Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture

Edited by:
  • Paul D. Miller
aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid MIT Press: 2008. 416 pp (plus CD). $29.95, £17.95 9780262633635 | ISBN: 978-0-2626-3363-5

Not every disc jockey has their first book-jacket blurb penned by Stanford University law professor Lawrence Lessig, the public-intellectual face of copyright reform in the era of digital technology. Nor does every DJ have their second book introduced by Steve Reich, a leading minimalist classical composer. Nor is it common for a DJ to have their first two books published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Press.

Then again, 'DJ' doesn't mean what it used to. No longer just a disembodied radio announcer (think of the iconic and elusive Wolfman Jack in the George Lucas film American Graffiti), the DJ has become a centre-stage cultural figure — performer, composer, remixer, sound artist and activist. DJ Spooky, born Paul D. Miller in Washington DC in 1970, is all of those and more. The experimental musician and producer has applied his mixing techniques to film (reworking D. W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation), to soundtracks (accompanying a 2001 issue of Nest magazine and both of his MIT books), and to the archives of esteemed record labels (the avant-garde label Sub Rosa for his MIT projects, and reggae label Trojan). He has exhibited at the Whitney and Venice contemporary art Biennials, and interacted with artists from Yoko Ono to death-metal drummer Dave Lombardo. A professional audio provocateur, Spooky revels in the twenty-first-century enthusiasm for artistic border-crossing, a phenomenon fuelled by rapid advances in technology that have transformed art and communication.

Investigating the nature of that transformation is the purpose of Spooky's latest book. Sound Unbound is a collection of essays that explores the ways in which our culture is built on sampling. His previous book, Rhythm Science (MIT, 2004), defined sampling as “creating with found objects”. That description makes it easy to connect the dots from the ready-made art installations of Marcel Duchamp to the literary cut-ups of novelist William S. Burroughs, to the tape manipulations of The Beatles to the loop-based music-making that defines hip-hop. Today's media landscape is characterized to an unprecedented degree by cultural appropriation, genre bending, networked collaboration and high-tech craftsmanship.

Edited by Spooky, Sound Unbound's three-dozen essays, interviews and poems by various science, art and cultural commentators explore diverse if interrelated subjects. Bruce Sterling reflects on early technologies that failed to gain the public's support, precedents to the rivalry between VHS and Betamax video formats. In his tour de force The Ecstasy of Influence, originally published in Harper's last year, Jonathan Lethem treads the fuzzy line between plagiarism and originality and then exposes how his essay was built, like a model from a toy construction set, out of other people's words and thoughts. Composers Pierre Boulez and Steve Reich (along with Reich's wife and collaborator, the video artist Beryl Korot) submit to detailed interviews about their creative maturations. Musician Brian Eno contributes a compact, erudite history of bells (taken from the liner notes from his 2003 album, January 07003). Frances Dyson and Douglas Kahn struggle to locate a metaphor for navigating today's digital-media saturation. Erik Davis divines the spiritual roots and metaphysical future of dub music. And Naeem Mohaiemen and Ron Eglash focus on racial implications in rap music and computer circuits.

Disc jockeys such as DJ Spooky epitomize today's trend for sampling and artistic border-crossing. Credit: JASON LAVERIS/WIREIMAGE.COM

Spooky emphasizes how the present bleeds into the future, yet the book is deeply rooted in the past. Jeff E. Winner provides a useful history of Raymond Scott, the composer and electronic innovator. Joseph Lanza shows how 'easy listening' prefigured 'ambient' as a celebration of background music. Ibrahim Quraishi likens ancient Islamic ritual music to modern-day music loops. And in an interview that might be mistaken as extraneous, long-time album-cover artist Alex Steinweiss talks about the packaging of music. Given that compact-disc sales are diminishing more quickly than the sales of music downloads are rising, his reminiscences take on the aura of a requiem.

Clearly applying his DJ skills to editing, Spooky layers seemingly incongruous material and lets the sympathetic overtones register with the reader. As a bricoleur, he is a little light on the mortar that binds the book: aside from a brief introductory essay, few connections are drawn between the chapters. Some bricks are less sturdy than others. An interview with electronic musician Moby has nothing to distinguish it from his countless other interviews. Pointillist, anecdotal texts by musicians Chuck D, Saul Williams and Daniel Bernard Roumain do not reflect their accomplishments in recordings and in concert. And Jaron Lanier, in the book's cranky closing rant, overemphasizes hip-hop's relationship with digital technology and under-acknowledges the impact of MP3 file-sharing on music sales (he suggests that the record industry's decline is caused by today's music being “crummy”).

The absence of biographies for the contributors is strange. It would have helped to learn that Daphne Keller — contributor of perhaps the most clearly articulated essay, describing the US legal system's adjustment (or lack of it) to the digitization of culture — is a product lawyer at Google. It would have been useful to know that Ken Jordan, who writes about digitally induced synaesthesia and co-authors an overview of networked collaborative art with Spooky, is both a founder of the entertainment website http://www.sonicnet.com and an editor of Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality (W. W. Norton, 2001). Readers might have liked to learn that many contributors are musicians — not just Eno, Roumain and Williams, but also Vijay Iyer, Pauline Oliveros and Robin Rimbaud (known as Scanner), among others.

The book's index is especially haphazard. For instance, multiple references to rap group De La Soul and to drum-and-bass act 4 Hero go unindexed, whereas single-instance nods to soundtrack composer Jack Nitzsche and rock band Rush make the cut. The Boulez interview cites Max Mathews, the computer-science legend and namesake of the popular Max/MSP music software program, but he is not in the index because a translator mistakenly rendered his surname as “Mathieu”.

The 45-track CD that accompanies Sound Unbound illustrates and parallels the book's central argument, locating a historical foundation for today's innovations. Explanatory material beyond the song listings would have been appreciated, however. Segues make unforeseen associations, such as when an Erik Satie orchestration blends into a Steve Reich woodwind piece, suggesting a distant precursor to contemporary minimalist composition. The set is heavy on excerpts from avant-garde stalwarts, serving as a primer both on early pioneer composers (Edgard Varèse, Pierre Schaeffer) and on modern figures from the laptop era (Ryoji Ikeda, Carsten Nicolai). Evident in much of the music is how producers such as Spooky and Bill Laswell filter existing material through their own record collections and musical equipment; on several tracks, DJs take archival spoken-word recordings of Marcel Duchamp, Jean Cocteau, Antonin Artaud and others and set them against a groovy back beat.

DJs may have come a long way from the halcyon era of night-hawk broadcasters to the brave new world of mash-up-happy culture vultures, but one thing has remained — successful DJs need to know their audience. Perhaps the audience for MIT's publications expects just a little more rigour, a little more structure and a little more editorial rhythm.