A Phone Conversation with Paul D. Miller a.k.a. Dj Spooky
100 years from now, William S. Burroughs’ legacy will be enormous. Monuments will be erected of his gaunt junkie frame. His Nike Ad will air all the time, proving that even cooperate America felt the need to pay tribute to his Vision. Still, in the late nineties, with Y2K imminent, few people glorify the genius that was Burroughs. Enter Paul D. Miller: cyberkid wünderkind. Still in his twenties, Paul Miller epitomizes the post-human philosophy that Old Bill predicted forty years ago. A musician, writer and artist, Miller’s mark is already being placed upon the world of modern media. His personal weapon, the BEAT - and the power that it’s rhythm unleashes.
A conversation with Mr. Miller, who records music under the alias DJ Spooky, that Subliminal Kid, is like a trip through the library of today’s technocrat. Hip Hop, Sci-Fi, Videography and the Internet are explored with a wit and wisdom that only a true sage can deliver. Paul D. Miller is that sage - John the Baptist to the Church of What’s Happening Now. His art carefully destroys concepts and notions of genre - jumping from link to link in hypertext autoeroticism. Confused? Peep his records, especially the New LP "Riddem Warfare", and read on. Get ready kids - Miller’s mind travels far. Miles beyond Thunderdome.
ANO: Since your name is a direct reference to William S. Burroughs, how do you feel your music coincides with Burrough’s philosophy?
SPOOKY: A lot of his work was about a corporate colonization of the collective unconsciousness. How people become completely dominated by their interaction with media, and he would go write these wild kind of Science Fiction takes on it. But what I found was amazing and really resonant with his take on it was, these days everything from "The X-Files" and, if you read the New York Times, people being cloned and all that type of stuff, there’s a kind of remix of his aesthetic that happens in mass culture.
What I [also] found amazing was the placement of sound, it was always really important for evoking memory, the activation of memory through sound. In his stories you have people who are able to make sounds that affect reality. Brion Gyson was his mentor, and Gyson is one of my favorite artists. I like Gyson’s artwork, and he has his own sound recordings as well. I just like the fact that they viewed sound as a kind of Magical Theatre Play. He would talk about the sounds of needles, and stuff like that. I’m not actually a drug user like that, I’m talking about his metaphor.
ANO: He was a drug user, but he still used [his drug addiction as a metaphor], and a lot of people make the mistake of taking his work at face value.
SPOOKY: Right. Junk was his addiction, and we are definitely a society of addictions.
ANO: Later on, Burroughs actually went on record, saying that he was all for the turntable musician, and that these musicians were working with sound the same way in which he and Gyson were.
SPOOKY: Yeah, it’s the inheritor of his aesthetic, but it’s also incorporating him into technology in a way that you would never have the conventional literary people do.
ANO: I get pissed off that electronic music is always promoted as a futuristic sound, when to me it is more a statement on today’s society; much in the same way that Science Fiction comments on popular culture in a futuristic setting.
SPOOKY: Science Fiction is the literature of alienation. I’m really influenced by Phillip K. Dick, Samuel Delaney, and also a lot of the Cyberpunk guys, Bruce Sterling, John Shirley, William Gibson, Pat Cadigan. Another writer, Octavia Butler, uses genetic mutation as a metaphor for what’s going on in society, psychologically, emotionally, and economically. It’s all being determined by genetic type in her books.
ANO: One of my favorites is Greg Bear’s Blood Music. Just the whole concept of being the host mother for this intelligent virus that is the next step in evolution is wonderful.
SPOOKY: But it ends in total destruction...
ANO: But the idea is that there is a sacrifice of this civilization for the next step in future, the Age of the Intelligent Virus.
SPOOKY: In a lot of ways music, to me, becomes a sort of virus. It carries information. There’s a resonance between what Bear was talking about, with how the cells began to mutate rapidly, and, for me, samples and peoples memories begin to absorb and refract. How like what you heard as a child sort of becomes this embedded memory, and then you kind of slowly remix it out into your own creation as you go. The same with language, I mean Burroughs would always say that "language is a virus". I think sampling is it’s own language. For example, I’m looking at a small wall of records, that’s thousands of people right there, their compressed actions, emotions, thoughts all in the space of four feet, that’s it - it’s right there. I think that a great motto for it comes from the movie "Videodrome" : "Long Live the New Flesh" .
ANO: Are you influenced by J. G. Ballard at all? There’s a great new book out called Bad Girls and Sick Boys that links writers like Ballard with modern performance artists like Bob Flanagan and Orlan. The author, Linda Kauffman sees these artists as the living embodiment of Ballard’s work.
SPOOKY: Yeah. "Sex X Technology = The Future", that’s Ballard’s motto in Crash. Yeah, a lot of that revolves around sadomasochism, and technology. I feel it. When your sitting in front of a computer screen for hours and hours and hours, what the relationship is, you’re transferring your own energy into this machine. You’re numb and blind to your own desires. If you look at that as an abstraction, it’s actually pretty psychotic in a way.
ANO: Yeah, Bob Flanagen had it all down. He thought that S&M kept him alive. He found that inducing a small amount of pain, pain that was in his control, helped overcome the pain he felt due to his cystic fibrosis. He could be in control of his own pain.
SPOOKY: On another level, were all in pain at all times. That’s what a junkie feels when they withdraw. In a natural state of being, you would curl up in pain and agony ...there’s certain chemicals, neutrotransmiters. What happens when you withdraw from junk, is your body stops producing chemicals that keep the pain that you feel. I mean, even if you creak your arm just a little bit, that would be massive pain if there weren’t these neurotransmitter dampers. To me, I can recognize that the body is in physical pain at all levels, at all times. To me, a lot of the cyberpunk, and Flanagan are like... look at what happened in American culture, you want to talk about pain, and the structure of racism, and the psychotic situation of living with your own language stripped away from you - being shipped... that’s the original Generation X. To me, what my Generation is doing in America is creating their own remix of American Culture, and I think that’s healthy. There might be some unhealthy side effects, but just like you’re saying that Flanagan wanted to control trajectory and expression, that’s what music does, that’s what’s happening with youth culture. I think we’re just a Generation of Amnesia, I mean no one really knows what went on, even 20 years ago. That’s amazing! The media has a lot to do with that. People would rather watch MTV, get a new pair of Nikes...
ANO: That’s the great thing about sampling, especially in the hip hop world. The sample actually does bring kids into the record store looking for a Bob James album, or a John Coltrane album. People actually seek it out, and it gives them a taste of history, and makes them interested in finding out about the history.
SPOOKY: Yeah, to me sampling is, is essence, like psychological time travel. You take the resonance of what was going on at a different time period, and reach back. That’s what I mean, the Burroughs connection. The same thing with Octavia Butler, sampling has all this resonance with two areas, no three. One is genetic engineering, where you splice, and take DNA samples. That’s the obvious reference. The other one’s are architecture and code writing. The rhythms become their own code structure. To me sample, or when people are dancing, they’re adjusting their bodies to these psychological pulses in the music, but you can sit down and dance in your head just the same.
A lot of my albums are about reflect the environment. New York sends different signals to you at all times. The new album is more like what I call virtual theater. The other ones, the rhythms their selves were the theatre. A lot of people were like "Oh, there are no vocals on the album", I was like "Yeah, the beats speak for themselves".
To me, djing is a digital exorcism for me. I been collecting records for years. It all has a resonance with the entire culture, when something travels that quickly. It’s pretty intense when you get down to it. I travel a lot, I’ve djed in Venezuela, and the kids... it’s consolidated at a very rapid rate, like most industrial, electronicized cultures. It’s truly Global... the dress codes are very similar, the styles of dancing, everything has been streamlined. There’s definably been a massive psychological remix going on.
ANO: Do you ever plan on working in a visual art medium. I’d love to see you do Installation Art.
SPOOKY: I already have. I was in last year’s Whitney Biennial. I created a musical map of Mexico City’s Zona Rosa. I translated it into the viral strata. Mexico City stands at the crossroads between North and South America, and it has this economy of people processing old objects and copies of thing. They’ll sell you a real, or fake Aztec statue made out of plastic. It shows that the New World is just an extension of the imaginations of the people who got there first.
I also had a show called "The Death and Life of a Phonograph", and that was about, again, sampling as psychological and individual remixology. I made a maze that was made of different resonances of rooms. My piece was a series of completely artificial room chambers that I ran different beats through and different musical fragments through. The music would take on the resonance of the different rooms. "Sounds of Beat and Cathedral", "Sound of Hallway". I made a virtual room out of all these different resonances."words are like one piece of air that comes out of your mouth" and as soon as thing are described they "slip through you hands like so much water". Conversing with Mr. Miller was a journey of many tacks and tangents, ultimately leading to that center - the proverbial "Zona Rosa", where our collective unconscious drives us towards creation and recreation. He refers to the mixtape as an "electromagnetic canvas", and likens the electronic music scene with Ishmael Reed. His mind may travel at 57K sometimes, but with the proper software installed, his program is definitely worth checking out!
originally published in (Sic) Vice & Verse by Dafydd McKaharay
www.alphabeats.com
A conversation with Mr. Miller, who records music under the alias DJ Spooky, that Subliminal Kid, is like a trip through the library of today’s technocrat. Hip Hop, Sci-Fi, Videography and the Internet are explored with a wit and wisdom that only a true sage can deliver. Paul D. Miller is that sage - John the Baptist to the Church of What’s Happening Now. His art carefully destroys concepts and notions of genre - jumping from link to link in hypertext autoeroticism. Confused? Peep his records, especially the New LP "Riddem Warfare", and read on. Get ready kids - Miller’s mind travels far. Miles beyond Thunderdome.
ANO: Since your name is a direct reference to William S. Burroughs, how do you feel your music coincides with Burrough’s philosophy?
SPOOKY: A lot of his work was about a corporate colonization of the collective unconsciousness. How people become completely dominated by their interaction with media, and he would go write these wild kind of Science Fiction takes on it. But what I found was amazing and really resonant with his take on it was, these days everything from "The X-Files" and, if you read the New York Times, people being cloned and all that type of stuff, there’s a kind of remix of his aesthetic that happens in mass culture.
What I [also] found amazing was the placement of sound, it was always really important for evoking memory, the activation of memory through sound. In his stories you have people who are able to make sounds that affect reality. Brion Gyson was his mentor, and Gyson is one of my favorite artists. I like Gyson’s artwork, and he has his own sound recordings as well. I just like the fact that they viewed sound as a kind of Magical Theatre Play. He would talk about the sounds of needles, and stuff like that. I’m not actually a drug user like that, I’m talking about his metaphor.
ANO: He was a drug user, but he still used [his drug addiction as a metaphor], and a lot of people make the mistake of taking his work at face value.
SPOOKY: Right. Junk was his addiction, and we are definitely a society of addictions.
ANO: Later on, Burroughs actually went on record, saying that he was all for the turntable musician, and that these musicians were working with sound the same way in which he and Gyson were.
SPOOKY: Yeah, it’s the inheritor of his aesthetic, but it’s also incorporating him into technology in a way that you would never have the conventional literary people do.
ANO: I get pissed off that electronic music is always promoted as a futuristic sound, when to me it is more a statement on today’s society; much in the same way that Science Fiction comments on popular culture in a futuristic setting.
SPOOKY: Science Fiction is the literature of alienation. I’m really influenced by Phillip K. Dick, Samuel Delaney, and also a lot of the Cyberpunk guys, Bruce Sterling, John Shirley, William Gibson, Pat Cadigan. Another writer, Octavia Butler, uses genetic mutation as a metaphor for what’s going on in society, psychologically, emotionally, and economically. It’s all being determined by genetic type in her books.
ANO: One of my favorites is Greg Bear’s Blood Music. Just the whole concept of being the host mother for this intelligent virus that is the next step in evolution is wonderful.
SPOOKY: But it ends in total destruction...
ANO: But the idea is that there is a sacrifice of this civilization for the next step in future, the Age of the Intelligent Virus.
SPOOKY: In a lot of ways music, to me, becomes a sort of virus. It carries information. There’s a resonance between what Bear was talking about, with how the cells began to mutate rapidly, and, for me, samples and peoples memories begin to absorb and refract. How like what you heard as a child sort of becomes this embedded memory, and then you kind of slowly remix it out into your own creation as you go. The same with language, I mean Burroughs would always say that "language is a virus". I think sampling is it’s own language. For example, I’m looking at a small wall of records, that’s thousands of people right there, their compressed actions, emotions, thoughts all in the space of four feet, that’s it - it’s right there. I think that a great motto for it comes from the movie "Videodrome" : "Long Live the New Flesh" .
ANO: Are you influenced by J. G. Ballard at all? There’s a great new book out called Bad Girls and Sick Boys that links writers like Ballard with modern performance artists like Bob Flanagan and Orlan. The author, Linda Kauffman sees these artists as the living embodiment of Ballard’s work.
SPOOKY: Yeah. "Sex X Technology = The Future", that’s Ballard’s motto in Crash. Yeah, a lot of that revolves around sadomasochism, and technology. I feel it. When your sitting in front of a computer screen for hours and hours and hours, what the relationship is, you’re transferring your own energy into this machine. You’re numb and blind to your own desires. If you look at that as an abstraction, it’s actually pretty psychotic in a way.
ANO: Yeah, Bob Flanagen had it all down. He thought that S&M kept him alive. He found that inducing a small amount of pain, pain that was in his control, helped overcome the pain he felt due to his cystic fibrosis. He could be in control of his own pain.
SPOOKY: On another level, were all in pain at all times. That’s what a junkie feels when they withdraw. In a natural state of being, you would curl up in pain and agony ...there’s certain chemicals, neutrotransmiters. What happens when you withdraw from junk, is your body stops producing chemicals that keep the pain that you feel. I mean, even if you creak your arm just a little bit, that would be massive pain if there weren’t these neurotransmitter dampers. To me, I can recognize that the body is in physical pain at all levels, at all times. To me, a lot of the cyberpunk, and Flanagan are like... look at what happened in American culture, you want to talk about pain, and the structure of racism, and the psychotic situation of living with your own language stripped away from you - being shipped... that’s the original Generation X. To me, what my Generation is doing in America is creating their own remix of American Culture, and I think that’s healthy. There might be some unhealthy side effects, but just like you’re saying that Flanagan wanted to control trajectory and expression, that’s what music does, that’s what’s happening with youth culture. I think we’re just a Generation of Amnesia, I mean no one really knows what went on, even 20 years ago. That’s amazing! The media has a lot to do with that. People would rather watch MTV, get a new pair of Nikes...
ANO: That’s the great thing about sampling, especially in the hip hop world. The sample actually does bring kids into the record store looking for a Bob James album, or a John Coltrane album. People actually seek it out, and it gives them a taste of history, and makes them interested in finding out about the history.
SPOOKY: Yeah, to me sampling is, is essence, like psychological time travel. You take the resonance of what was going on at a different time period, and reach back. That’s what I mean, the Burroughs connection. The same thing with Octavia Butler, sampling has all this resonance with two areas, no three. One is genetic engineering, where you splice, and take DNA samples. That’s the obvious reference. The other one’s are architecture and code writing. The rhythms become their own code structure. To me sample, or when people are dancing, they’re adjusting their bodies to these psychological pulses in the music, but you can sit down and dance in your head just the same.
A lot of my albums are about reflect the environment. New York sends different signals to you at all times. The new album is more like what I call virtual theater. The other ones, the rhythms their selves were the theatre. A lot of people were like "Oh, there are no vocals on the album", I was like "Yeah, the beats speak for themselves".
To me, djing is a digital exorcism for me. I been collecting records for years. It all has a resonance with the entire culture, when something travels that quickly. It’s pretty intense when you get down to it. I travel a lot, I’ve djed in Venezuela, and the kids... it’s consolidated at a very rapid rate, like most industrial, electronicized cultures. It’s truly Global... the dress codes are very similar, the styles of dancing, everything has been streamlined. There’s definably been a massive psychological remix going on.
ANO: Do you ever plan on working in a visual art medium. I’d love to see you do Installation Art.
SPOOKY: I already have. I was in last year’s Whitney Biennial. I created a musical map of Mexico City’s Zona Rosa. I translated it into the viral strata. Mexico City stands at the crossroads between North and South America, and it has this economy of people processing old objects and copies of thing. They’ll sell you a real, or fake Aztec statue made out of plastic. It shows that the New World is just an extension of the imaginations of the people who got there first.
I also had a show called "The Death and Life of a Phonograph", and that was about, again, sampling as psychological and individual remixology. I made a maze that was made of different resonances of rooms. My piece was a series of completely artificial room chambers that I ran different beats through and different musical fragments through. The music would take on the resonance of the different rooms. "Sounds of Beat and Cathedral", "Sound of Hallway". I made a virtual room out of all these different resonances."words are like one piece of air that comes out of your mouth" and as soon as thing are described they "slip through you hands like so much water". Conversing with Mr. Miller was a journey of many tacks and tangents, ultimately leading to that center - the proverbial "Zona Rosa", where our collective unconscious drives us towards creation and recreation. He refers to the mixtape as an "electromagnetic canvas", and likens the electronic music scene with Ishmael Reed. His mind may travel at 57K sometimes, but with the proper software installed, his program is definitely worth checking out!
originally published in (Sic) Vice & Verse by Dafydd McKaharay
www.alphabeats.com
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