Remixing the Matrix:
An Interview with Paul D. Miller, aka
DJ Spooky
By Erik Davis
I first met Paul Miller over a decade ago, when we both scribbled
for The Village Voice. At the time he was living in the Gas Station,
an avant-garde ruin in the East Village's Alphabet City that was
heavy on metal assemblages, rodents, and chaotic all-night affairs.
I recognized a voodoo symbol on one of the DJ Spooky that Subliminal
Kid stickers he had plastered around the office as a veve belonging
to the loa Legba. So we got into a heady conversation about tricksters
and messengers, LSD and Marshall McLuhan. Over the years I've seen
his own trickster messages reach a widening range of audiences,
from hip-hop kids to European media snobs to Afro-futurist artistes.
His latest music reflects this scramble: Optometry, a jazzbo outing
where Miller's turntables and sampled upright bass round out the
amazing sounds of Matthew Shipp and William Parker; Modern Mantra,
a scratchy-fuzzy-mystic-beat-void DJ mix; and Standard Time, a limited
edition video/music CD about time zones that came out of an artistic
collaboration between Miller and Julian LaVerdiere, the one of the
artists responsible for the World Trade Center memorial sculpture.
Besides Miller's most visible (and lucrative) career as a musician
and DJ, he also wears the hats of a media theorist, painter, sculptor,
SF writer, and all-around everywhere man. In addition to his current
music projects, which include the score for an independent film
about Latino drag racing, Miller is looking forward to two book
releases: Sound Unbound, a collection of articles he edited about
music and media, as well as Rhythm Science, a book of his own essays
that will come out on MIT Press. The web component of his recent
Marcel Duchamp remixology project can be seen at http://www.moca.org/museum/dg_detail.php?dgDetail=pmiller.
He also shows up occasionally to present bits of a large work in
progress: a video and audio remix of D.W. Griffith's Birth of a
Nation.
Some might say that Miller stretches himself too thin, and that
his work can be more dabbling that definitive. But classic definition
is not what he's after. His is a genuinely multi-tasking consciousness,
and he does what he does in the spirit of the global mix, of trying
something new, of constantly rewiring our planet's mad cultural
networks. Like all tricksters, the dude cannot be boxed in, and
he's fast on his feet (though he always claims he wants to slow
down). I caught up with him in San Francisco, where he was in town
to DJ a gathering of Creative Commons, a group developing novel
systems of copyright that encourage collaboration rather than corporate
control. He had just flown in from Monaco, and radiated his usual
friendly energy and hectic enthusiasm.
***
TRIP: Tell me about what Creative Commons
is about and why you got hooked up with them.
PM: Creative Commons is a public domain archive basically. It's
chaired by Lawrence Lessig, a cyberlawyer who argued the Eldred
vs. Ashcroft case in front of the Supreme Court [a failed attempt
to overturn the nefarious Sonny Bono act, which extends the rights
of big copyright holders like Disney]. There's a debate ranging
on the Internet and among people involved in sampling culture in
general over ownership issues. Today Mickey Mouse is being used
to push this whole notion of extended copyright to the point of
drying up any sense of collective use. That's not what creates new
objects; that just controls the idea of content and limits it.
I'm fascinated with pushing that envelope, with this idea of collective
memory. Part of my whole vibe is creating a sense of irreverence
towards how memories are contained in objects, software, and the
net.
How do you approach this issue in your own
work? How do you deal with people who appropriate your own stuff?
There's a middle ground. The term on the internet is "creative
co-authorship." So as long as it's interesting and done in
an intriguing way, and at the same time at least partly acknowledges
the music as the original vector for it… it's a transitional
area. So part of me is like, yeah, probably get in touch, just drop
me a quick line. I don't go crazy over it. It's just making sure
things are clear and cool.
Creative Commons isn't interested in a totally "free"
environment, but in coming up with ways to balance certain kinds
of controlled copyright with loose distribution and use.
You have two extremes. One is copyright anarchy, where you just
run with whatever. The other extreme is you have lawyers looking
to control aspects of almost everything that could possibly be in
a song, like a breath of air, or a snare drum, or a high hat…
If they had their way, you'd be clearing every tiny discrete sound
on a track, which doesn't make any sense. It's an immense amount
of paperwork.
I'm dealing with this on the scale of an indie kind of scene. But
as the scale gets bigger, like with Madonna sampling stuff, then
you need to be reasonable. If someone's going to make a fortune,
maybe it should be a percentage. It's looking at the creative act
as a reasonable dialogue in pop culture instead of an irrational,
litigious kind of thing.
You just flew in from Monaco. Why were you
there?
In Monaco, I did a collaboration with Gaetan Morletti, the Principal
Dancer of the Royal Ballet of Monaco. They commissioned a work and
we did a live piece at the Royal Ballet Showcase.
How much do you prepare for something like
that?
I send them elements in advance and say, basically you're going
to hear a remix of this. It's kind of the basic template, and then
I put it together live.
Are the things you sent them samples of other
people, or your own stuff?
It's mostly my own stuff, 98%. If there's other stuff, it's very
discrete… small sounds, nothing like a drum beat. These days
everyone and their mother is DJing, so you don't want to just send
a basic loop. You've got to give people a sense of total context
and environment, and that means you've got to be a lot more creative,
and really open up some new space with your material. It's a lesson
learned, because it's part of the creative act to actually make
new stuff. The whole scene now is saturated.
Do you feel in some ways the saturation is
forcing another kind of creativity to emerge? You can't just keep
using samples and remixing found sounds. Even turntablism sometimes
seems like a museum piece now, a sort of fetish for an earlier gesture
of recombination.
It's archive fever. We're in a delirium of saturation. We're never
going to remember anything exactly the way it happened. It's all
subjective. Because of that, you're looking at an eruption of, for
lack of a better word, a dyslexic thinking process. Do you want
to have a bored delirium or a more exciting one?
In some ways, this oversaturated sampling
process seems analogous to the eruption of excess and delirium that
psychedelics produce. In the 1960s, McLuhan talked about LSD as
a preparation for the electronic age. Do you think there's some
kind of connection there?
Yeah. Most drugs come out of either military or biological or pharmaceutical
research. They're like military applications to condition troops
for different environments. A lot of research into painkillers was
done in World War II -- imagine the kind of pain you feel when there
are bullets flying over your head and your leg gets shattered. Or
what kind of speed you need if you are in an airplane and need to
stay awake. Drugs are definitely looking at the idea of man/machine
interface and conditioning the meat to be able to deal with the
machines.
At the end of the day, it's all on the screen. Drugs are like a
graphical user interface. I can almost tell what substances people
are on depending on what mix they're doing. There's the herb mix,
there's the acid mix, there's the Ecstasy-style mix. Each of them
gives a certain kind of interface quality. They summon up different
kinds of psychological projections when you hear them. Depending
on what kind of substances you've done yourself, the sounds might
evoke those same memories. Or they might even be able to give a
foreground/background kind of thing, where you're looking at the
psychology of the listener being bounced back off the environment
that the creator has made.
You can think of it as a subtle psychology of industrial culture
-- what I like to call the archaeology of the subconscious. Somehow
the technology has conditioned the very way we communicate. It's
like a different kind of language. A lot of times people use dead
words, so to speak, and that's when a mix doesn't work. What you
do as a DJ is to breathe new life into it and see what happens,
and that's what sampling's about. It's speaking with the voices
of the dead, playing with that sense of presence and absence. If
the mix doesn't evoke something, it doesn't work.
Your music doesn't sound "trippy"
the way a psychedelic band does, but there is a sense of constantly
flowing through different structures without having a fixed sense
of ground. Have your own experiences with psychedelics helped you
deal with all those multiple levels happening at once?
I can't say there's one formula to the structure of my sound, but
there's definitely this sense of a syncopation of all these different
layers of culture that move at different rhythms and tempos: African-American
culture, academic culture, digital media. I love the word "syncopation."
Syncope means a small gap in consciousness, and when you play with
those gaps and make a mesh out of those presences and absences,
that's a beat. Everything is about pulling together these disparate
fragments. If there was one thing that African-American experience
is about, it's pulling together these tasty fragments of the shattered
culture.
I feel like psychedelic culture flows through white America and
black American culture along different vectors. I'm a product of
Washington D.C., and African-American culture in D.C. is highly
segregated. When I did my first series of psychedelic interventions,
I was a teenager, college age. Some of my weirder experiences were
staying up all night and just walking around Washington, D.C., and
seeing all the weird monuments. Class and social hierarchy issues
are just etched like a rubber stamp on the whole zone. Seeing African-American
kids playing plastic buckets in front of the White House, weird
shit like that, that's what D.C. is about. There's more Haitians
and vodoun kind of scenes in D.C. than in the South.
What kind of area did you grow up in? Was
it predominantly black or was it more of a mix?
It was more like an academic community, and also sort of a cultural
scene. My Mom had a store called Toast and Strawberries right off
of Dupont Circle. Also a lot of the punk rock scene was going on,
a lot of the conceptual political art scene. Fugazi was coming out,
Minor Threat, Bad Brains. A lot of experimental culture in general,
but at the same time, in the black culture scene, a lot of poetry
was going on.
To me it was much easier to jump between zones and scenes.
It's amazing, to this day, if somebody gets into a beat, there's
a whole structure that goes into that rhythm to the point where
you can actually see exactly what people's tastes are, what weird
niche they inhabit.Your taste and preferences become mapped onto
the specific structure of the rhythm. So hip hop is a lifestyle,
like a clothing or a line of cars. J.Lo just did a song about the
Cadillac Escalade, so all of a sudden they're saying, "As in
the J.Lo song…" People will rhyme about being in their
Lexus going to go buy some Möet and have a good time. It's
an entire lifestyle. But that's the end result of advertising as
the American dream.
Beats form certain mnemonics, like sonic logos
that carry whole lifestyle connotations. But remix culture gestures
towards the possibility of not getting stuck in any one groove.
DJ Spooky is certainly a brand, but at the same time you're this
curious multi-tasking guy, grabbing from lots of things and just
going forward and making it work without being too focussed or careerist.
Some people accuse you of being a dabbler, but you are connecting
between lots of different spaces.
I've never felt like I should be a careerist. It's like the summer
I first did this liquid acid, walking through D.C. A good friend
of mine committed suicide that summer and put me into this weird
depression thing. I was actually studying to be a diplomat. That's
when I said: Do I want to do this? Seeing these weird monuments,
and people rushing around, going through the office doors like in
Koyaanisqatsi or Metropolis… It gave me this weird sinking
feeling, a haunted feeling. I can't deal with that.
We're living in a world of absolute standards of identity, time,
regulation. It's a highly regimented culture, but it's so subtle
that it's almost totalitarian, far more than anything the Soviets
could have ever achieved.
Where is the real heart of the control, of
the regimentation?
Personally I think it's about living in a culture of highly structured
time -- seconds, minutes, days. You have to fit all aspects of life
into that interface, the same as you would a graphical user interface
like Pro Tools, putting all of your expression into these different
tracks and layers and making a mesh of it so it's synchronized and
syncopated.
It's like the way people fill out their datebooks,
with those little slots.
In the '60s, with psychedelic culture, you saw this first burst
of trying to break out of that. The drugs shattered people. They
took acid and said, Holy shit! Psychedelic culture disrupted all
the regimentation and let all this new energy out. Now you have
multiculturalism, you have respect for diversity of sexual orientation,
of women's rights, all these things. After the '60s, mainstream
America viewed that as a problem or a mistake, whereas it's just
about being human instead of being some weird, programmed android.
When you look at Ginsberg and all those 1960s and 1950s guys, they
were like neo-Romantics. But in literary or musical circles these
days, there's just a deep confusion about how to break out of the
system and really be outside of it. The Matrix - that's one of my
favorite parables around. It's the whole Plato's cave thing, where
you see the shadow of the projection of reality and you take that
as the basic rhythm of what's going on.
Do you think there are ways in which drugs
can help illuminate that trap or are they just another dimension
of it? In The Matrix, Neo takes the red pill. Is there still something
in psychedelic consciousness that enables people to break out?
With drugs, there is no one answer. It's all dualities, paradoxes,
twisted involutions. In a way, it's healthy, but as human beings
we also seek standardization. It's like a hive thing. We're more
insects than the insects perhaps. I remember reading the other day
that they found a huge ant colony that stretched for like 3000 miles.
You could say the same thing of the East Coast megalopolis - stretching
from Boston down to Atlanta... We're the same thing.
I don't think the drugs clarify anything. I think they just diffuse
the interface a little bit and allow you to see the cracks in the
system. But unless you can walk through those cracks, or think out
of the cracks, you don't know if it's just another illusion.
Do you think there's any way out of that loop?
You'd have to make some sort of intense cognitive break with the
psychological/perceptual architecture of what makes you a normal
human. In the Robert Heinlein book Stranger in a Strange Land, the
kid's raised by aliens, and his whole perceptual architecture is
conditioned differently by them. Philip K. Dick, Samuel Delaney,
all these science fiction writers were engaging with standardization,
with trying to figure out how to think outside the box. The tragedy
is that there is no outside the box. You're just in another box,
in another box, like a Russian matroyshka doll.
Have you ever felt close to some kind of radical
cognitive break like that?
You just never know. It's a hall of mirrors. Unless there's some
scientific way to get proof. It's like the H.P. Lovecraft story
["From Beyond"] where this guy can see in different dimensions
and then he gets hunted by this one creature who notices him. We
do live in many dimensions. That's actually the physics, the scientific
reality.
Speaking of multiple dimensions, do you have
a very rich dream life?
I dream all the time. Around March or April this year, I was in
some kind of weird mood or humor, and my dreams went geometric.
Lines and points and structures. All kind of vectors. Nowadays my
dreams are more narrative. I've done a lot of exercises to try to
remember dreams. Dreaming is reflective. You are taking a step back
and looking at your own trajectory.
How do you condition yourself to deal with things through your dreams
and aspirations and ideas of how you can be? There's an old KRS
rhyme where he's like, "You want to be rich? Picture wealth
and put yourself in the picture. Health is your mental wealth."
I like the idea of mental wealth. It's not about having a big car.
It's the idea that you are your currency. If you hold yourself high,
you will be able to attract all sorts of different exchange rates.
Lots of people's imaginations are so conditioned by the consumer
thing, that's their dream. That's the picture they want to put themselves
in. Pretty standard and boring picture. That's what I like about
Burning Man. It's a different dream.
You first attended Burning Man in 1995. What
do you think about the festival?
I consider Burning Man to be the near future, like you're living
six months to two years into the future. There will be what I call
Burning Man moments where you are walking down a street in New York
and there's an accident, or a car flies by, or there's an awkward
intervention of something into the fabric of normal urbanism, like
when a homeless guy walks by mumbling to himself wearing a fedora.
That's a Burning Man moment.
I look at Burning Man as a postmodern carnival. I'm one of these
kinds of guys who likes breaking down words, and carnival means
-"carni-vale" - throwing the flesh, you know, being able
to wear all these different masks and being able to switch identities.
Afro-Caribbean culture and a lot of southern European culture is
fascinated with carnival, with the festival of the saints. These
are all neo-pagan eruptions that Christianity somehow absorbed.
But when you apply that Dionysian search for some eruption of irrationality
into a very regimented world… it's madness by normal standards.
How does Burning Man compare to raves?
To me, raves are trying to balance some kind of madness with standardization,
which is the beats. The people dancing and hanging out, and the
Ecstasy and acid and all that, is just a psychological buffer between
seeing the shadow on the wall and realizing you can't get around
it. There's an existential quality when you go to really big events.
I've seen a whole arena chanting "Who Let The Dogs Out"
in unison. It's like Albert Speer, like Hitler using TV to get propaganda
messages out during WWII - "Triumph of the Will." Etc
etc. The whole thing is intense psychological compartmentalization,
and when you look at that gestalt mentality, yeah, DJing is part
of the science of regimentation. Is it an avant-garde thing? No,
it's just part of the fabric…
What's your personal attitude towards psychedelics
now?
I've kind of distanced myself from the psychology of psychedelic
culture. I DJ'd at Burning Man last year and took some DMT. I felt
much more disassociated than before. At the end of the day, that's
what it's all about: the logic of things, you do A thus B happens
or C happens. But psychedelic culture breaks those associative chains,
and makes you feel like everything's without cause and just floating.
When I did that heavy psychedelic at Burning Man, I actually felt
like my brain had gone past the point of no return. I mean, everything's
already fragmented, but it feels like if I touch this stuff ever
again, my brain will just fly to pieces.
In general, I haven't done anything over the last year or so - I've
had some coffee, some wine. The more I've actually pulled back from
stuff, the more it feels like the entire planet is psychedelic --
like the geometry of a city seen from above, or seeing ocean waves
just near the Mediterranean. Monaco looked like a Walt Disney recreation,
but then you realize that Disney is just recreating that weird palace
vibe. We live in a culture of relentless quotation. You see something,
you absorb it, and it pops up unconsciously in your next thing.
After the last time I did DMT at Burning Man, I felt like my brain
became Time Square, a kind of boring, rushing collage of conflicting
images and ideas, each one demanding its own time and space in my
brain.
I think a lot of this stuff is psychologically corrosive. To get
any work done, you can't think like that, because you're just outside
of any notion of normal language and being able to communicate and
deal with things. It takes a lot of psychological integrity to be
able to balance between psychedelic culture and being able to maintain
and build a normal world and still have that sense of overview.
When you talk to some executive guy, they've got just a one-track
mentality, because that's what allows them to do their thing. Anybody
who wants to do something has to compress.
Once you've done X amount of some substance it actually remodels
your perceptions, the architecture of how you experience stuff.
You do the drugs and then the drugs do you. When you look at a computer
screen, synaesthesia is just there on the surface, like when you
touch it and you see little waves bubble away. There are special
effects at every level and from every angle.
As an artist, I'm at a paradox, because part of me has that urge
to trip. But there's always the sense that once you go past that
point of no return, you're in a universe of one, because you're
your own language structure, your own mentality. At the peak of
any trip you sometimes feel this inability to have any sense of
real language. That's what Burning Man felt like: that sense of
linguistic loss, of not being able to enunciate normal words or
the flows of how you would normally put sentences together. It's
post-linguistic or something.
You've mentioned how psychedelics in white
culture and black culture are really different. In general, you
don't see too much evidence of black psychedelia, but then you have
something like Parliament/Funkadelic, which is like the most insanely
flipped out thing that happened in the mid-'70s. What's going on
there?
I think white American culture is kind of fragmented in a way that
black American culture isn't. In black America, the pressure to
conform is really intense. All the kids will all of a sudden start
wearing new Fila gear or the new Nike. In white American culture,
the point is to actually to stand out, to be able to cut against
the grain of things.
In terms of lifestyle issues, it's fascinating when people start
rhyming stuff. That means it's truly attained. When you hear Missy
Elliott rhyme about taking Ecstasy and drinking Möet, you know.
Or like, "Yo, I'm the dealer man, pusher man, herb guy."
Whatever. They always externalize it in a way that leaves you with
these paradoxes, because to rhyme about the experience kind of takes
away any sense of the magic of individualism . So you are left with
this sense of a pre-conditioned emotion.
That's been a real intense trope in black culture for a long time,
because you have this sense that, if you leave the crowd, then that
means you've left the sense of struggle, and you're supposed to
always be in tune with the sense of dynamic struggle and change.
I think that makes Afro-American culture an inherently revolutionary
culture, but at the same time, it leaves you in stasis, because
no one goes outside of it.
Have you felt kind of torn between the pressure
of this group identity and your own desire to discover your own
unusual way of dealing with all these different cultures and scenes?
Yeah, I get it all the time, and I'm pretty mellow. I can only imagine
what somebody like Hendrix must have felt. George Clinton was able
to be both psychedelic and still in the normal fold. But when you
hear Snoop Dogg talking about psychedelic culture -- he's always
talking about being a freak and freak out -- that almost feels very
conservative to me. Dr. Dre always talks about Mary Jane, cheeba,
but I don't think they engage this kind of psychedelic culture or
pot culture that tries to break free of things.
In my music, it's much more about paradox. I mean when you look
at the Platonic myth of the shadow on the cave, it could just as
easily be perceptual breakdown or something. There's the uncertainty
of the box within the box, the Cartesian demon of doubt. To really
face that is to say, "Look, we live in a world where you just
don't fucking know, and there is no certainty, and so you just make
it up as you go and see what happens." But we're not conditioned
to want that sense of "the certainty of uncertainty."
That's what I try to evoke with my stuff.
In terms of black culture, again, you can't think of things in terms
of monolithic styles. It's far more nuanced and bizarre than that.
These days the drug of choice for a lot of MCs -- at least that
you hear rhyming about -- is Ecstasy. And if you listen to Timbaland's
beats and styles, there was a sharp change about four years ago,
when he all of a sudden starting doing what they call the acid sound.
One time Donatella Versace threw this after-New Years party and
she had me fly out to DJ. Missy Elliott was backstage hanging and
they were just chilling but it didn't feel psychedelic. There's
times when you're backstage and everything is completely out of
whack and you get that feeling, yo, anything could go off. In the
last couple years, I've just felt a sense of calmness.
You've encountered a lot of weird places and
situations across the planet. What's the weirdest scene you've been
in?
One of the more intriguing parties I've been to was in Iceland.
Björk was having this New Year's Eve party, and all these Icelandic
people were just rocking out. That was a couple of years ago, outside
of Reykjavik. People were on these glaciers…
The party was on the ice?
Yeah.
Wasn't it terribly cold?
Yeah, but they get used to it, man.
People were outside?
Yeah, the sound system and stuff was outside, on the ice fields.
It was dark, this kind of surreal, gray, dawn aura kind of thing,
and that was weird. They like hard techno and trance. They have
all these mixtures of culture, Inuit and European, and they are
also just a really open and friendly people, a fishing culture,
a small island. When I got back from that party, I cut all my hair
off.
Another bizarre scene was when I was living at the Gas Station on
Avenue B. I used to throw these after hours parties, and we'd just
leave the door open, and homeless people, crazy people would come
through. For one party we put up these TVs, and every TV had static,
and they were hanging from these industrial chains on the ceiling.
People were coming in off the street, I had no idea who the fuck
they were, but they would jump onto the TVs and swing around. The
televisions were the only light in the room, and there was crazy
music, and then you'd look out and see all this melted metal and
burned up sculpture and stuff. Those were weird parties. But that
was a different time.
You live a life that would run most people
ragged: you sleep five hours a night, you travel all the time, you're
always working on a gazillion projects and collaborations. You don't
seem based in any particular spacetime because you're moving around,
dealing with different layers of society, all the time. What drives
you?
It's just fun. The world is such a fucking weird place. It's an
exquisitely bizarre thing. I'm just happy to be alive in this era.
It's truly exciting to travel around just checking out how strange
it all is. I'd say this is going to be a century of hyper-acceleration,
and I just get a kick out of seeing it. One of my favorite phrases
from William Gibson is: "The future is already here, it's just
unevenly distributed."
That hyper-acceleration can be tough to take.
When you start to get the feeling that there's too much stuff going
on, how do you get grounded?
You don't. There's always something popping up, something that needs
to get done on the phone or email. It's 24/7. But when I really
want to chill out, I just take a long bath and put some music on
and just sit in the hot water. Actually my plan next year is to
decelerate a little bit and take some time off [note to reader:
Miller has been saying this as long as I have known him]. I'd like
to do more soundtrack work, so I don't do have my economics derived
so much from DJing and traveling. Plus I've got a house up in the
countryside, so I can just come to New York strictly when necessary.
I really want to finish my fiction by early summer, because I've
been working on that book forever.
What's it called?
It's called Flow My Blood The DJ Said. It's this whole involution
of what I call control themes, and science fiction, and music and
sound.
How experimental is the writing?
It started out very experimental, and then I realized, wait a second
here, I've got to fine-tune it. Then I brought it back to more of
a narrative thing. There's chapters where it's just these rushes
of phrases from advertising, weird advertising lingo. I'm fascinated
with this catchphrase thing. You see enough of certain phrases,
and then the city itself spells a big sentence. Times Square is
like that. If you selectively edit between all the information flowing
through your mind, the sentence built is like some kind of Finnegans
Wake James Joyce-type stuff, but it still has some resonance for
me. My fiction's like stream of consciousness mixed with media streaming.
At this point in your career, do you mostly
DJ because it's a nice cash flow, or do you still have an investment
in being a pop culture figure who throws good parties?
Well, that depends. My parties and my music are really outside of
normal DJ currents. I don't spin at the same rave as a Paul Oakenfold.
But at the same time, I love DJing as a hobby. It was never really
meant to be my main thing. DJing was meant to be an art project.
Imagine having one project take over like that!
Over the next year or so I'm going to be doing a series of conceptual
art projects, and migrating out of DJing. I used to pass out stickers
saying, "Who is DJ Spooky?" and cassettes that had stories
on them. I'm still doing that. But these days it's much more informal
and just kind of fun. So DJ Spooky was a project, and now Paul D.
Miller is a project of DJ Spooky, and I'm slowly remixing out of
that.
On your new record Optometry, you play some
acoustic bass. What's up with that?
I started studying bass in college. For my senior year recital,
I had to do this kind of waltz, and I completely flubbed it. Now
when I play stuff , I just sample it. Optometry is all samples.
I wasn't in the same room as anyone; everyone just gave me elements.
Being able to synchronize and put that meshwork together was a really
fun kind of thing, but it sounds live. I've got to figure this out,
though, because next year I'm going to do more stuff with a band.
We're going to take Optometry on the road live.
Bass playing is one of those calm kinds of things I do to try and
stop thinking. You just play, you hear the sound, and that's it.
Everybody has their little gestures that they tune in to and repeat.
Like some people have prayer beads. For a couple years playing bass
was my mellow activity, usually playing alone.
I've always loved jazz too, so Optometry is the jazz record I've
wanted to make for a while. A lot of people say it sounds happier
than the rest of my music. If you actually heard the original stuff,
it was chaos -- you just had someone squawking their horn for like
five minutes, like really aggro free jazz, while someone else's
playing crazy drums. The sense of finessing that, of being able
to figure out even what tempos or what arrangements to make things
around, was fascinating. Free jazz is totally out of the normal
DJ beat, pulse, range, style. Optometry was a good exercise in structural
silence. Most free jazz bands are maximalists, they go and bombard
you with all of these heavy sounds. So pulling silence out of that
was a really interesting exercise.
One of the things you've been doing lately
is taking the DJ performance and putting it into places where you
don't usually see DJ decks, like in art galleries. Do people get
what you're trying to do?
Well, some people love it, some people hate it. I've gotten vicious,
bitter reviews by critics. But that's all just fluff. As an artist
and writer, I do what I enjoy. If I didn't like it, I wouldn't do
it. I think if you follow through with whatever you're into, you
can do it. It doesn't matter if it's not consistent, there's a market
or niche for every possible endeavor under the sun at this point.
I'm actually at a crossroads myself in terms of trying to figure
out the writing stuff, especially this idea of writing as total
text.
What do you mean by total text?
I'm in the process of editing my first two nonfiction anthologies,
Sound Unbound and Rhythm Science. I'm going to have multimedia,
I'm going to have web, I'm going to do a limited edition CD, I might
want to do some performances around them. That's what Wagner was
trying to do with the whole idea of the Gesamptkunstwerk ["total
artwork"]. But that approach is actually more of an African
kind of thing in general. In Europe, because of the specialization
trip, you had to specialize and just do one thing. But why? I guess
I'm just deprogramming out of the specialization thing. Why not
have a book that can be HTML code, or a building that's a symphony,
or whatever?
You first got on the map doing music and DJing.
You've done sound art, installation, sculpture, painting. You've
been working lately with video remixing and getting into the mixology
of images. But in many ways you still define yourself primarily
as a writer. Why is it important for you to stay tied to the world
of writing?
At the end of the day, you still want to communicate with your fellow
human beings. Otherwise it becomes a subjective implosion.
Yeah, but some people would say that images
are now a better form of communication, that text isn't a very good
form anymore. It's too slow, for one thing.
It is, it's all that. In fact it's kind of retro. But that's cool,
too. That's why people wear bell bottom jeans. You can always squeeze
something out of the past and make it become new.
But for you, it is about communication.
It's a puzzle you set for yourself. Being at a crossroads like this,
and being uncertain which direction to move, is actually a good
thing, because it makes me question everything a lot more. Why do
I want to write, why do I want to make a track, why do I want to
do this installation? They're all hobbies, which keeps the fun.
If I were a dead serious artist guy, who wanted to just strictly
be in all the right collections, and network the gallery scene,
that's easily done. Same with the DJ circuit. But by being a hobbyist,
a kind of flaneur or somebody who jumps around, it keeps things
fresh and new. I can only imagine what kind of mentality most people
must have doing one thing all their lives. But I guess because I
grew up with books, I've always wanted to write one, to add my own
book to the bookshelf in my mind or something.
How do you feel about writing? You've written
almost two books…
It keeps me sane. I like dabbling in multimedia or doing performance,
and I like speaking before audiences a lot. But there's something
about the labor or writing and the sense of being part of the continuum
of writing that goes back thousands of years. It is a retro form,
and in some ways it doesn't quite fit what's happening. The challenge
then is to describe or characterize what it feels like to be alive
now in the midst of it, but using this other kind of form. My consciousness
is still partly in the Gutenberg world. I know people who are totally
electronic and it's fascinating to see them, but in some ways their
consciousness works differently. There's a reflexivity that comes
with having to compose and letting language come through you. It's
a different speed, there's a slowness there. And the way language
is infectious, the way you pick up language from other writers.
It's kind of my home base.
Writing becomes your own temple and you just move in and make sure
everything flows and the right divinities are in effect.
Nowadays writing just looks like one more
technology, with its pluses and minuses. What have you been thinking
about lately in terms of the future?
These days I've been thinking a lot about universal computing, and
how that's going to affect us. It's going to just be psychological
after a certain point. Your mind will be the software or whatever.
Once you have that density of information in terabytes, and everything's
just kind of in the air, what happens after that? That's just around
the corner.
Last night, Larry Lessig and I were talking about this idea of artificial
scarcity. If you're in a digital world, where anyone can make a
copy of anything, what you then need to do is to pull stuff out
of the loop and make it become more scarce. That's one of the new
economies of scale that he thinks will be going on. It's already
started and will slowly evolve.
Give me an example.
There are some artists who will only make five copies of a DVD.
If they're in the conventional art world, they'll be able to sell
them for like $75,000 each. They're still dealing with the digital
medium, but it works: people with the collecting mentality will
pick up on that. Another example of artificial scarcity is where
Bill Gates is buying up all these images and charging people X amount
just to use the images. He set up a bunker and put millions of images
in this one place.
Oh, you mean the paintings, the photographs,
the actual physical objects?
Yeah - the original photos of the objects. It's this bunker in Pennsylvania,
buried underground, in this secure thermostatically-controlled,
humidity-controlled environment. It has guards and stuff like that.
So a bunker of images. That's artificial scarcity.
You have to imagine a world where, on the one hand, basic resources
like water and oil are becoming more scarce. That's a real scarcity.
Digital culture's blossoming like an artificial desert being made
over again, because people are actually making more copies of everything.
There's more cities in Sim City than have ever existed in human
history.
But you can't eat that. You can't flush it and you can't drink it,
so it's an artificial thing. It's this weird kind of information
environment. But how do you sustain the architecture in your own
mind? I'm fascinated with the idea of being able to be in a world
where it's not how much information that bombards you, but how little
you have. That's going to be your wealth. Less is more.
What's scares you the most about our moment
now?
Well, I think if we don't play our cards right in this century,
we'll be extinct. I think we'll just play our deck, have a wild
party and just wrap up and make room for the next species. There's
too much pollution, too much tinkering with DNA, weird biotech weapons,
control systems, computer stuff… I don't think there's any
real sense of responsible growth or engagement. We're already messing
up the oceans, we're already killing off the dolphins and all these
different species. Statistically speaking I think we're just around
the corner from some mass, twisted thing. Somebody will just get
in their airplane with some new biotech weapon and spread it around,
or somebody's going to splash a whole city full of some virus. Today
huge devastation can be brought about just by a couple of bugged-out
people. And there are a lot of bugged-out people.
You're in the special position of going around
the world and meeting lots of interesting and very different people.
Despite cultural diversity, are you getting the feeling that everyone
is starting to feel the same way about the state of things?
Yeah, I definitely think that anyone who's watching the world knows
that, yo, shit is mega fucked up. You can't walk down the street
without feeling this sense of empathy or pain for some crazy person.
You catch their eye, and you realize this is a shattered psychology,
somebody who just got fucked by the zone they grew up in. I think
humans are building systems that are psychologically devastating
to ourselves, far more pervasively than at any other time in history.
And that's just our own psychology. Forget about the environment
or the air we breathe or the ocean we're swimming in. I think that
most people who are even vaguely aware feel this giddy sense that
something's wrong and things are really fucked up. It's pretty hard
to miss the signs. Unless you're Bush.
Erik Davis is a contributing editor to Trip.
http://www.tripzine.com
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DJ Spooky and DMC of RUN DMC at Soul Festival, Jakarta, Indonesia! 10/31/2009
Copyright Criminals - a Documentary by Ben Frantzen and Kembrew Mcleod
ORDER NOW!!! 
OUT NOW! DJ Spooky's "Sound Unbound"
CREATION REBEL MIX CD on Trojan Records
DJ Spooky has produced material on the new Yoko Ono album.
RHYTHM SCIENCE:
DJ Spooky in Berlin 2008