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Post by Swamp Gas on Feb 19, 2006 0:07:25 GMT -5
No grunting and groaning, no "Gangsta" crap, no bashing whitey and females, no Bush-Supporting. Spooky has played with Boulez, Meat Beat Manifesto, Xenakis, and many other great electronic and avant garde musicians. Very spacey, and Non-Linear. Included is a low bandwidth version of a song called "My Heart My Life" www.noble-gas.com/my-heart-my-life.mp3
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Post by Swamp Gas on Jun 18, 2006 20:19:08 GMT -5
We turned on two college professors and the guitarist from Tiny Tim's Band, who plays occasionally with Noble Gas, to DJ Spooky recently, and they were thoroughly impressed. In fact, we will be contacting Spooky soon.
DJ Spooky is a musical messiah for this electronic age. He's a DJ, a writer with a degree in French literature and philosophy, and a published art critic who spends his days composing the subliminal theme music for our generation's quest to understand what it means to be children of technology. _This isn't dance music. Spooky's music is a meditation on and an immersion into the modern urban landscape. This is "illbeint" a synthesis of experimentalist soundscapes, hip-hop, and jungle. Taking full advantage of our place in history DJ Spooky uses instruments ranging from the upright bass, digital samplers, West African folk instruments, vinyl, even a laptop Powerbook to paint dense, chaotic, and often rhythmic layers of sound. _On a tour for his latest album entitled "Riddim' Warfare" (Outpost Recordings), DJ Spooky undertook the challenge of assembling a band of musicians to help him perform songs he had originally composed entirely on computer. I had the privilege to get an interview with DJ Spooky "That Subliminal Kid" when he stopped in Sacramento during the SnowCore Tour. We talked one on one about his band experiment, about our future with electronic music, and about the DJ as the folk singer of the 21st century.
DB: Not really knowing what to expect from a DJ Spooky show, I was surprised to see you performing with your own back-up band. It's interesting considering how you've come from more of a "one man behind a computer" style of composition. Was there any difficulty in trying to conceive of how you'd want the band to be structured?
Spooky: Yeah. Because on a certain level, not many drummers can handle that style of weird, martian, hip-hop beat, but on the other hand with drum and bass you have to be really fluid with snare fills and stuff and it's really fast.
DB: What was the name of that drummer you used. That guy was so sick!
Spooky: Jo-Jo Mayer. You'll be hearing a lot about him. Drummer Magazine had him as one of the best drummers in the U.S. now. He's got some offers to do solo drum albums just playing jungle style. He's one of the few dudes I know who can pull it off. Other drummers, when they see him they're like (drops jaw).
DB: He blew me away.
Spooky: Now for me, everything I do has layers and layers of experimentation. The idea was: here we have an album I mostly did on computers, but when I step out of the studio is it so interesting to watch someone flip knobs? No. On the other hand, is it interesting to watch someone just scratching like crazy for more than twenty minutes? No. I mean, every one of my brothers is scratching right? To me, it's just like all right, all right. Seeing someone scratch for twenty minutes, you know it gets kinda stale. So, I wanted to try a balance between the computer aspect, this cut up turntablism mode and because I play all these different instruments anyway, y'know why not do a band to incorporate them. We're one of a few bands I know where we can all sound like a backwards swipe on the turntable. My drummer is good enough where he can make himself sound like he's playing backwards. Or Karsh Kale, he's our percussionist, he's been playing tabla, he works with Talvin Singh. He's a really amazing percussionist. Or DJ Wiz, he's has a turntablist crew called the Steel Workers. Now, I feel like I've explored that. I want to do another follow up tour this summer with the band again but this set of the SnoCore tour I'm doing strictly me as the turntablist, band and the mc.
DB: And you're playing other instruments too, like the upright bass?
Spooky: I love playing with the music as variables. One thing I know with my friends in rock bands is once they get into a certain mode y'know they keep playing the same thing over and over again.
DB: It gets ritualized.
Spooky: Yeah, and I'm like the anti-ritual ritual. Atomization is my mode and fucking shit is my game (laughs). It tends to make some people have trouble absorbing my style.
DB: I noticed there's a kind of tension in your audiences, like they're not sure exactly how to react to your show? (Spooky laughs) With the exception of Riddim' Warfare a lot of your albums are just dense textures of sound without any beats whatsoever, or very few. What do you expect the audience to do? Or do you have any expectations? Is there a code of conduct that's emerging?
Spooky: Confusion.
DB: Utter confusion.
Spooky: I'm into the idea of people not even being sure if I'm gonna be on stage. We can set up a mannequin and have a projection of me, projected on the mannequin, rhymin'. And have the band playing. That's what I should do. That's kinda' like what I'm gonna be doing on my next tour. Okay, we've done the pop culture angle of like the band. The next tour we'll be taking the whole art side of the downtown scene and make it into a groovin' festival. Yeah, the confusion is that people are so trained at the stage. Say for example, this tour, the kids they come in they don't look around, they're just weird, even if there's no one on stage they'll just go and stand and wait for whoever's coming on. It's an amazing anthropology. It's all a soundtrack for an invisible film. That's kinda' what I try and flip. But at the same time....Yeah, people at our shows, they don't know if they should be staring one way or if something else is going on. At the beginning of the Absolut tour, I had a wireless microphone and me and the MC went out into the audience during our set. The main MC jumped out into the audience and started moving around...Did you notice?
DB: Yeah, I remember that.
Spooky: I was going to do that, but I heard feedback from people that it really caused confusion. So I still had to stay on stage as the anchor point. People were like "all right hold on, we get the idea but it might be a little too chaotic." So I'm trying to walk this line between chaos and order.
DB: That reminds me, in the liner notes of your album Necropolis, it mentions some live audio conceptual art experiments you had done by planting microphones and radio transmitters in cafes across New York so that you could do a live mix of cafe noise from around the city. What's was that about?
Spooky: Oh, it's just crazy shit. It's actually a cut up of a Burroughs story. It's the story where I took my nickname from. William S. Burroughs wrote this novel called Nova Express, and in it the Nova mob is taking over the Reality studio and it's transmitting these weird film loops back at planet Earth and the loops are like violence, hatred, racism, all this crazy shit. So the Subliminal Kid wants to change the program 'yknow, literally. So he has these electromagnetic scalpels and he gets into the Reality studio where they're beaming all the fucked up images of what's going on and programming people's minds. So, Subliminal Kid gets in and takes his electromagnetic scalpel and cuts the loops so the future can leak through. Burroughs' stuff is pretty crazy, but it's pretty sharp. You gotta' remember he was writing that back in the 50's and 60's.
DB: I remember seeing you in Iara Lee's electronic music documentary Modulations. I thought she did a excellent job showing how the emergence of electronic music logically parallels society's embrace of technology, or what you would call electro-modernity.
Spooky: Right, right. Because they say "postmodern" and I'm sick of that word postmodern. I thought it was time for a new...
DB: Yeah, it's a lazy label.
Spooky: That's it! So...electro-modern.
DB: Sure. So what do you think about that?...The parallel between our embrace of technology and our acceptance of electronic music as a viable art form.
Spooky: Sure. I just think there's no other route. Y'know kids are growing up. How old are you? 20-mid 20s?
DB: 20.
Spooky: Yeah, we're probably the first generation in human history to grow up with media as our...
DB: Baby-sitter.
Spooky:... as our mother's nipple. Most people I know get more of their information from "sucking on the tube" than they do from books or their parents. We are the media generation. Whether it's internet, mixed tapes, crazy trans-satellite dishes, and shit. Everyone is dealing with the electromagnetic at this point. So, the soundtrack to that is electronic. That's why I would say electronic music is the folk music of the 21st Century. People can just make a mix out of whatever and just send it out. In a way, that creates a more organic vibe because everyone is making their own mixes and checking out their own style instead of just being a normal consumer. That pisses off a lot of major label types because they feel like it's dissolving... Like did you hear about Public Enemy releasing their stuff on-line as MP3 files, and their label almost stopped them? They were really gonna get destroyed basically, so they had to stop it.
DB: That's really interesting...
Spooky: And that's the future. Everyone's gonna be releasing this shit
DB: Do you think that it can be stopped? There's this MP3 [authors note: an MP3 is a CD quality, compressed audio file used popularly for pirating commercially copyrighted songs over the internet] underground internet culture that's circulating all these songs for free. And as far as what I've seen it's just growing and growing and there's no way they're going to stop 'em...
Spooky: They can't stop it. Cause it's too pervasive. It's just as easy as sending an e-mail. And once you get to that point... They might raid your house later. You heard about this R.I.A.A. thing [Recording Industry Association Of America]?
DB: That whole Negativland sampling rights lawsuit?
Spooky: Yeah, it just shows how the industry is just really hyper-paranoid toward sampling. I think it's gonna get to the point where there's a lot of hackers and stuff out there fucking with this shit. And they do it because it's fun. They stop one site, and ten other sites will pop up. It's too pervasive. Once it's out there, it's gone. You might as well just deal with it.
DB: Viral Sonata, an album you released under your real name Paul D. Miller, includes pieces you composed as sound installations for the Whitney Museum of Art in New York. Can you tell us more about what you did exactly?
Spooky: Yeah sure. I did the Viral Sonata as a music piece that was a map. I chose a city that I feel is at the crossroads of a North and South American kinda post colonial weird thing with Mexico City as a perfect example because there's so many languages. They speak spanish, english, they still speak some of the old Aztec. Once you focus in on that, which section of that city has the most craziest stuff happening? There's this area called Zona Rosa. So I made a track named after this one area where all this stuff was happening. If you ever go there, physically, it's a weird area of the city where everything is fake of fakes. Like Christian saints done as plastic dolls, fake Aztec jewelry, plastic Elvises, and all these pop icons, its just one of the most bizarre North American/South American junctions. Everything is just copies of copies, fakes of fakes. So the track was trying to schematize an urban area where you had this notion of real and unreal. So they asked me do an art piece or painting, and I said, "Well, why don't I just do music as an electromagnetic canvas?" Because for me at this point painting is dead, sculpture is dead, it's all just digital copies of copies of copies. So that's what I was trying to go for, just this area that you can kinda' erase and evaporate into. So instead of just putting it on a pedestal and making some nice looking thing to put it in as a sculpture, I put it in the elevator. So it was played as elevator muzak.
DB: Kinda scare some people?
Spooky: Yeah. It makes the hair on the back of your neck kinda stand up. It's funny, because to me a lot of what I'm doing is a critique of the object. I feel DJ-ing is the art form of the late 20th Century, I say that over and over. Mixes are what I call "post-symbolic mood sculpture". You go into a room you hear that bass pulse, you feel those extra sounds, you have your memory getting tapped. And it deals with how people think. DJ-ing is like externalizing memory, taking your own soundtrack and just puttin' it out there. That's my art.
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