Rhythm Science CD

http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/reviews/jx8c

DJ Spooky Rhythm Science Review

Compilation. Released 15 January 2004. Discography information comes from MusicBrainz. You can add or edit information about Rhythm Science at musicbrainz.org.


BBC Review
"The thinking man's Norman Cook embarks on a trip through Sub Rosa's archives and..."

Colin Buttimer 2002-11-20

Do you fancy listening to e.e. cummings declaim against a backdrop of beats mixed down alongside Gertrude Stein set to DJ Wally? Are you waiting to hear Gilles Deleuze ruminating over Brion Gysin's violin laid over Nicholas James Bullen's doomy bass-scapes or Kurt Schwitters mingled with Bill Laswell and Scanner? Then grab your hat and wait no longer because DJ Spooky's been given the keys to the Sub Rosa vaults and here he is with Rhythm Science, Excerpts and Allegories From The Sub Rosa Audio Archive.

Do you experience a shiver of pleasure at the prospect of negotiating such peaks and troughs of high and low culture? Are you recoiling in horror at the sacrilege of such a conceit? Is the result respectful or insulting, ridiculous or sublime? Well, maybe it's a mix of all those, and a manifesto worth assimilating. This musical and sonic mix raises a lot of questions, and for once that's no oxymoron.

Rhythm Science weaves cultural and temporal streams together to create a vivid, shifting tapestry of flow. In so doing he stakes a powerful claim to the democratising powers of the mix. For Spooky the mix form is "...a temporary autonomous zone where any sound can be you. The mix is all encompassing..."

Over the course of thirty three tracks and seventy eight minutes he undertakes an exposition of ebb and flow that surrounds the listener with an ever-circling, ever-mutating procession of character, shapes and rhythms. The range of voices alone make for fascinating listening: Gertrude Stein's "If I Told Him, A Completed Portrait Of Picasso" is a live looping, self-sampling wonder, Apollinaire is almost lost in static and William Burroughs is his irrascible, sage, ever-recognisable self. Some of the cultivated accents heard through the crackle of time convey notes of pathos, others weariness, vitality and so on. Such wonderful voices speak through the medium (sic) of electricity and the DJ.

An oft-levelled criticism aimed at Spooky's output is that his rhetoric has too often outweighed the substance of his musical output.It's an argument that is disappointingly difficult to refute. However with Optometry and now Rhythm Science his work has grown to become challenging and engaging. Coincidence or not, the copious liner notes on this release are remarkably readable, witness: "Stories have always fascinated us, and I guess that's why we use music to communicate so many of the things that we can't seem to get out in other ways..."

Rhythm Science begins and ends with Sussan Deyhim, underlining the circularity of the project. Consider placing this mix alongside Coldcut's seminal Journeys By DJ on your shelf.

Creative Commons Licence This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. If you choose to use this review on your site please link back to this page.

1. 1 Afterimage / Sussan Deyhim - The First Reading / [traditional] - Tibetan Evening Music
2. 2 Poesi / Antonin Artaud - Alienation et magie noire
3. 3 Oscillations (Milky remix)
4. 4 Encode / E. E. cummings - Let's From Some Loud Unworld's Most Rightful Wrong
5. 5 Zeta Reticulli / Gertrude Stein - If I Told Him, A Complete Portrait of Picasso
6. 6 Accidents and Emergencies (instrumental)
7. 7 Oscillations (Vedic's Live Pop remix) / Scanner & Freeform vs. Michael Mayer - Biological Closure / Kurt Schwitters - Ursonate
8. 8 Kali Rising / Tristan Tzara - Pour sompte (Phases, 1949)
9. 9 April (Oval remix) / James Joyce - Anna Livia Plurabelle (Finnegans Wake)
10. 10 April (Oval remix) / Oval vs. Main - SDII Audio Template / David Shea - Satiricon / Marcel Duchamp - À l'infinitif
11. 11 Sanctus
12. 12 Chrysanthemum Haradjani / Meira Asher & Guy Harries - Girl
13. 13 Darba Del Hameni / Jean-Luc Fafchamps - Ground
14. 14 Is It Now?
15. 15 Bitchley's Kow Korn / Hugo Distler - In Principio (Easter Nocturnal Liturgy)
16. 16 Fuse / William S. Burroughs & Martin Olson - The Five Steps
17. 17 Atavistic Endeavor / Scanner - Control Phantom / Merzbow - Lux Automobile (Krokodil Rock mix)
18. 18 Afterimage / Vladimir Maïakovski - Une aventure extraordinaire arrivée À Vladimir Maïakovski, en Été A la datcha
19. 19 D'un Cahier d'Esquisses
20. 20 Memoires d'Un surfeur au bord du désert
21. 21 Bad Day For Wasps
22. 22 Dada Cat
23. 23 Indigo
24. 24 Suite #11 / Bill Laswell & Trilok Gurtu - Nothing
25. 25 Brin / Bill Laswell - Dislocation
26. 26 One Night @ The 1001 / [traditional] - Tibetan Evening Music / Jon Hassell - Map of Dusk
27. 27 With the Flow Against the Current / Gnaoua De Abenb Binizi - Jellaba Titara / Guillaume Apollinaire - Pont mirabeau
28. 28 Again and Again / Brion Gysin - Violin Solo (One Night @ The 1001) / Gilles Deleuze - Selected Readings
29. 29 Drum Break (Machine Chop) / Morton Feldman - Triadic Memories / David Toop - Tricyrtis Latifalia
30. 30 Subnubus
31. 31 Remix of Konstantin Raudive
32. 32 Morning High
33. 33 The Last Reading

Contributors

* DJ-mixed by DJ Spooky

Release Details

* Label

Sub Rosa

* Release Date

Feb 10 2004

* Country

United States

* Format

CD

* Catalogue No.

SR 201 CD

Samples on Amazon

Dee Morris

Contemporary Poetry, Experimental Writing

My writing, teaching, and administrative work converge in a fascination with the constant possibility of intelligent and novel steps within an old framework. The frameworks of my most recent writing are modern and contemporary poetry and poetics, twentieth-century experimental writing, and the U.S. system of higher education. My most recent books are a collection of essays called Sound States: Innovative Poetics and Acoustical Technologies (University of North Carolina, 1998) and a study of H.D. and contemporary innovative poets entitled How to Live / What to Do: H.D.'s Cultural Poetics (University of Illinois Press, Spring 2003).

In between, I have written essays on such topics as Emily Dickinson, Adrienne Rich, storytellers in contemporary feminist fiction, the construction of the American literary canon, oppositional intellectuals and the job market, and the pleasures and perils of chairing a department, co-edited two collections of contemporary poetry, and followed the poet H.D. into and out of the frameworks of science, anthropology, and mysticism.

My most recent teaching turns to the question that centers my next booklength project, titled "What Else Can Poetry Do?" I am particularly interested in the intelligent and novel steps made by such writers as Gertrude Stein, John Cage, Lyn Hejinian, Susan Howe, and Nathaniel Mackey and in the ways in which these steps anticipate the framework of contemporary hypertext poetics.

Office: 460 EPB
Phone: 319-335-0412
E-Mail: Dee-Morris@uiowa.edu

• Curriculum Vitae
• Selected Publications/Projects
• Course Links
• Affiliations & Links

Course Detail

008:173:001 Topics in Digital Media

Department: English
Chair: Claire Sponsler
308 English Philosophy Building (EPB), 335-0455
Web site: http://www.english.uiowa.edu
General Catalog: http://www.registrar.uiowa.edu/registrar/catalog/liberalartsandsciences/english/

Rhetoric (or its equivalent by transfer) is a prerequisite for courses in this department.
Admin College: College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
Description:

This course provides an overview of the emergent field of literature composed, disseminated, read, and archived on computers. Working with a mix of print and electronic materials, we’ll explore the contexts in which electronic literature is created, played, and interpreted, survey its major genres, and examine a number of theoretical issues raised by the shift to the discourse network of the digital.

In addition to technotexts of all sorts, readings for the course will include examinations of the transition from orality to literacy, print to electronic information processing. We’ll look at writing created by hacking, file-sharing, sampling, mixing, and plundering; read algorithmic and procedural poems; click through on-line graphic narratives; engage imaginative structures built in virtual worlds; and construct a lineage of innovation in which these and other electronic literatures make sense.

Theorists and cultural critics on the roster include Espen Aarseth, Walter Benjamin, John Cayley, Donna Haraway, N. Katherine Hayles, Lev Manovich, Talan Memmott, and McKenzie Wark. Our four main texts will be:

Espen Aarseth. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature.

N. Katherine Hayles. Electronic Literature.

DJ Spooky. Rhythm Science.

McKenzie Wark. A Hacker Manifesto.

Course work will include regular posts on a discussion board, class presentations, travelogues from Second Life, digital experiments, position statements on new media issues, experiments with a wiki, and, for a final project, an annotated bibliography, prospectus, and essay. Students should be comfortable with computers, have access to a fast internet connection, and enjoy the glitches that happen in new vectors of information.

This course is taught by Dee Morris.

English majors may apply this course to the following area and/or period requirement. AREA: Literary Theory and Interdisciplinary Studies. PERIOD: 20th- and/or 21st-Century Literature.
Subtitle: New Media Poetics
Approved GE: None
Prerequisites: None
Corequisites: None


Course # Title Hrs Spe Req Cur Opt Status
008:173:001 Topics in Digital Media
Subtitle: New Media Poetics
Instructor: Adalaide Morris
Time & Location: 10:55A - 12:10P TTh 209 EPB
3 s.h. 19 30 Open