Sound Unbound

AMG Review of Sound Unbound

Rick Anderson
All Music Guide

In 2004, DJ Spooky was given full access to the archives of Sub Rosa, a Belgian label celebrated for its catholic musical range -- everyone from Bill Laswell and Alter Echo to Nam June Paik and Edgard Varčse (posthumously, of course) have found their work featured on Sub Rosa releases. Given his status as the most prolific and admired of the postmodern DJs, Spooky was an obvious choice to create a huge sonic tapestry from this wildly varied catalog, and his creation was titled Rhythm Science: Excerpts and Allegories from the Sub Rosa Archives, Vol. 1. Four years later comes a companion volume with a similar title, this one more groove-oriented and really very fascinating. In typical postmodern fashion, it revels in juxtapositions that make little sense on paper but turn out to be quite compelling listening -- spoken word excerpts from Allen Ginsberg and Jean Cocteau rub up against instrumental selections from To Rococo Rot and Trilok Gurtu, and often the different elements are layered over each other. On track seven, for example, music by Marcel Duchamp is layered with music from the Master Musicians of Joujouka and juxtaposed with snippets of an interview with George Heard Hamilton. Elsewhere, chunks of Philip Glass' "Music in Fifths" are followed immediately by Varčse's pioneering piece of musique concrčte titled "Počme Electronique," and Bill Laswell's "Ghost Dub" provides a dark musical bed for a recording of René Magritte discussing the elements and history of surrealism. What all this adds up to is, inevitably, yet one more chance for DJ Spooky annoyingly to show off his erudition (at least this package doesn't include a photograph of his book collection) and it's also true that he's pushing his luck when he asks the listener to regard this program as an "essay" in any meaningful sense of the term. But it's also a fascinating crazy-quilt of forward-thinking musical sounds spanning a whole century, and it will provide plenty of food for conversation as well as a starting point for any number of musical research projects. Highly recommended.