DJ Spooky - Paul D. Miller - raps with Ed Baxter about cultural entropy, mending your own computer, and being 25 in the mid-nineties.

Ed Baxter: Paul, can you tell us something about how you came to be collaborating with Ben Neill, who is a student of LaMonte Young and comes from a contemporary classical background? And maybe tell us something also about the 'Tone Club' that takes place at The Kitchen, which you co-curate.

DJ Spooky: It's a long story. When I was in school I had a radio show named Dr Seuss's Eclectic Jungle, and it was focusing on extreme collage, four turntables, several CD players, stuff that would allow you to have a stream of sound going continuously, whether it be loops or cassettes, cut-ups or whatever. My degree was in Philosophy and French Lit., and I did my senior thesis on Luc Feurbach and the End of Rational Thought in European Contemporary Philosophy, but critiqueing that from the viewpoint of an African-American male. The aesthetics of the post-rational is what I talked about. But DJ-ing was always an extension of my writing. When I graduated I moved to Paris for a while, and lived there working on two books.

When I got back to New York I wanted to see these written things manifest, but I was really disappointed with the conventional club scene, and also disappointed with the conventional art-music scene, and the art world in general. That was two years ago. Mainly I wanted to see some way of fusing all these different elements. To me there's never been any barriers between these things; but, as we all know, music and its distribution tends to reflect social hierarchy, so art-music people are still trapped or entrenched in what is basically an early seventies aesthetic of what is experimental music, and the focus is on the live performance or the traditionally validated musical instrument. This was for me a very disappointing situation.

Some friends and I started doing a lot of happenings in Brooklyn called Lolandia - specifically, Karen Lovett, who does conceptual fashion design, and DJ Olive, or Greg Ash, who was also a painter.

There was a very big buzz about this kind of stuff, and people like Ben Neill, who were in the conventional art scene, would come to the events and figure, "Oh this is what the young people are up to." We would build mazes of urban detritus, or mazes of architectural designs, and the maze would continually shift throughout the evening, and we would have five or six DJs going at the same time. You'd turn left and you'd hear Heavy Metal doom music, and you would turn right and there's Jungle, up some stairs and it's ambient. The idea was to have a de-centred event that would reflect the entropic nature of urban culture.

EB: I should have asked you earlier how old you are.

DJS: I just turned twenty-five. Been out of school about three years and trying to figure out what to do, because the conventional art-world is so sterile at the moment, at least in the States. Over here I'm not sure what's happening: I was just at a show of Sarah Morris at the White Cube gallery and that was pretty interesting, as is Scanner and what he's up to. I think he's a bit older. There's a sense of rebellion against the extreme sterility of the American art-scene, and there's no cross-fertilisation any more. They've done the whole pop-art thing and it's old news, so I'm just trying to figure out with these happenings what to do.

EB: Do you feel that a late sixties aesthetic, the kind of thing that Alan Kaprow was interested in, is that more to your taste than the early seventies? Or is it a bit of cheek on my part to suggest that you're going back even further that your peer group?

DJS: Well, probably even further! The stuff I feel is really reflective of what I was doing was the Italian Futurists in the early part of the century, Luigi Rossolo with his noise generators, or for that matter the whole French manifestation of Dada. But there is also the nineties aesthetic of a highly literary-oriented movement. Everyone's in their early twenties. Most of the people doing these events don't read about the sixties. My generation has to deal with a media vacuum, and most people don't find a historical reference for what they're doing, they just say, "This is what I'm doing, and it reflects my interests."

EB: But you seem to place yourself quite definitely in a known historical continuum, at the end of the twentieth century. You're an intellectual, you study books, you relate texts to musical events. It's not a complete surprise that you should team up with Ben Neill, who worked with David Wojnarowicz - someone who was known as both a writer and a visual artist. Last time Ben Neill was in London was to perform, posthumous to Wojnarowicz 's death, a version of ITSOFOMO, which used text, video and musical material. How do you interact with Neill's music?

DJS: I like to see my stuff as walking a fine line between abstraction and cacophony, chaos and order. His music is not very chaotic, it's very immersive, which is good, there's nothing wrong with that. There's different compositional approaches; my sound tends to be a lot more organic and I even sample scratchy records, a little hiss and popping, and I put that in just to have a sense of timelessness. Even if it's a crystal clear rendition on a CD, I always sample the hissing and popping of an old record.

EB: There is a kind of fascination being displayed now with machines that are somehow obsolescent, and that have a peculiar numinous quality because of that - the way that the railroad in American mythology arises out of its obsolescence, and it's celebrated in a fantastic way by somebody like Sergio Leone in his Westerns. There seems to be a tendency in much contemporary music that is interested in the obsolescent quality of vinyl and how it carries with it a history that is somehow decaying.

DJS: I tend to see it as a form where the record becomes a sort of fetish. I know people who are obsessive vinyl collectors and I'm the same. Last time I counted them I have about 15,000 which is up from 10,000 a couple of years ago, and that was a little while ago. They're in storage, I can't keep them all at home. My collection is really diverse, but generationally speaking the warm analogue sound of the record really has...I'm trying to put a finger on the exact emotional sentiment... not nostalgia, but a sense of warmth and comfort. I don't want to put down digital music because I'm quite into it, but there's a sense where I'm listening to digital, that it's too clean. With a lot of conventional Techno or House it's too crystal clear, but that's from my own personal viewpoint, it's not a critique of the actual composition.

On a generational thing, I think records are actually making a huge comeback with the DJ. They're cheap, comparatively speaking, and they're also distributable, you can make mix tapes from them: there's a whole new mythology or constellation round this.

Here we are confronted with all these technologies, and most people have no clue as to how it works, or for that matter how to fix it. So the notion of 'techne' or 'psyche' becomes utterly magical. The Scottish philosopher David Hume said, "Custom is the only thing that holds us all together." And in this day and age for someone to flick on a light switch and expect the light to go on, the only thing that holds that together is this magical notion. If you don't know exactly where the wires are, the density of the wires or the amount of electrical voltage they can carry, then the only thing that allows you to interact with this stuff is a sense of magic.

EB: So you feel a kind of existential perspective is waning and that unconsciousness is on the increase?

DJS: Definitely. I keep thinking about this every day, no-one knows how to fix anything, and it's a condition fostered by the manufacturing companies, I'm sure. If it was up to me I would have an electronics training course from kindergarten on up, because otherwise we have at least three generations coming up that will have no idea about electronic stuff, unless it's as a hobby.

EB: So you see the immediate future of music as a return to something like skiffle?

DJS: No, I just see people using the equipment in any way that they can. People are buying the stuff, but in terms of a pure notion of being able to completely dig into the instrument, the sampler or whatever, as far as I've read, this used to be considered to be part and parcel of using this thing. You had to know how to fix it, put it back together - if your violin broke, for example. I mean, most people know how to change the pre-sets and the settings on stuff, that's easily done, but to change the overall instrument, that's something that you have to be an engineer or a technician to really do. Half the problems that people get with these computers that they throw out are completely minor - an extra piece of soldering, or a new wire or a new transistor and you will have a brand new machine that you sell again.

EB: People typically want to upgrade their technology, don't they? The seasons have been replaced by whatever is new in a shop window.

DJS: That's where we get to the point of neo-capitalist structures of distribution, and the American fascination with the new is becoming a world-wide paradigm. America was the first country to have 'new' as the driving thing of the entire ball-game. In Europe people were very conservative towards the telephone, for example: Thomas Edison had to do a lot of convincing - the British especially, because they thought it would break down a lot of class barriers; but in America to have a telephone was to step into the future.

It's intriguing that all the major music movements have come out the States out of this mythology of the future... Techno, Hip-hop, breakbeat - although Jungle is probably the first new music contribution specifically from Britain. Most of these other electronic musics have come out of the States, and out of areas of urban implosion like Detroit and Techno.

EB: You talk in terms of your music of elongating the present, and you critique your peer group, who, rather than face a loose wire in the present, will merely wait a month for the new version to come out. You're deeply critical then of the whole American project of heading west and up into the sky... it's the kind of mythology that figures even as radical as Sun Ra would invest in and were consciously part of.

DJS: At this point there are no expanding frontiers anymore except the Internet, which they've already called the new frontier that everyone's marching into. There's an expansionist notion, a 'Manifest Destiny,' which was the reason we used to invade Mexico and appropriate their land, but I don't know if I can say 'we' of a European-American aesthetic that somehow permeates the entire ball-game over there. It's killing the planet I think. The pollution, the economies of scale, all of these things... the average TV contains so many toxic elements that it's mind-blowing, and even the shoes we wear, the jeans, the dyes that are used... the only way the planet's going to be able to deal with this kind of trochal technology that it's created on, is through bio-technology, with genetic engineering, which God knows will probably create even more nightmares. But I see the thrust of this new mythology going towards the Internet as a focus of communications and telephony.

You can't even say, "Critique it, or be critical of it," because it's a world-wide paradigm. And there is no outside of it. It's "The system, the system," everybody's talking about the system. No-one thinks that they can have a specific impact any more. It's an eclipse of the self probably unheard of in previous histories. There's no sense of personal responsibility. For me to have that critical stance, which I do, it makes me feel very absurd. I'm wearing shoes, I have jeans on, I brush my teeth and use fluoridated water... I'm just as much part of it. Even your average Greenpeace person, unless they're wearing completely organic shoes made from rice or leaves or something.... you're part and parcel of the entire structure of both production and distribution. I'm just trying to figure out where it's all going. It's a pretty depressing picture.

But then again the planet will always survive regardless of whether or not the human race is here. We have people able to travel at such high speeds, and if some kind of virus breaks out or something that's really lethal, it can spread world-wide. There's a book called Earth Abides, it's one of my favourites, a late sixties science-fiction book. A virus spreads precisely in that way and wipes out most of humanity.

But then again, everyone wants history to end in their lifetime. That's my other bad habit, I can always say on the other hand there's this and this... I see people being conditioned not to think or question their environment or the devices that they're using. There's a complete acceptance of newness - new, new, new! More glitz, more bells and whistles on a computer that you don't really need any bells and whistles on, like Windows 95. To critique it is to say I might as well just build a spaceship and get out of here. Which I did want to do when I was a kid. I was deeply interested in interstellar travel, and I actually have designs of spaceships I wanted to build. I was always fascinated with travelling faster than the speed of light. This is my American pioneer spirit - wanting to get out of here and go: that's just as much part of my mythology as well. I have a little phrase, "Where has he gone? To a song?" Maybe that's my frontier, digging into the sounds, and exploring those. Meanwhile I'll probably be jumping off the Empire State Building someday soon.

EB: Can you tell us about the relation between text and your music that you alluded to earlier? Your text seemed to arise from a post-modern critique in which free-floating signifiers are the vehicle for thought, and your music maybe exists also within that area. And if this is not complicating things, could you tell us something about how you square your "futurist" aspirations of a post-historical aesthetic with your position as a black American who alludes to Sun Ra and to the rural blues on a historical continuum? Because there seem to be two divergent paths, and where they meet is very interesting - and that seems to be the position you currently want to occupy.

DJS: Let's put it this way. Think about the etymology of two of my favourite words at this moment: 'persona' and 'phonograph'. Phonograph means the phonetics of graphology, the phonetics of sound, the needle on the record playing; and persona means 'That through which sound enters.' So there's this notion of creating a persona, which is the DJ using the turntables. I could easily do my set via the computer, mainly for the iconography of it, but I prefer to use the turntables.

But as an African American male, many of the traditions that inform my music focus on the social construction of subjectivity. Most African American music focuses on people borrowing riffs like jazz. There are certain motifs that come in and out of the songs and there are certain rhythms that are named. Then there's the migration of West African rhythm patterns up through the south to the north, where we get the urbanised industrial aesthetic that switches blues to a more schizophrenic, chaotic jazz. To me the DJ is the cybernetic inheritor of the jazz tradition of improvisation.

But on the other hand we are also using a fusion of European technology and West African sound to create these kind of things. When you're dealing with externalised memory, which is to me what records represent, they become a way of appropriating a past and re-configuring it using the association lines that hold them together in memory. It's what I call cutting the association lines between the past and present so that the future can leak through.

Right now American culture is in such a strange racial deadlock. No-one is going anywhere anytime soon. There's 270 million people in that area and the tensions between the two are rising, and it's an absurd cycle. When I went to West Africa I realised - Jesus Christ! I'm very American actually. We're very Americanised and the African motifs which inform the culture are almost subconscious or unspoken. This is an example: in Harlem is this market where there are West African merchants selling fake African cloth, printed in Texas, but which looks authentic. Next to the cloth there's fake Nike and Adidas with very futuristic stripes and stuff, and people selling these sports outfits, very chic urban sports gear. And if you look down at everyone's shoes, they're wearing these strange globular tennis shoes - so if you look around you have copies of West African stuff versus copies of American corporate sports culture, and people wearing both comfortably, and listening to a boom-box of hip-hop made of samples of a drum from 1960 with a horn from 1930 and a bass line from 1974. And it gets to the point where you're seeing a multi-valent cultural text in this one market place, which to me is one way of encapsulating this notion of what is a market of culture.

EB: The market provides some kind of resolution to social and aesthetic chaos, you feel? Are you as comfortable with it as one of the rural blues players - for instance, Skip James? Or perhaps a better example would be The Roaring Lion, the Trinidadian singer, who throughout his career was very comfortable with the recorded form, and not particularly bothered about notions of exploitation through commodities, because he was making a living from recording. Rather, he is very critical of the notions in popular West Indian culture that Calypso specifically arises from West African folk culture. The Lion's position is that the myth of Africa is essentially destructive to people in Trinidad and that Calypso was forged very much in the present.... obviously we're talking about the late twenties now.

DJS: I think all these musics arise from being forged in an isolated African-American community in the diaspora of dispersion. People come up with whatever rhythms they can deal with to help them get through their situation. I think the West African rhythmic tradition is part and parcel of all the musics that slowly arose from the wreckage of the slave experience.

EB: In the physicality and structure of your performances with the turntables, you seem to be arguing in a quiet way that all of that is inscribed in a Derridian sense: where the needle actually becomes the physical emblem of the pressure of Western industrial culture upon those rhythms.

DJS: Goldie has a phrase, he says, "Any time you drop the needle to a record you are in our world; and when you take the needle off, you're out." Which is an interesting way of putting it. All these things point to culture becoming an entropic force that becomes malleable and distributable, and even point to this notion of music as a distributed network of consciousness, where you can take bits and pieces of other musics and other people's expression, and reconfigure them to your own taste and then slowly distribute them back out via mixed tapes, via 7-inches, via radio, via Internet (a lot of my mixes are now down-loadable via the Internet). There are so many ways of distributing these modalities of consciousness that it becomes necessary to go right back to the West African aesthetic whereby rhythm conveys messages.

But all these things point to technology and to the Western European aesthetics of a classical, formal text being completely inverted and burst apart. At the same time it validates both the US/European aesthetic and the African aesthetic, through what I like to call the American Microwave (rather than melting pot). But it's brought out all these different bits and pieces of all the cultures, and allowed the flotsam and jetsam to create these strange experiences shimmering at the edge of perception.

Sound becomes reflective of a social hierarchy which is anarchic and entropic. When I hear Coltrane I hear people skipping and fleeting through the geometric regularity of the urban landscape, and then you hear Sun Ra and you hear the end experience of that continuum. Next you hear Goldie's more underground 12-inches, and you hear the cybernetic inheritance of that same kind of chaotic, schizophrenic, paranoiac, conflicting impulses in the music. Like Jungle, even its jazz loops and drums sound very much like a Max Roach drum solo. All these things are methods of what I like to call prolonging the present: the loop becomes a method of stretching it out and allowing a space in which the mind can find calm and peace in the midst of... (on cue, sound of siren from street) ...you hear the siren?

EB: The question that begs is, What is the purpose of your methodology? If everything is in a chaotic soup, then it becomes difficult for people not as well-informed or as conscious as you to tell what is going on.

DJS: My stance is actionary rather than reactionary, let's put it that way. I think music has a way of reflecting social hierarchy in bringing cultural values to people who wouldn't necessarily deal with it if there wasn't music. I mean, you saw blues slowly bringing Western African notions of rhythm and modality into what eventually turned into rock. At this point in the game you can have a multiplicity, there's no one specific single narrative anymore - and my political stance is saying that there are many truths, not one truth, and there are many loves. To me music and love - I'm talking in an abstract sense of love - to me that is the only way we are going to survive into the 21st century because of the amount of pollution going on and the ethnic warfare, and this kind of stuff is definitely increasing and it is a self-reinforcing loop. Music becomes a way of saying, "Alright, we can deal with these things, you can listen to my music and I can listen to your music." You can borrow from elements and slowly but surely check out the other cultures. Knowledge and understanding is the only way...if you can understand someone's culture you can at least sit and talk with them. There's madness going on, but if we can understand one another then at least we can change things for the better. It's perhaps an idealistic thing, but it's a very cynical time in the world, and I guess it takes a bit of strength to be idealistic at the moment.