Rhythm Science (DJ Spooky at Boston's ICA)

Paul D. Miller, aka DJ Spooky, was at Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art last weekend. He did a well received DJ spin in the ICA's giant lobby on Friday night and presented a "work in progress" live mix of a string trio on Saturday that was universally panned savaged in the Boston press (more on that below).

But Thursday night's lecture / performance was what I was most looking forward to -- and it's the only gig I caught. Miller's talk was loosely based on his award-winning "Rhythm Science" (MIT Press, 2004) -- a treatise on the role sampling technology has played in transforming culture and our view of art and reality. Or, as the book's promotional website puts it: "taking the DJ's mix as template, [Miller] describes how the artist, navigating the innumerable ways to arrange the mix of cultural ideas and objects that bombard us, uses technology and art to create something new and expressive and endlessly variable." A must read (well, in my book).

Paul was hungry, missing dinner, and probably tired. You see he'd very recently returned from a month in Antarctica, where he was filming the melting continent while living on a rented Russian trawler crammed full of high definition cameras and his recording studio. Miller premiered the initial mix of the film at Sundance, projected onto a circle of 17 screens. He showed us a snippet of the film, which he's remixing to play at Imax type theaters.

While hip hop is constructed drawing off the vibe, culture, and surroundings of the urban environment, Miller said he wanted to do the same thing in Antarctica, totally divorced from urban society. Thus, Spooky composed the mostly improvised soundtrack for his new film on board the ship -- in large part using his recordings of the sound of ice cracking and breaking-up, with an occasional penguin squawk tossed into the mix. It was interesting, but didn't sound all that inspired and at times even seemed to borrow some well-worn avant-minimalism themes from Philip Glass' soundtrack to Koyaanisqatsi (not that there's anything wrong with that, but I was expecting more -- like a startling mix of rhythmic ice crunch and flow. But perhaps he had an Imax audience in mind).

Much more rewarding was Spooky's discussion of the history of sampling and sequencing in film -- beginning with a short film from 1900 by French filmmaker Georges Méliès (you've probably seen the homage to his most famous film Voyage Dans la Lune (posted here on YouTube) in the video for the Smashing Pumpkins' "Tonight, Tonight," which includes the famous scene of a spaceship crashing into the eye of a stylized "man in the moon"). Spooky showed Méliès short film L'homme Orchestre (The One-Man Band), pioneering the technique of superimposing multiple exposures to make objects appear and disappear. Méliès film presents a magic act in which, with a wave of a wand, he creates multiple copies of himself on stage with different instruments, who all play as a band, and then one-by-one collapse, back into a single band leader (check the film, posted here on YouTube). This, according to Miller, is the first example of sampling and sequencing in film.

Fast forward to the present, and Spooky connected Méliès innovation to the contemporary use of digital editing to seamlessly cut and paste, manipulate, and mash-up footage. As an example, he presented a perfectly edited and hilarious sequence he constructed of a Bush state of the union speech, which had Dubbya actually speaking the truth about the war in Iraq ("we invaded Iraq based on lies and distortions," "and we made sure the risk of terror increased and spread around the globe," "and we were evil," etc).

This set-up Miller's discussion, with clips, of his celebrated "Rebirth of a Nation" reworking of W.D. Griffith's racist 1915 film "Birth of a Nation." Check here for a great article on the project.

DJ Spooky started the evening by passing out free CDs, noting that he was helping to spread music and art as an open, "gift-based medium." Which fits in with his championing of the open source movement and Creative Commons. I got a chance to speak briefly with Miller after the lecture about his recent performance at the Creative Commons five year anniversary bash. If you don't know Creative Commons (cc), it's a groundbreaking licensing method that provides a range of alternatives to copyright (c). Creative and scientific works with a cc license may be set for free use with a variety of restrictions, fostering creative and cooperative development stifled by draconian or outmoded formal copyright.

At least one artsy type in the audience at Thursday's lecture didn't realize where Spooky was coming from. In the Q&A after his talk, she mentioned that he samples other people in his work, and then asked, in an accusatory voice, "how would you feel if somebody else sampled you !?" (RIAA agit prop?) Miller was very nice about it, basically answering "just fine." He noted that all sorts of his mixes are available for free download on his website, and that he wouldn't be surprised if some DJs the audience went home and made their own mixes using the free CDs he handed out earlier.

Speaking of those free mixes, here's a 12+ minute edit of the 80 minute mix I received as a gift.

Trip Jazz mix (Asphalt-Bitches Brew-Hot Rats edit) -- DJ Spooky

In addition to samples of Miles' title track to Bitches Brew and a Low End Theory-like, looped bass line from Zappa's sublime "Little Umbrellas" (from the jazz-rock masterpiece Hot Rats), the mix kicks off with Carl Hancock Rux spoken word "rap" in "Asphalt" (the title of his celebrated novel, a must read . . . well, again, imho). The rap in "Asphalt" is taken from Spooky's jazz collaboration with Matthew Shipp and William Parker (and Joe McPhee and Guillermo E. Brown) for Thirsty Ear records' Blue Series. That album, Optometry, is one of my favorite jazz albums of the past 5 years. More here.

I've got two turntables and Coltrane
and not just Blue Coltrane
and not just Monk and not just Miles
I've got a million musicians playing over my head
a band of angels responding to the percussion of stomps and hollars
heads don't even know what's happening to 'em
they just know something's happenin' to 'em
I'm the anointed one, turning them over to an urban space
a vacant lot near a tenement building . . .

As a bonus, here's a sample from DJ Spooky's remix of material from the Thirsty Ear Blue Series:

CD:Dir - Gesture - N B LA (Theory Remix) -- DJ Spooky: Celestial Mechanix: The Blue Series Mastermix (2004)

Back to DJ Spooky's apparently ill-fated performance with a string trio last week. Titled "Subliminal Strings," the evening was billed as one in which Paul would sample, sequence, and live mix the string trio, cutting and throwing into the mix beats and bits of everything from Gotan Project to Radiohead. Sounds great. I was sorry to miss it . . . until I read the reviews.

None of the press write-ups mentioned samples of Gotan Project, Radiohead, or anything else, expect the live mix of the strings. Nobody was impressed. Or rather, everyone was distressed by the performance. A few snippets from the major press accounts, which are highly entertaining in their savagery:

Boston Phoenix review Subliminal Cruelty: "As [the string trio] plucked out abstract figures and droned cerebral moans, Spooky would burst in with dissonant woodwind samples, pitch-bent textures, and woefully dated drum loops. It was endless, drab, meandering, and somewhat insulting."

Boston Globe's review Aural Collage Becomes a Collision: "[Spooky] called it a 'collision between recordings of the ensemble and the materials they are playing,' although it's unlikely by collision he meant train wreck. . . . Rather than playing off each other, Spooky and the trio played against each other, competing for the listeners' attention. It felt something like sitting between two rehearsal studios, a hip-hop group practicing in one room and a classical group in the other, snippets of sound bleeding through the walls. . . . Spooky described his 'strange experiment' as a 'work in progress,' which is true in the way that falling down a flight of stairs is a work in progress toward smashing your head." ouch.

And the exceedingly harsh Boston Herald review DJ Spooky Spins Out of Control: first line: "If you gave DJ Spooky an enema, you could fit him in a tin can." yeow. "[DJ Spooky] has pushed a lot of boundaries in his career, but unfortunately the emperor was buck-naked at the ICA, where the extra-modern waterfront venue only added to the pretension. . . . Maybe he is a genius; not many DJs can get a flock of aging white folks to pretend they like something." ouch.

Guess I'm glad I wasn't there. Then again, I'm even more sorry I missed the performance since I have no way to determine if it was really that bad -- or if I, as a Spooky sympathizer, would've ranted against the unfair reviews.

But Miller has successfully merged avant guard and contemporary classical music with turntablism before -- including his performance of Anthony De Ritis' Devolution: A Concerto for DJ and Orchestra at Harvard's Sanders Theater last Spring. At that performance, his last Boston appearance, Spooky got to cut it up and improvise on the ones and twos with the Boston Modern Orchestra Project. De Ritis, chair of the Department of Music and director of Multimedia Studies at Boston's Northeastern University, used Ravel's Bolero and a theme from Beethoven's Seventh Symphony to construct a piece within which DJ Spooky could loop and throw back bits and pieces of those compositions, along with broken beats and other sounds, including the haunting wail of an Arabic muezzin (which worked particularly well).

As I noted in a review last Spring, it was a great performance. I've re-upped the tracks in that post, which include a sample from Spooky's excellent avant-classical collaboration with the Freight Elevator Quartet.

So what went wrong with the string trio last week? Maybe Spooky was still jet lagged and simply exhausted from his month in Antarctica. Or had been partying too late with his DJ spin the night before. Or maybe he was just bored.
. . .