of intellectual property and copyright law, are brought into question as the communal reception of music takes on
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the significances of being the sonic equivalent
to alchemy.
The mix speaks to you of the bricolage of a place where the "self" exists
as a deployed network
of personae (the latin root of personae means "that through which sound
enters"), music created out of a particular scene or social grouping and
it shows the inexplicable mutability of sound as different people share
the memories brought about by the same songs. It demonstrates the
uncanny power of metamorphosize, through audio alchemy, the passage of
sound into a kind of unspoken story, that like its predecessor, the oral
tradition, can pass on "tales" of songs.
In the electronic milieu
that we all move in today, the DJ is a custodian of aural history.
In the mix, creator and re-mixer are woven together in the syncretic space
of the text of samples and other sonic material to create a seamless fabric
of sound that in a strange way mirrors the modern macrocosm of cyberspace
where different voices and visions constantly collide and cross fertilize
one another. The linkages between memory, time,
and place, are all externalized and made accessible to the listener from
the viewpoint of the DJ who makes the mix. Thus, the mix acts as
a continuously moving still frame ca camera lucida capturing moment-events.
The mix, in this picture, allows the invocation of different languages,
texts, and sounds to converge, meld, and create a new medium that transcends
its original components. The sum created from this audio collage
leaves its original elements far behind.
As a conceptual artist, my work focuses on what
I call "Differentiated Being," and its rapport with the electronically
accelerated culture of the late 20th Century. The core elements that
comprise my "art" are derived from my experiences as a young African American
male living as an object of history rather than its subject, and the social
construction of subjectivity.
For me, my world represents an artistic attempt at understanding the role
of intersubjectivity and the creation of the art object. My work
highlights the tenuous relationship of a youth culture based on rapid change,
i.e. extreme cultural velocity, a paradigm in which what Lucy Lippard called
"the dematerialized art object" holds sway - to the static art object of
the traditional European museum structure.
I feel that because it is in a state
of discrepant engagement with modern electro culture, the conventional museum
structure is rapidly moving towards a state of desuetude with regards to modern
electronic media's impact on the generation to which I belong. Kinetic
potential and its manifestation in cultural productiona re core tenets of my
work. A short hand way of describing its presence in the art objects (some
still call them songs) I create, would be to see that they focus
on "art as potentiality" with regard to a state of being as void, or continuous
becoming. There are many problems one encounters in the attempt to reconcile
conventional "art" with the culture that I call home. But to me, fragmentation
is what all of this is about. My work as a DJ is my prime inspiration,
and it is the memories that I have gained from my various experiences as a DJ
that fuel my inquiry into the art object as a vessel of cultural representation.
I do not call my constructs paintings, but rather "objectiles" - that is, objects
imbued with an extreme sense of cultural velocity - object + projectile.
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In DJ culture music is carried by shards of time
- records, CD's, and most popular amongst the inititate - the "mixed tape."
All of the previously listed objects are activated by various electronic
applicances, thus the kinetic potential - the movement of a static object
into a relation of dynamic movement with regards to a social function of electricity
- that lies at the center of my oeuvre. To me, the mixed tape is
the ultimate example of a new art object. By using a found object
- the cassette - that has the ability to hold replicated information,
and in turn can be used to reproduce that very same information whenever
it is activated: the cassette arrives at a point where it is the electromagnetic
equivalent of the blank canvas, and "all the world is in the mix."
The mix of found objects or self generated music that a DJ records to tape,
is representative of a style that s/he uses to evoke emotive responses
in the listener, thus involving the spectator and creator in a situation
where the boundaries
dividing the two blur. Dj'ing is also informed by a fluid dialectics
of culture that places it at the center of the transition from mimetic
to semiotic representation that electronic artforms are highlightning.
What these diverse new forms of representation indicate is a migration
of human cognitive structures into the abstract "machinery" of the electronic
environment.
"I am you, you are me, with language, we are three" - Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky
Ideas improve, the meaning of words participates. Plagiarism is necessary. Progress implies it. It presses after an authors phrase, uses his expressions, erases a false idea, replaces it with the correct one. - Lautremont, Poesies
The style a DJ uses is their
imprimatur, their way of appropriating the psychological environment that
the people that made the records put into their mix, and sharing it with
those who attend the performance. In this way the DJ acts as a cipher,
translating thought and sound into functional mood units whos accumulated
meanings can be found in the audio equivalent of a parataxic structure
of linguistic elements or what I like to call "the body telematic," or
what Artaud
liked to call "the body without organs." In this sense, the records,
samples, and varius other sonic material the DJ uses to construct their
mix, act as a sort of externalized memory that breaks down previous notions
of intellectual property and copyright law that Western Society has used
inthe past. It is in this singularly improvisational role of "recombinaer"
that the DJ creates what I like to call a "post symbolic mood sculpture,"
or the mix; a disembodied and transient
text thaat mirrors the dematerialized art object mentioned earlier.
The implications of the style of creating art are three fold:
1) by its very nature it critiques the entire idea
of intellectual property and copyright law.
2) it reifies a communal art value structure in
contrast to most forms of art in late capitalist social contexts.
3) it interfaces
communications technology in a manner tha anthropomorphisizes it.
In this manner, DJ'ing posits music
as an extension of a neurolinguistic relationship of human beings to their,
as Marx put it, "alienated
life elements." Those "elements," seen through the medium of the mix -
reveal to us a place where different voices, rhythms, and tones fuse
to creat a syncretic flow
of sound as externalized memory.
They become epiphenomena whose central purpose is to act as a mnemonic device:
the social construction of subjectivity
is informed by the memories that become the shared text of an attenuated media
environment made possible by a variable architecture synthesized from the tones
that comprise its forms. C.S. Pierce noted in his idea of semiosis a similar
unfolding of human expression, albeit without its cybernetic
inplications (although they are implicit in his work I believe), when he wrote
back in the 19th century "that since any thought, there must have been a thought,
has its analogue in the fact that, since any past time, there must have been
an infinite
series of times. To say, therefore, that thought cannot happen in an instant,
but requires time, is but another way of saying that every thought must be interpreted
in another, or that all thought is in signs."
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Memory and temporal structure are the new spaces of art
to me. Deleuze and Guattari arrive at similar point in their critique
of late capital and schizophrenia
with the rhizome
structure, a decentered and nonhierarchical form that perfectly illustrates
their metaphor for counter culture. Among philosophers like David Hume, Giordano
Bruno, Frantz Fanon, Martin Luther King, Friedrich Hegel, Nietzsche,
and Malcolm X, a fixation on multiplicity gives their expression all the more immediacy
because of its fragmented nature. This, to me is almost the equivalent
of time travel along psychological association lines that artists and writer
as diverse as Brion
Gysin, Sun
Ra, Alain Robbe-Grillet, William
S. Burroughs, Marcel
Duchamp, Rammetzee, Samuel Delaney, H.G.
Wells, Greg Tate, Tricia Rose, Grand Master Flash, Sol Lewitt, and Yevgeny
Zamyatin, to name a few, have based their works on. Adrift etymologically,
the word "Phonograph", means "sound writing". In literature, the methodologies
used to assemble the mix a DJ creates could be called stream of conscious narratives
(roman fleuve), or nonsequential (roman mallaparte). The previous meanings,
geographic regions, and temporal placement of the elements that comprise the
mix, are coralled into a space where the differences in time, place, and culture,
are collapsed to create a recombinant text or autonomous zone of expression
based on what I like to call "cartographic
failure."
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"Autonomous zones are interstitial, they inhabit the in-between of socially significant constellations, they are where our bodies in the world but between identities go; liminal sites of syncretic unorthodoxy... Autonomous zones may be thought of, in temporal terms, as shreds of futurity. Like "outside", "future" is only an approximation: there are any number of potential futures in the cracks of the present order, but only a few will unfold. Think of autonomous zones in terms of time, but tenseless: time out of joint, in an immanent outside (Nietzsche's untimely)." - Brian Masumi - _A Users Guide To Capitalism and Schizophrenia_
All I can say is that in this era of hypermodernity,
the current message has been deleted. Any sound can be you.
It is through the mix and all that it entails - the re-configuration of
ethnic, national, and sexual identity - that humanity will, hopefully,
move into another era of socialevolution.
I can only hope that the world can shift into this new matrix
without too much disruption. The other options: genocide, intercine
ethnic strife and warfare, the complete destruction of the environment,
and the creation of a permanent underclass that doesn't have access to
technology, are what the future holds if humanity can't come to grips with
these new and explosive forces technology has released in us all.
Paul D. Miller
aka DJ Spooky, Spatial Engineer of the Invisible City
_Riddim Warfare_ MixCDon
Outpost/Asphodel (1998)
_Synchronic
Disjecta_ MP3Dr.
Octagon
with Warren Beatty_Post-Human
Sophistry_ MP3 (vK)Zero_
MP3entertain,
I enter the brain."Digitalis_
MP3Soylent
Green)_ MP3(1973) _Necropolis: The Dialogic Project_ on Knitting (1996)
by Eric B. & RakimUFO.
Mix]_ MP3_Quark
Soup_ MP3 _File Under Futurism_ by DJ Spooky vs. Freight Elevator
Quartet on Caipirinha (1999)
Grooveprotocol
Mix)_ MP3Asynchronicity_
MP3 (192k) _Under The Influence_ MixCD on Six Degrees (2001)
Emergency
Broadcast Network - _3:7:8_Beastie
Boys off of _New Style_ MP3 (192k)
off of _License To Ill_ 12"
on Def Jam (1986)Phoenix Orion
- _Music Is..._ MP3DNATime_
MP3Youth
- _Tremens_ MP3 _Synthetic Fury_ 12" on Asphodel (1998)
by N.W.A. (1988)
release _Modern Mantra_
MixCD on Shadow (2002)
_Zxero_
MP3 (192k)Dragon__Elevatorium
(Sub Dub Remix)_
electro jazz release _Optometry_ on Thirsty Ear (2002)
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release _Adbusters: Live Without Dead Time_
MixCD
(included in Adbusters subscription)
by Eric B. & Rakim off of _Paid In Full_ 12"
(1987)
by Beastie
Boys off of _License To Ill_ 12" (gatefold)
on Def Jam (1986)Marshall
Mcluhan - _Advertising_ MP3 (160k)Negativland
- _Why Is This Commercial?_ MP3 (160k)Coldcut
- _Re:Volution
(feat. George W. Bush)_ MP3 (160k)
Conspiracy
- _The First Conspiracy (Drum
Solo)_/Martin Luther King, Jr. - _Let Freedom Ring_ MP3 (160k)Foundation
- _Rivers Of Dub_/Mista White - _American Psychosis (Symptom One)_/Adbusters
- Ads & Phone
Conversations_ MP3 (160k)EBN
- _State Extension_ MP3 (160k)_Starbucks_/Mario
Savio & Malcolm X - _Various Excerpts_ MP3 (160k)Public
Enemy - _Revolverlution_ MP3 (160k)Honey
Barbara - _Famous Animal_ MP3 (160k)Babylon_
MP3 (160k)Sun
Ra & His Arkestra - _Nuclear War_ MP3 (160k)_New
World Worder_ MP3 (160k)Japanese_
MP3 (160k) appeared in the films:
Stockhausen
to Squarepusher_
Directed by Jacqueline Oskamp & Frank Scheffer (1998) |
Science
Fiction is the literature of alienation.
I'm really influenced by Phillip
K. Dick, Samuel Delaney, and also a lot of the Cyberpunk
guys, Bruce Sterling, John Shirley, William
Gibson, Pat Cadigan. Another writer, Octavia
Butler, uses genetic mutation as a metaphor for what's going on in society,
psychologically, emotionally, and economically. It's all being determined
by genetic type in her books.
- dj spooky
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We're looking at these creative records here, in this
hypothetical crate of records. You ever read Umberto Ecco or--what's the writer
from South America? Borges!
Most of their narrative structures are againhypertext--where
the surface narrative is a shimmering kind of mirage and you fall into it. Sound
is like that. I was trying to deal with that with my sound.
- Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky
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witnessed Paul D. Miller speak @
MOCA 2/24/02
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he hasn't come up with anything
new in awhile, but one interesting point he brought up was that the record album
(12", vinyl), was an important medium to transfer sound waves
into the home on a mass scale. that's a given. what's more important
was that it was also piggybacked (viral like) by visual artists via record cover
art. it was the first time that art could be appreciated outside of the
act of going to a museum and buying the actual piece. it was reproduced
on a mass scale, and was included with the sound waves. that is why vinyl
still lingers. it has just the right size and interface
as that of a painting that fit in the home - and you can collect a lot of them...
i have quite a few prizes myself based on this idea - hand silkscreened covers,
personalized inserts, numbered presses, included fanzines, vinyl
etching messages, etc. all play into the notion that we don't pay just for
the music - it's almost like the music became advertising for an experience
- you look at pictures of the band, find out facts, absorb their expression...
when the big labels take over, it all becomes depersonalized. - the other
factor is dj culture - in this realm, the more faceless and blank, the more
provocative - you are effectivly hiding and seeking memetic information based
on competition (to get the latest and rarest tracks) - historically this can
be seen way back in Jamaican dub
culture with an almost mafioesque vibe, including "spies" and "bouncers" that
help wage warfare to find out what the latest tracks from america were, or what
studio was employing which vocalists to toast over the drum and bass - this
was happening in the early sixties and eventually morphed into dj culture, with
the hip hop/breaks/drum & bass scene carrying those potent hints of violence
surrounding those early days (a la gunshots, braggadacio, etc.) - @Om*
2/28/02
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Anomalog:
Rebirth
Of A Nation
by Kirk Hammett (guitarist for Metallica)
and DJ Spooky
off of _Hi Fidelity Dub Sessions - The Second Chapter_ compilation (2000)Dada
Nihilismus_ MP3
by Amiri Baraka
meets DJ Spooky(44.9megs)
- DJ Spooky speaks at Creative Commons launch part 1(32.3megs)
- DJ Spooky speaks at Creative Commons launch part 2(109.6megs)
- DJ Spooky speaks at Creative Commons launch part 3604
track _Almost Spooky_ MP3 (192k)
by Waterjuice
off of _Language Of Light 3_ compilation on Ceiba
(2001)ambient
track _No Jumping Up & Down/Spooky Action At A Distance_ MP3
by Beatsystem off of _2297_ CD on Em:t (1997) |
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