Lunenfeld Peter - Rhythm science: Paul D. Miller, aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid

A Mediawork Pamphlet

2004 Paul D. Miller

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

Rhythm Science: Excerpts and Allegories from the Sub Rosa Archives audio CD courtesy Guy-Marc Hinant, Sub Rosa Brussels, Belgium. www.subrosa.net

Production by
COMA Amsterdam/New York

Printed and bound by
robstolk, The Netherlands

The cover is printed on Curious Touch Soft Milk 300 g. Curious Collection is a trademark of ArjoWiggins. www.curiouscollection.com

Library of Congress
Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Dj Spooky That Subliminal Kid.

Rhythm Science / Paul D. Miller.
p. cm.(Mediawork pamphlets)

ISBN 0-262-63287-X (pbk. : alk.paper)
1. Technology and civilization. 2. Science and civilization. 1. Title. II. Mediawork.

CB478.D5 2004
303.483dc22

2003061503

eISBN: 978-0-262-26100-5 (ebook)

The beginning. Thats always the hard part. Once you get into the flow of things, youre 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 thats what Im going to talk about. Rhythm Science. Myth Science. A catalog of undecided moments at the edge of my thinking process. This is not about pseudonyms or alter egos. Thats already been done. Think of this book as an exploration of the cold logic of the surface. Ice: Ice isnt just ice in this picture; its ice cubed, the changing same bounced against itself on the cold surfaces people create when they name themselves, cool as Kool. Make the link between the names people make up, and the image resolves. The game face moves from version to version. Whether youre logging in under a new name, or youre a Dj trying out a new persona, the logic is an extension rather than a negation. Alias, a.k.a.; the names describe a process of loops. From A to B and back again. Dig beneath what lies on the surface only to arrive where you started. Its a circular logic, a database logic. Surface meets surface in a translation game of chilled desire.

Rhythm science is not about transparency of intent. Rhythm science is a forensic investigation of sound as a vector of a coded language that goes from the physical to the informational and back again. Rhythm science. Rhyme time. Rough trade. Sound. Think of it as a mirror held up to a culture that has learned to fly again, that has released itself from the constraints of the ground to drift through dataspace, continuously morphing its form in response to diverse streams of information. Sound is a product of many different editing environments, an end result of an interface architecture that twists and turns in sequences overlaid with slogans, statistics, vectors, labels, and grids.

Sound. Think of it as a dance of neologisms, an anemic cinema for the gene-splice generation where sign and symbol, word and meaning all drift into the sonic maelstrom. This is a world where all meaning has been untethered from the ground of its origins and all signposts point to a road that you make up as you travel through the text. Rotate, reconfigure, edit, render the form. Contemporary sound composition is an involution engine. Traditional drawings and models have given way to animations, scans, and readouts, and sound has become a digital signifier whose form adjusts its shape in front of us like an amorphous cloud made of zeros and ones, 1s and 0s. The beginning. Thats always the hard part. Once you get into the flow of things, youre always haunted by the way that things could have turned out. This outcome, that conclusion. You get my drift.

The term vector comes from geometry and refers to a line of fixed length and direction but no fixed position. Consider the way ideas move through our minds and bodies. There is no fixed position. Theres only the improvisational nature of recall. Thought vector: the relationship between a geometry and a geography of information. Sound vector: think lines of flight in the digital now. Vector of a sound in motion: wave propagation and particles of thought. The mean machine of how we perceive language floats across the scenario, its flight is of fixed maximum length, but potentially in any direction. This is the freestyle. A vector has a fixed property and an indeterminate property. One could say length is fixed but axis is not. Strictly speaking, thats a vector. But by extension, one could think more abstractly of a vector as a relation between a determinate and an indeterminate property. The virtual dimension to any vector is the range of possible movements of which it is capable. This is the wildstyle. Check the flow.

In epidemiology, vectors spread infectious agents like viruses or parasites But in the case of sound, memories are the infectious spores, viral modes that pop up in tracks, sifting mechanisms that filter and file memory as sounds move between populations. Sex is confusion. Loop, repetition, loop. The machinic process of creation generates its own fascination. Sounds unfold, organize, and iterate cultures as abstract machines, filing memories away in the idiots mind. In this scenario, the vector moves through an architectonic environment form follows function, fact follows fiction. In the case of certain infectious agents, vectors are capable of transmitting the disease only during a certain time period. In these situations, vectors play host to the agent. Once the agent is within the vector animal, an incubation period follows during which the agent grows or reproduces or both, depending on the type of agent. After this phase is over, the vector become infectious. Only then can it transmit an agent that is capable of causing disease. Infectious rhythms? Its been said that language is a virus, so sounds and words multiply, become viral agents of an omni-sensory condition, a compilation of local, distant, and virtual spaces, all evoked by sound.

This book is a theater of networks, of correspondences that turn in on themselves and drift into the ether like smoke-rings blown in an airless nightclub. This is a theater of the one and the many, of texts that flow with the intensity of bullets. Heat death, entropy, cyclical turbulence. Its all here. Technical malice in my freestyle rips the threads holding the narrative together and we see the structure beneath the structure. The words within the words. Rhymes are social armor, waiting for bullets to test their integrity.

Flow. Machines that describe other machines, texts that absorb other texts, bodies that absorb other bodies. Its a carnivorous situation where any sound can be you, and where any word you say is already known. Flow, counter-flow. The idiot as processing device, slave to the moment, outside of time because for him there is only the moment of thought. No past, no present, no future. The idiot is a zombie, a character straight out of Thriller, one of Michael Jacksons chorus line of decaying bodies moving into yalls neighborhood. Watch the idiots dance to rhythms they do not feel or understand. There is our beginning, and there is our narrative path. The person without qualities who cannot say I. The person whom others speak through, who has no central identity save what he or she knows. And what they know is that they know there is nothing else. That is the narrative role of the idiot in this journey, and that is where I begin this scenario.