Wikipedia:School and university projects/Open Source Culture/Rhythm Science

Rhythm Science

By Paul D. Miller AKA Dj Spooky That Subliminal Kid

Cambridge, MIT Press, 2004

Rhythm Science is a perfect vehicle to understand the art of DJ Spooky. It is not a book about deejay culture, rather it is a pastiche of reflections and diaries, philosophy and subculture. The life of Paul Miller is seen through the mass of DJ Spooky. The practice of djing is told as a choice of life. Records are the means to rebuild memory, to recombine history. The art of turntables is “the art of being memory permutation machines”. DJ Spooky’s music is an opportunity to born again. Composition of abstracts and their recontextualization is proof of the presence of an only divine viewpoint, that of the dj. As DJ Spooky says “The sample is an interrogation of the meaning we see in a song, of its emotional content lifted away like a shroud from a dead corpse, only to be refitted and placed on another body”. Besides, text benefits from the added value of a graphic cloth following the sense of DJ Spooky’s philosophy. From the cover, through pages, reading is accompanied by the virtual circular presence of a disc we find real just at the end of the book: it is DJ Spooky’ science’s rhythm, it is Rhythm Science.