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
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
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.
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OUT NOW! DJ Spooky's "Sound Unbound"
CREATION REBEL MIX CD on Trojan Records
DJ Spooky presents
DJ Spooky has produced material on the new Yoko Ono album.
DJ Spooky and the 2007 Venice Biennial
RHYTHM SCIENCE: