Paul D. Miller on Mon, 17 Feb 2003 18:01:02 +0100 (CET)


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[Nettime-bold] Remixing The Matrix - Erik Davis and Paul D. Miller - a Dialog


here's the deal - this is a conversation me and Erik Davis (Author of the book "Techgnosis: Myth, Magic and Mysticism in the Age of Information," URL www.techgnosis.com). Davis - sometimes editor of Wired and other journals of strange culture, sometimes journalist, and dabbler in what I like to call "consciousness retro-engineering modifiers," did the piece for Trip Magazine. It's about alot of different themes in contmeporary art and media - but most of all it's a dialog about the different worlds of aesthetics and techonology seen through the prism of psychedelic culture. Trip Magazine - a magazine that focuses on - yep, you guessed it - psychedelic culture, commisioned the piece: Trip magazine, the url: http://www.tripzine.com


pax,
Paul




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 itŠ 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 hatŠ 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 discreteŠ 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 songŠ" 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 MetropolisŠ 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 worldŠ 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 fabricŠ

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 glaciersŠ

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 booksŠ

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 stuffŠ 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.




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"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free...."
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe


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