DJ Spooky at the Tate as part of Futurist Fridays

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Freakaholic

not just an addiction
DJ Spooky at the Tate - now "Extreme Minimalism"

First, Im not in England and will miss this. :(

http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/event...ofagreatcityaccompaniedlivebydjspooky5660.htm

Berlin, Symphony of a Great City (1927) was last accompanied live by DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid in 2001. The film, directed by German avant-garde film pioneer Walther Ruttmann (1887–1941), presents a typical day in Berlin from dawn until midnight.

The cinematography is by Relmar Kuntze, Robert Baberske and Laszlo Shaffer, and most of the film is said to have been shot using cameras concealed in suitcases. Many of the sequences are metaphorical, for example a crowd scene is juxtaposed with a shot of cattle, and dancers in a chorus line imitate a speeding train. As in his purely abstract films, Ruttmann presents the energy of movement and shapes which reflect the modern city in motion.


Anyone see it the last time he did this? Anyone gonna see it this time?

Also, I read his book a while back and loved it. Anyone else?
 
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Raw Patrick

Well-known member
The film sounds interesting, like a German equivalent to Dziga Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera.

DJ Spooky is a fucking joke though--has there ever been a bigger disparity between someone's percieved view of what they are doing and what they are actually doing? The best that can be said for him is that possibly he's not as bad as Scanner.
 
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vache

Well-known member
Raw Patrick said:
The film sounds interesting, like a German equivalent to Dziga Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera.

DJ Spooky is a fucking joke though has there ever been a bigger disparity between someone's percieved view of what they are doing and what they are actually doing? The best that can be said for him is that possibly he's not as bad as Scanner.
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Amen. For someone who spends a lot of energy waxing about theory/practice, the irony is his total disconnect between the two.

However, curators seem to heart him big time. What does that say? :p
 
M

mistersloane

heavy heavy monster sound
that whole season - spooky, tuesday weld, courtney pine, carsten - oh. It just makes me want to cry. I wish curators were cooler.
 
L

Logos

Ghosts of my life
I'm going to go see the re-hang next week sometime but the programme over the weekend is tedious in the extreme (with odd exception).
 
P

polystyle

Well-known member
DJ Spooky - ugh , the worst of NYC and that's right , a joke
'Lame since 19 ___' ,
running on fumes from years ago
early on he released other people's music with his name on it .
BS 'Art' friendly , cuddly dippy non threatening - right for museum's i guess .
The not so er Subliminal guy' , to know him is to ... be down on him.
Such ire only reserved for the really irksome and 'that Sub' fill the bill

Movie sounds fine though ...
 
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F

Freakaholic

not just an addiction
Wow, I had no idea there were such strong Anti-Spooky senitments.

While i do find that his music can get droll, boring, and tedious at times, i cant just as quickly write it off. Hes done some great stuff that, while not danceable, still has merits.

Hoewever, he keeps promising a full tour for his band from Drums of Death, which I really want to see, but it hasnt materialized.

I have some older 10" of his that are loud, ambient, drone music that i think is great. Plus, some of his tracks with Kool Keith were great as well. Sure, he has a tendency to think hes doing a lot more than he is, and to overintellectualize his place in the musical world, but i think that comes form living in an art house in NY.
 
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Ness Rowlah

Norwegian Wood
Logos said:
but the programme over the weekend is tedious in the extreme (with odd exception).
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oh dear - I was rather looking forward to putting my arse on a pillow on Monday night and hearing Monolake and Alva Noto for some "extreme minimalism" (how extreme can you get?)
 
Z

zhao

there are no accidents
sounds terrible and should be avoided.

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but Alva Noto? his set should be worth while
 
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gek-opel

entered apprentice
Yeah the minimalist electronics set on the Monday looks pretty decent- Ryoji Ikeda, Alva Noto, Monolake... visuals etc in the turbine hall... I'll be attending this one... As far as how extreme minimalism can get--- have you heard Ikeda's "Dataplex" album released earlier this year? Symphonic structure, built out of cut up strands of data, arranged into funky as fuck minimal techno/at times almost SNDesque, but if anything LESS fat, more stripped back, but intricate...

I can't believe DJ Spooky is still going... he's just pretension and out of date sonics surely??
 
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mistersloane

heavy heavy monster sound
Lol @ stelfox.
Tate 'modern'? ahahahahahaha

My vote would be for everyone to turn up with a ghettoblaster and play 'Ha' by Juvenile on a loop through all of the sets.
I really liked Spooky til I saw him live, but I still quite like having an idea of an artist who is better in theory than in practice, he's kindof a living embodiment of what he talks about.
 
D

Dubquixote

Submariner
Let me be the sole defender of Spooky.

Songs of a Dead Dreamer was a lovely album and I thought (at the time at least) that it came close to articulating in sound what he was, however pretensiously, talking about in the liner notes. Truthfully I haven't really kept up with what he's been up to since then, and haven't pulled that record out in a long time, but I still rate it highly among the Wordsound / Electric Ladyland / Axiom projects at the time which introduced a noisy, imperfect, post-industrial, intellectualized element into the trip hop landscape.
 
V

vache

Well-known member
Ness Rowlah said:
oh dear - I was rather looking forward to putting my arse on a pillow on Monday night and hearing Monolake and Alva Noto for some "extreme minimalism" (how extreme can you get?)
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Oh, good god. I've seen both these artists live and enjoyed them, but "extreme minimalism"? Why is it that curators and academics have to market any sort of non-canonical project (in the museum sense) like this as though it is some sort of, in the parlance, liminal experience? It's just so middle-class.
 
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gek-opel

entered apprentice
I know Ikeda's repping arts council funding....

But "extreme" seems a bit of a silly (and inappropriate???) term for minimalism... and anyway none of these people are as minimal as the lowercase/new London silence improv lot anyway, so yr right, it is a bit of nonsense hyperbole designed to sell "low art" to the art set (although as I say Ikeda's on an arts council grant, and Alva Noto= Carsten Nicolai, who is noted for his installation art, so it seems pretty unnecessary...)
 
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