“I want to have people really look at turntables, Apps, and classical music from the whole viewpoint of sampling as a composition,” says the multifaceted artist. “My friends and colleagues like DJ Qbert or experimental composers like Steve Reich who wrote the introduction to my last book with MIT Press, Sound Unbound, are big inspirations for what I’m looking at in DJ culture. I think Silo is presenting some really interesting approaches to new music, and that is what I celebrate. I took a studio to Antarctica and to the Arctic Circle to remix climate data as a kind of meditation on how DJs can look at climate change. These are some of the most beautiful and fragile places on Earth, and I guess I wanted to just pay homage to that.”
A keen explorer who was named one of National Geographic’s Emerging Explorers of 2014, Miller says his trip to Antarctica allowed him to discover in a new way both the fragility and wonder of humanity. “Human beings are so fragile,” he asserts. “Our bodies are 90% water and our interior temperature 37.0 °C (98.6 °F) is a kind of internal balance between interior and exterior. Antarctica or the Arctic – in this kind of place you could fall in the water and die in about two minutes. Just stop and think about what two minutes is. It’s much shorter than your average track. You feel that kind of fragility when you are in remote places, and it puts me in awe of how humanity can handle so many extremes of the planet. It just puts things in perspective.”
Miller has a hunger to create and philosophise through various artistic expressions. He’s best-known as a master turntablist who writes compositions for turntables, but his artistic realm is far-reaching. Even as one of the most innovative electronic and experimental hip-hop artists, Miller is a true sound artist and much more. Miller has released numerous albums – including the classics, Songs of a Dead Dreamer (1996), Riddim Warfare (1998), and Drums of Death (2005); written three books, Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture, Rhythm Science and The Book of Ice; made a film, Rebirth of a Nation; toured his multimedia performance piece, Terra Nova: Sinfonia Antarctica; exhibited work at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, Germany, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago; edits Origin Magazine, and teaches Music Mediated Art as a Professor at the European Graduate School.
Miller’s Rebirth of a Nation was a film and DJ mix that critiqued DW Griffith’s deeply racist, problematic film, The Birth of a Nation. The police killings of Michael Brown in Ferguson and Eric Garner in New York City reinforce the urgent need to address race relations, not just in the US, but everywhere.
“Racial politics is truly the place we need to understand better if we can have a more dynamic situation in the 21st century’s hyper-connected, hyper-volatile environment,” says Miller. “I love magazines like Adbusters or online “dark web” gatherings like Defcon or Chaos Hackers conventions because they really show the underbelly of what’s going on. I wish there was an equivalent for racial politics that could be hacked as well.”
Miller has often noted that the philosophy behind his work as a sound artist is to try to make sense of the disorienting and overloaded world that we inhabit. Is this still the philosophy behind his work as a sound artist and how well can he now make sense of our disorienting and overloaded world?
“I always like to think of sound as a navigation tool,” says Miller. “I’ve been doing a magazine for a while and have now written and collaborated in over seven books in the last couple of years. Nothing takes as much energy as facing the basic entropy of modern life as sitting down and creating a new piece of art or music or writing. They are mediums that reflect how we explore the world, and ya know, we know nothing. We are just projecting whatever fictions serve our current state of civilisation. It’s just a story we can tell ourselves. And yes, it can all be changed. A lot of musicians see things in a very one dimensional way. I like to be irreverent and skip all rules.”
How have Miller’s perceptions of art and of himself as an artist evolved over the years? “I have less and less patience,” states Miller. “It’s something I am trying to work on. The state of the world is totally fucked up, and it really doesn’t need to be that way. People are so passive. It really makes you feel that radical change is necessary to just wake people up. I’ve evolved over the years to just think about approaching people from a more positive viewpoint. I’ve always been political and my music is all about abstraction as a tool for getting people to really try to explore how much possibility is out in the world.”
BY CHRISTINE LAN
