Waking up to an everyday landscape purified and made strange by snow on the day after seeing DJ Spooky’s Subliminal Strings: Nature Morte musical performance was a perfect reflection of the concert itself. Starting out with a familiar, instrument-based backdrop, Spooky built an electronic scaffolding on top that both complemented the more traditional sounds and allowed them to become even more breathtaking. While built on recognizable notes and tonal systems, the conversational interchange of Spooky’s equipment and the musicians’ instruments created an uncannily attractive yet innovative performance that was perfectly echoed in the unheimliche buildings, streets, and open spaces we all saw this morning.

All told, DJ Spooky's Subliminal Strings performance at the ICA, which saw the electronic artist accompanied by violinist Rohan Gregory, cellist Rafael Popper-Keizer, and bassist Scot Fitzsimmons, was a remarkable experiment in artistic interrelationships. The performance reached beyond the musical plane by incorporating video. From extended scratching sessions to rockin' recorded drumbeats to delicately plucked strings, the musical offerings were many, and the accompanying video made them even more meaningful. For more on what it was like to experience this wild mash-up of DJ, violin, cello, bass, and video screen, make the jump to read the rest of this entry.

Note: image above is not from last night's Boston performance--if you took photos, let us know!

In his commentary on Nature Morte, DJ Spooky describes an “urge to spatialization” based in part on Salvador Dali’s Nature Morte Vivante (pictured below), and the multi-layered sonic creations of Spooky and his accompanying trio certainly achieved a sense of spatiality not often reached in music. Perhaps ironically, the video that played along with the music was more two-dimensional than the live musicians themselves, sometimes depicting three-dimensional scenes but frequently incorporating two-dimensional artwork including maps and Man Ray’s photograms. Time served as the third dimension for these flat images, allowing them to evolve and create a more meaningful whole. While not always acknowledged as clearly as it could be, time plays a crucial role in music, with the space between notes becoming at least as important as the notes themselves—without it, music would just be a constant wash of meaningless noise.

Beyond emphasizing and combining the spatial and dimensional aspects of music and video, DJ Spooky’s performance dealt with some topical issues. The music began with a playful yet obvious interchange between the recorded music and the live performance, with the live musicians echoing what was played on disc. Soon after this light beginning, the video footage displayed scenes emblematic of some of the most high-profile attacks in America in recent memory, including Columbine, the Oklahoma City bombings, and even 9/11. The catch: the footage was played in reverse, in essence erasing the occurrence of these events and, perhaps, returning Americans to a more peaceful, less paranoid time. As the footage played backwards, though, Spooky’s electronic music became more morbid and dissonant, while the string section played on with oblivious sweetness. The message seemed to be a combination of urging us to remember more innocent, more trusting times, while also prompting us to remain cognizant of the real—not media-defined—significance of major world events.

But by no means was Subliminal Strings a major downer. The performance was fun at times, with one particularly enjoyable section featuring the music rising and falling in time with black and white squares enlarging and shrinking on screen. Silly circus music accompanied footage of a woman on a swing, and amusing footage of a conductor and his disappearing band offered light but piercing commentary on who holds the power in a musical performance (musicians? director? audience?).

Perhaps the most jarring portion of the evening occurred when Spooky’s Mac (so they’re not infallible!) encountered a -36 error in DVD Player and he had to switch from some fascinatingly abstract Man Ray footage to a black and white Marxist propaganda film called “The Society of the Spectacle.” The subtitles to the film, while perhaps interestingly abstract, distracted significantly from the enjoyment of the music and lent an odd, incongruous political bent to the night. While the overlap of French and English subtitles (which rendered both languages illegible) that occurred at one point in the film was a remarkable—if accidental—reflection of the overlaying electronic and instrumental music being played live, this film was not as effective a visual accompaniment than some of the others. It’s certainly worthwhile to be reminded that art and performance are not always about enjoyment but ultimately should be about considered thought. Still, it’s not quite clear what “The Society of the Spectacle” wanted us to think beyond “Hey, maybe Stalin’s not so bad after all," or maybe “I am so very alienated by bourgeois society and the means of production, even though I am here enjoying the results of artistic production with a likeminded (and, let's admit, pretty bourgie) community.” Overall, this film just didn’t quite add to the performance the way other footage did—music is better combined with politics in a more subtle manner. (This modern YouTube take on The Society of the Spectacle, though, is sort of interesting.)

Prior to performing Subliminal Strings with his three accompanists, DJ Spooky treated last night’s audience to a preliminary showing of his latest work, Terra Nova, which is based on his recent travels to Antarctica. The music was more eerie and less rich than the sounds he created in tandem with his trio, but the effect of pairing it with footage of Antarctica was truly moving. Particularly in light of what we know about global warming, the dramatic changes in the Antarctic landscape that were shown on screen and accompanied by nature noises (including deft use of flowing water as an instrument) sent a powerful message about the interconnectedness of our planet.

Reinforced by gorgeous map footage, repeated and arranged so as to give Antarctica a nearly fractal appearance, Terra Nova created a soundtrack to the stillness of Antarctica and constitutes a step toward understanding the significance of this remote place to all our lives. In one particularly arresting scene, an ice floe avalanches apart as Spooky’s beats continue on uninterrupted, serving as a reminder of the constant environmental destruction happening every moment of our everyday lives.

Spooky summed up Subliminal Stings as a composition that is “all about quotations and de-contextualized fragments of the everyday world we find becoming stranger and stranger with every passing moment.” While DJ Spooky’s words do a beautiful job of conveying the meaning of his work, only the actual experience of Subliminal Strings—which necessarily involves being there, not just listening to the sounds or even watching the videos—is crucial to understanding the need for individuals to take an active role in contextualizing and de-fragmenting their own everyday experiences by questioning the meaning of fragmentation, sharing their thoughts on the meaning of relationships, and even creating their own work—“artistic” or otherwise—from the pieces of the greater whole available to them. DJ Spooky is certainly involved in creating some amazing artwork from his thoughts and experiences; hopefully he might inspire you to do the same.

It doesn’t look like Spooky is performing Subliminal Strings—or anything else—locally anytime soon, but be on the lookout for any recorded versions of Nature Morte or Terra Nova. While they won’t be as striking as a live performance, they should still be able to convey the concept of spatialized fragmentation and the need to understand and respond to it.

DJ Spooky image form his website, http://djspooky.com/. Dali image from http://dali.uffs.net/galerie/pictures/1956_living_still_life_01.jpg. Antarctica image from Flickr user es0teric: http://flickr.com/photos/es0teric/.