Subliminal advertising
DJ Spooky tries to make a point and remain on point
The Echo Lounge, Jan. 17 — Appearing with drummer Mike Clark of Herbie Hancock/ Headhunters fame, New York “illbient” producer Paul D. Miller, aka DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid, presented both a showcase and a show of mixed media and mixed messages to promote his album Optometry, part of Thirsty Ear Recordings’ Blue Series Continuum of nu_bop explorations.
The first to take the crowded stage was Psyche Origami, the local trio of MC Wyzsztyk, DJ Synthesis and DJ Dainja, whose dialect reactivates Native Tongues styles. The group’s jazzy, relaxed interchange smoothly transitioned into the head-bobbing records — LL Cool J, Big Daddy Kane, A Tribe Called Quest — that buffered the set changes. The jams’ friction-burned grooves offered a warm welcome to latecomers.
After the hometowners came a homecoming of sorts, as the ATL-born, boogie-down-Bronx-bred Djinji Brown took the stage to promote his album, Sirround Sound. The son of Georgia-born avant-garde saxophonist Marion Brown, Djinji segued his own tracks with occasional John Coltrane bits while repping strictly in rhyme. Bobbing and weaving like a tribal shaman caught in traffic, Djinji played the kind of multi-ethnic, polyrhythmic Nuyorican soul that in the right hands can be both spiritual and spirited. Unfortunately, he set a precedent for the rest of the night by trying a little too hard to make a point between the bass dips and flute trips, salsa and samples, drum ‘n’ bass and dub. He seemed too concerned with revealing his roots than with making sure listeners could firmly put their root down.
Still, any aversion to Djinji’s indulgences was easily commutable compared to those of headliner DJ Spooky. Admittedly, reactions toward Spooky will vary depending on one’s ability to block out his pretensions, but as soon as he initiated his introduction to what he called the “science of seeing,” his Achilles heel — an inability to speak to an audience without speaking down to it — quickly came into focus.
With Mike Clark settled behind the drum kit, Spooky assumed the role of “one-man jam band,” using prerecorded tracks, turntables, processors and an electric upright bass as accompaniment. The results were at times head bobbing, other times head scratching. While on record, Optometry is a commendable melange whose repeated motifs blur the line between live and laptop, those lines were more tripwires in a live setting. Spooky equates everything he does to “jazz,” a type of open-source message system. But a lot of the time, his habit of putting concept and context before the audience is like asking two modems with different protocols to connect.
While Clark brought the funk as he played along to elements from the original Optometry, Spooky was merely funky, throwing in trumpets drunk with despair and bass lines that hobbled haphazardly. Spooky picked frequencies from the air like a radio hemorrhaging signal bleeds. The program came in strong at times, but too often it was cut short by heavy-handed re-contextualizing and abrupt channel changes.
Interspersed among the onstage dialogue were Statements (capital S for Spooky). A “No Blood for Oil” stance was commendable. But it was hard to take seriously Spooky’s brandishing an American flag whose 50 stars were corporate logos when his own show was so heavily branded. Spooky’s logo graced a banner hung from the stage as well as several Ben Stokes-directed videos screened while he performed a set of incessantly freeform turntable scratching.
As images of beat-downs, battles and burlesque played on the video screen, the mood kept cycling — from phaser-swept dub mixes to a Djinji Brown freestyle encore, to Mike Clark’s exit as Spooky finally put aside the “artistic” showcase for a more pleasing drum ‘n’ bass DJ set.
But in projecting this visual essay — an adaptation of Guy Debord’s 1967 radical text, The Society of the Spectacle — Spooky only served to highlight the weakest element of his show. Spectacle seems to demand the undermining of passive observation, while Spooky’s set never broke beyond the traditional performer/audience relationship. Worse, one could argue that Spooky’s ambiguously “revolutionary” art just feeds the capitalist order. Because whether you extend Spooky’s art the benefit of the doubt or doubt its benefit, it is first and foremost a spectacle.