There are two ways to approach DJ Spooky’s work: with your ears or your eyes. Via
the ocular route, you need a solid background in semiotic theory and French
deconstructionalism as well as a hardy attention span in order to parse massively
dense musicological manifestos. You need to be as widely read in critical
communication theory as you are in the history of jazz, hip-hop, illbient, and
experimental music. With your ears, on the other hand, you just need to be
receptive — open to the possibilities of recontextualization and remix theory. You
need to be ready to accept that what you hear may be simultaneously familiar and
new. It can be tough; I’ll be the first to admit that reading DJ Spooky’s written
word causes me mental dropouts. However, as an experimentalist curious as to the
potential offered by digital de- and re-construction, his work is fascinating.
His current experiment — Celestial Mechanix: The Blue Series Mastermix — is a
two-fold examination of Thirsty Ear’s Blue Series back catalogue. The first CD is
remixes, DJ Spooky-style; the second is a thirty-five track master mix with the
eleven remixes of the first disc worked into the continuous mix. Electronic music
in the 21st century is a mutable construct wherein live instrumentation can be
sliced, diced, stretched, chopped and distorted beyond the physical ability of the
performer. The art of the sampler — of the mash-up, of recontextualization —
allows the musical experimentalist to seamlessly blend one musical idea into
another. If they are good, then we, as listeners, don’t realize just how much of a
Frankenstein’s monster is the music we are hearing. DJ Spooky’s Celestial Mechanix
allows us to hear these Frankenstein construction in an isolated environment and
then as part of a police line-up where we are asked to single it out from the
others.
Yeah, it’s tougher than it sounds. If you are intimately familiar with all of the
original material from Thirsty Ear’s Blues Series, it would be easy to discern the
seams. But such knowledge only increases your enjoyment of what DJ Spooky has done
because you will be more cognizant of how he’s made new music by folding the old
into itself. That’s the real appeal of Celestial Mechanix: on one level, it’s a
smooth retrospective of the progressive electronic-tinged jazz of the sub-label; on
another, it’s a masterful exploration of the possibility of sonic
recontextualization.
Celestial Mechanix: The Blue Series Mastermix is out now on Thirsty Ear.
