Viral Sonata

Paul D. Miller - Viral Sonata

released in 1997

If this seems familiar to some of you, I posted this one in another of my online projects some time ago. In case you're not familiar, Paul D. Miller is better known as DJ Spooky for which he uses this alias for most of his releases.

Viral Sonata elements:

backwards jajouka
20 layers of television static
sonograms of ocean's depths
sound of the rings of Saturn
Jupiter's magnetosphere
an audio analogue of solar wind
audio translation of human DNA code
Macintosh Quadra 800
Yamaha DX-7 keyboard
Moog Opus 7 keyboard
Pro Tools (algorithms)
Sound Design Program (algorithms)
human body (algorithms)

flute elements provided by Space
Krafta Sitar elements provided by Ranabir
tabla elements provided by Karsh
guitar elements provided by Akin Atoms
duelling moogs on "Morphic Interlude": a battle between Manny and DJ Spooky
all other music elements provided by DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid
Cybernetic dissolution elements provided by Akai s3000 sampler

The Viral Sonata: a compositional note by Paul D. Miller:

The Viral Sonata was conceived as a semiotic engagement with music as a bearer of cultural meaning. It is inspired by the writings of Iannis Xenakis, Luigi Russolo, Tricia Rose, Ishmael Reed, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Ludwig Fuerbach, Ralph Ellison, Douglas Kahn, Allen S. Weiss, Greg Tate, Joseph Kosuth, Grand Master Flash, Afrika Bambaata, Cutty Ranks, Kojin Karatani, Bounty Hunter, Bob Marley's lyrics, Dick Hebdige, David Toop, aerosol expressionist artists, Daze, Lee, Futura, and Toxic.

I would like to thank the musicians that provided the sound elements for the composition. Ranabir, a brilliant sitar player who works in NYC and Karsh, an extremely talented percussionist, provided the Indian abstract "ragas" elements, Akin Adams provided the guitar elements, and Spazecrafta provided the flute elements. I play keyboards, bass, and various other computer equipment. Additional tones for "Morphic Interlude" were provided by Manny (a member of the NYC electroacoustic ensemble "Byzar"). The project's engineer was Chris Flam who works at Mindswerve Studios in the Lower East side.

I wanted aspects of the album to sound "live" so I had people come by and jam to some beats I set up. I then took the beats away, and sampled what people had played against the rhythm patterns. Things were rearranged, altered, and cut-apart from their original contexts of human representation. My voice was part of the composition as well, but it is not recognizeable as a human sound in the composition. Rather, in mixes like "Indra's Net" or in some of the Interludes (elements provided by several 12" and some of my work [Sub Dub]) you will hear the voice as a bass presence, or a rippled, and "timestretched" tone structure that no longer represents any articulate human narrative. I thought that this would work with the ragas form of the indian music, where *raganini* (the core elements of the ragas) were regarded as deities, and represented complex systems of rules, rhythms, motives, formulas, forms and ideas, that have accumulated over the centuries. In "Indra's Net" there is a central tone that everything else in the track revolves around in a very oblique manner, and this was my attempt to reconstruct a kind of cybernetic "vadi" (in Indian music this music structure is made more prominent by repetition or special emphasis, and this "vadi" tone is called "that which speaks.") The "samvadi" or "king of tones" acts as a centralized narrative, a place where memory is linked to the continuous flow of repetition.

Without the "samvadi" the music becomes an expression of a kind of anarchy, a country without a king, disorder in the feelings, and emotional instability. This "emotive sculpture" of narrative turbulence is what I attempted to reconstruct throughout the viral sonata. In a sense, the "narrative turbulence" that I try to portray is a reflection of the cultural dissonance occuring in contemporary society as humanity's ancient forms of cultural production encounter electro-modernity. There are many other cultures that flow through the Viral Sonata, but this particular motif is central to the compositional structure of the entire work. The Viral Sonata, at heart, is an attempt to invoke with sound the kind of cultural entropy that I think humanity will have to come to grips with if it is going to survive the many environmental, economic, social, and geopolitical upheavals and changes the 21st century probably has in store for us.

Tracklisting:

1. Prologue (The Duchamp Effect) {7:22}

2. Indra's Net (Song of the Circular Ruins edit) {11:08}

3. Morphic Interlude (The Sun Ra Effect) {2:50}

4. Nodal Flux (The Rauschenberg Effect) {2:08}

5. Invisual Ocean (Critical Bandwidth mix) {7:55}

6. Striated Interlude #1 {1:58}

7. Necrologue (The Lament of Darth Vader) {5:07}

8. Striated Interlude #2 (Biomorphic Structure #786*Beta) {0:55}

9. City on the Edge of Forever {8:06}

10. Zona Rosa (Total Chromatism mix) {7:36}

11. Colophon {6:49}

12. Striated Interlude #3 (Synchronic Overload edit) {1:58}

13. Primary Inversion {7:05}

14. Striated Interlude #4 (The Fanon Effect) {1:50}

15. Epilogue (Processed Digital Feedback) {1:04}

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