Digital ghost

DJ Spooky patrols the virtual dance city

by Jon Garelick

Beyond the sweet soul thump of house music, the gangsta boasts of hip-hop, and the rapid-fire beat mixing of techno, there's "illbient" -- perhaps the ultimate destination of DJ-written music. But don't expect to whip yourself into a dance frenzy when illbient's foremost proponent, DJ Spooky, drops in at the Middle East next Thursday to mix with like-minded alterna-folks Ben Neill, Edsel, Chainsuck, and Willie Wisley.

Spooky's stuff is not dance music. In fact, a full five minutes pass on his Necropolis: The Dialogic Project (Knitting Factory Works) before you hear anything you could begin to call a beat. Vocals are minimal: snippets of sampled chant or rap, plus spoken word. Rhythmic patterns come from spare bass beats or, more likely, the echoing click-and-rattle of subway tracks. Occasional synth or piano motifs offer the only clues to a melodic narrative. If Brian Eno's original formulation of ambient was a warm, soothing, aural bath, an electronic pastoral on Tiger Mountain, then Spooky's world is an ill fix on an urban dreamscape somewhere between the Lower East Side and Brooklyn.

"Illbient was trying to put a New York take on things," Spooky explains over the phone from New York. "New York is accelerated, it's dense, there's noise, there's pollution: it's a media-saturated urban landscape. Ambient, to me, has this notion of withdrawal. To me, a lot of the ambient stuff -- it almost comes off as musical Soma. I distinguish what we're doing from Eno specifically because of that urban content. It's not a withdrawal from the urban landscape, it's an immersion in it."

Spooky is known for his theoretical spins as much as his DJ mixes. He spins and organizes latter-day multimedia semi-improvisational "happenings" at places like the Knitting Factory and the Kitchen and spaces like the House of Ouch and the Anchorage in the Williamsburg Bridge. But he's also Paul D. Miller, a 26-year-former French and philosophy major who writes for publications like Paper and the Village Voice and is working on two books: Flow My Blood the DJ Said ("A theory exploration of the linkages between semiotic theory, electro-modernity, and urban youth culture") and And Now a Message from Our Sponsors ("a sci-fi narrative of a DJ who becomes involved in a war between genetics and technology"). Miller annotates his own albums, alluding to everyone from Gertrude Stein and Walter Benjamin to Sun Ra and Grandmaster Flash. Of course, as hip as the illbient scene in New York has become, Spooky has his detractors. He got one sharp blast of backlash in a recent New York Press. And as one New York music industry insider and clubgoer told me, "Paul's a writer, so he sometimes plays what he thinks people should hear rather than what sounds good."

Yet Miller has strong club-scene roots, and his music suggests a life lived in real time, and in an idealistic vision of urban culture. "In the conventional club scene, there was always this kind of hierarchy -- people getting let in the door with ropes, and if you weren't dressed right you were turned away. I came out of DC, which had a punk scene in the late '80s that was really about pulling together people and building bridges between different musical styles." After getting his degree at Bowdoin College in Maine, Miller moved to New York and found his calling. "I was trying to figure out ways of having this kind of theory stuff move into the concrete and the realm of real life."

Meanwhile, the illbient scene was brewing. "Our scene grew up in the East Village, mainly because it was word-of-mouth and it was idealistic. We felt bad even charging people money at the door. And then it blew up from there. We realized that a lot of kids from the different scenes weren't into just hearing a rock band or just hearing hip-hop; it was cool that you could have a lot of different stuff going on at the same time, moving through different spaces. So we tried to get rid of the barriers between stuff."

It's paradoxical that a technologically advanced, urbane music should be as rooted in community as, say, Cajun fiddle music in Eunice, Louisiana. "I say this over and over again," Miller insists. "To me, electronic music is, in a way, the folk music of the 21st century. Instead of, say, the '20s, where you had everyone who knew a blues riff playing a guitar, you now have everyone who knows certain beats and things like that putting them together and then circulating them -- this scene is about mixing and mix tapes. Technology is making the creative process democratic. Most people now can sit down with a sampler and start making stuff within about two months. And with that kind of competition, the music's going to have to get better or the mixes will get weak and people won't listen to it. If you're going to approach life as a mix, you better make sure it's a good mix."

Other forms of electronic pop can claim to be more accessible, drawing you in mostly with their manipulations of dance rhythms. In some cases -- with Underworld, say -- you give yourself up to the relentless tyranny of the beat. Other "chill" trance music is just that: lacking vocals, it's beautiful, but also cool and icy. Spooky's music, even on disc, has a surprising emotional warmth and weight. Most sounds seem to have their source in ancient analog technology. A black silence is broken only by vinyl-record-surface noise. Low-frequency tape-delay feedback can be manipulated to create pulsing rhythms or a flock of birds' rising cries turning into a police siren's scream. Staticky spoken-word tracts float in and out of the mix as from an overheard radio. On first listen, Spooky albums like Necropolis, Songs of a Dead Dreamer, and the new multi-DJ compilation Incursions in Illbient (the latter two on Asphodel) can sound like special-effects records -- or the logical fulfillment of John Lennon and Yoko Ono's "Revolution #9." You could say that techno versus illbient is body versus mind, but it's more like body/conscious mind versus subconscious. It's not for nothing that one of Miller's aliases is "That Subliminal Kid."

Necropolis, Miller points out, is the product of his remixing of other DJs' mix tapes, like DJ SoulSlinger, Ben Neill, and Joe Nation. Dead Dreamer, on the other hand, "to me has this kind of underlying organic feel, but it's totally digital. It's an analog experience rendered digitally. It was me playing bass on a lot of tracks and then sampling that because I almost didn't want it to sound like a live thing; I wanted it to sound like samples, I like samples. I play a riff and then I sample it and then loop it and partition it and edit it in such a way that it sounds like it's a sample." But, he adds, "I still want it to sound kind of within the realm of possible music. I actually like the idea of making tracks that no live musician could really play, because they're dealing with tonal harmony and modal progression. With audio collage, all those kinds of compositional rules go out the window."

Instead, Miller moves sounds, noises, forward and back, dub-style, on a very deep imaginary soundstage (he's also called himself "Spatial Engineer of the Invisible City"). When one of his oscillating tones swoops from the foreground of the mix into the distant black silence that surrounds ambient subway noise, radio static, and raps from a distant car window, it's hard to tell whether you're in your own dream or following someone else's -- to paraphrase Little Richard: directly from his subconscious to you. That tone disappears into the blackness like an unarticulated thought, now lost forever in the mix.

Miller himself doesn't impose any narratives on his pieces. And he's very open to how an audience responds to one of his club performances. When I suggest that he's not necessarily trying to get 500 people to jump up and down together, he responds, "I don't mind that. At the same time, that's just one aspect of it. The idea, overall, is to create an environment that people want to move into and physically become immersed in. You can dance in it, but you can also sit down, you can walk around, some people stand still. It's definitely not about one pounding beat all night and people feeling like they're in a big space and they have to dance."

DJ Spooky appears upstairs at the Middle East next Thursday, December 5.