DJ Spooky new album project with VP Records Debuts on Billboard in the Top 5!!
// GET THE ALBUM HERE
Join the NAACP and DJ Spooky and host a screening of this important film!
http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/videos/birth-of-a-movement-full-film/
Boston 1915. African-American newspaper editor and activist William Monroe Trotter wages a battle against D.W. Griffith’s groundbreaking blockbuster The Birth of a Nation. A Notoriously Ku Klux Klan-friendly reimagining of history, Griffith’s motion picture unleashes a conflict that still rages today about race relations, representation, and the power of Hollywood. Narrated by Danny Glover and featuring interviews from Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Spike Lee, Birth of a Movement, based on Dick Lehr’s book The Birth of a Movement captures the backdrop to this prescient clash between human rights, freedom of speech, and a changing media landscape.
Music Score by Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky
Broadcast Premiere + Independent Lens/PBS
February 6, 2017 + 10PM/9c
Free After Broadcast until 3/9/2017
Supported by: WNET Thirteen, Independent Lens, Northern Light Productions, National Endowment for the Humanities, Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Brothers Fund
By Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky
“To speak truly, few adult persons can see Nature.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature
It’s been said that wilderness holds answers to questions we have not yet learned to ask. Here’s a question: How would you make a composition out of a forest? Would you have instruments made from wood? Well, that’s already been done for hundreds of years—every single instrument that influences our modern sensibility comes from wood or metal. But what about the information that forests generate? That’s what I thought about when I began work on a symphony about forests.
It’s been decades since Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer coined the term “soundscape” but for me, a 21st century update is the term “acoustic environment.” It’s an idea that informs my work, and that give me inspiration for a project that, at core,is as much about the collision between code and culture, as it is about the massive disruption of the ecosystem.
Article no longer available at National Geographic
Artist Statement:
For Heart of a Forest I wanted to explore how to remix some of the ways we think about traditional forms of music versus digital interpretation of nature. Is a landscape a portrait? Is a composition a portrait? These are questions left lingering over the entire project. Thoreau once went to the forests of New England to write his seminal works. He wrote of the experience “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to confront only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” I think that we need music to catalyze how we can rethink our relationship to Nature, and I am inspired by Thoreau and the collision of data, sound, and new ways to think of the absence of “origins” – no one owns the forest and the sounds that it inspires. It’s all a mirror of what is possible in our hyper interconnected world. Like the roots of the trees underneath the forest. It is all connected, and we all contribute to the elements that make it evolve. All is connected.
The Album and DVD by DJ Spooky
on Thirsty Ear
SPECIAL GUESTS INCLUDE THURSTON MOORE OF SONIC YOUTH, THE JUNGLE BROTHERS, SUSSAN DEYHIM, THE COUP, ROB SWIFT (THE XECUTIONERS), SPOKEN WORD EMCEE MIKE LADD, AND MANY OTHERS
The Secret Song– isnʼt really an album: itʼs a manifesto about the place of history in our modern collaged, scrambled, sampla-delic to the core, mega info overloaded digital culture. With references stretching from Thorstein Veblenʼs “Theory of the Leisure Class” and John Maynard Keynes classic in the field of economics “The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money” over to hip hopʼs relationship to psychoanalysis and a la Edward Bernayʼs concept of the “manufacture of consent” – DJ Spookyʼs new album is a groundbreaking meditation on hip hop and electronic musics relationship to philosophy, economics, and the science of sound in a world where the steady drumbeat of the financial meltdown has made music the last refuge of young people with less and less time and money. DJ Spookyʼs peer group of artists like DJ Krush, DJ Shadow, Cut Chemist, RJD2, DJ Logic, Amon Tobin, and Coldcut have all played with the idea of concept albums. With “The Secret Song” DJ Spooky looks to bands like Nine Inch Nails, and Radiohead for inspiration. As DJ Spooky likes to say “people – it’s ALL about economics.” Dig?
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//WALL STREET JOURNAL: SPOOKY ECONOMICS
By Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky
ピース・シンフォニー
Inspired by the everyday stories of the last remaining survivors of the nuclear bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky has created Peace Symphony: 8 Stories.
The idea behind this work came from Miller’s personal interaction with eight Hibakusha (被爆者 Atomic bomb survivors) on Peace Boat’s 83rd Global Voyage (Peace Boat is an international non-governmental and non-profit organization that works to promote peace, human rights, equal and sustainable development and respect for the environment) where Miller recently served as a guest educator and artist-in-residence.
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