Exercising the ghost in the machine: Golan Levin and DJ Spooky

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At stake were the grand unanswerable questions: at what point does sound become music? When is sampling creative? Has it all be done before or is there anything new under the sun? What is art?

Levin doesn't call what he does music. It's "new media performance", even though there are sometimes singers, often melody and even possibly rhythm. Miller creates his performances through sampling and mixing the music and speech of others.

Levin is frustrated with the cutting edge. "Music's at a dead-end right now," he says dismissively. "People will still always need music that involves recognisable tunes and that they can move their ass to, but in terms of art music and avant-garde music, I don't find anything particularly interesting happening. For example in the digital musics category of Ars Electronica, the winning selection is a bunch of people who basically dork around in the studio and make interesting sounds and then release them on a CD, you know, music concrete or that expanse of painful or unpainful industrial sounds and so forth and this has been done for twenty or thirty years, coming out of [Brian] Eno and all that."

For Miller, what's interesting is new music distribution and how it changes the music that is made. "I think so much of what's going on in music culture is a reflection of this whole peer-to-peer issue, the networks, MP3 file exchanges," he says.

So, what's the future of music look like?

Floccus - image from interactive work by Levin
PM: I think it's going to go a lot more to multimedia, to full-scale environments where people set a situation up and people move into it and see what's going on. Right now, the whole peer-to-peer culture thing, the way that people are getting into mixing and downloading, file sharing and fileswapping, all that is just about dissolution of the normal compositional process. I think everyone's going to be a DJ, and already is, moving to that direction, when you're selecting and picking files, and figuring out what's going on, that's mixing you know. That's now the archetypal underlying architecture for 21st century creativity, so I'd say within the next 10 years it's just going to become more and more expansionary and I'm curious to see that.

I definitely think right now it's got to be about visual stuff, it's got to be about expanding your archive, always having intriguing sounds going on and as it gets digital, that's absorbing the same evolutionary dynamic that was going on with turntables but just again because it's digital it'll be about networks, it'll be about dispersion.

I did a show a couple of years ago called "absolute DJ" where we had people in different continents, one in Australia, one in South Africa, one in Greece, one in I think Greenland and one person in Canada, and I presented the work at the Monterey Jazz festival as a new kind of jazz where everybody was giving me elements over the Internet and I was mixing them and sampling them and splicing and dicing but also presenting the work as a seamless musical experience for the audience in Montreal. Each DJ had a different screen so I was DJing the mixes of seven other DJs, sending the signals from all those different continental locations. You know, that's a fun thing, but it's also conceptual and it's also rhythmically accessible as a normal DJ thing. If I did something like that at Ars Electronica I would figure out a different angle.

GL: What did it mean to you to mix things like that, that are live coming in from all those people? What do you think the process means or what do you think the product means?

PM: If you look back at the origin of the root of the word jazz, it comes from a French verb jazzer which means to have a conversation and it's about just having an enriched dialogue with other fellow artists, and really exchanging and really seeing what's going on.

GL: Across great distances, for example.

PM: Yeah. And I like the idea of this whole McLuhanesque global village situation but I also think we need to move past that to the idea of real sense of community requires interaction and implies respect for different compositional strategies and styles, you know.

GL: These folks in these other locations, what kind of materials they sending to you? Are they sending you the traditional folk songs of their country or are they sending you McDonald's jingles?

PM: No, they were sending electronica, they were sending house music. Some people were sending weird electro-acoustic squiggly sounds. The palette was very open.

GL: Don't you think that as globalisation progresses, though, the sounds are sounding the same everywhere you go?

PM: Sure. I can usually tell what software people are using by the edits in the tracks, by the various frequencies that the tracks highlight, stuff like that.

GL: What do you think about that?

PM: It's an intense flatlining and people need to be a lot more creative to stand out.

GL: But creative how? With the same software? With their own software?

PM: All aspects.

GL: Is it about materials and tools that's levelling them out or is it about culture and ambition?

PM: Both. I mean, the culture's flatlined and the software's flatline and the next wave [is] going to be about this idea of personalisation and specialisation but at the same time being able to expand your vocabulary and continuously absorb different things. Right now it's a strange world, because this is the famous William Gibson phrase, "the future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed", which is a nice little way of thinking about many futures and many presents and many pasts going at the same time.

Three days ago I was in Canada on a panel with a German woman who had gone to Afghanistan to record Afghani Taliban holy songs, and she was playing all these examples of this... you know the thing is they banned music, in a certain way, you could only play specific hymns and you know holy chants, and her as a German woman going there was pretty wild, so they recorded material from there, they just wanted to document it, almost as an ethnological statement and so for her to have that as a statement was fascinating, but at the same time I was like "can I borrow that CD for a second?" so I started noodling around with it and seeing what I could come up with, you know, it was funny, because the audience was like, well, if I was in Afghanistan I guess I'd be stoned to death at this point, but hey we're in Canada in the middle of the jazz festival so let's see what we can do. Does that imply disrespect?

GL: Here's the thing. I was reading an interesting interview with Michael Brook who worked a few years ago with Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan before he passed away. And you know, Michael Brook is coming out of this whole Brian Eno tradition and worked with Eno and so forth and has a great reputation as an ambient musician, and so naturally through Real World or whatever he gets this deal with Ali Khan and they do an album together, and he takes Ali's vocals and cuts them up and puts them together over a beat or whatever and then two months later Ali Khan goes back and listens to it and says, you know, "What went wrong? What did you do, why'd this happen?" and Michael Brook said "What do you mean? What's wrong with it?" and apparently these are holy songs, and you're not supposed to interrupt the vocal, that's like the one rule of this kind of music, and here is you know, Ali Khan, this amazing virtuoso saying to Michael Brook "How dare you?" and Michael Brook felt really chastised.

PM: He should have called. <ALL LAUGH> And asked over the phone or something.

GL: Yeah.

Who's who. BRIAN ENO: ground-breaking artist, musician and producer. Produced early experimental music and video installations in the 1970s. Credited with coining the term "ambient music". CHRISTIAN MARCLAY: visual artist and composer. One of the first musicians to use a turntable as an instrument in its own right outside of hip-hop. JOHN OSWALD: composer and collaborative choreographer. Coined the term "plunderphonics" to describe his practice of making new music from existing recordings. JOHN ZORN: composer and improvisational saxophonist. Mixes jazz with various other styles, including grindcore and klezmer, and experiments with postmodern experimental music with strict formal rules for improvisation. JEFF KOONS: Avant-garde artist whose work celebrates the superficiality of consumption. MATTHEW BARNEY: media artist, sculptor and photographer best known for the film series The Cremaster Cycle. WILLIAM LATHAM: computer artist whose work experiments with generative 3D art through raytracing amid a formal ruleset. ROMAN VEROSTKO: algorithmic artist. Creates a computerised set of instructions for a mechanical artist that then produces abstract works using traditional art materials such as paint and paper. MANFRED MOHR: early generative artist. Works with computer algorithms and four, five and six dimensional "hypercubes". IANNIS XENAKIS: experimental composer. Worked with stochastic mathematics as part of his formal composition techniques. MICHAEL BROOK: guitarist and producer who worked with Pakistani singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan on his album Night Sky.

PM: It depends on who you work with. I mean if it's a file and I'm just noodling around, it's a whole different ball game. If it's a specific collaboration and you're working with somebody, you need to respect what they're doing then it seems pretty obvious, but I'm talking about kids growing up downloading files and just running with it and seeing what they're doing.

GL: And it's all equal.

PM: Yeah, it's all equal.

RB: Is this the natural evolution from something like [early 90s collaborative outfit] Res Rocket Surfer?

PM: Sure, it's expanded by a quantum leap because it's millions of people.

GL: But this point's been made ten years ago by folks like John Oswald.

PM: They were doing it as an esoteric sound art statement, like Christian Marclay and I think that they didn't have the vocabulary that they could expand outside of that.

GL: You mean a vocabulary that can't address teenagers?

PM: Well, expand out to anybody else outside of that very specific vernacular. They were limited to me by that style of their dialect by that artsy...

RB: Which is now a question about elitism and music, and whether the avant garde must be elite in order to be the avant garde.

GL: But I mean if it's contemporary with John Oswald and Christian and so on, and the work of Public Enemy for example with their cut-up and the same anything goes attitude...

PM: And John Zorn and all those guys. I like elements of it. John Zorn I'm not so big a fan of, Christian I feel coolly neutral about, John Oswald I like his work.

RB: You were talking about the audience as DJ. What happens then, when it's collaborative with the audience? What's the role of the artist then?

GL: For me the issue is not about music at that point, it's about interaction and interactivity and what that term means when you have 100 people or 1000 people collaborating on something, this is a mess and it's a very challenging situation and managing group scenarios like that is a really interesting interaction design problem.

My own personal work, I'm open to whatever it ends up sounding like. Like with the mobile phone concert I had no preconceptions about what it was going to end up sounding like and the act of doing it was actually a research question, which is to say, what happens when you have this kind of sound? What's the result? The kind of interactivities that emerge from a situation like that really vary very widely. First of all your phone itself is something you have a very deep personal connection to. Your phone rings: even in the concert scenario you feel, "Whoa, my phone's ringing, that's me that they're trying to reach," even though there's no one at the other end but my dialling system.

PM: That's pure social engineering. I don't have a relationship with my cellphone, I have a deep relationship with the company. The phone will change every year and a half.

GL: I heard contrary reports from some people in the audience, where for example...

PM: That's sad.

GL: One person described it like this: if you're ever in a car accident where someone rear-ends you, you don't say to yourself, "Hey, that person hit my car", you say, "Hey, that person hit me". One of the reports I got from the mobile phone concert was somebody saying, you know, even though they knew intellectually there was no one at the other end of the phone when their phone rang that they were "Oh, there's a call for me" and this was a real psychological event that was iterated thousands of times over this audience of several hundred people of someone saying 'Oh, there's a phone call for me. Oh, it's just this concert."

PM: Okay, so let's apply this idea to when you hear a familiar sound or familiar voices, we're looking at the idea of the uncanny. The human body and the human voice have been disincarnate for most of the last century and these are free-floating variables of representation of self and then how we deal with that psychologically, I mean that's kind of what the core issues are, if we're looking at code equals life and you're playing with the voices of people... the whole Spooky motif was meant to be kind of a pun on the uncanny, if you look at what Freud was talking about with unheimlich for example, there's just so many different layers of how human context is what's important right now. It's such an important thing for artists to kind of engage that and think about and try and create new ways of understanding this kind of stuff and art should be about expanding consciousness and your understanding of what's going on in your environment.

A Jungian pause. The mobile phone rings.

RB: We've seen a lot of discussion about generative art, and the whole question about whether that's art...

GL: The whole generative thing, man, it's sooo 1970s.

PM: I'm pretty tired of it.

Generative art by Verostko
GL: I mean, it's totally like back to computer art in the 70s with like this generative thing, it's like William Latham and Roman Verostko and Manfred Mohr. I mean, they're great but that's like 70s. I mean, I totally respect Manfred and Roman for keeping at it because they're artists and they're still programming in their 70s, and I hope that I'm so lucky when I'm in my mid-70s and I'm maybe still programming but in context of the current dialogue I'm amazed to see so much generative art and people saying "Look, when you hit a button, you get another variation!"

RB: So what happens when you combine that with the collaborative audience, an unknown variable put into the generative algorithm?

GL: Well, that's interactivity. Once they're involved in some way... when you think generative, it's usually all about the algorithm.

RB: Right, so this isn't purely generative. Is that then more interesting?

PM: I tend to think of it as much more of a social entropy that kicks in because there's too many voices and it turns to cacophony rather than euphony and I'm fascinated with the idea of polyphony: many, many rhythms and styles being able to operate simultaneously and interact with one another and again that's a Deleuzian issue of multiple timeframes operating within the same context. But the voice and the body are very specific markers of humanity but all of that is now post-human, whenever I hear James Earl Jones's voice, you know saying "This is AT&T", I have flashes of Darth Vader, he was also one of the main characters in Kunta Kinte...

GL: His voice has become a brand. And you can apply it to whatever you want.

PM: Right, so what does that mean for him as a human being? He's a signifier that's really specifically become attached to various economic, social and advertising issues just as a branding of himself. Warhol was an artist that really dealt with these motifs in a fascinating way and if you look at people like Jeff Koons and his celebration of celebrity by becoming one or Matthew Barney's idea of biological surrealism, with his whole idea of himself as a kind of expanded theatre. He's got all these mutation and DNA issues going and like sexual motifs...

GL: ...and castration...

PM: Yeah, castration issues, or you know, but it's still about permutations of the self and that's what most of the nineties high art that's been celebrated in the conventional art world's all about. But in the digital art world and in the sound art scene, we're doing that on almost a daily basis, that most of these conventional art world types, they can't hang with that because it's too fast, our whole scene changes really quickly.

RB: So if the nineties has all been about obsession with self, what is the subject, what is the issue that is being explored in the musics of the naughties?

PM: I can't think of an overriding motif. What do you think?

GL: I think it's too fragmented. Everything's fragmented. In fact maybe that's it.

RB: Fragmentation?

PM: Too much of everything, all the time, everywhere.

GL: Yeah, anything goes in the software world. Anything fair.

RB: Baudrillardian exstasis?

PM: Some days I just wake up and look at a wall of records and then realise that's all so obsolete because I have a 30GB iPod now, I don't need to carry the bulky records around, I don't even need to think about them, they're just files, and different ways of organising the files. And that's a nice feeling but there's also a strange sense of loss, the nostalgia of the record cover sleeve, of the graphic design...

GL: Or even the nostalgia of when you could look forward to an artist releasing an album.

PM: I just don't feel it any more. I don't know what entices me about pop culture except for like the seduction of like watching a racehorse, like who's number one, who's five, who's four, who's three?

GL: And you care about that?

PM: Not any more.

GL: At the Saturn, you were like, "Ooh look, my friends are number one".

PM: Sure, I was happy to see that, I was happy for them as people. That means they're making money and having a good time. And getting a lot of hot girls at their shows. And that's a good thing! [laughs] If it was people I didn't know, I wouldn't care about it.

GL: It seems very ephemeral to me. I mean, like, they're number one today and tomorrow someone else will be number one.

PM: Sure, that's the racehorse thing.

GL: And who decides? Does the popular vote decide?

PM: You decide.

RB: And music as commodity, what does that mean to you?

GL: It's going to take a little while for artists to find a new way of making money but the record companies have to go down.

PM: You're going to see a lot more live shows. Bands just touring constantly, like forever. Like the eternal Grateful Dead tour.

RB: Music as a service rather than a good.

GL: No, I think you'll find a good, but they'll be alternative kinds of goods.

PM: Limited edition DVDs. Weird multimedia stuff that gives a special environment. Stuff that takes you out of the normal mix scene.

GL: Products, knick knacks, instruments. I mean, look at Maywa Denki. These are the Japanese guys who did a whole series of mechatronic instruments to perform with and among other things they're basically very good hardware and software designers so they make these products and they make one of a kinds and they also work with toy companies in Japan to produce multiples that they then sell. And frankly they have some really cool equipment.

Maywa Denki

RB: What really interests me is that the Maywa Denki package as a performance with the incredible Japanese irony added in that is not apparent or not emergent from the products.

GL: I think they represent a really important mode of artistic practice right now. They design their own instruments, they perform on them and they also make those little plastic knickknacks, they're making a fine income and they're rock stars in Japan. Their schtick is that they pretend to be a company. What they bill as a concert -- what ultimately is a concert, in their narrative is a product demonstration. They dress up in these kinds of worker costumes and then they perform on these instruments and say, this is the following product.

(For anyone who had trouble understanding any of that, click here for enlightenment. Ed.)

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An Iraqi Christmas

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None of that seems to have worried Nouri, who usually pulls in about $3 a tree. "Sales always pick up after December 20," he said.
 "That's when the rush starts."
 There's a word for people like Nouri Dawood. They're optimists.
 
Iraqis purchase Christmas trees - Islamic NewsThe world's united media and all your neighbours might be telling you things are going from bad to worse - that if you haven't been bombed by the New Year, you'll certainly be blown up by Easter.
 But some of us keep on doing business anyway. Don't get angry, and don't get even.
 Just keep on doing what you've always done. This Christmas, I like to think of that optimistic Iraqi shaking a sap-stained hand on another $3 deal - may there be many more of them.

There's optimism of a different kind running through the words of Steve Earle. The country singer and anti-death penalty crusader provoked outrage, you may remember, just over two years ago with a song about John Walker Lindh.
 Lindh is a convert to radical Islam who was sentenced to 20 years' jail in 2002 for aiding the Taliban in Afghanistan. Earle's song "John Walker's Blues" dared to put a sympathetic slant on the Walker Lindh life story.
 Political singers like Steve Earle do this kind of thing almost without thinking. The outrage they provoke is deliberately sought.
 And how could lines like "they're dragging me back with my head in a sack/to the land of the infidel" not provoke outrage?
 Provocation, though, is the point. I don't believe Earle actually sat down early in 2002 and said to himself: "Now how can I dream up the most outrageous possible set of words for my next song, just to stir people up and get them to hate me?"
 But the effect was much the same. Like a $3 tree, this was the deal Steve Earle was looking for.
 Why do this? Obviously, there's a significant difference in political outlook between performers of Earle's ilk and the general American population.
 Look at the relative line-ups of entertainment celebrities in the Bush and Kerry camps during the recent Presidential election campaign. While Kerry's message drew busloads of A-list entertainers, Bush's drew what really counted: votes.
 Some may suspect that what drives the contrariness of an Earle is a kind of reverse snobbery. The people think one way, so I'll prove myself better than them by camping out with the beautiful people and singing protest songs.
 There's no doubt this kind of class elitism plays its role in sustaining the political Left wing of the music business. But there's more here, I believe, than simple snobbery.
 Earle also represents a utopian thread in American culture - a strand of spiritual optimism with its roots, obscure but deep, lying somewhere in the psychology of the sectarian past.
  The ideas are non-denominational, but deeply religious. This is why Earle can produce a song like John Walker's Blues, which incorporates the Islamic shahada ("There is no God but Allah ...") but also claims to be about "just an American boy."
 To see Steve Earle's message clearer, look beyond the lyrical high-wire act that is John Walker's Blues. The real punchline of Earle's controversial 2002 album, Jerusalem, comes in the title track, which sounds as good a Christmas song as any.
 Earle laments the bad TV news from the Middle East ("Death machines were rumblin' cross the ground where Jesus stood,") but then refuses to accept the inevitability of this conflict.
 He affirms his nation's religious roots ("I don't remember learning how to hate in Sunday school,") and professes a belief that one day, all hatred and bloodshed will be purged from the human race.
 The song's chorus provides an optimistic underpinning to all of Steve Earle's politics: "I believe that one day all the children of Abraham/ Will lay down their swords forever in Jerusalem."
 It's a nice thought - though sooner than the Second Coming, it's difficult to foresee exactly when this happy scenario will eventuate.
 People will always disagree with Steve Earle - myself included. But the more I hear his music, the more I think the source of disagreement is less about politics than spirituality.
 The optimism that motivates a singer to want to build a better world is good. In Earle's case, it often leads him to write powerful songs about those caught on the wrong side of the law - and on death row.
  But optimism goes off-beam when it leads us to believe the world can be cured of all its ills. That brings us to the brink of fanaticism - and that, after all, is what today's wars are really all about.
 He'll never make a hit record, but Nouri Darwood gets my vote over Steve Earle. At the end of the day, it's better for a man to have sap on his hands than in his head.
 
Steve Earle's latest album is called "The Revolution Starts ... Now."

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