Product Description: Winner in the book category of the AIGA 50 Books/50 Covers of 2004 competition presented by the American Institute of Graphic Arts
"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." —Rhythm Science
The conceptual artist Paul Miller, also known as Dj Spooky that Subliminal Kid, 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.
Miller's textual provocations are designed for maximum visual and tactile seduction by the international studio COMA (Cornelia Blatter and Marcel Hermans). They sustain the book's motifs of recontextualizing and relayering, texts and images bleed through from page to page, creating what amount to 2.5 dimensional vectors. From its remarkable velvet flesh cover, to the die cut hole through the center of the book, which reveals the colored nub holding in place the included audio CD, Rhythm Science: Excerpts and Allegories from the Sub Rosa Archives, this pamphlet truly lives up to Editorial Director Peter Lunenfeld's claim that the Mediawork Pamphlets are "theoretical fetish objects . . . 'zines for grown-ups."
Sampling the world Rhythm Science di Paul D. Miller (The MIT Press, Mediaworks Pamphlet Series) non è un saggio sulla Dj-culture, ma più semplicemente una raccolta di appunti e di idee, talvolta anche autobiografiche, sul senso del fare musica, sulle origini del processo creativo contemporaneo, sulla filosofia e sui padri del campionamento.
L'autore, Paul D. Miller meglio conosciuto come Dj Spooky that Subliminal Kid (Washington DC, 1970) artista concettuale, scrittore, filmaker e musicista, descrive il processo creativo del Dj moderno come è una serie interminabile di campionamenti successivi, di molecole che si uniscono e si integrano per creare elementi nuovi. Citando i padri del processo di campionamento.
"It is as difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others as it is to invent" scrisse il poeta Ralph Waldo Emerson in "Quotation and Originality". Era il 1875, dieci anni prima la guerra civile aveva distrutto metà degli Stati Uniti d'America. Ricostruire le proprie idee attraverso il pensiero altrui. Contaminare. Mescolare le idee. Il dj moderno nasce due anni dopo, quando Thomas Edison inventa il primo fonografo, la macchina parlante, la macchina della memoria. La voce non è più in sincrono col tempo. Nasce la possibilità di mixare suoni preesistenti.
"Sampling is a new way of doing something that's been with us for a long time: creating with found objects"
Dj Spooky è come un vettore si muove a grande velocità lungo il globo, cambiando continuamente direzione come un'idea che si sviluppa attraverso le cellule della nostra mente. Sfrutta le autostrade digitali, si nutre delle creazioni altrui, le modifica, le sovrappone, le altera fino ad annullarne il copyright, le rimanda in circolazione come fossero semplici objets trouvées. Analogamente a Robert Rauchemberg, quando nel 1953 comprò un disegno di Willem De Koonig solo per cancellarlo, annullarne il copyright. "I sample all sorts of stuff. The strategy, of course, is to make it unrecornizable".
Con la seducente veste grafica disegnata dallo studio COMA (Cornelia Blatter e Marcel Hermans), Rhythm Science è un libro avvincente, che salta a ritmo frenetico da un tema all'altro senza bisogno di collegamenti certi. Spooky ci invita ad ascoltare il c-side del libro, un cd con musiche campionate dai suoni più disparati, incluse parole di Marcel Duchamp, Tristan Tzara, Kurt Schwitters e tanti altri fino al Finnegans Wake di James Joyce.
L'estetica del sampling, il ritorno di immagini nascoste nel fondo della memoria oppure, più semplicemente, di suoni registrati su un i-Pod. Niente paura, la creatività trionferà sempre perché, per usare le parole di Mallarmé: "Un coup de dés, jamais n'abolira l'hazard".
Good CD with over-done liner notes I like to think of this as a gimmick-packaged CD instead of a book. Paul D. Miller has assembled a remarkable mix of music. It's a shame that the words accompanying the music almost spoils it.
I might have liked it better if the thing wasn't so ugly to look at. Like some of MIT's other Mediaworks pamphlets, Rhythm Science is over-designed to the point that discerning the text is a chore. Unlike other publications in this series (e.g. Shaping Things by Bruce Sterling) the thoughts contained within do not really justify struggling through the various typefaces. Miller's prose is not well written nor does it contain any arresting new ideas; he seems content to regurgitate rhetoric and jargon.
I understand that part of Miller's intent is to apply DJ principles to prose. His facile attempts do not compare favourably with, say, Brion Gysin's & William Burroughs's cut-up & fold-in experiments in the '50s & '60s, or even to Jeff Noon's attempts at word remixing in his novels.
However don't let the disappointingly pseudo-intellectual and pseudo-hip writing put you off the music. Five stars for the CD, 1 star for the book: my overall rating is the median of the two.
5 stars + Look people: Rhythm Science is about mixing art and sound. The book is totally readable and accessible, and either people have a reading level of a 2nd grade student or something, or they just don't get theory stuff, or maybe they're just stupid. The reason the book is great is that it draws together writing and music like a dj would and should: with rhythm. Spooky mixes words and texts in the book like a mix CD, and the CD that goes with the book is a kind of audio companion. They are both pretty amazing, and they compliment each other nicely. It's annoying to see people always come off conservative and dumb when this is obviously an "avant garde" kind of book. Come on people: it's not Martha Stewart telling you how to dj - but you'd think that alot of the reviews are. People always want something simple, and Spooky never does that. That's why this is an amazing book. Think of the early Dada manifestoes (even Kurt Schwitters is on the mix CD!), think of the early Surrealist manifestoes of Andre Breton or Jean Cocteau, and then fast forward to now. Digital media and cut culture blur all of these things together - art, music, and writing, and Paul D. Miller a.k.a. Dj Spooky gets that. The problem is it seems like he's ahead of alot of people who don't. The book shows why.
Lyricism in the age of the mix This book is not just a book, it is poetry, music and artwork all rolled into a unique look at copy culture and the mix. DJ Spooky transends the traditional notions of mix by including artists like Boulez and Debussy as well as other DJs typically associated with the genre. Using the words and voices of authors and poets like Gertrude Stein and James Joyce on the CD, Spooky reveals his theory of rhythm science explaned in the book and decodes, deconstructs and creates new through found objects.
A thoughtful 'exorcism' in regards to our Global Community With Globalization approaching faster and faster, how does an artist/ writer/ muscician keep up? This incredibly thoughtful, poingnant, and reflective piece is the culmination of DJ Spooky's process that is the foundation of all his work. In it, he keeps a fast-paced conversation going on how we are overwhelmed with media, choice, community, and "networks" and how all these relate to the idea of "Rhythm Science". What is Rhytm Science? Its speaking through the voices that have overwhelmed a global community. Essentially, you are a propagator of these voices and using them to speak, not for you, but trough you is the key. One of the best 21st century pieces of writing on philosophy, art, and music that you will find. Plus, its as visual a book as it is literary. The CD that comes with it will surely bring all of what DJ Spooky talks about together for you in a unique auditory collage. Don't miss this one...
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