Interview RSS The Exclusive MP3.com
Interview Podcast Audio DJ Spooky
Creation Rebel

Rare is the recording artist that follows a dub and reggae remix album with a multimedia project focusing on the acoustic qualities of Antarctic ice forms.

But DJ Spooky is by no means your typical artist.

Spooky--real name Paul D. Miller--has long since charted his own course in the music world. Since his debut in the mid-1990s, he has jumped between such seemingly disparate ventures as his avant-jazz Optometry and hard-edged Drums of Death collaboration with Slayer drummer Dave Lombardo, lacing each with his own inimitable turntablism.

Spooky has also taken on multifaceted, intellectual pursuits like his 2006 multimedia project Rebirth of a Nation, an audio-visual remix of D.W. Griffith's film Birth of a Nation, which he has performed throughout the world and plans to release on DVD early this year.

Two days before embarking for a month-long outing in Antarctica for the aforementioned ice project--dubbed Terra Nova: The Antarctica Suite, Spooky spoke with MP3.com about Creation Rebel, his second batch of remixes from the Trojan Records catalog. He also talked about the importance of Jamaica in the history of music, and technology as an extension of our lives.

Hey, Paul. How are you doing, man? I'm all right. I'm just a bit hectic. I'm going down to Antarctica in a couple of days to shoot a film. And we're just dealing with equipment issues. What's that project all about? That sounds exciting. It's a film about the sound of ice. Oh cool. Ice breaking or just ice in general? All of the above. Okay. Yeah, I read not too long ago, there was a guy doing a long-term project, kind of charting the existence of ice in Antarctica, and I mean the changes that are occurring and at what tempos and that sort of thing. Yes, you can really look at it as a kind of--for lack of a better word--a record of the planet. I mean ice really preserves air and all sorts of stuff. Interesting. When do you head down there? I head down there like in two days. Okay. With all the equipment issues. Exciting, and hectic, and at the same time, I'm sure. Yeah. I'll be there until the second week of January. So, I've got to--I have to deal with like weird clothes that kind of work for cold weather and stuff like that. Absolutely, even colder than New York in the winter or whatever. Yeah. Oh, a lot colder. [Laugh] [Laugh] Absolutely. So, let's talk about the record. I wanted to ask you--I mean this is your second chance to dig into the Trojan Records catalog on Creation Rebel. You've been a vocal proponent over the years, not to take away from the contributions of other parts of the world, but how important Jamaica was and how far Jamaica was ahead of its time in so many regards in the '60s and '70s in terms of sampling and cross-pollination and remixes and that kind of thing. Why do you think that was? Was it the melting pot nature of the people on the island, or was it something else? Well, the Caribbean, it's a fascinating whirlpool because it's just really--it's all about this kind of collage, if you think about all the cultures it came through. The whole idea of the whole region was a collage, you know? Yeah, absolutely. And the whole issue for me is not necessarily saying that dancehall or reggae is better or worse. It's just more a matter of just saying like it represents this truly multicultural vision of global culture right now. Right. I'm looking at it as a musical style that worked really well with electronic music from a lot of different angles. And one of those angles is like, not only is it the programming and like the way people respond to the sounds really fascinate, but the fact that it's from this tiny island. It's a small place. Right. When you think about it, Jamaica is just a tiny sliver of land. But it's been highly influential. So, I like stuff like that--weird but strange cultural issues. And it's just interesting. For such a little island, its effects are so dramatic and so widespread I mean, across so many different genres and so many different styles of music, and so many different techniques in both recording and remixing and all that kind of thing. Yes. So, the whole idea of technology of the third world as being able to apply everything from editing techniques to the way that they're recorded. That was very high tech for its time. Absolutely. I'm not really saying it's over or anything because Jamaica is still very innovative. But, at that time, in the '60s, when Trojan was really coming up on the scene, The Rolling Stones, and [Jimi] Hendrix and all those guys, and The Beatles, had access to the highest technology available, and if you compare that to King Tubby, and like the reggae scene in Jamaica, it still--it can hang with that, you know? Yeah. And one of the other things that's interesting about that era is that this little island again was producing and putting out and releasing all of these covers and remixes of popular--whether they'd be rock and roll from London, or R&B and soul from Detroit, and America in general, that's another interesting aspect of all of this. I mean it's almost like Jamaica gave birth with all these cover songs and remixes to the remix itself in a lot of ways. The whole idea of a mash-up, yeah. It's pretty interesting. I mean just the fact that here we are nowadays in a--for better or for worse--a mash-up culture. And that was prevalent almost four decades ago at this point in Jamaica. [Laugh] So, I mean, in a way that just is very organic and we realize the extension of--like everybody thinks technology is like robots and spaceships. I tend to think of it as the way people use material. So, technology is always an extension of people's everyday life. There's something in the West that really makes people feel like technology and art and everything is separate from life. And when you look at places like Brazil, or India, or Africa, or China, everybody's like--rolled up their sleeves, and really--kind of this is how they live. It's not from esoteric, weird things that's controlled by like androids on a spaceship some place. It's like here and now. Right. That's a good point. Yeah, it's the material and how you manage it and that kind of thing, and that's what changes. Yes. You published the Rhythm Science book a couple years back now. And it talked about a number of issues from DJ culture and sampling and that kind of thing. I guess I was wondering if you could give us a sense of whether or not you think sampling and remix culture has changed much just in that short time period since the book came out. Yeah, I mean everything is about memory, and the way memory has gotten smaller, and more robust. I mean it's like--I made my first album on an Akai Sampler. I was really happy it had like 30 megabytes of memory. And that's--my keychain now has 6 megabytes of memory, just on my keychain. Right. And the sampler back in the ancient mid '90s took up my whole desk. And it was a big deal. It was expensive. And if I look at earlier computers--I did a project at Columbia University a little while ago with some of the oldest computers in the United States. And we got them to make drum and bass, which is kind of funny. Cool. Okay. But those are computers we had to program with punch cards. Yeah. Okay. Those took up the whole room. And the computers were like massive, weird, big, heavy, vacuum tube, all that kind of stuff. So, I'm a fan of these kinds of ways of saying that miniaturization, they're kind of the logic of like what they call Moore's Law--that computing power gets faster and more efficient. That's again another kind of strangely Jamaican motif because of the way that they played with compression and being able to pull together as much sound as they could within a small amount of time and space. Yeah. Little weird stuff like that. I mean everything is a metaphor for how technology is no longer separate from life but it's kind of a reflection of life. I wonder also how far--are you kind of like an "all-in" kind of person, or is it important for you to find a balance between adoption of new technologies and the efficiencies that they create, and kind of some sort of tight grip on traditions. Two examples are with DJs in Serato and that sort of thing, and whether it's important or not, or if you think that that's a transition that you've made, or is worth making. Yeah, well, software like Serato is, basically, an emulation platform. It's software that just lets you emulate turntables but with digital media. The same thing with the Pioneer CDJ and all that stuff. I think that's cool. It's just more of a matter of the way DJ culture has always been ahead of a lot of the computer scene because it's about a certain kind of collage, certain kind of editing process that people really need to figure out not only is it improvisational, but it's also deeply rooted in your archives. Like you have to have a certain amount of literacy in how you remember music. Absolutely. Yeah. So, memory is part of it. Again, like it's human memory, not machine memory. One of the other examples I was thinking of recently was this idea that we seem to be able, or we seem to think we're able of using technology to create this illusion of something that doesn't exist. Like when you hear an album put out by some pop celebrity who,we all know can't sing, it sounds auto-tuned to death, or even someone like Snoop Dogg. I don't know if you heard this "Sexual Eruption" song, but he's actually singing through an auto-tuner with a vocoder. I mean it's like Snoop Dogg as soul crooner. And it's such an interesting thing that we're at that point. What's the name of the song? "Sexual Eruption." I think it's been altered, for obvious reasons, for radio play to "Sensual Seduction." But it's his new single. It's been out for about a few weeks now. And it's such a funny thing. I mean it's literally Snoop Dogg as '80s soul singer. Not to belabor the point, but just to the extent that technology is creating this ability to just auto-tune things to death. Oh, yeah, "Sensual Seduction." Okay. I'm online. I just found it. Okay. Interesting! So, it's Snoop Dogg. There you go. That's it. Right. That's funny. Okay. Snoop Dogg getting his pimp on. Right. I mean with Snoop Dogg, there's an obvious comedic aspect to it all, of course, which is great. He's got his voice corrected soft and slow. I guess it's computer seduction rather than sensual seduction. Right. [Laugh] Him and Paris Hilton need to get together I guess. You know, it's funny, when they edited her voice they had so much edits of her that it might as well have been the computer singing really. Right. Yeah, I mean it was so pitch-controlled and all that. You know, again, the Jamaican thing is raw, live and direct. It's really--they didn't have that kind of stuff. And they had to make a record really quick, and get out of the studio because nobody could afford to pay for that stuff. And it's definitely something that's kind of a magical quality when people are put in a situation like that. And they're forced to create and innovate. I love stuff like that. Absolutely. The last thing I wanted to ask you--you mentioned the Antarctica project, which just sounds like a terribly, terribly interesting thing to take on, and I wish you luck with it. But you're always a person that has interesting collaborations in the mix whether it's the Drums of Death project you did last year with Dave Lombardo from Slayer and Chuck D, or work with other people like Thurston Moore and Yoko Ono. I mean is there anything else cooking for you on the collaboration front these days? Yeah, I'm doing a project with the guys from The Police, you know, the rock band? Sure. It's with Stewart Copeland, the drummer in The Police. He's playing a couple of songs on my next album. Okay. Interesting. He's my favorite drummer. So, I've always wanted to work with him. The Police is stuff I grew up on. Absolutely, yeah. So, it was a real pleasure to just kind of flip things like that. Yeah. He's a guy that's known for experimental, innovative kind of ideas. He's done a number of different projects over the years, and that kind of thing. Yeah, exactly. And that's a really important kind of--for lack of a better word, to me it's a visionary kind of musical quality when you think about, not only are they one of the most important rock bands in the last half of the twentieth century, but they're smart. Like I love--he's got the whole African kind of aesthetic and polyrhythm and looking around not only for rock but for reggae. If you listen to a lot of the early Police stuff, there's a kind of a dub connection there, too. Absolutely. Yeah. Cool. Well, thank you very much for taking the time to talk to us. It's my pleasure, and I wish you luck on the Creation Rebel album. And try to stay warm in Antarctica. Yeah, Creation Rebel will definitely be a key part of my parka. I'm sure. Well, good luck with it. I appreciate it, man. All right, thanks.