At the May 2024 Far Futures launch event, composer and artist Paul D. Miller, aka DJ Spooky, took part in a contributor panel. The panelists talked about their Far Futures works and their approaches to imagining a world without nuclear weapons, as well as the value of bringing creativity and storytelling to our planet’s most pressing problems. Paul’s (edited/condensed) answers to the questions posed to him during the panel are below. Eager to watch the whole event? Click here for the video.
One of the things that struck me with the premise of this commission was how we have to think about layers of complexity. When you think about sound, a tone is made of overtones and undertones. There are always layers to sound. So right now you hear my voice; it’s being encoded, being chopped into small packets that are going over the internet. I’m using bluetooth frequency headphones, and the amount of complexity going into that computationally speaking would have been incredible even a couple decades ago.
The Peace Symphony that I composed had several influences. Several years ago I took a studio to Antarctica and went to several of the main ice fields. The idea was to do what I call acoustic portraits of ice. Most of the material I used for that was based on equations from Johannes Kepler, one of the more important mathematicians of the last several centuries, and from Brian Greene’s work around string theory.
Antarctica is a petri dish of the Anthropocene era; the sheer volume of nuclear tests that we’ve done have left dust throughout the world. Of course, Hiroshima is ground zero for this. And that’s the other project I drew on. A few years ago I went to Hiroshima and interviewed some of the last surviving victims of the bombings of Hiroshima, they’re called “hibakusha” in Japanese. I spent four weeks with them on the Peace Boat; it’s a huge ship that comes out of Japan and does tours around the world teaching about peace. I did a series of interviews set to electronic and classical music that I composed. For Far Futures, I repurposed elements of that conceptual thinking and also wrote a series of insights and philosophical aphorisms and ideas that were set to music.
Returning to what I said about overtone and undertone—those are things that nuclear blasts are also made of. They create such an incredible compression that you have all these radically different ascending and descending temperature zones in the actual blast. So I looked at the history of when other composers have looked at nuclear issues. The most obvious are Penderecki’s “Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima,” which is kind of a noise composition, and John Cage’s “Imaginary Landscape.” But from the viewpoint of a composer of the 21st century, it’s about beats, about patterns, and above all about pattern recognition. So you start to think, What would be the tempo of the last couple hundred years?
You could say we’ve accelerated culture, we’ve accelerated every aspect of production; capitalism has led to the industrialization of almost all aspects of human life. And now we’re in a data driven society, so some people would say we’re in the fourth or fifth industrial revolution. Classical music, one could argue, comes out of the legacy of the renaissance and the industrial revolution—an orchestra is essentially a factory of sound, with all these moving parts and components. For electronic music, all of that has become discrete particles of data. So, long story short, I wanted to do an acoustic portrait of the nuclear incident that set off the Anthropocene era. And it’s remixable, there are components based on archival footage, and above all I like the idea of a composer engaging in the physicality of a situation.
I love to think of sound as humanity’s sense of nonlinear memory. And because of that, language shapes and configures how we think about expectations of the near future. And so if we can’t imagine a word for something, how do we describe it? Here we are in 2024, rethinking 1984, all puns intended. One of the most powerful legacies of that narrative was the control of language. And from my perspective, with the way algorithms shape mass narrative and shape how we think about contemporary storytelling, how do we break out of the filter bubble?
We need a new vocabulary to reimagine what’s possible. And that’s what’s incredible about the legacy of the arts. Because if you can’t imagine something then you can’t move out of it. My motto for when I was thinking about this project was that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism. And we think about what capitalism has done in the era of ionizing radiation and the era of nuclear reconfiguration of nation states…. It’s wild that the lessons of the past still linger over our time, yet we refuse to learn them. That’s what makes this collection so inspiring. It is a reimagining of what’s possible.
I like what Sheree Renee Thomas said: that dystopia is not inevitable. But we are countering a multi-trillion-dollar narrative, and I think we need to be proactive with giving people new narrative tools. As we move further into the turbulence of the 21st century, the world is getting more and more interdisciplinary, and because of that we’re seeing an explosion of new tools. I like aphorisms, and so I like to say that imagination is the ultimate renewable resource. Remixing and sampling is a DJ’s approach to composition. We can do this too with language. We have to always think about renewal, remixing, and recalibrating.
Listen to Paul D. Miller’s reimagined composition, “Peace Symphony.”