Interview with the Harvard Advocate
An interview of Paul D. Miller by Eva Marie
Pinon for the Harvard Advocate. The Advocate dedicated an entire
issue to exploring contemporary African American intellectual
culture and its relationship to electronic music.
Harvard
Advocate
1) What were your first emotions with electronic music?
The artist Piet Mondrian said back in 1943 when he was asked to
describe the geometric patterns in his famous work Broadway Boogie-Woogie:
"I view boogie-woogie as homogenous with my intention in painting-a
destruction of melody equivalent to the destruction of natural
appearances, and a construction by means of a continuum of pure
means-dynamic rhythms." Several decades later, the geometric abstractions
painters like him, Cubist-phase Duchamp, Kandinsky, and a host
of others almost seem to be a direct precursor to the digital
graphics that pervade the world we inhabit. For me, electronic
music is simply holding a mirror up to the world and seeing what
comes back through the framework of how we see things around us...
beats are like pulses, thoughts, fragments.... always a refraction
of the flow.... When I was growing up in D.C. for me, the whole
wold came out of the radio... it was always mixed, and you could
check out all sorts of stuff. Rock, Go-Go (Trouble Funk, Rare
Essence, The Junk Yard Band) were D.C. bands that influenced alot
of hip-hop at that time, but it was always a kind of since of
"what next?" This stuff was electronic in a way that alot of the
Afrika Bambaata/Kraftwerk scene couldn't simulate; so in a way
you could say I grew up on "live" electronic music but combined
with a kind of dub tradition too... I like to think of mix culture
as a dynamic palimspsest - call it the electromagnetic canvas
of a generation raised on and in electricity. In this day and
age where basic software modules for America On-Line come with
something like seven or eight pre-fabricated personas that you
can use at will to construct on-line identity, I felt like Dj
culture had inherited what Dubois spoke of when he described African
American identity as "Double Consciousness" but added several
layers of complexity: the "current" - all puns intended, alternating
and direct - has been deleted. Any sound can be you. It's an emotion
of abstraction and attention deficit disorder: there's so much
information about who you should be or what you should be that
you're not left with the option of trying to create your own "mix"
of your self. Where in the past blues musicians would "go to the
cross-roads" to tell their stories, I look at the internet as
the new cross-roads, and mix culture, with it's emphsis on exchange
and nomadism as a precedent for the digital contexts that later
arrived from the realms of the academy. Again, you have to think
of how much narratives like D.W. Griffith's "Birth of a Nation"
influenced America's sense of narrative fracture - and again,
that was a film based on race and paranoia. The "mix" absorbs
almost anything it can engage - and alot of stuff that it can't...
emotion and catharsis, in the context of jazz and blues, become
cybernetic aspects of coded structure. Have you ever seen a crowd
say the same words a performer? Apply the same logic to karaoke
or hip-hop and you'll see what I mean. Identification and cathexis:
both become a kind of post Situationist critique of what Guy Debord
called "psychogeographie". And if you think about the etymology
of "phono-graph" you get a similar logic: sound writing, geo-graph
- both are recursive aspects of a culture of information collage
where everything from your identity to the codes you use to create
your art or music. It's that simple and it's that complex....
2) What is your background-classical, self-taught, (conservatoire,
gamelan class,trumpet)
My whole thing growing up in D.C. was always to check out whatever
was around, and I still do that. It's mainly a matter of being
open to whatever seems interesting, and that makes me listen to
alot of different stuff. If I get more into something, I'll just
learn how to play it. I play alot of instruments on my albums,
but then I sample them and combine 'em with scratchy record sounds
and a couple of different sound filters to make 'em sound more
old....you know how it goes... supersonic bionic, like Kool Keith
says... my work and my style is hypertextual, one instrument leads
to another and basically the sampler can be any instrument so
basically my whole vibe is basically open to whatever WORKS....
there are also alot of other literary/artistic precedents that
mirror what I'm up to and in a way, this is the American modus
operandi... a place where sound becomes image becomes media scape
and my interpretations of contemporary America's fascination with
what W.E.B. Dubois called "Double Consciousness and multiple personality
disorders that seem to be on the rise these days is basically
a way of checking out the way different music instruments can
summon different voices and make you feel certain ways. For me
it's all about dealing with the world as sound, so I guess you
could say the entire planet is my mixing board. I just don't have
enough memory to hold it all in my brain so I have to flip into
the sampler.... but yeah, I also play upright bass, kalimba, some
percussion.... it's all a hobby, really
3)What brought you to the use of machines and why did you choose
the G3 and Max for eg?
For a while I've been wanting to get a more compact set-up. Carry
mad amounts of records around and having to deal with customs
and whatnot every time you get into a different country is mad
boring, so the way I see it, eventually I'm going to be able to
upload my sets onto something like MP3 and then remix it live
at different locations... my G3 can handle that kind of memory
and programs like Max, Granular, C Sound, Recycle, and Metasynth
let me flip things in "real time" and combine the flow from my
laptop with my turntable set up... the basic idea is like some
sort of digital mixing board situation like King Tubby and Scientist
meet Napster and MP3...
4) In general, do you think that the evolution of technology has
changed the processes of creation?
At this point, I can't think of a sound I haven't heard or that
I couldn't make. For me the strangest sounds I hear at this point
in my life come from inside not outside. My dreams and basic nighttime
thought process are where I find my most creative sounds. Nothing
else can come close to some of the sounds I've heard in my mind.
The basic idea is to use digital stuff to try to make a bridge
between the interior and exterior, and music like hip-hop and
alot of the electronic stuff out there is all about theater: how
people live to the sounds. For me, technology is a collective
hallucination, and we are able to send our visions and ideas in
ways our ancestors would have thouhgt were god-like. When I look
out and see kids running around on roller blades listening to
mini-discs and wearing bugged out sun glasses, I can only wonder
what someone like Andre Breton or Marcel Duchamp would think:
the whole thing is so surreal.... it gets to the point where myth
and code are just two sides of the same coin, and basically people
are becoming more technological in a way that is at heart how
we live and breathe and think in the everyday. Human evolution
and machine evolution are utterly combined and the best way to
see it is as a kind of symbiotic situation where we have made
certain mythic sacrifices to new stories. It's all in codes at
this point: wetware, shareware, software.... it all depends on
what operating system you live in and with...
5) Describe one of your fantasy in terms of art project including
different means of expression like sounds and images...
these days for me, it's all about showing how much we've become
involved with art and recontextualized it into a dynamic filter
for "real" life - the contexts have changed and we now have a
world of total media saturation at almost all levels of the post
industrial world. We're probably the first generation to grow
up completely electronic environment. I always think about the
first time John cage went into an "anechoic chamber" - a place
where there is literally "no sound" and he heard two weird rhythm
patterns: one high frequency and one low frequency - the low frequency
pattern was the sound of his blood circulating in his veins, and
the high frequency was the sound of his nervous system. These
days we'd be able to emulate and precisely take the sound of someone's
"operating system" -wetware and hardware - and simulate them from
the ground up. Once you get their basic credit information and
various electronic representations of that person, who needs the
real thing anymore? In the U.S. there's a rising crime wave associated
with this stuff and they call it "theft of identity" and it's
all about manipulation of the electronic representations of your
"self" but when you think about it, what does that do to your
"real" self? That's what my art critiques: live and non-live -
the two are utterly mutually conditioning, and in a way, the sense
is that this cycle will intensify throughout the 21st century.
6) The Scanner project, how did it happen?
Robin (Scanner) is an old friend of mine, and we've talked about
doing this project for a while. We both have a fascination with
how intensely the "real" world is being displaced by our human
interpretations of it... the natural is being displacedc by the
human version of it: form and function, fact and fiction these
now are fringe aspects of the human condition; That's what the
"Quick and The Dead" was about....
7) Environnment and music, does that ring a bell?
The world is
one big frequency at this point: I like to think of it as when the movie "2001: A Space Odessy" became inverted into the
Matrix: inner and outer space.... transmit, decode: is this the
remix of the American dream of continuous expansion? Aesthetics
and Ethics: you seem to definitely have a situation where there
are modes of behavior and ideas that are acceptable/unacceptable
can be manipulated, like in Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World"
but ours is a consumer world where we line up to receive what
the system defines as being desireable.... that's what alot of
my work critiques: a sense of trying to creating your own narrative
in a world where we're forced to accept some Hollywood bullshit
version of how we can live and think.... there was a musician
named John Hassle back in the 70's who viewed music as being a
kind of "4th World" where somehow someway we could flip things
around and try to figure out a different situation. I look at
my work as continuing that style of thought in a multi-cultural
electronic music environment. We have created a sort of "poly-theist"
impulse in consumer culture that reflects the loss of some sort
of European fixed standards. The question I ask is this: for you
how does this affect the way we engage technology and the creation
of new mythologies and art in the 21st century? Is the weight
of the past so intense that we are locked into some sort of loop
cycles with respect to how we can even view the liberating aspects
of technology? I call the Milton Friedman versus Fernand Braudel
issue: central narratives and markets versus distributed networks
of ideas always lose. But will the loser try to take the winners
down with them? The American Dream would seem to point to another
option.... but then again, this could always be a multiple choice
question, eh?
5) Mention some of your favourite creators , writers, poets, performers,
film directors, photographs, cartoonists..
It's a huge list... I don't know where to start, but mainly I'm
into people who flip things around and try to create and foster
new kinds of thought, Marcel Duchamp, George Clinton and Parliament/Funkadelic,
James Brown, Butch Morris, Charles Ives, Basquiat, Ornette Coleman,
Amiri Baraka, Charlie Parker, Mallarme, Iannis Xenakis, Abbey
Lincoln, The Art Ensemble of Chicago, John Cage, Afrika Bambaata,
Miles Davis, Grand Master Flash, Sun Ra, Raymond Scott... all
of these people are heroes for me precisely because they didn't
just sit around and accept what was around... they created new
situations for people to look at the world around them... Let's
call this the Sally Jesse Hemmings issue: post-modernism meets
the lies of the American past: DNA and science versus some of
the core America's oringal myths: Thomas Jefferson, "reconstructed"
identity in light of new information.... information should be
improvisational and if you can deal with that, then you can see
why I'm into
6) The Global nomad concept, is that something you feel close
to, in what way...
You can flip it like some old Jean Cocteau type film or even think
of stuff like what happened in the past - the troubadour, the
bard - the blues concept of "going to the cross roads" - where
everyone could play the same song but flipped it every which way
until it became "their own sound" - or even the jazz concept of
"call and repsonse." Bu the basic idea for me is simply a kind
of mixing board metaphor for how we live and think in this day
and age of information. The internet is our metaphor for the way
we think and it's a living network made up of the "threads" of
all the information moving through it at any given moment, just
like the railroad used to be, or the idea of being a travelling
"beatnik" back in the 1960's used to be... the idea is that information
and beats and rhythms never stay in one place. It's all about
algorhythms: code is beats is rhythm is algorhythm is digital...
I like to think of the French idea of the "Roman mallaparte" or
even the "Oulippo" scene that created weird text games based on
math... but the historic kinds of precedents for thinking about
dj culture are out there, all you have to do is be open to different
interepretations of how we should look at art. It's been a real
uphill struggle to deal with different peoples perceptions of
what can be art, and people tend to be mad conservative when it
comes to looking at things in a different light. At the end of
the day, the music speaks louder than any individual voice, and
basically the music is saying: the old boundaries are no longer
existent. The present moment has been deleted. Any sound can be
you.... that's my nomad idea. Sound and signification: this is
the electromagnetic situation... 7) The party aspect, what would
b your contribution to a club concept for 2000 ? Everything at
this point is one big mixing board. Elements. You have to think
of everything as elements that can be mixed. I'm really into the
"dj tools" concept - stuff that people are meant to mix, and that
leave enough room for people to check out in their own way. Each
and every dj is a walking radio station transmitting their own
style. You just have to be open to different frequencies. That's
what makes a good party; when there's different shit going on,
not just the same music all night... it's the year 2000. Things
should be really wild. Anything else is boring.
8) Your position in aesthetics (Dostoievski's sentence " Tout
est permis ", everything can be shown, proferred, played, performed. ; the fact that there aren't anymore boundaries in our so-called
post-modern civilization, you mentioned the word decadency, everybody
talks about progress and evolution, how do you feel about all
these things?
Dostoievski is cool, but I like to think of this kind of thought
pattern from where I come from. In the U.S. African American's
were the first "generation X." We had everything taken away, and
the old forms of culture had to be reconstructed. That's where
you get the first idea of "found objects", and the whole post-modern
situation, to me at least, is a reflection of when you feel your
identity being dispossesed/dispersed.... everyone in the post-industrial
world has a kind of feeling of floating these days... it all seems
so unreal. Progress is an illusion. It's all about how much we
can reconfigure oour ways of thinking about how we fit into nature
and the world around us. I think sometimes we're killing the planet,
and there's so much bullshit and petty shit, no one can even think
that the atmosphere is being destroyed or that 50% of the world's
population has never even made a phone call.... everyone wants
to think that they're "on some future shit" but the shit is now,
and if things keep going the way they are the future is going
to be pretty grim seperation between those who have information
and those who don't. Europe's myths of freedom were an illusion
for the rest of the world, and the post colonial situation will
be more bullshit if people can't simply respect the people around
them.... music is a universal language. So is mathematics. To
me, that's what electronic music is pointing out: that humans
can fucking relate to one another and build bridges over the historic
bullshit... maybe.
9) Ancient civilization, folklore and traditional forms of music,
explain your interests if any...
At this point, it's all about collage. Everything we see is made
up of fragments of other stuff. The past is a game of poker...
pick a card, any card...
10) Do you think we're going toward a " brand society " in that
vast accumulation of datas?
Logo... it's all about the logo. Call it "generation attention
deficit disorder" but the idea of growing up in a society based
on t.v. and continuous rapid exchange cut-ups and advertisements
has created a kind of mass amnesia in electronic youth culture.
I think of it as a visual soundbite: there's so much information
out there the only way you can deal with it all it to filter,
and that's what dj's do: the music is our way to condensing and
reflecting a world made of bits and bytes back to some sort of
individual meaning. Sometimes I look at my records (I have something
between 20-30,000 records and have been collecting since my father
died when I was three years old, I have a wall of records at home
that I use, and the rest I keep in storage), I get dizzy with
all the voices and potential mixes that I could make. It's infinite,
and it's heady... there's no sound that I can't think of, and
in a sense all the technology that I use to make my art is corporate.
We're so involved with technology (software, hardware etc etc)
that the old notions of left-wing, right wing, need to be remade,
because in an information economy it's all about how information
creates identity as a scarce resource: my mom used to say - who
speaks through you? I can only wonder what the next generation
will think of how we used technology... like I always say, technology
is like a card game, and on that issue I'll have to sit back and
poker faced, say "pick a card any card...." things just can never
be made simple, and the complexity of it all is what makes life
exciting for me. The illusion of a static and linear universe
that we've been so acclimatized to seeing/existing in is becoming
so utterly boring that even movies like the Matrix or Being John
Malkovitch can become populated with the kind of narratives that
normally would be associated with psychosis or madness on one
hand, or dj mix culture on the other. Forced memory and hyper
saturation - these are the issues that we're facing these days,
and the interaction between stimulus and and imagination no longer
works in blocks and chunks like a bad tv channnel playing for
the evening family hour or something. Instead through the kind
of mix that I've been talking about, people experience more stimuli
with a lower definition - more dispersion, more fragmentation
equals information as a kind of particle physics of communication,
and like Paul Virilio said a long while ago, communication takes
on a rapturous quality, like a frequency operating on a really
short wavelength. The American Melting pot as the World Microwave?
What's it like to live on a planet put in parenthese by satellites
in the sky? Ask any kid and they'll tell you, or maybe they're
all too busy listening to Eminem (that's meant to be humorous
by the way....). Anyway, one of my favorite physicists, Richard
P. Feynman said when he was discussing the way our civilization
is changing - it's like the classic situation where a professor
walks into class at the beginning of a new semester and writes
a statement for a quizzical class on the previously blank blackboard:
"why?" and then walks out. The class assumes that this is a statement
about some philosophical issue and almost no one responds. The
professor returns and says this is a test. What answers do you
have, you have 5 minutes to respond?" No one replies and the class
is given a surprise pop quiz response: the professor returns and
on the opposite blackboard the answer to this strange question
is written: "why not?” Needless to say, the entire class failed
the exam.
|
|
|
DJ Spooky has participated in two new book projects.
DJ Spooky also has participated in renowned photographer Lyle Owerko's new book "The Boombox Project" on the history of boomboxes. 
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:
