Foto: Michael Raz-Russo

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky-That Subliminal Kid
USA

Sound Unbound
Lecture-Demonstration
Grande Auditório da Universidade de Évora
July 1st, 3PM
Duration: 90min.

The Secret Song
Multimedia Concert
Colégio do Espírito Santo / Universidade de Évora
July 1st, 10PM
Duração: 75min.

All Ages

Free Entrance

“The deejay is a collector of information, first and foremost. It’s not just about how many rare records you have or how many software patches or iPhone applications, it’s about pulling [all of these elements] together and making something interesting.”
---- DJ Spooky apud Sean Ryon, “DJ Spooky Talks The Secret Song, Music Diversity” in HIP-HOP DX REVIEW

“What goes through your mind as you move through the geometric fray of contemporary hypermediated life's frequency drenched landscape? [...] Rotate, reconfigure, edit, render the form. Contemporary sound composition is an involution engine.[...] The story unfolds while the fragments coalesce."
---- Paul D. Miller in RHYTHM SCIENCE

"Miller raises compelling questions about the philosophy behind the DJ mix and the role the DJ plays in society."
---- Doree Shafrir in PHILADELPHIA WEEKLY


Born in Washington D.C. in 1970, Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky-That Subliminal Kid is a New York based composer, multimedia artist, and writer. He is a multi-tasking, trans-disciplinary conceptual artist, bringing to the field of electronic music his eclectic education.

His work a DJ does not consist simply in playing music to entertain dancers in a party – he goes far beyond that. Paul D. Miller developed a whole philosophy around the DJ’s activity of re:mixing and the role the DJ plays in society. In his best-selling first book Rhythm Science (2004), he presents a real manifesto on his grasp of the world of art: artistic creation based on the flow of patterns in sound and culture. Taking the DJ's mix as model, he describes how the artist, in his/her task of assembling and re:arranging the various cultural concepts and objects that surround us, uses technology and aesthetics to create something new, expressive, and endlessly variable. "The story unfolds while the fragments coalesce," writes Miller in Rhythm Science, “This is a world where all meaning has been untethered from the ground of its origins and all signposts point to a road that you make up as you travel through the text.” This text Paul D. Miller is talking about is not only the text we find in books, but also the text of the whole landscape surrounding us. The eclectic and idiosyncratic cultural and multi-media landscape we all live in today, and whose pieces DJ Spooky re:combines and re:plays for his audiences.

According to Paul D. Miller the DJ engages music as a medium, as a device to carry information, in other words, an instrument of communication. This conception is put into practice by the author when he works as DJ Spooky: he finds the material of his mixes in real life and “music is but one of the dialects of creative language.” Contemporary artistic expression shall not ignore technology, as Miller recalls, since it “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.”

Paul D. Miller’s practical and theoretical work is deeply entangled and are the product of an extremely rich and varied background. He mixes his academic education in French Literature and Philosophy with his wide musical culture and comes up with an eclectic aesthetics: a fusion of hip-hop, jazz, Jamaican roots and DJ culture, with experimental music and cinema, literature and contemporary art by some of the most sophisticated thinkers of the last one-hundred years, such as Deleuze, Guattari, Artaud, Lefebvre, Virilio, and Adorno. He first conceived his persona, DJ Spooky, ("spooky" given the eerie sounds of hip-hop, techno, ambient, and the other music that he plays) as a conceptual art project, but later he came to regard it as the opportunity to reconstruct the role of the DJ: an artist that stimulates the birth for new creative languages.

“Spooky” is also the name of a William S. Burroughs’s character in the novel “Nova Express” (1964), the plot of which cannot be easily described. It was written using Burroughs's "cut-up method" of enfolding fragments of different texts into the novel. The “cut-up method” is an aleatory literary technique in which a text (or multiple texts) is cut up into smaller portions at random, and rearranged to create a new text. That is the basis of a re:mixing technique and that is what Paul D. Miller’s persona, DJ Spooky, does: he is a magician of the remix, not a simple record re:player. DJ Spooky is a stage name now recognized worldwide by its essential, always developing, contribute to the re:mix culture we are all experiencing. With his multi-media approach, which includes video, sound, and images, he establishes unexpected connections between different times, cultures, and styles, creating entirely new objects.

It is almost impossible to try to list all DJ Spooky’s works and collaborations. His production of multimedia contemporary art was shown in diverse contexts like the Venice Biennale, the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, the Whitney Biennial, the Ludwig Museum in Cologne (Germany), and the Kunsthalle in Vienna. His essays and articles are published in Ctheory, The Source, Artforum and The Village Voice. He has played with Arto Lindsay, Iannis Xenakis, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Butch Morris, Kool Keith aka Doctor Octagon, Pierre Boulez, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Yoko Ono, Thurston Moore from Sonic Youth and many others. Paul D. Miller's most famous project to date may be the film Rebirth of a Nation (2004), a piece that reworks and restructures of the infamous D. W. Griffith’s film Birth of a Nation.

In 2008 Paul D. Miller published his second book, Sound Unbound, an eclectic collection about the re:mix: how music, art, and literature have blurred the lines between what an artist can do and what a composer can create. In Sound Unbound artists and writers, like Brian Eno, Chuck D, Pierre Boulez, and Jonathan Lethem describe their work and compositional strategies, in essays that approach sound from a variety of perspectives: cosmic, chemical, political, and economic.

Fully embracing Paul D. Miller’s musings on sound, rhythm theory, and the role of the DJ in contemporary society, DJ Spooky’s last music-and-video project, The Secret Song, centers on the collision between economics and globalization in sound. DJ Spooky looks back at the 20th century, approaching “history through lens of the sample”. The Secret Song is DJ Spooky’s take on this changing world and its consequences in 21st century music, economics, and global culture. Inspiration and theoretical references stretch from classic economists like Adam Smith and John Maynard Keynes, to Thorstein Veblen’s “Theory of the Leisure Class”, over to hip-hop’s relationship to psychoanalysis and Edward Bernay’s concept of the “manufacture of consent”. The list of collaborations and materials used in this piece’s album is extremely diversified: from Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore, to Vijay Iyer, old school African hip hop legend Zimbabwe Legit, stunning turntablism by Rob Swift (the leader The Xecutioners), to political hip hop from The Coup, The Jungle Brothers, the renowned Iranian singer Sussan Deyhim (who sings in Farsi), and Abdul Smooth from India.

In The Secret Song the sound plays along and against the transaction of space, time, and commerce in both individual and social histories, depicturing the world's reaction to the ups and downs of financial markets. Sound digs into the roots of an arbitrary economy, examines existing ideas and articulates new ones through and across the track list, placing the short sequences of sonic inquiry next to, on top of, and underneath one another.