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RB: So talking about DJing for a second and the whole pastiche of sampling and how that functions, is that at a dead end too? Where next from that?
PM: I think it’s going to go a lot more to multimedia, to full scale environments where people set a situation up and people move into it and see what’s going on. Right now, the whole peer-to-peer culture thing, the way that people are getting into mixing and downloading, file sharing and fileswapping, all that is just about dissolution of the normal compositional process. I mean the term’s “genius moves to senius” with people making collaborative situations and events. I think everyone’s going to be a DJ, and already is, moving to that direction, when you’re selecting and picking files, and figuring out what’s going on, that’s mixing you know. That’s now the archetypal underlying architecture for 21st century creativity, so I’d say within the next 10 years it’s just going to become more and more expansionary and I’m curious to see that. I definitely think right now it’s got to be about visual stuff, it’s got to be about expanding your archive, always having intriguing sounds going on and as it gets digital, that’s absorbing the same evolutionary dynamic that was going on with turntables but just again because it’s digital it’ll be about networks, it’ll be about dispersion. I did a show a couple of years ago called absolute DJ where we had people in different continents, one in Australia, one in South Africa, one in Greece, one in I think Greenland and one person in Canada, and I presented the work at the Monterey Jazz festival as a new kind of jazz where everybody was giving me elements over the Internet and I was mixing them and sampling them and splicing and dicing but also presenting the work as a seamless musical experience for the audience in Montreal. Each DJ had a different screen so I was DJing the mixes of seven other DJs, sending the signals from all those different continental locations. You know, that’s a fun thing, but it’s also conceptual and it’s also rhythmically accessible as a normal DJ thing. If I did something like that at Ars Electronica I would figure out a different angle.
GL: What did it mean to you to mix things like that, that are live coming in from all those people? What do you think the process means or what do you think the product means?
PM: I think of it much more about... If you look back at the origin of the root of the word jazz, it comes from a french verb jazzer which means to have a conversation and it’s about just having an enriched dialogue with other fellow artists, and really exchanging and really seeing what’s going on.
GL: Across great distances, for example.
PM: Yeah. And I like the idea of this whole McLuhanesque global village situation but I also think we need to move past that to the idea of real sense of community requires interaction and implies respect for different compositional strategies and styles, you know.
GL: These folks in these other locations, what kind of materials they sending to you? Are they sending you the traditional folk songs of their country or are they sending you McDonald’s jingles?
PM: No, they were sending electronica, they were sending house music. Some people were sending weird electro-acoustic squiggly sounds. The palette was very open.
GL: Don’t you think that as globalisation progresses, though, the sounds are sounding the same everywhere you go?
PM: Sure. I can usually tell what software people are using by the edits in the tracks, by the various frequencies that the tracks highlight, stuff like that.
GL: What do you think about that?
RB: Do you see that as a problem?
PM: It’s an intense flatlining and people need to be a lot more creative to stand out.
GL: But creative how? With the same software? With their own software?
PM: All aspects.
GL: Is it about materials and tools that’s levelling them out or is it about culture and ambition?
PM: Both. I mean, the culture’s flatlined and the software’s flatline and the next wave that we were talking about about where you think it’s going it’s going to be about this idea of personalisation and specialisation but at the same time being able to exapnd your vocabulary and continuously absorb different things. That’s the DJ situation is constant constant transformation but right now it’s a strange world, because this is the famous William Gibson phrase, “the future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed”, which is a nice little way of thinking about many futures and many presents and many pasts going at the same time. Three days ago I was in Canada on a panel with a German woman who had gone to Afghanistan to record Afghani Taliban holy songs, and she was playing all these examples of this... you know the thing is they banned music, in a certain way, you could only play specific hymns and you know holy chants, and her as a German woman going there was pretty wild, so they recorded material from there, they just wanted to document it, almost as an ethnological statement and so for her to have that as a statement was fascinating, but at the same time I was like “can I borrow that CD for a second?” so I started noodling around with it and seeing what I could come up with, you know, it was funny, because the audience was like, well, if I was in Afghanistan I guess I’d be stoned to death at this point, but hey we’re in Canada in the middle of the jazz festival so let’s see what we can do. Does that imply disrespect? Does that imply...
GL: Here’s the thing. I was reading an interesting interview with Michael Brook who worked a few years ago with Ali Akbar Khan before he passed away. And you know, Michael Brook is coming out of this whole Brian Eno tradition and worked with Eno and so forth and has a great reputation as an ambient musicial, and so naturally through real world or whatever he gets this deal with Ali Akhbar Khan and they do an album together, and he takes Ali’s vocals and cuts them up and puts them together over a beat or whatever and then two months later Ali Akbar Khan goes back and listens to it and says, you know, “What went wrong? What did you do, why’d this happen?” and Michael Brook said “What do you mean? What’s wrong with it?” and apparently these are holy songs, and to cut them up is tremendously <LAUGH> and you’re not supposed to interrupt the vocal, that’s like the one rule of this kind of music, and here is you know, Ali Akbar Khan, this amazing virtuoso saying to Michael Brook “How dare you?” and Michael Brook felt really chastised.
PM: He should have called. <ALL LAUGH> And asked over the phone or something.
GL: Yeah.
PM: It depends on who you work with. I mean if it’s a file and I’m just noodling around, it’s a whole different ball game. If it’s a specific collaboration and you’re working with somebody, you need to respect what they’re doing then it seems pretty obvious, but I’m talking about kids growing up downloading files and just running with it and seeing what they’re doing.
GL: And it’s all equal.
PM: Yeah, it’s all equal.
GL: It’s all equal.