Hey people - I'm just coming up for air after several weeks generating material for my Arctic Rhythms/Ice Music project with Cape Farewell. Over the course of the last couple of weeks I've blogged from Treehugger.com and www.capefarewell.com. There's video footage, high definition recordings etc on their site and www.djspooky.com

We've visited semi abandoned Soviet era Arctic bases, checked out polar bears (something you don't want to do very closely), measured oceanic acidification and salinity levels, and checked out atmospheric readings from a wide variety of satellites. All of that will go into the compositions that have been generated for the project. Next year marks the 100th anniversary of the Norwegian Polar Explorer Roald Amundsen's discovery of the South Pole, and there will be a wide variety of global celebrations of Polar culture. There will be choreography, contemporary classical music, and Arctic and Antarctic concerts! Think Arctic and Antarctic symphony...

I've walked across creaking glaciers, been surveyed by Arctic foxes, and had tea on the side of mountains of ice. It's a long story, but all I can say is that I'm glad to be back in Longyearbyen in the far north of Norway. It's the first taste of civilization I've had in a couple of weeks. I get back to NY in a couple of days for 3 events coming up next week:

1) The opening of the Vimeo Film Festival - me and Lawrence Lessig of Harvard University's Berkman Law Center are having a dialog about intellectual property and digital media //MORE

2) I have a BIG event at The Guggenheim Oct 9, 10 //MORE

and 3) I have an opening of some of my artwork generated by my Nauru and Vanuatu island project at Google's corporate headquarters in NY. This is with Chris Ranier, who does quite a few covers of National Geographic - the exhibition, Ancient Stories with Modern Technology, will open at Google's NY headquarters on October 28, 6 - 8 pm, 75 Ninth Ave, 2nd Floor. RSVP required. www.theprojectroom.org

All of these will be cool events, and quite well attended. I highly recommend that you RSVP early, 'cause they will definitely sell out. I've been unloading out equipment from the ship (computers, cameras, recording stuff). Kinda tired... gonna grab some hot chocolate... I hope to catch you at one of these events!

I hope to see you at one of the upcoming events!
in peace,
Paul aka DJ Spooky



Arctic Notes:
Arctic Rhythms: Ice Music: 9/26/2010

"Whosoever will be an enquirer into Nature let him resort to a conservatory of Snow or Ice." ~ Francis Bacon

OK – so here I am in the High Arctic with Cape Farewell, creating a series of drafts for several compositions that I’ll eventually turn into several string quartet pieces, a gallery show, and a symphony out of the experience. I’m looking at how to collect impressions of the landscape, distill the material into something that I can use in the compositions (visually, sonically, and for writing as well), and arrive at a point where sound and art can create portraits of what’s going on up here. The next couple of steps are now: how does this all come together? Dj culture is all about collage – sampling, splicing, dicing etc etc everything is part of the mix, and there’s no boundaries between sound sources. When you apply the same logic to the environment, there’s a lot of room for mapping sampling techniques to the environment itself. The world is a very, very, very big record. We just have to learn how to play it.

Borges once wrote in his essay "The Fearful Sphere of Pascal” that "it may be that universal history is the history of the different intonations given a handful of metaphors.” I tend to think that this Cape Farewell excursion has been a journey into the realm of the hypothetical, a world where fictions clash with the realities of the everyday world, with really mixed results – that’s what makes this trip

Let me give you an example or two:

As we pull into Krossfjorden, to survey Fjortende Julibreen Glacier, I’ve been thinking more and more about the patterns holding this fragile ecosystem together. This morning when I started writing, I took a break and went outside to take a series of photographs of the glacier from several angles. Whenever you look at a glacier, you’re seeing geolgic time: every glacier moves at certain tempos, and the way they sculpt the land beneath – all of this is the way the planet moves in different rhythms and tempos. At one point while I was looking at some of the striations in the glacier a huge “boom-crack!!!” came out of the glacier – with no visible change in the ice facing me.

Fjord after fjord we’ve looked at has been a site of glaciers vanishing – they move in patterns that are difficult to see, but you can feel the sense of disappearance. I look at the whole process as a starting point for some of the hip-hop and electronic music, and the classical music compositions I’m working on for the Arctic Rhythms project. Ice is a geological clock. It measures the transformation of the earth’s atmosphere, and the overall temperature of the planet. In the last century, small temperature changes created an environment of radical ecological change, all this has accumulated, and we’re being presented with a bill none of us thought would be due for a long, long, long time. So what does this have to do with looking at a glacier?

Glaciers are the planets measurement of change. Ice measures the tempo of the change. Glaciers in retreat are like rivers in reverse, running straight back into the landscape, they’re a beautiful criss-crossing of layers, diaphanous veils of material that seem like clouds frozen into new forms of cumulus. What I love when I look at stuff like the Fjortende Julibreen Glacier is the layers of time, the grooves carved into the ice and land on a massive scale. The ice’s micro-terracing is a kind of granulated, fractal infinity of sharply cut surfaces, molded forms shaped by wind, water, and the passage of time. Think of them as clouds as a kind of wave-form that’s been flattened, made prismatic blue and white, with streaks of earth materials run through. Looking at the glacier’s retreat, you can see how the movement of the ice is occurring in two directions – forwards and backwards - it’s kind of like looking at a time lapse photograph in reverse, the glacier goes straight back to its source. The glaciers we’ve seen aren’t just melting and retreating, they’re falling apart from the bottom up. Rivers form underneath the glacier, and the currents weaken the foundation of the ice that has formed above, until the point that “moulins”, naturally formed funnels that let water from the top drain down into the ice sheet below, drill through layer and layer of the glacier on their way down, carrying water at different temperatures to the bottom of the glacier where they cause more and more melting at the glacier’s sole. The “boom-crack” I heard was from what scientists call “basal sliding” – the ice repositions itself and creates massive sonic booms that reverberate throughout the glacier at every level. The ice grinds against the soil beneath itself, causing more friction, causing more melting, saltwater from the sea invades the ice tongues underneath the “roots” of the glacier, causing the ice to break off. Thus you get a kind of sonic “echo-system” that mirrors the way the rest of the planet’s systems move in and out of “homeostasis.” Think of it all as a kind of meshwork – the planet isn’t improvising, it’s creating dynamic tensions between complex living systems in a planetary choreography: a balancing act between physical, chemical, biological, environmental, and human components. Arctic ice – I try to contextualize everything in the material I look at – is a kind of global text, and all the material that makes up the vanishing place that I saw today, it is all part of the problem, just as much as it’s all part of the solution.

The sound pieces I’m composing for the “Arctic Rhythms: Ice Music” project are essentially acoustic portraits in motion. They’re focused on pattern recognition in flux: the carbon pollution we’re pumping into the atmosphere is no geologic anomaly – the whole climate change scenario is loosely resonant with the way we produce this particular material, but everything in this world is connected, so one thing affects another. In music you could call it “polyphony” of many tones and forms – but in another paradox of our situation, the carbon dust causes global dimming as well – it blocks sunlight from getting into the planet’s atmosphere - that becomes noise. If I was planning on doing a music composition today, I’d have to think about this kind of material, and try to turn it into sound sketches. I guess that’s what I’m doing here and now in the Arctic.

Arctic Rhythms: Ice Music
Beginning

Meta: Macro-Systems
Interstellar space, close up to the earth on the Arctic, then turning globe – various nations that participate in the Arctic Treaty System, then close up to:

Then flying over glaciers, ice cracks, water, ice islandsSeals, whales, weather patterns, my personal images (water, boat footage moving through ice fields), GPS coordinates, archival charts showing the changes in Arctic ice-mass, parts per million of various dust particles in the air, ocean currents

Macro-Micro: Ecosytems - history
Historic footage, scientific footage, (molecular diagrams, ice crystals), earth’s magnetosphere, aurora borealis, historic texts projected from Emerson, Whitman, Thoreau

End
Storms, Antarctic Convergence, Arctic polar pack-ice melts, katabatic wind, water sounds, satellite footage, zoom out away from the ice back to the beginning footage in reverse.

www.djspooky.com/art/terra_nova.php

The Arctic compositions I’ve been working on are based on a place where Nature is a commons, owned by no one. My first Antarctic symphony project was an “acoustic portrait” of Antarctica as a place that has no government, and is under a kind of “Terra Nullius” context – the Arctic Rhythms project will take that path and go further along. So many countries claim the Arctic. I want to make music a way to reflect on this, and move beyond it. Today, concepts like “land” and “territory” are becoming more and more abstract – the internet has radically changed the way we relate to both concepts. The “commons” in our information economy based global culture is just as intimately linked to climate change in the Arctic and Antarctica as anywhere else in the world. In “Terra Nullius” – the legal concept of land considered “ownerless” property is usually free to be owned – how do we portray that in music? Under international law, no country owns the North Pole, or the region of the Arctic Ocean surrounding it. The five surrounding states – Russia, The United States, Canada, Norway and Denmark, have “exclusive economic zones” but under the United Nations Convention on the Law of The Sea, there’s a lot of possibilities that the Arctic could be opened for exploitation in a way that Antarctica never can. That’s what these compositions will look at – how music can reflect some of the basic realities facing us in this time of massive change and they’re a signal, like the glaciers I watched this morning, that we need to really think of everything as being more connected than we realize.

Check out the expedition blog on www.capefarewell.com/2010expedition/

DJ Spooky at Monaco Glacier
Video by Matt Wainwright

In this interview with David Buckland, founder and director of Cape Farewell, Paul shares his thoughts on his work, on the inspiration he finds in the Arctic, his interest in the difference between nature and urban culture, and his upcoming multimedia concert in Toronto for Nuit Blanche on October 2 that will incorporate footage and sounds collected in the Arctic.

This interview was recorded near the Monaco Glacier, somewhere north of the 79th parallel, on the upper deck of the Noorderlicht. The 100-year-old schooner is the floating home to the scientists and artists of the Cape Farewell project as we move down the west coast of Spitsbergen on our three-week venture.

[see top of page]

Arctic Notes:
Circles within Circles: 9/24/2010

“The regions around the North Pole – well, yes, the North Pole itself – had attracted me from childhood, and here I was at the South Pole. Can anything more topsy-turvy be imagined?”
Roald Amundsen, The South Pole (1912)

The Ice Museum

Today we visited Monaco Glacier, a stunning slice of several million years of time wrapped around the Liefdefjorden, a fjord that faces the northern expanses of the island of Spitsbergen. Words are hard to put to precise use for this kind of landscape. The fjord is filled with shards of ice that have been forming mini-icebergs that will probably melt within a couple of months, nothing heavy… But the basic idea of being able to look at each iceberg as a snapshot of a process in-formation is a good start for this particular spot for me. I’ve been thinking about how collage and specific patterns of disruption have made a musical landscape out of the Arctic for me. I’ve been a hunter gatherer of experiences and moments, fleeting impressions that leave a trace of a moment, and that moment is what I need to figure out how to translate into compositions.
All of this brings me to the walk I had today through ice fields and over sastrugi, and on glacier fields.

You never see the same iceberg twice. Each one is a unique configuration, a condensation of time and space melded into a water based solid structure that is always changing.

Huge walls of ice march from the landmass into the sea waters facing the island, they stretch out and speak in a language like music, with no words but with undeniable meaning. And like music, the vista is a language we don’t have to learn to be profoundly moved – we who do not use our environment but appreciate, admire, and even worship it. The landscape is a response to Heraclitus’s famous remark about not being able to step in the same stream twice – but moving with geological calm, stretched out over millions of years. I started today listening to Arvo Part, Gorecki’s “Symphony of Sorrowful Things” and stuff like Moondog’s “Bird’s Lament” – not the happiest stuff, but the way things are proceeding in the remote north where we’re located has left an indelible impression of how geologic time is unfolding. We are the dreamers of a planetary dream – human beings somehow have to turn off the nightmare of how we try to organize the planet to flesh out our dreams. Again, and again. The music I’m working on while I’m walking and thinking about landscape is a post-minimal situatuation: how to translate the volume and density of this place, the immense expanses, the way the eye is fooled by the optical qualities of the ice, or the way the ear is fooled by the echoes of our footsteps as we walk through these empty, primordial spaces. I’m still not sure… There’s something about walking up the side of a huge mountain, or looking at the effects of climate warming on a massive structure like a glacier that’s made of literally millions and millions of tons of ice and water, all moving and sculpting the land that it moves over. Something that huge being reduced to rubble and dust by… carbon dioxide… you stand back and watch the earth crack and the permafrost crumble beneath your feet. The main thing is to carry this information back and to translate it into something that people can relate to. Simply put, I’m translating as much of the experience as possible, but there is so much emotional information I feel when I look at these landscapes, that the time to digest the situation will take a lot longer than I expected. Still thinking about it all as I finish this blog post. Above me as I write, the crumbling ice, stretched and covered with “seracs” – the castellated masses of the Monaco Glacier that faces us, wind swirls and eddies in the freezing wind.  “Sastrugi” are the swirls and eddies of the snow that the wind sculpts into sculptures that are more beautiful than most of the things that one sees in any museum. The main thing right here, right now is to figure out how to translate it into a composition. Several sketches are ready! More in a bit.

Check out the expedition blog on www.capefarewell.com/2010expedition/

Arctic Notes:
The Ends of The Earth: 9/17/2010

"When a man journeys into a far country, he must be prepared to forget many of the things he has learned, and to acquire such customs as are inherited with existence in the new land; he must abandon the old ideals and the old gods, and oftimes he must reverse the very codes by which his conduct has hitherto been shaped."
~ Jack London, In a Far Country

Today we moved through Murchison Fjord and landed in Kinnvika Bay, and explored Kinnvika Base, a group of wooden huts constructed by a collaboration of Swedish and Finnish scientists who studied the Vestfonna Glacier, one of the largest glaciers outside of Greenland in this region. The huts were built during the second International Polar Year in the late 1950’s – they reflect the form that was needed at the time – they embody the pragmatics of northern architecture: form and function flow from the desperate need that early explorers had to create structures quickly, and inexpensively. The ruins of their vehicles are rusting in front of the buildings, and I’m reminded over and over again that almost every aspect of life in this region is an uneasy tension between monuments that need to be preserved, versus the actual fact that nature in this region entombs almost everything it touches – it’s like nature itself has become a kind of abstract mausoleum. It sometimes feels like the whole situation is exploring a huge dead temple, that has a discrete life of its own. We went for a several hours walk on one of the islands to the glacier and visited the empty base that has occupied the island since the second International Polar Years back in the mid 20th century. The rusting vehicles remind me of some fragment of a JG Ballard novel or something out of Soviet Science fiction by the likes of Boris and Arkady Strugatsky and Stanislaw Lem.

As always, geography and landscape overhang almost every aspect of being here in this region, but the accumulated debris of several centuries, and the technologies and methods of exploring the landscape that each era used, these all linger in the present moment. It’s as if each island, each landscape is a collage of different eras, and with techniques like ice-core drilling, or archeology, you encounter what Heinrich Schliemann must have faced when he “discovered” the ancient city of Troy in the late 19th century. What later archeologists found was that he had dusted away all the microbes that were needed to enhance the study of the city’s material traces, plus not only had he found one city, but that the city itself was a group of cities that had been built on top of one another.

My sleep patterns haven’t been great so far: I go to bed around 2am, and get up around 6am, write for a little while, then take a nap or read for about an hour. The experience of living on a compact ship has really changed my work process, and I realize that my creativity comes from hanging out (DJ culture is all about the hang out!!!), but I really need time to withdraw and contemplate, and that means silence and working with my own material in my own time. The good thing about being with a lot of people on a ship is that you have access to the minds of the scientists, but the drawback is that there’s not enough time to absorb the situation. I tend to compose better through the “rear-view mirror” and not in “real-time.” I’ve been working on a couple more sketches based on the dreams I’ve had – the slapping of the water against the hull, the smell of the bread baking in the morning, the anchor chain rattling through the ship as we pull anchor and get ready for another day of movement. It all means that this group of “Ice Music” compositions is a kind of archeology of the everyday for me, each moment fractures into a timeline of many possibilities – time is elastic in this kind of environment. I’ve been listening to David Tudor’s “Rainforest” (a simulation of a rainforest with electronic music), Duke Ellington’s “Harlem Tone Poem,” Charles Ive’s “Central Park in the Dark” and his “Tone Roads.” That kind of thing combined with Herbert Ponting’s photographs of the Terra Nova expedition or Edward Burtansky’s photographs of the north of Canada… And it all lingers in my mind as a response to these kinds of compositions that focus on the environment (urban and natural) – it’s still unclear what it is to think of the sonic landscape of the High Arctic as a palette for new compositions. Which direction to take? Metaphor or direct musique concrete? The scientific rendition of the hexagonal structure of ice? The unique form of a snowflake? I’m still grappling with which direction to take, but so far, the sketches have been pretty solid.

I’m still thinking of the wind howling across the empty base of Kinnvika, thinking about the ice microbes preserving the history of the region in the ice, and I wonder: am I erasing the history of the place as I walk?

Check out the expedition blog on www.capefarewell.com/2010expedition/



Arctic Notes:

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Today I write to you from the Noorderlicht after we’ve left a deeply barren island that’s pretty much the most northern part of our journey. The island reminded me of a scene from the 1817 novel “Frankenstein” where the monster has chased its creator all the way to the Arctic circle, and murders him. In a Promethean gesture, we’re left with a sense that artificial life, the Arctic North, and the way stories are told all are revised in the epic tale of Shelley’s fevered imagination.

Between 1816 and 1817, while she was sojourning in the Swiss Alps, Mary Shelley wrote her classic book of fiction – “Frankenstein.” What interests me today after we’ve visited several fjords, and walked on the ice island of Chermsideoya between the Nordkappsundet sound near Beverlysundet is how eerily the region echoes a place that Shelley never visited, but was able to describe with immaculate accuracy. Throughout the day we’ve experienced extreme wind – solid gusts that are strong enough to hold you up if you lean into them, and wet enough to leave you feeling a damp ambient cold beneath your clothes. The weather was pretty much a solid wall of grey with gusts of wind, but basically the overall vibe was like a combination of a palette of subtle shades of grey sprinkled with white dust and invisible currents of wind dusting the stone gray rock filled beaches. There were no even surfaces, and very few places to escape the scouring wind. The meaning of place and geography, of metaphors that I’ve been looking for with sound in mind were shattered by the arrival of a symbol from the bloody history of the 20th century.

At one point we found a swastika left by a previous expedition German soldiers during World War II who left a group of stones in the form of the dreaded symbol of Hinduism that the Third Reich reversed and made into the Swastika that we all know from the war. What made it so strange and surreal to see such a symbol of hate left on a remote beach of a desolate and bleak landscape is the eerie fact that the soldiers had left the symbol – a group of stones piled by hand – and that nothing had changed the landscape for over 60 years. Nearby, another group of stones had been laid by a Swedish ship that had navigated through the Beverlysundet in the 1890’s. It too had been left intact by the fierce wind. The beach was a kind of amber drop, that had captured a world war, a lost vessel, and a group of artists all within the space of a couple of feet. It left a strange impression on me: abnegation, death, an imaginary oasis in the wasteland of the deep north. Remember the words of the monster after the story’s infamous ending. I can only imagine the monster saying this from one of the peaks of Chermsideoya as he does in Shelley’s book: “I shall quit your vessel on the ice raft which brought me thither and shall seek the most northern extremity of the globe; I shall collect my funeral pile and consume to ashes this miserable frame, that its remains may afford no light to any curious and unhallowed wretch who may create such another as I have been. I shall die.”
It reminds me of the end of Blade Runner where the main Replicant states simply “time to die.”

When you see a bleak place like Chermsideoya, one can only imagine the thoughts of the other travelers who have somehow made it there. The bleak landscape asks a question that I’m thinking about as part of my compositions for this project. One that I’m not yet quite able to answer. I guess that’s it for the moment. I finished more notes for a score for today, but it’s unfinished, and it’s almost midnite here, so… gotta dream and think of more parables for the Ice Music scenario.

Check out the expedition blog on www.capefarewell.com/2010expedition/



Arctic Notes: 9/14/10

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Yesterday we visited Magdelene Fjord and checked out Gullybryn Glacier. It was a peaceful situation, made even more poignant by the fact that a polar bear left its prints in the sand facing our ship. It checked us out in the nite as we were anchored in the fjord. It’s eerie to think that we were being stalked, but hey… that’s what polar bears do. They can smell other animals’ scents up to about 20 kilometers away and focus like a laser beam on their prey. I guess the polar bear felt it would be a bit too difficult to get to our ship, so it just watched from shore. They can kill a human being with one blow, and rip you to shreds within a couple of minutes… But anyway, I digress…

Today and yesterday, several compositional ideas came to mind. I spent the bulk of 9/15/10 sitting and thinking about pattern recognition and its relationship to how environmental issues are so ambiguously and deeply complex. The basic theme of so much music that has focused on environmental issues is usually based on a metaphor – John Cage’s composition from 1948, “In A Landscape,” Debussy’s “La Mer” or Mahler’s “Das Lied Von Der Erde, 'Song of the Earth'”, Handel’s “Water Music,” or even Yoko Ono’s song “Walking on Thin Ice” – they were all responses to metaphors – a composer’s distillation of the impressions left by their muse when they thought of the topic at hand. Recently, composers like Vincent Ho’s “Arctic Symphony” or David Rothenberg’s “Thousand Mile Song” concept that plays with recordings of whales that are the equivalent of musique concrete, John Luther Adams “Earth and The Great Weather: A Sonic Geography of the Arctic: The Place Where You Go To Listen” or Ryuichi Sakamoto’s recordings made when he was with Cape Farewell’s last voyage to the Arctic, that were entitled “Out of Noise” – all of these are materials for me to think about during this journey. Because these composers have already explored certain themes, I want to avoid what they’ve already done. So I look at stuff like James Gleick’s “Complexity” and Jules Verne’s science fiction about the North and South Poles, or biographical material like Tété Michel-Kpomassie’s “An African in Greenland.” Triangulating from that kind of expressionistic work, I look at oceanic currents, atmospheric pressure masses, ice pack density and other phenomena for inspiration.

At the moment, what I’m thinking about is ocean currents – columns, sheets of temperature differentials etc - and their relationship to the deep complexity of how energy moves around the planet and the accumulated effects that economists like to call “externalities” on the environment. The layers of deep complexity in Oceanography rival almost anything in quantum physics, or information theory, but have an immediate impact on almost every aspect of modern life. When I think about some of the explorers from the “Heroic Age” of Arctic and “Antarctic” exploration that inspired my “Terra Nova” project and my current development of my “Ice Music” project, the names Nansen, the Duke of Abruzzo, Andreé, Baldwin, Fiala, Borchgrevink, Bellinghausen, Wellman, Filchner, Shirase, Mawson, Cook, Peary, Sverrup, Henson, and others resonate for me in a way that is a good starting point, but I want to figure out some of the core issues involving the patterns holding this transformation of the Earth’s environment together.

What geologists are now calling the “Anthropocene” era (our modern era), isn’t the only era with intense carbon dioxide. The Creatceous period, from 65 million years ago that ended when an asteroid struck our planet and ended one of the highest concentrations of carbon dioxide, is usually considered the ne plus ultra of carbon dioxide in terms of parts per million in the atmosphere. OK, OK, I get that. But the basic idea here is that I’m looking at pattern recognition, and climate change literacy and starting points for my compositions on this trip. Yes, Johnannes Kepler’s essay “Six Sides of a Snowflake” is a big inspiration – looking at the almost algorithmic process of how snowflakes are generated in the atmosphere, where they achieve an almost unique structure for each individual snowflake, leads you straight to the idea that these processes can have a mathematical origin. That’s what I’m thinking about at the moment. How do you translate these phenomena into compositional elements? Each day I’ve generated a seed of a composition that I’ll expand when I get back to NY, but yesterday was particularly fruitful. Today, the ship came to Muffin Island. Translating the movement of the ice against the prow of the ship, and creating material (patterns, patterns, patterns!!!) will be the task of the next couple of days for me. Last year, working with the choreography group, Ekko Collective aka The League of Imaginary Scientists (http://www.ekkoproject.net/site.php?language=uk), at the National Gallery of Denmark (Statens Museum for Kunst) in Copenhagen November 11, 12, 13th of 2009 I came up with several compositions that mirrored the slow motion/time lapse of a glacier – they move in a time frame of millions of years compressed into large waveforms. The dancers moved in a wave that reflected the density of geological time, with the electronic music patterns. At The Statens Museum for Kunst, I presented a mini series of electronic music compositions that were human interpretations of geological phenomena. From this trip with Cape Farewell, I’ll probably have enough material to do several more choreographic works with them as well. More tomorrow!!

And check out the expedition blog on http://www.capefarewell.com/2010expedition/