Like Sun Ra used to say "the Nubians of Plutonia are just fragments of a dream yet to be..." I like to think of these kinds of dialogs as an update on the whole "systems" debate - music as shareware, the artist as shareware etc etc Drum patterns as nets in time... beat/pulse... think of it as a scene in Thomas Pynchon's "The Crying of Lot 49's" electronic music club, or Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man." -- Paul Dialectics of Entropy/Code/Cybernetic Jazz a conversation between Paul D. Miller a.k.a. Dj Spooky that Subliminal Kid and Matthew Shipp. NYC 2002 skip/fade/enter>goto>> Paul: So, your last album was called "Nu-Bop," and mine was called "Under the Influence: Synchronia", so I guess we've been simultaneously talking about these kind of issues relating to improvisation. What do you think of the parallels between turntablism and jazz? Matthew Shipp:: Well, I think these are exciting times. I guess as a jazz musician, or someone who grew up as a classical jazz musician, or classical free jazz musician, however weird that sounds, I'm looking for something else which can encapsulate all my interests, and my interests are varied, and I'm feeling the need to kind of expand outside the realms of jazz, even though I find jazz theoretically to be a melting pot for everything, and it's an exciting language, because it's open to, or supposed to be open to all the possibilities of world music, all rhythms. But the jazz world as it is, kind of fosters a very closed vision of what the possibilities are, so I just want to go out into space, like Sun Ra did, and be free to explore all world musics and all outer space musics. And if that means using computers, programmed beats, if it's a funk drummer, if it's me screaming! I want to be free to try to put it all together in the same puzzle. Paul: Well one thing that's fascinated me about the Vision Festival, about yourself, and William Parker, and Patricia Parker, is that you guys have been kind of a triad of support, giving other musicians a kind of platform I don't think you really find in other areas of NYC culture - it's absolutely a progressive milieu where people explore all the different contexts for sound culture - I guess you could say that it's truly multi-dimensional and truly multi-cultural. I mean hip hop, for example, is one of the most conservative styles there is. Shipp: Well, it's interesting you say that, because I feel that way about jazz. And when I look at hip hop, I see a lot of freedom there. You know how the grass is always greener on the other side. I know what you mean, though, being a black male and knowing some of the social situations hip hop functions in and how it works within certain parts of the black community, I mean, I do know what you mean! (laughs) But it's just funny, to me it always seems certain aspects of the hip hop world, not the mainstream, but certain aspects of it seem to potentially offer freedom to somebody like myself. I mean, a lot of people who listen to hip hop will never listen to what I do, even if I did it with beats, they just wouldn't be interested for many reasons. But there's an openness to some hip hop that jazz potentially has but doesn't practice. Paul: I guess I would say that there are really two areas of hip hop and dj culture: there's turntablism, and then there's the freeform lyrical stuff, people like Saul Williams or Carl Hancock Rux, Ursula Rucker, or Chris Csikszentmihalyi who made his "Dj I Robot" as a composing 'bot ... these are all folks who are trying to push the envelope. But for me and the turntable, I always viewed it as being like a writer, as writing, because if you break down the etymology of the word, its "phonograph" - the "phonetics of graphology", or "sound writing" - so essentially, this signal-to-noise ratio of the written text is "under erasure" - think of the robot dj as a jazz automaton or something like that... So in my work, I like to be able to play back and forth with the way people view culture, and basicslly I think of all of this as a kind of inheritance - what folks like John Cage and Iannis Xenakis were doing from two radically different camps of "systems culture," has now become the basic way we think about music - random and algorithmic at the same time. DJs are essentially like tricksters, playing these little snippets of everything, and reconfiguring. But jazz is like that too, with its infinite quotation and the motifs and how you play with that. I remember when Duke Ellington talks about Marshall Mcluhan's ideas at the beginning of his "Afro-Eurasian Eclipse" or when Charles Ives flips gospel into his New England symphonies - hybrid stuff like that is what I'm talking about. Shipp: Yeah, its funny the way you describe turntablism. Because I view the piano as, kind of a spaceship, or a rocket ship, that can take sound and generate frequencies upwards in a funnel. I can also take various motifs, language, snippets of melody and play with them, reconfigure them, almost like when I fool around with little riffs and things, I view it like the central nervous system, with a spine and certain little systems of information, or like sounds that fire different synapses of the mind. I'm trying to always break down language, to trying to always take an alphabet and massage little aspects of it, of information. Paul: In a sense, that's where historically I find your style of jazz at a crossroads like where the Fluxus cats were, and then earlier before that Apollonaire and Mallorme and some of the French cut up guys - Mallarme, Appolinaire, even Rimbaud - where they take certain languages of poetry and create their own vernacular. It's way before and way beyond stuff like John Hassel or Brian Eno, but those guys fit into the matrix too.... not that I'm knocking either one of 'em, but mainly, it's all about that kind of polymorphous flow.... there are no rules. Imagine if Wole Soyinka did a series of tone poems or if Ben Okri's "Famished Road" had been a dj mix... I always think about how to give a story context... In Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man" the main character has had to deal with so much bullshit, the novel starts where it ends - it's one big loop: with him listening to Louis Armstrong's "How did I get to Feel So Black and Blue" on 5 turntables at the same time... I'm into conceptual stuff like that, but engaged in a real world context of actuvely trying to bring together all of the disparate styles... I like to think of it as rhythmic pan-humanism, but you can just call it dialectical materialism... Shipp: The thing I really like about Mallarme is that his poetry is just so dense, and I never understand exactly what he's saying, but I always walk away with two or three images that are just somewhere out there in space and I really get something out of it, despite how dense and obscure it is, I get something very clear from it. Paul: And then also in terms of the French tradition, some of the French composers, like Boulez, this goes into point vector lines, clusters, really has a resonance with what you're doing with jazz, even with a lot of the titles of your material, there's this fascination with geometry... it's hybridity made into science... that's what made America so frightened of how deconstruction really related to how we think of identity... it showed that, beneath the surface, we're all linked, and basically that fucked up the power dynamics of the conventional artworld, conventional experimental music scene of the '80's and even left the whole ballgame open to some kind of revision of what constituted experimental music. That's where turntables come into the picture... Edison meets the dark side of contemporary culture. Kinda funny... The '80's must have been a weird time... Shipp: Oh yeah, I like Boulez, even though he's a complete asshole. (laughs) Paul: Oh, really? All right. Shipp: (still laughing) You don't know him, do you? Paul: Um, I'm doing a collaboration with him in August... Shipp: Well, he's mellowed out a lot over the years, I'm sure. Paul: We haven't met yet... It's a "live" remix of his composition "Pli Selon Pli," but hey... (laughs...). Everything is a remix. We'll just kind of stand around and feel slightly surreal... with all the computers around and the software... it'll just be one big dysfunctional family.... modernism and post-modernism... all in one evening. It'll be a fun show. Come on by... It's in Switzerland - in Lucerne, one of those Swiss cities that's really into "carnival." It should be wild... (laughs) Shipp: What I like about some of his piano works is that he was so interested in density and his harmonic language is like a sheet of glass, it's almost like a layer that you hear in Balinese music sometimes, and his little pointallistic... ballistic spurts, somehow his language was so compacted together that it related mathematically to his harmonic language in a way that I could never understand or explain, but that I can feel. In other words, a holographic effect or feel to his music. I could hear one isolated note, and feel it's relation to the whole work. And that's really what I'm into, the holograph of the holographic feel. Paul: Sounds like holographic jazz... The part represents the whole. And that's like sampling, too, the sample being a fragment of the larger text. And that's what I'm always looking for with my style of dj'ing - creating systems of cybernetic jazz. But when I hear your stuff, I'm fascinated with these systems of improvisation, you have your symbol systems, and Anthony Braxton has them as well, and then kind of how you guys update that. You all make your own language and sound systems like Cage or Luigi Russolo. But again, with that African "doubling" of sign and symbol. Duality can be fun! Shipp: So let me ask you a question, some of your contemporaries -- Amon Tobin, DJ Krush, and I know you're a lot different from these people, but like Squarepusher, or DJ Shadow, I'm just curious to hear, what do you feel are the common denominators to your work, and the differences? Paul: Well structurally and rhythmically, there's really been a sense of convergence in the past several years or so, from '92 to '93 on up, people were actually beginning to share a lot more of their rhythm structures, whereas I think before before it was a lot more specialized to local areas. But I view people like Shadow, DJ Cam, Krush, DeckWreckka out of London, Amon Tobin, we're like local and global filters, because we travel so much, andwe collect from wherever we go, and I find that's what gives us a kindred spirit is this critique of how hip hop... it's a response, to me, of this intense compression, of segregation, to a specific neighborhood or region, and having that generate a style. You know how Fab Five Freddy used to say there's a style below 42nd Street, until about 14th Street, and then from 14th Street to Canal Street, that's another style. But when you apply that to uptown, it's a lot more, its even denser. You've got the Bronx scene, the bridge, the expressway, and so on. But I view my system more like the Internet, which is completely global, with people excahanging files, the notion of neighborhhoods becomes microniche and taste oriented. Krush is definitely what I like to view as a Japanese prism, he's got the notion of reflection and condensation going. A prism always takes a certain beam of and refracts and concentrates it. He's doing that to hip hop and applying a very Japanese take on it, he works with Taiko drums and all that. He doesn't try to sound like an American, he translates it. I view him as a composer that's trying to get back to a Japanese purity -- but, impurity. Hip hop always has these little paradoxes... that it's inherited from W.E.B. Dubois's sense of "Double Consciousness": When you start talking about a medium's "purity" you know there's a lot of fracture points. There is never any purity. Amon Tobin's Brazilian but he lives in London. Shadow's a white suburban kid from California. We're all people who are alienated from the conventional hip hop situation, and we've each tried to create our own world. There are some people where it translates to a wider medium -- broadband vs narrowband -- again, transmission issues. I've always kept a relatively smooth parallel to the New York art and sound art community in terms of how I view my work. Shadow is more involved with an old soul, blues axis, and he samples a lot of that stuff. DJ Cam, he's more like a smooth jazz cycle, but very accessible, and when I say accessible, not in a bad way. Imagine Jean Paul Sartre coolin' out listening to Miles Davis, and feeling like he's the coolest philosopher... stuff like that... For someone like me to work with Xenakis and do scratch routines based on Sun Ra, or to play with the Sun Ra Arkestra, or to work with Yoko Ono, or Thurston Moore, or you, some of the guys who do the speed scratch stuff would think it was totally wild! But the fun thing is about that, by being nomadic, and moving around, it makes a longer sense of tradition, and gives me a more more elastic view of the compositional strategies of the 20th composition and even the early 21st centur turntablism. If you look at what was going on with Debussy appropriating from Asian motifs, if you look at the New York school of minimalism in the 60s with Steve Reich and Philip Glass, or Morton Feldman and those guys. All that stuff translates directly to hip hop. Morton Feldman, you could just add a little beat underneath. Shipp: Hip hop to me seems to me to be so universal, and so basic, and I mean that in a good sense. The essence of hip hop is just so powerful. And the impression in the jazz world right now is just so anti-hiphop. Yet, I feel most jazz musicians feel, even Max Roach for instance, I recall reading in an interview that he didn't understand the "young lions" and why they were trying to recreate the older styles, and that he thought hip hop was just so close to what he was doing with Charlie Parker that it was basically the same thing, and he felt that was the fresh language of the day. But I really like this whole thing about music as systems of information, or coded language, or breaking down different langauages and melding them into a panorama. That's what I like about listening to your records, it's like there's this vast panorama . . . it's like you're on a trip! Kind of like reading a Burroughs novel where it's cut up, and it's related in the narrative and it holds together, but it becomes this trippy thing, like a dream. That's where I want to go with my work as opposed to the straightahead narrative of a jazz album. Paul: I love the "NuBop" album... because it embodies alot of these ideas, and when I was working on the "Under the Influence" album I was thinking about alot of the impulses that seemed to guide early jazz and blues - like Charlie Patton mixed with Charlie Parker - jazz at 200 beats per minute, hip-hop mixed with the sound of the sun... stuff like that... But yeah, "Nu-Bop" - I've been listening to it a lot, and the album with Spring Heel Jack ;;cause I'm so bored with the normal alt.rock take on "free-jazz" etc etc such bullshit... it's really about people relating to ideas and actually mixing... The SHJ album didn't even sound like an "electronic album," it sounded so organic, or what I like to call sound origami, with all the folds and complexities and nuances, and I find one thing that might be a casualty that my generation has effected is a sense of compression, of flatness of narrative. Like beats have to be a certain way in house music, or in techno there's another format, or hip hop. But what I like about these records is that all notion of format has been thrown to the wind. And that's kind of what I'm doing with illbient. Shipp: Is that your term? I hear people using it all the time. Paul: Well, no one owns language. Language is language. Period. And permutation is what makes it all happen. It's nice to have a sense of humor about origin, since there is no real beginning, middle or end. Anyway, for me music is it own syntax, and "illbient" was meant to be an open ended term, meaning you can't define it. Illbient is an open structure, its also a sense of humor about language as a blank surface. But yeah, I created that term, and I play with it as a kind of open source document, and that's why certain people feel they can claim it as originators, but well... that's basically incorrect. That's why I like the term "Nu-Bop," - it's new, it's fresh... is that your term? People haven't had time to play games with your words yet. Shipp: Yeah, I was looking for kind of a generic . . . Paul: Generic!? Shipp: Well, I wanted people to be able to read into it whatever they wanted. Paul: I think one of the things I've always enjoyed about your scene is the attention to historical reference, and research. I've yet to meet someone from your scene who didn't have a broad historical awareness of the music. It's really refreshing. My generation, man... people don't know about history, and they pretty much don't care... it's almost as if history has become subconscious... samples are like that. Alot of people will hear something and not know where it's from. It's a "surface thing" like Baudrillard, but with an African twist - drum patttern awareness, timecode fallout, signal to noise dynamics - it's all about rhythm. It's all about sequences... Shipp: Well, the people that are known on the Lower East Side, yes. Very broad, in fact. Talk to someone like Daniel Carter, that cat is so deep, his knowledge of like, traditional R&B is so vast, and everything he plays is kind of an abstraction on that. Someone like William Parker, there are a lot of things that go into his music beyond what people might not think of, you know, beyond Jimmy Garrison and Charles Mingus, there's just an awareness of a lot of incredible stuff. Paul: And ther great thing that's happening now is this idealistic sense of, how should I put it? Ummm.... If we had Wynton Marsalis sitting here ... Shipp: That guy is such a blockhead. Probably if you took that guy's brain out of his head, it'd be shaped like a block. He definitely must suffer from some kind of serious disease or something. I just don't understand how people can get that way, these people who walk around saying 'this is right, this is wrong'. The universe just isn't closed like that, I mean, if you look at nature, they would see how fluid things really are. How fluid language is, how you can't try and define things like that. And these people are like dictators, or fascists, trying to control language and the definition of jazz because that's how these people make money. Paul: Well, to me, there's room for everything. If someone wants to have such a closed, fixed view of something, then I guess that's interesting thing. The Lower East side has its share of people who think experimental music should only be one thing too... But don't apply it to me! I'm not going to apply my rule system to them. It's that '80's squeaky sound scene who can't deal with beats etc etc they have a lock on alot of the downtown experimental scene, but yeah, I'm working on breaking that. So much of that stuff sounds the same... There's alot of friction between me and the '80's "establishment" (laughs...). Shipp: Yeah, there's room to sound bad if you want, if you wanna sound bad, sound bad! (laughs) Paul: yeah, think of that old Run D.M.C. phrase, "not bad meaning bad, but bad meaning good..." It's that kind of "double signification" that Henry Louis Gates talked aout too... and so there's people who can do that and almost make it become kind of interesting, and if that's their kick, more power to 'em. All right, but at the end of the day, it's all compositional strategies and tactics, how to both incorporate new forms and also evolve, not re-volve. I find that DJ culture right now is really flat. We've reached a plateau, and even turntablism has so many rules and regulations as well, that I find it a hyper-revolving culture, really quick. But stuck in a certain loop. I like to break loops up, ya know? Shipp: So what are they trying to get back to now? I mean, I would be surprised to hear people breaking down disco . . . Paul: Nah, that already came and went... I think, at the moment, there's a lot of saturation worldwide. New York winds up being kind of a clearinghouse for global styles, because there's people from all over the world here, so the styles come through this scene, where London is maybe more trendy, New York has a sense of endurance, where certain things will float through, but somehow remain. Think micro-tonal music meets blip-hop with hyperlinks or something... deadheads become webheads... just flip the equation and its an open sequence. Shipp: What's interesting about the New York free jazz scene is this sense of focus to it, I mean there's so much tradition to it in this city, especially in the lower east side, from Charlie Parker, to Mingus, to Cecil Taylor, all these people who've lived in the neighborhood, and that flow continues, that flow of the language, and the dedication to the specifics of that language, albeit trying to mutate and grow organically. And I think it's just such a beautiful thing. And when you look at William Parker, you see the apotheosis of that whole trend of language, since the '30s and '40s in that neighborhood. And when you use that word "purity," it's dangerous, but I want to use it in the sense of that focus and its strength, yet it keeps naturally growing and evolving. There are people out there who say the people in my school are just doing the same old free jazz. But those people don't have ears or they have something blocking their ears, beacuse there's a fresh energy that exists now, that's different from the energy of the 70s or the 60s, but at the same time I do think its time for something new! Paul: There's a friend of mine the writer, Mckenzie Wark that talks about how, 'we no longer have roots, we have aerials' - for him , contemporary life is all about just taking in all the frequencies. And there's another writer, Erik Davis, who always talks about the religious impulse in technology and I always think about music as an abstraction of all of these issues. We're the rootless generation, and/or the generation that looks down and sees frequencies instead of the ground. Thats why I enjoyed it when you were talking about your music as an extension of the nervous system. These days, I'm now beginning to think of my mind as an interlocking series of archives, just fragments of piles of snippets of CDs and records and movie clips, and even this conversation will be just another digital clip. It's be turned into a .wav file and will be sent up to Pete up at the magazine, and he can burn it to CD-R or sample it if he likes. And the funny thing is, the next generation of kids will be growing up with that sense of the world. To me jazz is all about conversations, but now it's also about a series of file transfers and making one computer talk to another. I like to call it "cybernetic jazz" or "dlialectics of entropy" or just plain old "collaborative filtering." Derrida liked to call it "archive fever." Your average kid would call it "wildstyle." It's a flipped out cognitive model I guess... Shipp: Sun Ra was always going into the depths of his spirit in order to go to the outer reaches of the universe. I keep coming back to the holograph, that's the essence to me of relating to the piano as an acoustic instrument but also as a system of languages, of technologies, even, that's not unlike a computer. To me, you have 12 notes, or 8 notes in the octave, or whatever, but an infinity of wavelengths within that, an infinity of relationships between the rhtyhms that encapsulates every bit of information that's out there. I can see the world in one grain of sand, as William Blake said.