Where is he now: DJ SpinOza

It's hard to believe that it is only eighteen months since DJ SpinOza first used the words 'post-visual theatre'to describe his début album, Uncle Vanya In Dub. The Edinburgh Fringe 2015 has only just started, but two of the most important plays are clearly in the post-visual camp.

'Yeah,' laughs a relaxed SpinOza, clearly enjoying all the money that comes from stringing together a few words by accident. 'McBurney from Complicite: he's doing it post-visual style in The Encounter, only he's got the cash to use bi-aural tech. I just had some old 45s and the truth.'

He's quick, however, to praise the other big post-visual show. 'Daniel Kitson's alright by me.' SpinOza sips on his vokda and smiles. 'Polyphony is smart. He's doing po-vi, sure, but that stand up shtick he's got? And all the little speakers? Genius.'

As delighted as he is to see po-vi take off, SpinOza is not resting on his laurels. 'I'm working with the Homeless Critic. I don't think people realise how high concept this is going to be. It's a fierce attack on the failure of theatre makers to act on their principles. He was reading Plato, and wondered whether he could test the claim that actors are morally dishonest. Hypocrites, even!'

It might just be the high grade cocaine, or SpinOza's background as a teacher of classics, but he dissolves into hysterical laughter. 'Hypocrites, see? Get it?' he mumbles, gasping for air between giggles. 

Radiophrenia

http://radiophrenia.scot/schedule/

the vile arts radio hour SpinOza gets busy....

DJ SpinOza has always been a maverick presence in the Vile Arts: unlike the rest of the team, he never speaks, and can operate machinery. With big plans in the pipeline for the Radio Hour, SpinOza took control of this week's show, matching random beats with fragments of a lecture by Foucault. 

SpinOza's attempt to use a funky commercial house beat as a leitmotif dominates two thirds of the show, fading in and out between songs by Dan Lyth, Flying Lotus and, of course, the wonderful Kemadrin. Rather than building a set that follows a lineal narrative, he slips between moods and throws in snatches of Kemadrin to rescue him from the less interesting tracks. The sudden appearance of Kate Tempest and Shonen Knife are intrusions of more 'pop' elements, and the set climaxes with full on commercial techno from some outfit no-one at The Vile Arts knows.

the vile arts radio hour

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playlist

I Belong to You
Caro Emerald	Dramatico
Forgiveness Step 1
Martyn	Ninja Tune
Voice of the Bird
Reteo Sound Machine	Sound Way
Over Light Earth
Daniel Bjarnason	Bedroom Community
Posted by Anonymous
Shilpa Ray	White Label
Card Trick
Red Snapper	Lo
This Time in November
Dan Lyth	Armellodie
Cognetin
Kemadrin	White Label
The Truth
Kate Tempest	Big Dada
Low
Young Fathers	Ant
Kemadrin
Kemadrin	Unclassed Media
About that Time
Flying Lotus	White Label
Robots from Hell
Shonen Knife	Damnably
rec
Serocell	White Label
Liquesce
Illium Sphere	Ninja Tune
T'aint No Sin
Daniel Bjarnason	Bedroom Community
Desert Night
Rufus	Sony
Golden Calf
Doldrums	Souterain
Occupy Your Mind
THE VILLAGERS	Domino
Flute Dance
Vazz

Caro Emerald

Polished cabaret music that deservedly gets bumped before the second chorus.

Martyn

Relatively enjoyable ambient introduction to his album that is a relief after the poptastic beginning.

Daniel Bjarnason

Intriguing neo-classical music, probably from Scandinavia.

Dan Lyth

Pastoral and rather like Perfumed Genius (according to Lorna Irvine...)

Red Snapper

A return, but not to form, from the formerly jazzy club band.

Kate Tempest 

Doing her best impersonation of Lily or Kate N. Not hip hop in my opinion. Discuss.

Young Fathers

I liked them when I saw them live, but this is insipid and full of easy couplets. It's all a bit 1980s, but people love them, don't they?

Flying Lotus

Responsible for some of the most tedious DJ sets of all time, FL hits the target on his own tracks. Gets a bit 8 track.

Shonen Knife

A bit of a refreshment for the palate before...

The Villagers

It deserved no more than a wee tinkle. 

Illium Sphere

Doldrums

More dark electronica... a little bit generic but filled with intriguing noises. Doldrums give it some beats.

Rufus

Commercial techno, does what it is meant to. I suppose.

Vazz

A post set whisper.

Kemadrin and Serocell

The best bits that litter the session. Noise given content. 

Sonya's Last Speech

The very last speech by Sonya presents all sorts of problems: even if the director accepts that it is serious, that she is really embracing a simplistic Christianity, its reception by an audience will be determined by their spiritual beliefs. It's a brilliant example of Chekhov's 'negative capability,' the ability to contain multiple interpretations without resolving into a single definitive explanation.

Aside from elegantly concluding Act IV and encapsulating the various resolutions it enacts, it is doubly ironic: Chekhov is writing at the time that the doubt expressed by Matthew Arnold in Sea of Faith was beginning to grow, and Russia would soon become an officially atheistic state. 

Furthermore, had Vanya and Sonya accepted this pious fatalism in Act I, the narrative would not have happened.

The decision to focus purely on her words for Act IV is an attempt

elliottfranks.photoshelter.com

to bring out their beauty, and ponder the influence of faith on art. The selections - with one crucial exception - are all religious compositions (even the drone is made by a Christian artist), and lean towards the mystical expression of spiritual belief. The citation index is less important than in Act III, since many of the pieces are based on Biblical texts. While the faith of Moby and Bach is invoked, the music is generally explicit in its religiosity.

Like Sonya's speech, the music resists earlier parts of Vanya. Whereas Act III climaxed in Dionysian chaos - the ferocious rattle of jungle filled with gunshots and street noises - the music here is gentle and contemplative. While Charles Shaar Murray notes that much of the supposed opposition of Apollonian and Dionysian is the product of over-heated German romanticism, Act IV hints at the more Apollonian mode, of order.

It can be seen as part of Act III's examination of club culture: if that was the dance-floor, this is the chill-out room. Yet the final track loops back to the beginning - Chris Hughes' Slow Motion Blackbird, which has bubbled beneath the sturm und drang of Acts I to III, is finally revealed in full. Based on instructions by Steve Reich, it represents a commingling of the natural (the blackbird's song) and the mechanical (the technology used to treat the song).

I choose to regard Sonya's speech as sincere, that Chekhov was offering his characters peace and divine consolation. A more bitter reading would see the speech as one more joke, a retreat into delusion when all else fails - simultaneously satirical and tragic. But Sonya has been the most blameless character throughout Uncle Vanya and the moral ambiguity of Chekhov's characterisation - Vanya acts out of love but cause suffering - make the Christianity expressed in these words, one of hope and desperation, suffering and consolation, fatalistic and redemptive reflect the playwright's complex vision of human existence.

Notes from DJ SpinOza

There is a clear punk aesthetic though, with a dash of Duchamp. All the material used counts as a ready-made, and was put together with common technology. Punk has been mistaken for a sound - you know, loud guitars, shouting - but it is an ethos. Use what is available, do it yourself.

Scissors and Glue: Punk Fanzines and the Creation of a DIY Aesthetic

Teal Triggs

Journal of Design History, Vol. 19, No. 1, Do It Yourself: Democracy and Design (Spring, 2006), pp. 69-83

Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of Design History Society

Article Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3838674

Triggs looks at various fanzines and suggests that the aesthetic of punk fanzines is a mixture of the music's raw aggression and the techniques first espoused in the Situationist International, Debord inspired anarchist artists who were attacking consumerism's ability to complete devour 'the real', replacing it with the spectacle. The essential aspects were detournement and 'recouping' images or, as Shane McGowan from The Pogues put it 'all the photos are ripped out of other mags.' This collaging added conscious theft and retooling to the vbasic Duchamp idea of the 'ready-made.'

Dj SpinOza talks Chekhov

He looks relaxed. The beard is more ragged than usual, and he hesitates when he speaks. He gesticulates wildly, of course, his hands betraying his anxiety that he might simply have created something that already existed. It is the danger of the autodidact, to expend energy on reinvention through ignorance.

'Come on, then,' he laughs. 'I'm ready to be grilled.'

I wanted to ask you about the name you've given to the work.

Post-visual theatre? Or Uncle Vanya in Dub? That's easy: I took a version of Chekhov's play, and dropped it into music. And some of it is dubstep, but the dub record, in reggae, is one for the dancehall. And I did that with my Text.

I was thinking about post-visual theatre. Inventing a genre is pretty bold, and isn't this just a radio play?

No - radio plays are still about the script being performed. I took a pre-recorded text of Uncle Vanya, and treated it as music - editing it, distorting it. This isn't a play, in the sense that its foundation was a soundfile, not a script.

There is a clear punk aesthetic though, with a dash of Duchamp. All the material used counts as a ready-made, and was put together with common technology. Punk has been mistaken for a sound - you know, loud guitars, shouting - but it is an ethos. Use what is available, do it yourself.

But the visual part - there are no visuals at all.

I'm inspired by Wagner's idea of total theatre... immersive performance too, which seems to be its natural successor. I was working on a visual theatre festival, manipulate, when we tried to decide what the genre meant. I see certain work, say David Harrower's Ciara as not being visual, because they are all about the voice and the words. He strips back set and movement, even presence of the actor.

But the bottom line is that all theatre is visual to some extent, except the radio play. And while this is not a radio play, it exists as audio. So the post prefix denotes that although it is influenced by visual theatre - and here I mean Dance Theatre, puppetry, works that contain video and so on, it has no intrinsic visual element. Yet.

Think of it like a soundtrack, only the video part is whatever you look at while listening. It does bear some similarities to electro-acoustic composition, in terms of the actual sound, especially in Act II.

How about that prefix, then?

I get to see a lot of what is called post-dramatic theatre. Lately, it has got into a rut, laying out all of its elements in order, encouraging contemplation on the form, not the content. Well, like the post-dramatics, I share a willingness to deconstruct theatricality, and challenge what 'theatre' is. And I like to make narrative into a problem... unless you know Vanya, you'll have a hard time following the plot.

What seems valuable in post-dramatic theatre is its diffidence towards big statements, but also the opportunity to play with themes rather than stories. The post-modern idea of destabilising, of rejecting a central position, solid ground... it makes theatre open to interpretation, emphasises the negative capability.

But I like to feel post-dramatic theatre can be about emotions. That is why music is so essential.

Essential?

Important... although even post-modernists have to admit that there has to be an audience of some sort. So there are essentials, I guess.

What was it about Uncle Vanya?

It's a classic. Now, when directors say that usually, they mean - I have no idea why I picked it, but it is the thing to do. Vanya is a classic, and it might be good - although the version I have, both translation and performance is shocking.

I want to expose what it means to be a classic: it means that directors think it is enough, sometimes, to do it straight. The LiberVox recording I use, God bless them for making it free, is very straight and was made out of a sense that this classic ought to be available. Never mind that they kill it with bad acting - Chekhov is available.

First of all, I was attacking the idea that a classic can be done with no interpretation. The way I cover it in music is insulting it.

But Chekhov poses other questions - like the one I address in Act II. Is it funny or a sad? Chekhov thought it was a laugh-fest, but Stanislavski treated it like tragedy. That tension runs through all the versions...

You use quite a range of music... from holy chants to drum and bass. What dictated those choices?

After I had my text, I wanted to give it moods. I try to interpret Vanya as a series of shifts in mood. Different episodes demand different styles... the dubstep is a short-cut to express the aggression I detect just beneath the civilised exchanges, and the classical music speaks for itself.

And does the music reflect the themes?

Yes - in Act I, I go between heavily mechanised music and more pastoral, classical pieces... I say pastoral, but they have a drama. There is also a leitmotif throughout, the blackbird, which resolves in Act IV.

I detected a kind of melancholic futurism in some of Astrov's speeches where he looks to a thousand years hence. He cares for the forest, he's an early environmentalist, but he fears for it. Funnily enough, Astrov's story of the plague and his forestry reflect Chekhov's own experiences as a landlord. Chekhov is often seen as presaging the sudden changes in Russian politics... the move from rural economies to the industrial... the weight of the dubstep is a nice contrast.

Each Act seems to have its own identity...

Each Act deals with a different set of formal possibilities... Act I is the straight one, it just gives the mood and reveals the vocabulary, or technique of post-visual theatre... Act II follows a question... Act III is a party... Act IV is spiritual. I was trying to see what the different boundaries were.

Introducing DJ Spinoza

Who is DJ SpinOza?
The third member of the Vile Arts triumvirate, SpinOza is 'the mixing monad,' responsible for the technical operation of Uncle Vanya in Dub.

What's with the name?
After reading Kode 9's book on Sound Warfare, DJ SpinOza took the name as a celebration of the concept that God is all things. He also liked the pun on 'spin.' Fun fact: SpinOza doesn't know how to use decks and makes his post-visual theatre in Audition.

And the capital O?
He says it 'represents the monad,' which is actually part of Leibniz's philosophy and was originally the gnostic idea of the Godhead. We think it is more likely that there are other artists who noticed the pun, and already have a copyright on DJ Spinoza.

What are his influences?
Having listened to his compositions, it is unsurprising to find out that he looks books better than music. He frequently quotes William Burroughs, the progenitor of the cut-up technique, (badly): 'in a pre-recorded universe, the only thing worth having is the master tape.' He says that his identity was developed after he read Goffman's book The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life. 'The general idea is that we are always performing,' he says. 'So I might as well have a stage name.'

Was he called DJ Fullback for a bit?
Er, yes. Before he started taking himself too seriously.

Yellow Tara by Gareth K Vile on Mixcloud