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DJ SPOOKY: Yo, hey, what's up, this is Paul Miller AKA DJ Spooky.
We did an open call for Twitter questions and Facebook questions and so I'm gonna do
a quick response to each one.
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@chris23 wrote Do you see an emerging field of musicians writing architectural composition
and soundtracks to the environment?
I would say absolutely yeah.
There's a whole group of artists and musicians and writers responding to climate change which
is, I think, one of the most pressing issues of our era.
Say, for example, Riochi Sakumoto did a project with Carston Nicholi where Riochi went to
Greenland and was looking at the ice formations there.
There's an Icelandic musician named Turujay Insumset who also—he makes instruments just
out of ice, for example.
Those are really beautiful.
So I'd say, yes, this is just the beginning and I think a lot more people are getting
aware, but online there's a tremendous, tremendous amount of stuff going on and these are just
a couple examples.
Next question.
@tim_sportz says Hey @DJSpooky!
Who are your favorite DJs working today?
Let me give you five because there's just so many going in so many different directions.
I would say Rob Swift from the Executioners.
He's one of the best turntablists scratchers going for a while.
DJ Wordy from Beijing.
He's a Chinese DJ who scratches old like Chinese records.
Both of them are excellent turntablists.
For dub step, I really like Bassnector.
He's done some great work.
That's three.
Four.
Out of some of the kind of—for lack of better word—global bass beats, DJ Diplo is doing
some great work and then for y'know kind of what's happening with kind of soul music meets
hip hop meets y'know rare grooves stuff, QuestLove from the roots.
He's doing some great work as well.
So those are all five radically different DJs playing radically different styles, but
they—I think the common ground is that they use records like kind of an old schools statement
about sampling.
We got one from @BROMMYD.
He says Hey DJ Spooky, what will music sound like 50 years from now?
What about okay's music will seem completely outdated?
50 years is millennia as this time is going.
I think depending on how the Internet has really changed and settled in, which it already
has settled in, we're gonna be seeing a tremendous amount of innovation around live presence
and the way that—the idea that interacting with multimedia enhancing things.
So bands like the Gorillaz, or for that matter, bands in Japan called iduru.
They're actually bands that are just software and people watch them as animation and there's
nobody live at all.
That's already been going on for a while sort of post karaoke.
I'll give you a funny example.
Karaoke means in Japanese if you actually translate it, it just means no orchestra.
And I love the fact that again it's like spooky because it manes people are singing or interacting,
but there's nobody there.
So as we go 50 years from now, I think you'll be seeing people doing music not just from
a technology point of view, but from a folk culture point of view in ways that are very
difficult for us to conceive of right now.
Radiohead did a New Years Eve party from their studio which had millions of people tune into
a live show.
I happened to be in a group of remote islands in the South Pacific y'know but we didn't
have Internet so our experiences were radically different.
I have other friends who DJ using turntable.fm for audiences they've never met.
You never know.
And this is now in 2012, so just 50 years, abstract it to scale and you'll probably be
seeing a lot wilder stuff.
And the last question was from Facebook.
It says, what was your favorite music collaboration?
I'd say my favorite music collaboration from my own stuff was probably when I worked with
Yoko Ono.
She did a series of song projects a while ago and some of that ended up on her album,
Yes, I'm A Witch.
Then for other people's music collaborations, I'm a big fan of Max Roche and Duke Ellington
had a project called Money Jungle which is a really cool album.
Long time ago.
I would say those are probably two of my absolute favorites.
Hey, this is Paul Miller, AKA DJ Spooky, subscribe to THNKR.