Thirsty Ear Recordings has announced the release of DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid‘s latest manifesto titled "The Secret Song." Set for an Oct. 6 release, the new record marks DJ Spooky’s sixth full-length album and will feature guest appearances from notable artists and musicians such as Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth, The Jungle Brothers, The Coup, Rob Swift, Mike Ladd and many others. "The Secret Song" is a groundbreaking meditation on hip-hop and electronic music’s relationship to philosophy, economics, and the science of sound in a world where the steady drumbeat of the financial meltdown has made music the last refuge of young people with less and less time and money.
It’s been a while since DJ Spooky has released a new album of his own material, but this constantly and famously creative force, also known as Paul D. Miller, has been anything but idle. Over the last couple of years, Miller has shot films in Antarctica, remixed a controversial piece of cinema history, and produced two of MIT Press’ top-selling recent books.
On "The Secret Song," DJ Spooky looks to bands like Nine Inch Nails, and Radiohead for inspiration, as he flips old school and new school sounds into a sonic fiction landscape where rock meets dub and experimental jazz; where he can re-construct a classic song of a band that is one of the most sampled bands in hip-hop, like Led Zeppelin, make dub out of it and add strings by the Golden Hornet Project. "The Secret Song" is an album that puts DJ Spooky’s brand of conceptual hip-hop front-and-center with eerily accessible reconstructions only an artist such as himself could possibly formulate.
According to DJ Spooky, his new album ironically refers to a few notable elements. The first being that "The Secret Song" is made by failed ATM transactions, credit card fraud, jazz motifs made into stock exchanges, and the futures market. Secondly, it is an album that says 2012 isn’t the end of time, like the Mayan Calendar says – it’s just the end of the last Walmart. Additionally, the album exposes the economics of music as the music industry as we know it goes through massive transformation – it’s the new Stop and Shop of the Mind. And lastly, "The Secret Song" has tracks hidden in barcode throughout most of downtown Manhattan. Don’t believe him? Swipe your IPhone anywhere you see a barcode. And so with "The Secret Song," we look back at the 20th century and see a couple of massive changes that put it in, what DJ Spooky calls, "history through lens of the sample."
Following in the steps of The Cinematic Orchestra’s rescore of Dziga Vertov’s cinema classic "Man with A Camera," "The Secret Song" album will be accompanied by a DVD of a rare film from the Russian Revolution, the 1924 film "Kino-Glaz" (Cinema Eye) by the renowned Russian Director Dziga Vertov. DJ Spooky rescored the film and remastered the footage in New York for the DVD to serve as a companion-piece to his new album.
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Download the song "Azadi" (The New Complexity) feat. Iran’s Sussan Deyhim here: http://soundcloud.com/dj-spooky/azadi-the-new-complexity
