DJ Spooky in Austin for AT&T Fuzion Series

Several hours prior to heading down to see That Subliminal Kid DJ Spooky at Waterloo Park in downtown Austin, I spoke with a friend from college now struggling to survive in New York City.

“What are you up to tonight buddy,” he asks.
“DJ Spooky is playing Waterloo Park tonight for free.”
“Sick. I saw Spooky perform here last week on Broadway. Dude – he had Matthew Ship, Rob Swift, Vijay Ayer and Guillermo Brown come out and perform – two hours in this seated theater – wow. Two months ago, I saw Spooky at Central Park with Guru [of Gangstar-fame].”

This is how my night started, expecting an amazing live performance from the much heralded and so-far-ahead-of-his-time-it-hurts, DJ Spooky. The same Spooky whose Dubtometry, Optometry, Celestrial Mechanix, and Riddim Clash I’ve had the pleasure of reviewing for various publications. One of the few DJs embraced by the jazz scene at-large, most notably the Thirsty Ear-affiliated players William Parker, Shipp and Brown, Spooky has taken the turntable to a totally new level of musicianship, rivaled only by fellow New Yorker DJ Logic.

The AT&T Fuzion series is billed as the latest in audio and video technology presented live, for free, in the city widely touted as the “Live Music Capital of the World.” Previous Fuzion performers have been Cut Chemist and RjD2.

The air was cool and the crowd thin but growing as we entered Waterloo Park. Local “DJ’s” – if by “DJ” you mean cats who mix tracks on their MacBook or tap buttons on an MPC processor – Supercontinent were warming up the crowd for headliner Spooky. Club music, white kids with nice computers and an ill-advised beatbox session did little to warm this noticeably chill Austin crowd.

By this time the crowd had grown and Spooky was busily connecting his audio gear and adjusting the dimensions of his laptop-fed video projector. Two two-story inflatable projection screens graced either side of the small stage where Spooky stood. Seated comfortably on the grace, I figured as long as I can see these screens I’ll be all right, and thankfully, you can’t miss these screens.

Grabbing the mic, Spooky explained how tonight’s performance would be a mix of audio and synchronized video, compared the area codes of Austin (512) and Brooklyn (212), and encouraged fellow laptop owners to make their own remixes.

For thirty-minutes, Spooky displayed the latest in video remix technology, mashing the Stones’ “Satisfaction” with Outkast’s “Hey Ya,” or cutting audio and video of Kurt Cobain’s “hey!” of “Smells Like Teen Spirite”-fame in and out of Ludacris’ guest verse on Missy Elliot’s “One Minute Man.” What about Prodigy circa Music For the Jilted Generation mashed with Stereo MC’s “Connected” – incredible.

This sort of performance is one those “you gotta see it to get it” scenarios. You can imagine how DJ’s cut and paste records together; now imagine the same concept but with music videos as the template for manipulation. Get it?

The mash-up has certainly become the technology du jour of disc jockey galore, made easier by the laptop, digital audio tape and internet downloading. The art of digging crates may be a dying art indeed, but Spooky himself, ever the forward thinking artists, encouraged fans to max and mash on their own, acknowledging the user-friendly nature of digital remixology. Yes, kids, you too can be a fantastic DJ, rock a party like a pimp and shake rumps with remix recipes.

In the evening most impressive moment, Spooky chopped up a vid of Jimi Hendrix’s classic Woodstock exposition of “Star Spangled Banner” that Jimi himself would have approved of, no doubt appreciating the philosophical and artistic relevance of a modern mixmaster dissecting Hendrix’s anthem. Slowly and rather gently, Spooky brought in a DMX verse. DMX mashed with Hendrix – and Hendrix at Woodstock no less?! Unreal.

So for thirty-minutes, Spooky was cutting edge. It was better than anything I had heard on any of his records, and while Shipp, Iyer and/or Guru weren’t there, it was impressive nevertheless. But still an hour-plus was left in the scheduled ninety-minute performance.

So for the next hour, That Subliminal Kid mixed pop tracks with drum ‘n bass, trance and all-too typical four-on-the-floor house music. A sped up “Message in a Bottle” followed by “Mirror in the Bathroom” tightly wound with throbbing house rhythms that had the diverse crowd moving in unison – save those of us content to sit on our blankets.

As for the video, by this point Spooky had settled on cueing preproduced videos from his Apple – repetitive flicks featuring the kid himself, bugs crawling on microchips and other images of technology gone haywire. By this point Waterloo Park had become the host of the first rave I’d witnessed since high school and was hardly what I was expecting for this calm cool Friday night in late September. With fifteen-minutes to go in the scheduled set time, my friends and I left to purchase Sparks and Lonestar.