Monday, February 01, 2010
Arts & Extras: Multimedia in the mix for DJ Spooky
He's the first speaker in the Taubman Museum of Art's new "Big Ideas, Bright Minds" series.
Arts & Extras column
Mike Allen, arts columnist
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Paul Miller isn't afraid to use music to tackle big questions.
As he put it in an e-mail interview, "Entropy! Quantum physics! String theory, and the collapse of the modern industrial nation-state ... something like that? What's the sound track for it all?"
Miller is an industrious and multi-talented artisan with a recent book published by MIT Press, "Sound Unbound," and a new CD, "The Secret Song." He was born in Washington, D.C., in 1970 and now resides in New York. He'll be the first speaker in the Taubman Museum of Art's new "Big Ideas, Bright Minds" series of lectures.
Better known by his music industry moniker, "DJ Spooky: That Subliminal Kid," Miller's variegated career has seen him working with the likes of Yoko Ono and members of Run-DMC and Public Enemy -- and also composing innovative classical compositions.
Miller wrote that the idea of someone working in such a wide variety of musical styles shouldn't seem strange at all in this era of iPod playlists.
"I like a lot of styles, and I mix them up. It's a post-playlist kind of situation. I bet if you really sat everyone down and asked them what styles of music they liked, you would get a lot of different responses from each person -- no one likes just one style. So I work with rock, hip-hop, classical, jazz, whatever. They're all just labels."
His multimedia creations have been exhibited in such venues as New York's Whitney Museum of American Art, Pittsburgh's Andy Warhol Museum, the Ludgwig Museum in Germany, the Venice Biennial and others.
Miller traveled to Antarctica in 2008 to record sounds and take photographs and film clips that he incorporated into "Terra Nova: Sinfonia Antarctica," a performance that involved image projections, a piano and string ensemble and, of course, a turntable. He calls the piece a meditation on landscape and the climate crisis.
An advocate for new ways of looking at copyright in light of changes wrought by digital technology and the Internet, he's created an iPhone application that lets a user import an iTunes library of songs into a cellphone and create mixes, or, as he succinctly puts it, "It lets you DJ from your phone."
He describes his most recent CD, "The Secret Song," as a musical project that looks at global culture through collage. He's made a song available for download from the project, "Azadi," which means "freedom" in Farsi and features Iranian singer Sussan Deyhim.
He said his talk at the museum will be about "sound art, digital media, and how people use new tools to transform music and art." Members of the Roanoke Symphony Orchestra will join Miller to perform brief segments from his compositions.
