Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Rhythm Science by Paul D. Miller Biography. Paul D. Miller (b. 1970), more famously known by his stage name and self constructed persona “DJ Spooky, That Subliminal Kid,” is an experimental and electronic hip-hop musician, conceptual artist, and writer. He was born in 1970 in Washington, D.C., but has been based in New York City for many years. He is the son of one of Howard University’s former deans of law who died when he was only three and a mother who was in charge of a fabric shop of international repute. Paul Miller then spent the main part of his childhood in Washington, D.C.’s nurturing bohemia. Paul Miller is a Professor at The European Graduate School / EGS, where he teaches music mediated art. DJ Spooky is known for, amongst other things, his electronic experimentations in music known as both “illbient” and “trip hop.” His first album, Dead Dreamer , was released in 1996, and he has since then released over a dozen albums. He was the first editor of Artbyte: The Magazine of Digital Arts , which has since ceased publication. Miller’s articles have widely been published in magazines and journals, including The Source, The Village Voice, Artforum, Paper Magazine, and Rap Pages, among others. Paul D. Miller studied in Maine at Bowdoin College, where he focused on his interests in philosophy and French literature. His thesis examines Richard Wagner’s theory of Gesamtkunstwerk (the total art work). After all, it is considered today an inaugural work of the contemporary new media revolution. In fact, very interestingly in a relatively early interview in 1997, Miller was asked what “originally got [him] interesting in performing/making music?” To which Miller gave a revealing answer, showing—perhaps surprisingly—his debt to continental philosophy: “My first interest came from reading. When I was in college, I was studying a lot of philosophy. I felt more and more that music was a dynamic expression of what I was reading, like Kant and Hegel. I liked that dry, rationalist approach to things. I had a radio show in college called ‘Dr. Seuss’ Eclectic Jungle from ‘88 to ‘92. At first, it was just a hobby but then I became more and more enchanted with the whole thing. It was a chaos radio show. It was really noise-oriented with three turntables (playing at wrong speeds) and a sampler-like device. I would find out the source of the samples of a lot of the hip-hop I was hearing at the time- I really liked EPMD and Public Enemy. The radio station had a big archive so it was easy to find this stuff to play and mix it in. So you’d hear this distorted hip-hop with these extra loops when I put it together.” DJ Spooky’s artwork employs a wide array of digitally-created music and multimedia to create a form of postmodern sculpture. Miller’s work is often referred to as both illbient and trip hop. Illbient is an umbrella term that merges the slang hip hop designation “ill”—a paradoxical positive expression using bad to mean good—and ambient. Originating in England, trip hop is a fusion of electronic music and hip-hop. Its distinctive feature being the absence of vocals and replacing them instead with abstract sounds. The theory behind Paul D. Miller’s eclectic aesthetic can be traced through the book Rhythm Science . His ideas on digital media art center around the figure of the DJ as the generalized, post-subjective auteur of postmodern media. The idea of the mix is central to his work and his entire aesthetic, in which disparate connections are made between different times, cultures, and styles, and through which something new can emerge. His approach is a source of controversy regarding his heterogeneous oeuvre, which creates unexpected bridges linking the art gallery to the dance club to the concert hall. Paul D. Miller has taken a turn towards film recently with such films as Rebirth of a Nation (2004). The project is a re-working and re- configuration of the infamous D. W. Griffith film Birth of a Nation , created by mixing in different images and sounds with the original film. The film attempts to create an aesthetic of the DJ through visual cut ups and layering. The aim, according to Paul D. Miller, was to see how the present audiovisual culture of fast editing, loops, and digitization was already configured by the style of D. W. Griffith back in the 1910s. Part of Paul D. Miller’s aim in this work is to express the interwoven nature of time and media in our post-modern era; through his work one can see ways in which that which one may want to call new is truly a layered expression of the old . His work leaves behind the idea of an origin and moves towards a more post-modern thinking. His work is also an attempt to show how current historical events resonate with the past, especially the uglier aspects of Western—and especially American—society. Collaboration is very much a part of Miller’s aesthetic sensibility, and some of his recent projects are collaborations. The project ‘Unfinished Stories’ is created by DJ Spooky together with Francesca Harper, a dancer and choreographer with Bill Forsythe’s Frankfurt Ballet company, and Margo Jefferson, a critic for the New York Times and winner of the Pulitzer Prize. Miller has also been working on several books and novels, including the novel Flow My Blood the DJ Said . In 2009, Miller (aka DJ Spooky) presented The Science of Terra Nova at the American Museum of Natural History. This was a presentation of his project called Terra Nova: Sinfonia Antarctica on the changing face of Antarctica in the wake of global climate change. In his effort to better understand the fragile environment and ecosystem of Antarctica, Miller traveled to the continent with a mobile recording studio in order to capture sounds of ice and the reverberations it produces. The project embraces a multi-media approach, including video, sound, and images. In addition to the many albums and remixes he has released, DJ Spooky is the author of the critically acclaimed Rhythm Science (2004). He has collaborated with many of the world’s pre-eminent composers and musicians, including Yoko Ono, Butch Morris, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Iannis Xenakis, Thurston Moore from Sonic Youth, Killa Priest of Wu-Tang Clan, Kool Keith a.k.a. Doctor Octagon, and many others. Paul D. Miller’s artistic work has appeared internationally in many prestigious exhibitions and galleries, including The Andy Warhol Museum (Pittsburgh), Vienna Kunsthalle, the Ludwig Museum (Cologne), and the Venice Biennale for Architecture (2000). Miller is also the editor of Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture (2008). Rhythm Science was about how things flow musically, while Sound Unbound is about the remix. More precisely, it is about how music, art, and literature have blurred the lines between what an artist can do and what a composer can create. In Sound Unbound , Paul Miller has asked fellow artists to describe in their own words their work and song composition approaches. Rhythm Science, By Paul Miller, AKA DJ Spooky. Rhythm Science , by Paul D. Miller, AKA DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid, is a fascinating and challenging book. It explores Miller’s ideas about Rhythm Science – the creation of art from the flow of patterns in culture. The book focuses on the role of the DJ as a metaphor for the artists in today’s culture. DJ’s are sampling, collaging and creating new works from elements of pop culture, and Miller has been on the leading edge of this. DJing and sampling offer new artistic tools, but also bring them cutting- edge controversy. Ultimately, it’s about the tension between slavery and freedom, in life, in culture and in art, tieing together African-American heritage with the ideas underlying the art of DJing. The book is an intellectual tour-de-force. Miller’s writing style adopts the free-form collage and sudden shifts of DJ music. This can at times make it a challenge to digest. He switches from theory to autobiography to history, throwing in reference to Nietzsche and the Wu-Tang Clan as he goes along. As a result, the writing is often dense, disjunct and the threads that connect sentences may not be readily apparent. Miller puts it this way: “DJ-ing is writing, writing is DJ-ing. Writing is music, I cannot explain this any other way. Take Nietzsche, for instance, whose brilliant texts are almost musical. Obviously, you feel the rhythm inside a great poet’s stanzas, but it’s there within the great philosophers’ paragraphs as well. So many media and cultural techniques of interpretation coexist – reading watching, listening, surfing, dancing – that this textual/sonic synasthesia demands a great deal from us.” Rhythm Science does demand a great deal from the reader. Miller’s range of references is massive, and he throws things together without trying to connect the dots for the reader. Nevertheless, the book is a compelling read for anyone interested in DJ culture and the ideas and issues that surround art in the digital age. Rhythm Science is also a work of art. Designed by COMA, the book alternates spreads of glossy pages and matte pages. The main text runs through the matte spreads. The glossy spreads feature illustrations and quotes that comment or highlight on elements within the main text. The book is bound with a CD by Miller that showcases his DJ style. It’s an aural exploration of the ideas in the book. The book is designed with a hole drilled through it that highlights the CD spindle bound into the back of the book. The CD isn’t a DJ mix in the popular sense, but more of a rhythmic sound collage. Miller takes DJing to the edge; both of what’s legal and of what’s accessible to a general audience. Just as Miller’s text is dense and freeform, the CD is all over the place. The music has an old-school feel in the way that Miller uses samples. Most modern sample-based music tends to take a recognizable quote from a popular piece and loop that to create a groove for rapping or jamming over. Miller’s music imagines an alternate world where ideas and art are unfettered by copyright concerns. Of course, we live in a world where artists have to deal with legal issues surrounding what can be created, shared and sold. Rhythm Science confronts us with these issues. While it doesn’t provide an answer to the questions that digital culture raises, it explores them in a compelling way. Merxi Ucluter. I am using Paul D. Miller’s book “Rhythm Science” as subject and Peter Halley’s “WebTake” of the same as source material for this remixed response. I found the book to be interesting, due in part to the frequent mentions the author made to his obvious depth of knowledge about the subject of cultural rhythms, but also due to the recycling and repeating of similar ideas throughout the book (an element also noted by Peter Halley). Rather than share my superfluous opinions about what might have appeared in the text, I am more interested in making my own mix of the subject through some sort of arbitrary process. I have selected material to recast here by choosing a number or series of numbers that correspond with the number of clicks I made on each topic heading in Peter Halley’s WebTake. The first bit of text that appears here represents the 5th click of my mouse on the topic “Entropy”, the second paragraph represents the 9th mouse click and the third paragraph represents the 13th time I clicked my mouse on the topic heading. I have repeated a similar process for each of the first five topics listed in the WebTake. The numbers are not random, nor the number of times I’ve selected to make a selection from the text, but are, as I’ve mentioned, arbitrary. This is my mix of a cultural effect as I see it manifest in this book: arbitrary connections. Entropy: 5, 9, 13 In epidemiology, vectors spread infectious agents, like viruses or parasites. But in the case of sound, memories are the infectious spores, viral modes that pop up in tracks, sifting mechanisms that filter and file memory as sounds move between populations. Writing may be a little retro, but that’s cool, too. That’s why people still wear bellbottom jeans. You can always squeeze something out of the past and make it become new. All the issues involved with aliases, multiple narrative threading, social engineering environments, and identity as a social cipher are tropes brought to the forefront of immigrant culture in America. When the slave experience of cultural erasure encountered the immigrant phenomenon of identity reconstruction in the city, the culture as a whole moved away from the melting pot model to become a frequency centrifuge: cultures in conflict, messages etched and pasted on every street corner, images raining down, thoughts like rain, the city fragments and coalesces. Code: 5 As for the philosophical or theoretical component in my music, I do know that average kids from the street are probably not aware of the connections between Derrida’s deconstructions and turntablism’s mixes, but it’s there if they ever come looking, and my own writings are a place to start. Freestyle: 8, 12 Each and every Dj is a walking radio station transmitting his own style. You just have to be open to different frequencies. African-American culture in D.C. was and remains highly segregated. Class and social hierarchies are etched on the whole zone, the city grid and the monuments themselves. Seeing African-American kids playing plastic buckets in front of the White House defines the District for me. D.C. was mix culture as dynamic palimpsest – the electromagnetic canvas of a generation raised on and in electricity. That multiplicity really prepared me for the present moment when even the basic software modules for America On-Line come with seven of eight pre-fabricated personae to use at will to construct on-line identity. Technology: 4, 6 The rhythm scientist proves there’s more at work, more in the process, than the computerized musical automation. The Web is the dominant metaphor for the way we think, it is a living network made up of the “threads” of all the information moving through the world at any given moment. This emphasis on mobility creates a continuity between the techno-hype for the internet and everything from the 19th Century’s obsession with railroads to the Beatnik’s mythological automobiles on the road. Surface: 3, 9 Hip-hop made from the “streets” of the frequencies that are coming to mean more than the physical world they inhabit and describe. In any case, the ‘90s were different from the ‘60s, the notion of “avant garde” was becoming obsolete. People simply wanted to get paid, figure out different ways to create a forum for their zone to flow, and then leave it at that. So I have recast elements from Miller’s book using Halley’s WebTake and my own arbitrary selection process. I’ll leave it at that. Rhythm Science Paul D. Miller (Music & Art Management, Inc) "Once you get into the flow of things, you're always haunted by the way that things could have turned out. This outcome, that conclusion. You get my drift. The uncertainty is what holds the story together, and that's what I'm going to talk about."- Rhythm Science. The conceptual artist Paul Miller, also known as Dj Spooky that Subliminal Kid, delivers a manifesto for rhythm science-the creation of art from the flow of patterns in sound and culture, "the changing same." Taking the Dj's mix as template, he 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. Technology provides the method and model; information on the web, like the elements of a mix, doesn't stay in one place. And technology is the medium, bridging the artist's consciousness and the outside world. Miller constructed his Dj Spooky persona ("spooky" from the eerie sounds of hip-hop, techno, ambient, and the other music that he plays) as a conceptual art project, but then came to see it as the opportunity for "coding a generative syntax for new languages of creativity." For example: "Start with the inspiration of George Herriman's Krazy Kat comic strip. Make a track invoking his absurd landscapes. What do tons and tons of air pressure moving in the atmosphere sound like? Make music that acts a metaphor for that kind of immersion or density." Or, for an online "remix" of two works by Marcel Duchamp: "I took a lot of his material written on music and flipped it into a DJ mix of his visual material-with him rhyming!" Tracing the genealogy of rhythm science, Miller cites sources and influences as varied as Ralph Waldo Emerson ("all minds quote"), Grandmaster Flash, W. E. B Dubois, James Joyce, and Eminem. "The story unfolds while the fragments coalesce," he writes. Miller's textual provocations are designed for maximum visual and tactile seduction by the international studio COMA (Cornelia Blatter and Marcel Hermans). They sustain the book's motifs of recontextualizing and relayering, texts and images bleed through from page to page, creating what amount to 2.5 dimensional vectors. From its remarkable velvet flesh cover, to the die cut hole through the center of the book, which reveals the colored nub holding in place the included audio CD, Rhythm Science: Excerpts and Allegories from the Sub Rosa Archives , this pamphlet truly lives up to Editorial Director Peter Lunenfeld's claim that the Mediawork Pamphlets are "theoretical fetish objects. 'zines for grown-ups." Rhythm Science Bewertungen. A densely allusive manifesto that is itself an objet d'art with a die-cut cover and a Dj Spooky sampler CD. - Josh Glenn , Boston Sunday Globe. . [A] huge leap for the culture of the now. It's software for your head. Upgrade your grey matter. - Roy Christopher , Slap. Miller gets his points across in novel and affecting ways. a singular voice. - Larry Blumenfeld , Jazziz. Miller raises compelling questions about the philosophy behind the DJ mix and the role the DJ plays in society. - Doree Shafrir , Philadelphia Weekly. Miller's insights as a practicing and successful DJ are fresh and unpretentious. - Publisher's Weekly. . Rhythm Science is a compelling book written by a formidable intellect. a pivotally important manifesto for DJs. - Christian Carey , Splendid. The writing drifts easily, while cool design from COMA and a CD round out the package. Rhythm Science. Paul D. Miller—better known as DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid—has created a manifesto of sorts for the digital age. Titled “Rhythm Science,” this book (his first) draws on a vast array of theoretical, historical, and autobiographical information in discussing the art of digital sampling and in broadly contextualizing Miller’s multi-facetted career as a DJ, conceptual artist, and author. In my view, Miller’s book can be rightfully included in the burgeoning body of literature on improvisation for at least two reasons. Throughout Rhythm Science , Miller positions DJ culture in relation to a variety of improvisatory musical traditions associated with the African diaspora – traditions that might (after George Lewis) be referred to as “Afrological.” In a chapter entitled “The New Griots,” for example, Miller likens DJ culture to the African griot tradition of storytelling through music. “The best Djs are griots,” he asserts “and whether their stories are conscious or unconscious, narratives are implicit in the sampling idea. Every story leads to another story to another story to another story” (21). Elsewhere, he suggests that digital sampling returns us to the metaphor of the crossroads so prevalent in African American blues culture, “that space where everyone could play the same song but flipped it every which way until it became ‘their own sound.’ In jazz,” he continues “it’s the fluid process of ‘call and response’ between the players of an ensemble. These are the predecessors of the mixing board metaphor for how we live and think in this age of information” (24). Miller goes on to suggest that his recordings Optometry and Dubtometry represent a “strategic side-step into jazz,” noting that Optometry “… plays with the historical mystique of the jazzman, remixed through digital media. … The vibe on this is ‘sampling as a new form of jazz’” (53). He refers to sampled music as ‘cybernetic jazz’ several times throughout the book. “Who speaks through you” Miller asks repeatedly. A remarkable number of voices speak through Miller, as he samples the work of theorists ranging from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Gilles Deleuze, from W.E.B. Du Bois to Paul Gilroy. “For the most part,” Miller reminds us, “creativity rests in how you recontextualize the previous expression of others” (33). To his credit, Miller seems to root his theoretical recontextualizations in musical examples drawn from the African diaspora, matching everything else to their rhythms and systems of logic. Miller seems to recognize, implicitly at least, that Afrological improvisatory forms—whether the African griot tradition, the blues crossroads, or jazz call and response— represent not only trenchant musical precedents, but also incisive theoretical models for digital sampling and for his own creative work which itself routinely blurs the lines of distinction between theory and practice. The other main connection that I see between Rhythm Science and improvisation relates to Miller’s writing style which has, at times, a clearly improvisatory feel. In particular, the first chapter of the book, titled “The Idiot – A Freestyle,” feels very much (as the title suggests) like the improvised freestyle of a hip hop MC, an impromptu flow of lyrics and rhymes delivered in a spontaneous manner. Take, for example, the following passage: This book is a theatre of networks, of correspondences that turn in on themselves and drift into the ether like smoke-rings blown in an airless nightclub. This is a theatre of the one and the many, of texts that flow with the intensity of bullets. Heat death, entropy, cyclical turbulence. It’s all here. Technical malice in my freestyle rips the threads holding the narrative together and we see the structure beneath the structure. The words within the words. Rhymes are social armor, waiting for bullets to test their integrity. (8) At its best, Miller’s improvisatory writing style is reminiscent of the poetry-inspired prose of Amiri Baraka and the lyrical work of contemporary poet, playwright, and author, Carl Hancock Rux. Compared to their examples, however, Miller’s prose/poetry tends to fall a bit flat, to my mind at least. Nonetheless, the improvisatory writing style in Rhythm Science highlights Miller’s laudable commitment to locate his written theoretical work in the Afrological musical practices exemplified by DJ culture. Later in the book, Miller is explicit on this point. “Dj-ing is writing, writing is Dj-ing” he asserts. “Writing is music, I cannot explain this any other way” (56). One of the main difficulties that I have with the text is the author’s tendency to generalize, substituting his own experience for that of DJs generally. For example, he states that “[a] deep sense of fragmentation occurs in the mind of a Dj” (21). It seems to me that this statement runs the risk of essentializing the minds of all DJs. How does this statement fit, I wonder, with the incident that Miller describes involving himself and Japanese turntablist, DJ Krush? Just prior to a show they were doing together in Tokyo, Miller recounts, “Krush’s wife walked in and handed him a samurai sword before his set, and everyone in the room was… ummm… kind of silent” (104). Miller goes on to describe Krush as “…a Japanese kid who prayed with his family and was into Shinto Buddhism chants before he went on stage to do turntable tricks” (105). This scenario (one of my favourite anecdotes in the whole book, incidentally) does not, in my view, suggest the deep sense of psychological fragmentation that Miller describes as “the mind of a Dj.” Perhaps an even more dangerous tendency in Rhythm Science lies in Miller’s apparent assumption that access to digital culture and the effects of digital culture are universal. “The web is the dominant metaphor for the way we think” he writes (24). I am inclined to raise questions about the “we” in statements such as these. In general, the parts of Rhythm Science that I find most compelling are the sections in which Miller discusses his own experiences as a successful contemporary DJ as well as the experiences that have shaped his artistic development. In the chapter entitled “Districts,” Miller goes a considerable distance in answering a question that I often have in reading his work (and in listening to his music for that matter), namely “where is Paul D. Miller in the mix?” In “Districts,” Miller discusses his upbringing in Washington D.C. We learn that his mother has run a successful imported fabric and apparel store there for several decades. The fabric store, which Miller describes as “a cultural landmark where poetry and culture mingle with fabric,” seems an apt metaphor for Miller’s music which constantly weaves diverse musical threads into a complex sonic tapestry. In contrast, Miller recalls of his father (a former dean of the Howard University School of Law who passed away when Miller was just three years old): “One of my earliest memories is of a piece of newspaper my mom clipped out of the Washington Post of [my father] during the Black Panther trials of the early 1970s right before he died. [. . .] The photo of the bound and gagged Panthers in the courtroom is seared in my memory” (37). To my mind, this autobiographical detail provides a very interesting backdrop for some of Miller’s more overtly political work as exemplified, for example, by his recording Live Without Dead Time . Released in conjunction with the May/June 2003 issue of the politically charged Canadian magazine, Adbusters , this re-mix features a range of political voices (including those of Martin Luther King Jr., Saul Williams, Sun Ra, and many others) combined with dense sonic textures and intense grooves. Together, the tracks on the recording offer a powerful condemnation not only of consumerist ideology, but also of U.S. foreign policy, the Bush administration, and social injustice generally. Miller/Spooky’s musical direction on Live Without Dead Time is in evidence on the excellent audio CD that accompanies Rhythm Science as well. On this recording, Miller has created a series of remixes (33 in fact) using recordings drawn from the Sub Rosa label as source material. We hear the voice of Antonin Artaud mixed with Nuuk Posse, James Joyce reading exerpts from Finnegans Wake alongside Oval vs Yoshihiro Hanno, William S. Burroughs set against the music of Scanner, and more. My favourite track features the voice of Gertrude Stein mixed with DJ Wally Zeta. In this context, Miller’s comment that “Dj-ing is writing, writing is Dj-ing” seems highly resonant. In the Rhythm Science CD, as throughout the text, Miller reminds us that, for him, theory is practice and practice is theory. In conclusion, I’d like to discuss briefly the innovative design and format of Rhythm Science . According to its back cover blurb, the book was “designed for maximum visual and tactile seduction by the international studio COMA.” The book references the form of vinyl and compact disc recordings through its front cover image, an image that gets repeated—and rotated—throughout the book. A hole cut through the center of the book reveals a circular red foam button that holds the book’s audio companion in place inside its back cover. Like a vinyl record, Miller has divided the chapters of the book into an “A-Side” and a “B-Side” with the audio companion forming a “C-Side.” In keeping with the A-Side/B- Side dialectic, the pages of the book that contain Miller’s text alternate with pages containing images and short bits of text sampled from Miller’s work. The paper stock that the book has been printed on is similarly double-sided – the text side is fairly coarse while the image side is glossy. One of the effects of this pairing of rough and slick pages is that when one casually flips through the book, one sees only text – the slick pages containing the graphics tend to stick to one another. As always, Miller encourages the reader (or the listener as the case may be) to look between the pages, to read between the lines, and to examine the liminal spaces between received cultural categories and idioms.