Edited by Paul D. Miller aka Dj Spooky that Subliminal Kid – Sound Unbound, Sampling Digital Music and Culture

Edited by Paul D. Miller aka Dj Spooky that Subliminal Kid

The MIT Press, ISBN 9780262633635, U.S.A, 2008
Music beyond composing. Dj Spooky edits an anthology about “music as one of the most immaterial of artforms” that is worth a careful reading to open one’s mind with real food for thought. “Dj is writing” he stated in his previous book “Rhythm Science” (2004), and the selection of texts in this new one seems to pick up writers dealing with the essence and the role of sound, through a wide range of topics such as muslim influences on hip hop, sampling, plagiarism, improvisation, silence, pioneering electronic music, aesthetic and politics. So among the contributors we find Pauline Oliveros, Manuel DeLanda, Bruce Sterling, Brian Eno, Chuck D, Scanner, Dick Hebdige, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Jaron Lanier and many others, sharing reputation and ideas that deserve attention in the twenty-first century. This heterogeneous remix of theories in printed form is then a thought provoking bumpy road, ready to shake any commercial limbo, and definitively corrupting the fake integrity of music as tracks to pay for and consume. The audio companion is a concept in its own, selecting historical sound documents (some of them remixed by Spooky) from the fabulous SubRosa electronic music archives (SubRosa is also releasing the same cd in a digipack format with an extra seminal poster / map about the whole acoustic wave spectrum in nature that opens endless possibilities for new ideas and experiments). Therefore this music culture anthology is a printed one that fits perfectly in the web era, giving music “creativity” a different and strategical perspective.