DJ SPOOKY THAT SUBLIMINAL KID'S SONGS OF A DEAD DREAMER

You probably remember this. It’s a warm summer evening. The sun has barely disappeared over the horizon but the heat is not taking a break yet: there’s still all the stored energy in every objects that needs to be radiated. You’re lying on a picnic table outside and it is busily heating your vertebraes. Somewehere close by in the parking lot, some kids in a car are listening to music: you know it’s hip hop because you can’t make out the rap, but the signature beats are leaving their imprint in your ears. About a hundred feet from where you’re lying, the local arena is opened: some sporting summer event is happening inside; you can hear the cheers that come and go, like the crowd is breathing in unison. There’s some cheerful organ music also, but you only get the echoes of it and it sounds somewhat dreary and ominous. Further still, an open space church is celebrating the evening mass: the sound system amplifies the litany that a transient priest has come to recite. You take it all in and it fits beautifully together, a perfect summer evening weaved into a tapestry of quantum sound strings.

If you don’t remember, maybe all you need is a sitting with Paul D. Miller AKA Dj Spooky That Subliminal Kid’s SONGS OF A DEAD DREAMER. Should shake those atavic memories awake.

This album has a special place in the evolution of ambient music. It’s one of the few landmark albums everyone should know about. It sits besides The KLF’s Chill Out, but I’ll reserve that one for another day. There’s Brian Eno: a lot of him is required listening. And there’s Dj Spooky.

Warp back to 1996. Nobody saw that coming. Washington DC is far from the cultural capitals of the world, and whatever happens in the music scene gets drowned by whatever happens on the national level: it is the presidential city par excellence, after all. So who’s listening to some obscure intellectual dj, who reads William Burroughs and Thomas Ligotti?

And then this album comes out. I remember the shock when I heard it the first time: back then, I was a huge fan of CBC’s Brave New Waves. Brent Bambury knew all about music, and he knew all about the music I liked, so I listened to his show with the blind trust of the faithful. One thing Bambury did that I especially loved was that he would always play a complete electronic album around 3 am. He’d present the artist at length, would expound on the meaning of the liner notes, and then let the music do the talking for an hour. Radio the way it should be done. So that night, he presented Paul D. Miller, and there was a lot of liner notes to read from (did I mention this dj is one heavily intellectual dude?). And then the intro to SONGS OF A DEAD DREAMER came on. I had never heard anything like that music: a strange mix of hip hop beats and snippets of more than a few genres, all heavily layered with studio effects, giving a sense of place to the whole, like you heard the reverb of an alien hall in some higher dimension. And the titles, suitably science-fictionesque for my pleasure, a dj after my heart (The Vengeance Of Galaxy 5, Hologrammic Dub, Anansi Abstrakt, all titles that would make great science fiction novels in their own right).

And the crowning moment of the album, the moment you know you will wait for anxiously every time you will listen to this album again: The Terran Invasion of Alpha Cantauri Year 2794. Another science fiction novel waiting to be written. But also a magnificent track: sounds vaguely reminiscent of a train station, heaving and humming slowly; suddenly, in the distance, Satie’s Gymnopédies costumed in the dubbest bass you can get an amp to sound. And then the beat starts. Bliss follows. Truly the high point of an otherwise plenty remarkable album.

I remember reading once about the american composer Charles Ives, that as a child he loved nothing more than to go on top of the church bell tower and listen to his father’s marching band, as other competing marching bands were going up and down nearby streets. The resulting cacophony was quite certainly formative to the musical ear of the composer. Listening to Paul D. Miller, we get the impression that he grew up in an appartment that was sandwiched between competing record stores, and that his very peculiar sound is the result. How lucky for us!