In remixing the complete Sub Rosa catalogue, DJ Spooky treats the acoustic wave spectrum as the froth of a culture of information. Music, that most immaterial of all art forms, presently enjoys a certain ubiquity. Pervading as it does an undifferentiated space, all of its forms coexist, and rather than endeavor to re-establish an aesthetic or otherwise illusory order, DJ Spooky furthers the obscenity and feeling of vertigo.
Rather than haunt us with shadows, then, it's a sort of ultra-reality that plagues the scene. Antonin Artaud is resurrected and put on a non-stop conveyor belt of cyclical hums, juddering metal guitar, and the incessant squeal of a manhandled violin. Similarly, Marcel Duchamp's "The Creative Act" is swamped with bowed wires of muddied timbre while a guitar gobbles at them with jellied waves of feedback.
During the life-span of the work, the infusions manage to range from abstract washes to hocketing redolent of musicians of the African rainforests. The odd piece, here and there, might very well stand out — Susan Deyhim's 'The Spilled Cup', for instance, filled out by a Moog burbling like a beached porpoise and what sounds like a semi-comatose swarm of bees — but owing to this veritable orgy of activity, every detail is reinforced by every other detail, and a general indifference and equality carries the day. As a result, in a sense, all of the tracks are inevitably successful, like those pictures you take of your friends and post on the web for the world to see.
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