DJ Spooky brings his art-music-and-science mashup to JCCC Saturday
I can barely hear Paul D. Miller when he answers his cell phone. When I reach him, he’s in the middle of a mountain hike near Boulder, Colorado, seemingly enveloped by wind.
It shouldn’t be surprising that Miller — known globally as DJ Spooky, that Subliminal Kid — is fielding interviews in the wilderness. The driving force behind Miller’s artistic practice (he’s a DJ, a composer, a multimedia artist and a writer) is nature — specifically, climate change. That issue drove Miller to Antarctica in 2007 and 2008, on two expeditions that resulted in his lauded 2011 book, The Book of Ice, and his 2013 album, Of Water and Ice. And it sent him to the Arctic Circle in 2014; on that trip, sponsored by the Sierra Club, he collected sounds and research for a work called Arctic Rhythms.
Miller performs a version of Arctic Rhythms Saturday at Johnson County Community College, with a string quartet of local Kansas City musicians. “The combination allows you to really think of it as a multimedia epic project,” he tells me.
After our interview, Miller texts me a photo of the scenery where he is walking: a lush and undisturbed mountainside, with snowy peaks in the distance and the hint of a rushing river. It was a long way from the Polsky Theater, but Miller assured me he’d find his way out of the woods.
The Pitch: How did you go about translating the experiences you had in the Arctic into the composed works of Arctic Rhythms?
Miller: Let’s put it this way: If you think about it, I combined science, art and music. That combination really allows everything to overlap — it’s all static. You have to remember that every art piece and every music composition and the patterns of the planet are all being disrupted by climate change. Music is about allowing people to understand pattern and sound, and DJing is just beats, so it all comes together.
Why are the planet’s poles so important to you?
As an artist, I’m always intrigued by the aesthetic that I see around me. Life itself is one of the most beautiful art pieces you can imagine, because the human mind is putting together a sensibility of what it means to be on this planet. Right now, I’m looking up at this crystalline, electric blue sky in Colorado, and that’s a beauty that is hard to capture and display. That’s a beauty you can find in the heart of what it means to be human.
I think ice is just one material that is profoundly mathematical, but at the same time, when you look at an ice crystal and a mountain of ice, there’s this poetry at work and there’s this poetic sensibility, which I love.
You grew up in D.C. Where did your interest in the ice start?
For many years, I’ve been intrigued by art and music and science. I would say the start for me was the relationship between [humans and] the environment and my respect for the environment. That’s something that’s always been a part of my work. One of my favorite spots in D.C. was Rock Creek Park.
We live fast, with an overload of technology. What’s your take on the relationship between modern media consumption and climate change?
Half the battle is getting people to be more aware of what’s happening and capitalizing on any response. People are numb. If you look at the electron cycle going on and Donald Trump and all this crap — it’s breathtaking that someone, in a way, still has a deep sense of numbness. Ultimately, the future of our system and our living is unsustainable. And the problem with the left is that they bombard people with facts, which can be hard to digest. But it’s hard to argue with a storm that just smashed your house. So when you say how can we make things more tangible, I think the answer is in the arts. The arts reach across all aspects of our society, and that gives people the tools to better understand our world.
What message do you want audience members on Saturday to walk away with?
I would say that anything that we can imagine, we can enforce. With climate change, the paradox is that people feel overwhelmed and want to deny that these things are happening, or they want to stick their heads in the sand. But we can combat that with incremental changes, with one response at a time. That’s the way that art allows you to reframe the way anything that you’re involved with is taken in. I believe art is one of the most powerful tools we have to build a relationship to climate change.
