Description
The Belgian label Sub Rosa invited DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid
to remix its whole catalog. Yes, it has been done before, but there
are two main factors of interest in this particular project. First
of all, DJ Spooky is an unusual DJ, to say the least: he's highly
imaginative and willing to push boundaries without going to the
extent of disfiguring his source materials. Second of all, Sub
Rosa's catalog encompasses a smorgasbord of audio art. And DJ
Spooky has tapped into the richness of Sub Rosa's audio archive
(dixit the album's subtitle) to produce a hard-hitting, 79-minute
mix. The mix rarely stays in place, constantly moving from one spot
to another. Spooky generally builds the music over three layers.
First is a groove derived from ethnic percussion (Trilok Gurtu and
Bill Laswell, among others) or beat-driven electro or DJ'ing (DJ
Wally, DJ Grazzhoppa, Yoshihiro Hanno, David Shea, etc.). The
second layer is provided by experimental electro or sound artists
(Scanner, Oval, Merzbow, Carl Michael von Hausswolff, etc.). The
third layer sees the highly-schooled DJ Spooky dive into Sub Rosa's
generous series of aural documents of modern geniuses. And so the
voices of James Joyce, William S. Burroughs, ee cummings, Brion
Gysin, Antonin Artaud, Tristan Tzara, and other Gilles Deleuze's
pop up everywhere, creating a meta-discourse, offering anachronical
comments on the music while they themselves become part of the
music. Welcome to Rhythm Science. It's an exercise in
pan-humanism, states Spooky in his lengthy liner notes. This
pan-humanism plays on the blurred boundaries between high art and
low art: the philosophical and literary aspects of the spoken
words, the sonic research of experimentalists, and the groove,
constantly and seductively present throughout the album. ~
Franaois Couture
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