Motherboard

It’s easy to get mixed up when talking to Paul D. Miller. You want to call him DJ Spooky, or Spooky, and you almost want to say That Subliminal Kid — a nickname he stole from a character in a Burroughs novel. This nominal confusion isn’t the result of some Diddy-esque identity crisis. There’s just no pinning down a nerdy DJ who’s built his dizzying career on remixing every musical genre against a backdrop of archival film, leftist politics, Afro-modernity, media studies, Dadaism, science fiction, neo-Marxist philosophy and old school hip-hop. His list of collaborators and citations is a mess of old Lower East Side and Bronx diasporas; the resume is packed with biennials, academic texts and thought-dense mixtapes, including his newest release, The Secret Song, which features Thurston Moore, Rob Swift and composer Graham Reynolds.

After messing with DW Griffith’s seminal 1912 Hollywood blockbuster (and white-supremist ode) The Birth of a Nation, Miller flipped the script on himself in 2007 and packed his recording gear for a trip to Antarctica. The resulting multimedia performance piece, Terra Nova: Sinfonia Antarctica, is a mixture of composition inspired by the trip against a collage of “found” audio and video of a continent under duress. The work premieres tonight, Friday and Saturday as part of the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival, with back up from the International Contemporary Ensemble, or ICE. (Get it?) We had some questions for the very un-icy sound artist, philosopher, turntablist, author — whatever you want to call him. To begin, a little Russian ice-breaker.

Motherboard: You were just in St. Petersburg? Must feel like Antarctica there.
Paul D. Miller / DJ Spooky: Actually, St. Petersburg is pretty warm these days. You’d expect it to be cold, but alas… global warming is serious, and real. People were wearing short sleeve shirts! In late November!

Like most people, your work is set on terra firma, at least physically, geographically. What in the world inspired you to want to go to the end of the world?
It was the kind of place that you’d think about as the most remote on Earth, and I wanted to hit the reset button on some issues about creativity, what is going on with music (everyone is using the same same software!). I guess I wanted to say position it as a scenario that would open up a dialog between the environment and sound. Sound art is kool!

Definitely. One of my favorite parts in Herzog’s Antarctica documentary was when they listened to the ice. Those sounds were gorgeous and haunting. Spooky even! Did that film influence you?
His film didn’t influence me, but I am really glad that it bought attention to the McMurdo Base. There’s only about 2000 people on Antarctica, they need some love!

You betcha. Were there any other influences or references points for you?
Lots and lots of influences and reference points. There’s a great phrase I have on my mental “stickies” board that Goethe said ages ago: architecture is nothing but frozen music. I like to think of my Antarctic project as de-thawing that process and getting people to think about the way remixing can make music liquid architecture. John Cage is another influence – his piece from 1948 “In A Landscape” is a stunningly beautiful meditation on the same kind of ideas I was looking at, and John Luther Adams, who is one of my favorite composers – he did a piece called “A Sonic Geography of the Artic” – there’s alot more, but yeah, there’s only so much space… Duke Ellington’s “geography” piece “Harlem Tone Poem” is a big inspiration.

Can you riff a bit on the relationship between remixing, hip hop culture, and the environment, and how this piece deals with the connections?
Remixing the land, remixing the source of all the sounds around us: the earth. I guess it’s just part of thinking about the world as a document. Why not? I spent 4 weeks there trying to figure this out, and it’s really a first step. I plan on going back over the next several years to different regions. Werner Herzog was shooting his film “Encounters at The End of The World” when I was there, so there’s an uncanny dynamic at work.

Flip a remix of Grandmaster Flash’s classic Adventures on the Wheels of Steel and you get the same thing: a journey into sound. I love seeing how two radically different people like me and Herzog could land on the same topic, but even more how to create a dialog to get kids to think about the environment of the “the city” as being tied into the planet as a whole. Ice is my palette for this project – think about how many black people call themselves “Ice Cube, Ice-T, Soul on Ice, Iceberg Slim etc” or bling bling is about “ice”.

The social metaphors are bizarre, and that’s what happens when you have an undefined space – it’s a metaphor. My symphony is about making that metaphor become a passion. I guess if you look at history, the term “collage” is based on the idea of gluing things together — it could be welding, it could be taking a web page and doing the same thing. The painters George Braque and Picasso are supposedly the people who coined the term, but you never know. Antarctica is a blank space, so we all project our ideas about it in one way or another. So many countries have tried to claim the idea, that the IDEA of Antarctica is a collage of imperialism, colonialism, Utopianism, et cetera. I like to think of it as a kaleidoscopic situation. And that’s what my piece is about.

How did being there effect your own relationship to the environment?
Everything you do, in every way, it connected to so many of the issues that drive our modern economy. The computer I’m typing on was made in over 25 countries, the clothes I’m wearing were fabricated and made in a process that parallels the same scenario. That’s all “sampling” in a different context. I guess you could say my Antarctic symphony is about climate change literacy. I know that’s a boring term, and if I want to reach the masses, I should probably have some girls in bikinis dancing on icebergs, but hey… I wanted to try something different. Ice is a transformative substance — it’s different in different contexts. I wanted to make music that would reflect that kind of “phase transition” between solid and liquid, fog and rain, ice and snow.

Was there a really memorable moment for you, dancing with penguins, falling into the sea on a breaking glacier?
New Years Eve, floating near icebergs, and feeling the ocean waves crash against our ship. A lifetime memory!

It sounds like a trip, but what did it take to actually make Terra Nova, in terms of time, costs and mental effort? How hard is it to record on a glacier?
It was about a year of work – I spent a month at a residency in Dartmouth, spent 4 weeks taping and shooting down on the continent, and then the research, etc. The biggest challenge was to figure out a way to make the material condense into a composition. Getting it all to work together – film, sound recording, and composition – basically was about finding equilibrium among a lot of different variables.

What’s your Antarctica manifesto about? Are you trying to start a penguin uprising?
If you tell an addict that doing the drug that makes them an addict is bad for them, they look at almost any possible answer to avoid the changes of behavior it would take to get rid of the addiction. Our civilization is doing the same thing. It’s kind of like trying to change the course of the Titanic with about 3 feet of wiggle room. You might deflect the course of the ship just enough to avoid sinking, but you’re still going to take a massive hit. The propaganda war about climate change appalls me because the right wing types that are in denial, are exactly like the addicts or zombies in a bad B-movie. It depresses me that so many people still believe them.

Yeah, they kind of make you want to bury your head in the ice. So what’s the best way for me to get to Antarctica?
There’s lots of ways to get there. The cheapest is to go to Ushuaia, in the southern most part of Argentina (very remote spot!!!) and hitch hike. Boats always have a little bit of space on them, and it’s easy to make inquiries. I’d suggest that route, but most people do the tourist route. There are so many websites. Type in “Antarctica + expedition” and you’ll probably get decent results. We ended up on a Russian ice breaker boat!

—INTERVIEW BY ALEX PASTERNACK