Musicbeat

Ice man

DJ Spooky

Paul Miller, a.k.a. DJ Spooky, is a musical journeyman. He has made music that by touches on a wide variety of styles, Brad Bynum from a wide variety of places, with a bradb@ wide variety of collaborators from newsreview.com rappers, like Kool Keith and Public Enemy’s Chuck D., to rockers, like Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore and Slayer’s Dave Lombardo, to jazz musicians, like William Parker, to classical musicians, like Kronos Quartet. For this email interview, he wrote about Ice Music, inspired by a trip to Antarctica, which he’ll perform at the Nevada Museum of Art on July 21. The concert is presented in partnership with the Holland Project and will feature musicians from the Reno Philharmonic. What can you tell me about Ice Music? I took a studio to Antarctica to think about music composition and the way we can reframe some of the issues facing everyone—climate change is a reality—and basically it was about exploring some of the more remote parts of the planet as a way of generating material for both music and art. I’m a big fan of how music can touch so many parts of what it means to be human. It’s all about using music as a way to create more information about the way we live. I guess you could say for me music isn’t music—it’s information. That’s what the show Ice Music is all about. The studio for most artists is a place to go away from the world and create. For me, it’s the opposite—the world is the studio.

“Electronic music is all about patterns,” says DJ Spooky. “But so is the world we live in.”

DJ Spooky performs at the Nevada Museum of Art, 160 W. Liberty St., with Frkse, on Saturday, July 21. 7 p.m. For tickets or more information, visit www.nevadaart.org or www.hollandreno.org.

For a longer version of this interview, visit www.newsreview.com. What appeals to you about Earth’s Polar Regions? The whole way we think about geography and landscape in an urban context is really about dividing up space—real estate, inches, meters, etc. The human scale. But when you go to places like Antarctica and the North Pole, you realize how fragile our entire existence is. It was a pretty intense experience to walk on huge ice fields, and not being sure if you could fall in or not. Putting one foot in front of the other and realizing how it could all simply collapse— that’s not something you do in the city. We’re used to “terra firma.” I kinda wanted to see how that would affect my way of creating music.

What are the challenges of representing, depicting or connecting to natural environments using electronic music? I guess everything you can say about “the environment” is about intuition and emotion—we all want clean air, we all want clean water. But the reality is that there is so much that is left out of the way we describe it. You can talk about temperature. You can talk about the fact that half the state of Colorado is on fire because of climate change and human indifference. But at the end of the day, it’s all about patterns. Patterns that are being disrupted and distorted by the amount of pollution we’ve put in the environment. Stuff that has actually altered the fabric of real life in real ways. Electronic music is all about patterns. Beats, tempos, you name it. But so is the world we live in—wind, water, etc.

You’ll be performing with Reno Philharmonic musicians. What can you tell me about that collaboration?

One of my favorite composers is Wagner. He had a great term, “gesamkunstwerk,” which simply means “total artwork.” He was a composer and architect. I think that’s cool, and it’s a part of the way I think about process. It’s all about structure and patterns. Orchestras are pretty much a group of human beings playing in synchronization. I do most of that with my computer equipment. I’ll be sampling the material the ensemble is playing through my iPad software that I developed with Music Soft Arts. We’ve had over 12 million downloads of the software. The Reno Philharmonic is a live “turntable” for me. I’ll be working with them for riffs and elements, and adding beats and electronics that I wrote when I was in Antarctica. Ω