Paul D. Miller

Softcover | 14 x 0.8 x 19 cm | 130 pp

MIT Press | 2004 | 9780262632874

Includes free CD -  Rhythm Science: Excerpts and Allegories from the Sub Rosa Archives

Rare & Collectible

Paul D. Miller, known as DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid, is a New York-based conceptual artist, composer, and writer known for mixing electronic music, multimedia, and literature to explore digital culture. His work focuses on collage-based aesthetics, digital sampling, and creating immersive installations that examine data, climate change, and urban spaces.

Rhythm Science delivers a manifesto for rhythm science - the creation of art from the flow of patterns in sound and culture, "the changing same." Taking the Dj's mix as template, he describes how the artist, navigating the innumerable ways to arrange the mix of cultural ideas and objects that bombard us, uses technology and art to create something new and expressive and endlessly variable. Technology 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.

Miller constructed his Dj Spooky persona ("spooky" from the eerie sounds of hip-hop, techno, ambient, and the other music that he plays) as a conceptual art project, but then came to see it as the opportunity for "coding a generative syntax for new languages of creativity." For example: "Start with the inspiration of George Herriman's Krazy Kat comic strip. Make a track invoking his absurd landscapes...What do tons and tons of air pressure moving in the atmosphere sound like? Make music that acts a metaphor for that kind of immersion or density." Or, for an online "remix" of two works by Marcel Duchamp: "I took a lot of his material written on music and flipped it into a DJ mix of his visual material - with him rhyming!"

Tracing the genealogy of rhythm science, Miller cites sources and influences as varied as Ralph Waldo Emerson ("all minds quote"), Grandmaster Flash, W. E. B Dubois, James Joyce, and Eminem. "The story unfolds while the fragments coalesce," he writes.

"Once you get into the flow of things, you're always haunted by the way that things could have turned out. This outcome, that conclusion. You get my drift. The uncertainty is what holds the story together, and that's what I'm going to talk about." Paul D. Miller

Accompanying CD
Rhythm Science: Excerpts and Allegories from the Sub Rosa Archives.

DJ Spooky remixes the catalogue of label Sub Rosa. The result is a complete re-building of the label in an unique piece of 80 minutes constructed with more than 50 parts. Here is the base of this complex architecture:

Yoshio Machida "Afterimage" mixed w/ Sussan Deyhim "The First Reading" / Tibetan Evening Music / Nuuk Posse "Poesi" mixed w/ Antonin Artaud "alienation et magie noire" / DJ Grazhoppa "Milky Remix" of Bill Laswell / Directions "Encode" mixed w/ e.e. cummings "Let's From Some Loud Unworld's Most Rightful Wrong " / DJ Wally "Zeta Reticulli" mixed w/ Gertrude Stein "If I told him, a completed portrait of Picasso" / Charles Hayward "Accidents and Emergencies (instrumental)" / Bill Laswell "Oscillations (Vedic's live pop remix)" / Vedic "Kali Rising" mixed w/ Tristan Tzara "pour compte (phases, 1949)" / Oval "April Remix" mixed w/ James Joyce "anna livia plurabelle (finnegans wake)" (needs to be louder....) / Oval vs Yoshiro Hanno "April Remix" & Oval vs Main "SDII Audio Template" / David Shea "Satiricon" mixed w/ Marcel Duchamp "some texts from a l'infinitif" / Scola Hungarica "Sanctus" / Jean Luc Fafchamps "Chrysanthemum haradjanii" mixed w/ Meira Asher & Guy Harries "Girl" / Darba Del Hameni "Jilala de Tangier" / Jean Luc Fafchamps "Ground" / Seefeel "Is It Now?" / DJ Wally "Bitchley's Kow Korn" mixed w/ "In Principio - extract from Easter Nocturnal Liturgy" / Scanner "Fuse" / William S. Burroughs and Martin Olson "The Five Steps" / Kim Cascone/Scanner "Atavistic Endeavor" / Scanner "Control Phantom" / Merzbow "Lux Automobile/Krokodil Rock Mix" / Yoshio Machida "Afterimage" mixed w/ Vladimir Maiakovski "Aventure Extraordinaire Arrivée a Vladimir Maiakovski, en été a la Datc" / Claude Debussy "d'un cahier d'esquisses" / David Shea +Tobias Hazan "memoires d'un surfeur au bord du désert" / Disjecta "Bad Day for Wasps" / Matik "Indigo" / Giancinto Scelsi "Suite number 11" / Bill Laswell with Trilok Gurtu "Nothing" / Luciano Berio""Brin" mixed w/ Laswell's "Dislocation" / Brion Gysin "One Night @ the 1001" / Tibetan Evening music / Jon Hassel "Map of Dusk" / C.M. von Hausswolff "With the Flow Against The Current" / Jellaba Titara "Gnaoua De Abenb Binizi" mixed w/ Guillaume Apollinaire "Pont Mirabeau" / Nicholas James Bullen "Again and Again""mixed w/ violin from Brion Gysin recording "at 1001" / Gilles Deleuze "Mille Plateaux" / Nûs "lament" drum break mixed w/ Morton Feldman "Triadic Memories" / Nûs "lament" drum break mixed w/ David Toop "Tricyrtis Latifalia" / Mouse on Mars "Subnubus " / Current 93 "some morning when the moon was blood" mixed w/ Lee Renaldo's remix of "Konstantin Raudive" / Patti Smith "Morning High" / Sussan Deyhim "The Last Reading".