Conversation with Paul D. Miller / DJ Spooky, That Subliminal Kid

by Odili Donald Odita

Paul D. Miller a.k.a. DJ Spooky, That Subliminal Kid

Odili Donald Odita: How would you describe the terms, 'Ambient/Illbient,' and 'Drum&Bass/Jungle,' as they are applied to the music you do? Do you find that they describe what it is you do accurately, or are they marketing terms?

Paul D. Miller/DJ SPOOKY: When it actually boils down to the core essence of what music is about, all of these terms are utterly useless. On the other hand, they act as a psychological shorthand that in this day and age of total information overload, can be real guideposts, just like when you're at a supermarket and you really want to just find butter and bread, you're grateful that they're labeled. For me, 'illbeint' started without the 't.' 'Illbein' - I used to live in a junkyard on Ave B and 2nd street, and it was truly grim - scarecrow junkies, absurd violence down the street, while at the same time, a nightclub across the street called 'Save the Robots' was one of the hottest spots in downtown - it hosted a truly diverse group of after hours types, and was a core spot for downtown culture during the late 80's and early 90's. So maybe it was the dissonance of the peacock like crowd of the nightclub scene and the utterly hopeless situation of the average people on the street as seen through the rusted and burned metal of the Gas Station's sculptures (the spot was in its own way an artist collective, and I made many of my early sculptures there). 'Illbein'' - it was basically an attempt to describe the reality around me - urban dystopia, loss of idealism in NYC's cynical artworld, loss of any sense of social justice in NYC's youth culture scenes, I guess loss of meaning, period. But it was at its core a collective situation to create meaning that came out of the events that a woman named Karen Levitt and I threw there, called 'Molecular,' where many types of music were allowed to co-exist, and many different cultures were invoked. This is where 'illbeint' started. There's another party called 'Soundlab' where several of my friends, Beth Coleman (Dj Singe), Howard Goldkrand, and a party called Abstrakt that I do with Dj Ambassador JR, have inherited the same aesthetic values. Marketing terms - anything that exists in language is there because people have a use for it. Anything else, well, that's outside my ability to say (heh heh heh!). But marketing terms - stuff like 'jungle' 'trip-hop' 'hip-hop' 'drum and bass' etc, etc, etc, they're intriguing as to how they entered collective use, but for me personally, they're a bit distant. Alienation has many facets, maybe one is just words...

ODO: Can you give a brief description/telling of your history as a musician and artist in New York City and before?

DJ SPOOKY: I am not really a musician. First and foremost I'm a conceptual artist and writer, and music is an extension of my artwork writing. My father was a lawyer in the 1960's and became Dean of the Howard University Law school in the early 1970's, and was dean until he died in 1973. He left me his records. My mother was both an artist and a fashion designer, and she had alot of poetry readings amongst DC's (that's where I'm from) poetry scene that entered around her store, Toast and Strawberries in Dupont Circle's bohemian scene. When I graduated from high school, I was planning on being a diplomat (!!!) and studied economics and social theory. Then a good friend of mine killed himself, and for one reason or another, I went into a weird depression, and basically felt that the bulk of human expression was utterly meaningless. So maybe it was out of a kind of cynicism and despair over the economic relations between human beings that really turned me off to being a diplomat. I switched majors, and started studying philosophy, literature, and music, with the idea that I could be a teacher or writer when I graduated. I went to a really preppy school called Bowdoin college and graduated with a degree in Philosophy/French Lit (1992), and basically found that the degree meant jack zero. So my art and writing wouldn't even have gotten out at all except if my music hadn't become well known. The anger I have is part of that, and you hear the alienation in my music - paradoxes all the way down to the last scratched record. I started dj'ing in college on my radio show, Dr. Seuss's Eclectic Jungle, and considered it to be an artmusic program. Really - most of the 'art-music' types thought anything with a beat wasn't experimental, so I called 'em 'spare-mental' and let the beats do the talking. I'd find out where records where sampled from, have mad amounts of feedback going, three turntables, a couple of cd players, a couple of DAT machines humming along, and would basically have a digital exorcism going out over the airwaves - noisy fucked up shit, then a pause, and a brief discussion of art and philosophy, while comedy records played underneath my voice. Absurd shit like that. I remember even taking a mix tape to one of my philosophy professors after we had a discussion about Immanuel Kant and his critique of rationality. On the mix tape were William Burroughs, fragments of Langston Hughes, fragments of Paul Robeson singing 'I've Known Rivers,' Public Enemy, and Noam Chomsky's discussions on language. The professor thought I was joking. That's how I started getting into dj'ing, I guess. I should have majored in computer science.

ODO: How do you link your music to the musical traditions of Jazz, western Avant Garde, European Classical, and African music (i.e.. Fela/African Juju-funk)? Do you think your music has a link to the great tradition of African-American music (again Jazz/Funk/Blues/Rhythm&Blues, etc.)?

DJ SPOOKY: To me, being a dj is merely a filter of many of the memories that I carry in my mind. The American continent has so many memories moving across it. New York is a focal point of those histories, and the Lower East Side/Chinatown, are focal points of that focal point. Waves of migration - you know 'give me your tired, your poor, your whatever.... on the bottom of the Statue of Liberty. It gets intensified. Records are cross generative as well as performative, just like language axioms: they generate many permutations. You never remember a record in one way, and in one way or many different ways, memory has a tendency to become associative, and create linkages where you never even felt 'em. My personal life is the sum of my experiences. Music is the same, only it's an abstraction. It is the sum of its individual human experiences. I really think that music is way past someone strumming a guitar, or writing an orchestra, or playing cut-up records. Ask the sky what it thinks, and you'll hear wind. Ask the ocean what it's feeling, and you'll hear the movement of the gravitational tides pulling water the world over.

ODO: Do you see any connections with your music and that of the late great John Coltrane? If so, what are the connections that you see?

DJ SPOOKY: Coltrane was creating music from his personal milieu, and that was a different world and time. I used to listen to his music alot, and it sometimes ebbs up as part of my psychological fabric. He's a phantom from my childhood, along with every other piece of music that has ever meant anything to me, and as much with a good deal of music that didn't. His compositional style of extreme repetition and modal density on records like 'Africa Brass' points to a psychology of fragmentation that theorists like Frantz Fanon were talking about: existential while life affirming, self-determination in the face of a totalizing hegemony of racism. That would shatter any horn solo, and any music that would be (and will be) created under these kind of conditions driving sensitive people to a psychological brink where repetition and fragmentation become bedfellows, and the mixture of the two acts as balm, a respite from the searing pain of the world around you. I guess you could look at it like this: if I have a record crate of 70 records, and those records each sampled hundreds of snippets of other records, and each of those went on to cull from the memories of the musicians that made the original music, that's thousands upon thousands of musicians in my dj set, each affirming my right to exist on this planet, a multitude of voices claiming space in my memory. Maybe one of them is Coltrane. I don't know.

ODO: Do you find it challenging that your music is compiled from other created sources? Is your goal to create something completely new and unrecognizable from the originals? What is your philosophy on this issue? Do you find that other people challenge you on this fact?

DJ SPOOKY: There is a great quote from an essay by Emerson entitled, 'Of Quotation and Originality', and Walt Whitman's 'Song of Myself.' Is sampling appropriation? Is memory appropriation? I feel like art has always been a world of give and take, music also, and literature is one of the places where 'sampling' takes place the most. Everyone who uses language is a sampler. Right now youth culture is simply externalizing that process, and creating a new artform out of it. It really is as simple, yet as breathtakingly complex as that. Formless, seamless. Without a 'guiding principle' except the laws of cybernetics. Collective memory, public spaces - these are parallel topics, both of which are being highly contested in late 20th century global industrial and post industrial economies. Who owns your memories? Maybe its a question no one can answer truthfully any more.

ODO: What does the term/idea Memory mean to you? Is it a collection of moments/events, and time, or...? Is sound your focal point for the representation of Memory?

DJ SPOOKY: Memory is always a falling or maybe I should say failing. Recall, for me, is filled with gaps, asynchronous, flat-time flow. Sampling is an externalization of memory, the phenomenonlogical equivalent of cannibalism or ancestor worship. We have many mixed impressions and impulses. Everything we experience guides our perceptions, and that means that the fragments of perception we continually experience are memories of our bodies in the world. Memories of memories of memories... layers and layers and layers...

ODO: Could you explain the difference between your two albums 'Songs of a Dead Dreamer,' and 'Viral Sonata,' versus your live shows? What was your concept of making less 'Pop' oriented albums, if I could call it that? Have you ever wanted to make more 'Pop' sounding albums- music that is more 'accessible' like the sounds coming out of the Asian Underground scene?

DJ SPOOKY: My album on Geffen/Outpost will be 'pop accessible' but with many of the elements that are core to my ideas of cultural entropy as I see it unfolding in today's electronicized youth culture. There is no difference in a Paul D. Miller record or a Dj Spooky record save that I use the 'name' I use as a signifier of my identity. Well, maybe there's another difference: on the Paul D. Miller records, I use alot less 'beats' and let the more abstract aspects of the music do the 'talking' in their own pulse codes. On the other hand I have total respect for the 'Asian underground' scene making pop accessible records immediately. They hit alot more people and spread their message more quickly, while, I, playing by the rules have had a slight delay in getting my message out. Fuck it, if I knew that the literary scene and artworld scenes were so stale in advance, I would have gone pop immediately - they both end up just being reflections of what's going on in the pop world anyway. Like I said before, I've always had problems with the 'spare-mental' scene of downtown NYC and Europe, but perseverance has its benefits. You build a stronger and more diverse platform to stand on. There are good people in alot of what's going on in the artworld and literary scenes, and there is a far larger majority of people who are really annoying and stupid. You will find that in any milieu: music, art, writing, whatever. These are the people that must be bypassed so that anything new will be able to live and thrive.

ODO: What is the difference for you between working in the studio and working live in clubs?

DJ SPOOKY: For most electronic music acts, the studio is the primary place where ideas are generated, which is why alot of electronic music is boring. For hip-hop, and jazz, and jungle, the place where the values are forged is the live situation. The studio is merely the place where you create the recording of that memory. For me, the 'live' situation is of utmost importance, and I gotta admit, I hate sitting in a studio for long periods of time. I'd much rather be out in the world.

ODO: What aspects of culture/reality do you find that you are trying to challenge with your music?

DJ SPOOKY: I am basically trying to create a milieu in which multi-culturalism of a truly dynamic kind, can exist without the poisons of nationalism and bitterness. In this day and age, there's a false kind of liberalism in which multi-culturalism is tolerated (at least in US liberal circles) as long as it doesn't rock anybody's boat. That means that everything remains in place, and that the seeds that centuries of systematic racism are left in place, creating yet more loops. My music tries to challenge those loops, break them open so that the future can leak through. But then again, from what's going on in Rwanda, and Israel, and the former republic of Yugoslavia, the future doesn't look so good. But then again, the future is what we make of it. My music challenges all received values.

ODO: What do you think of the description of your work as being 'difficult?' Could this be another form of racism/othering applied to your music?

DJ SPOOKY: The whole thing about the 'difficult' is that everything is difficult. Your body is in pain at all times, and there's a chemical your brain creates called 'dopamine,' just to let you be able to walk and talk and breathe without curling up into a ball. This is what happens to junkies: heroin makes their bodies stop producing dopamine, so when they kick, they feel the real pain of their bodies, a profound displacement of everything (the illusions of comfort): self as other. My music is a kind of electronic surge protector for me - it is a cipher through which everything passes for me. I wake up in the morning and listen to music, I go to bed at night and listen to music. The only moment of the day that I am not listening to music is when I walk around - that's because I stopped wearing my walkman recently. 'Othering' is part of how music gets out - people want to experience other peoples psychological experiences, and somehow look to the musician as a teacher. I am not a mirror of the people of this time. My reflection is many years ahead I think, or maybe many years in the past. I guess that is difficult.

ODO: Could you briefly explain the new album you are working on?

DJ SPOOKY: The new album is called 'Riddim Warfare' and its about the future of warfare - code, ciphers, rhythm patterns. Many of these find their way into the world through the unconscious. Music can be (and has been for a long time) part of how armies operate, yet it is also how theater has been developed. The album goes through several cycles: some parts of it involve narrative, others work through scratching, and yet still others deal with radio frequency distribution - but on a pop level. We'll see. There are many guest artists: Mariko Mori (an artist I have written several catalog essays on), Killa Priest (from Wu Tang Clan), Kool Keith (a.k.a Dr Octagon), Vinicius Canuarias (an amazing Brazilian acoustic guitar player that has worked with many friends of mine, like Arto Lindsay or Ryuichi Sakamoto), Thurston Moore (I played his 'elements records' on one track), Ben Neill, and a whole host of other people - multi-cultural to the core folks! In any case, there's a pretty solid buzz on the project, and I'd really like to see how people respond to it because it has so many different energies and patterns and cultures. It's a thought experiment really.

ODO: What is the typical day for you in New York as a musician/artist?

DJ SPOOKY: My phone starts ringing early, and then I check my e-mail, then I write for a while, then I go for a walk, then I make some music, then I walk some more, then I make some music, then I think about how absurd the world is (this is a ritual for me I think) and what I could do to change anything, then I walk around some more...

ODO: Could you talk about your artist experiences briefly?- your exhibition at Anina Nosei, the Whitney Biennial, and Ralph Lemon's 'Geography.'

DJ SPOOKY: These were all part of a larger growth pattern. They are all just facets I learn from, and I have been happy to have been involved with all of them. Beyond that, I look to the near future where I will do more stuff, and also be able to put together shows with other artists and curators and choreographers. I know that sounds vague and diffuse, but at the moment, those experiences are too close in the 'rear-view mirror' to really judge.

ODO: And what of your writing? How does this come into your practice as a musician/artist?

DJ SPOOKY: My writing is the core of everything I do. Writing is a kind of therapy - there is no boundary between any of my textual activity. Beats are my alphabet, letters, one aspect of how I move. But there are many layers, and many types of encoding procedures in writing and sound. All I do is write (music is writing, writing is music, and this is being didactic I guess) with hope that hope is still available. The page is like a maze, music is like a stage, each word with different sounds unfolding. Writing. Prosthetic? Memetic? I say the word aloud.

ODO: Can you explain the meaning of 'that Subliminal Kid?' -and the use of DJ Spooky versus Paul D. Miller as an identity/persona?

DJ SPOOKY: With the idea of 'schizophrenia' in minds, and shattered idealism, That Subliminal Kid is a cross pollinization between a character in William S. Burrough's Nova Express that uses sound to shatter the loops the 'Nova Mob' has used to destroy the minds of the planet earth. 'The Kid' is a character in Samuel Delaney's novel 'Dhalgren' who has lost his name, and seeks it in a shattered city where time and the basic laws of physics have come undone. Sounds like downtown, eh?

ODO: Do you think the music scene you are involved with will become as popular as Rap/Hip Hop Music has become?

DJ SPOOKY: Nah, but if we're lucky, we'll get a shot at trying to open doors for some sort of cross cultural dialogue out side the normal channels. That's the best one can hope for outside of the normal pop arena.

ODO: What do you see for your future and the future of the music you do?

DJ SPOOKY: I plan on doing alot more conceptual art projects, and really would rather be in a gallery situation, but I will probably have to move to Europe for a while to build things up to the point that the NYC art scene can get what's going on in youth culture. That's a drag, but if I can in any way alter what the American artworld has created for young artists, well, generations of young artists of all ethnic backgrounds will be able to create art for a world that can see with different eyes. It's a bit ambitious I guess.