The 'Days Between Stations' columns, Interview magazine 1992-2008: Music's New Construction Men
February 1999
Turntable artists blur the gender gap
DJ QBert and DJ Shadow are two of the San Francisco Bay Area's most adventurous turntablist-sampler-scratch & cut artists. Making their music out of bits and pieces of found art—old commercials, old movie soundtracks, forgotten or unrecognizable 45s, LPs, and CDs, vocal splices, all smeared, twisted, chopped, broken, and reassembled—they're pursuing a vision of the world as one big record.
It's a vision that goes back at least to the so-called cut-in discs the comedy team Buchanan and Goodman made in the '50s, most notably “The FlyÂing Saucer," where tag lines from Top Forty hits were edited into a hysterical newscast about the-MarÂtians-have-landed, thus making the point that rock 'n' roll came from outer space. But the thrilling seamÂlessness of the work of DJ QBert and DJ Shadow is the result of modern technology, of match dissolves that can't be separated into constituent elements, connections that can't be pulled apart—and this sound goes back to the 1981 Sugar Hill classic "The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel." The wheels of steel—those were turntaÂbles, and all through DJ QBert's debut album, Wave Twisters (Galactic Butt Hair Records), and DJ Shadow's recent supersession production under the name of UNKLE, Psyence Fction (London/Mo Wax), you can hear the wheels rubbing against each other, and against the limits of what anyone might do with them as instruments in and of themselves. At its best the music QBert and Shadow make has no pieces; it inhabits its own body.
One seduction Wave Twisters and Psyence Fiction share is that this body is almost genderless. Yes, there are distinguishably male and female voices used on both records, but they don't perform different functions, don't communicate different values, don't trade in stereotypes. The single exception throws this enchantingly undivided sexual landscape into relief, revealing the delicacy, the oddity of the amÂbiance QBert and Shadow have created. This comes with the guest appearance of Mike D. of the Beastie Boys on "The Knock (Drums of Death Pt. 2)" on Psyence Fiction—a horrible example of the sort of gross male brag that for years and years has served as the hip-hop equivalent of an NFL end zone dance. This sort of thing is never worth listening to. Mike D.'s turn is embarrassing to listen to, just like it's embarrassing to sit next to someone at a parÂty who's throwing up. I mean, Vanilla Ice did this betÂter. Like the Rolling Stones today, Mike D. can only negotiate a stiffened beat that cannot generate rhythm, a beat that in abstract terms is impossible to play, because there's no play in it.
At their most magical, Wave Twisters and Psyence Fiction open up a territory that is abstract before and after it's anything else—and on this ground Mike D. sounds like an intruder, a jerk who showed up at the party wearing a huge "I'm a Dude!" costume. He talks his head off, takes over the room like a guy cutting in on everybody on the freeway. And before he showed up there was such a faraway, dreamy quality to the night.
The night on Wave Twisters is busy, noisy ("Pure sound," says one voice—from some science fiction movie? "I think you're right," says a second. "I only wish there was some way we could tell it to shut up"), an intersection where the traffic never stops moving. On Psyence Fiction, which features vocals by Thom Yorke of Radiohead, Will Malone, Badly Drawn Boy, Richard Ashcroft of the Verve, Kool G Rap, Alice Temple, and others, the intersection is empty, almost completely quiet. It's as if you have to listen to a sort of implied silence—a woman a block away taking a walk, a distant radio, a man talking to himself behind closed doors ("A ticket . . . to nothingness," says a cool voice at the end of "UNKLE Main Title Theme")—before you can begin to hear the greater song they're all singing. Vocal themes and rhythmic repetitions take shape as orchestrated, wordless draÂmas—the film noir traps, the darkened Parisian hallways and darker California back roads where a vague sense of discomfort turns into a glamorous death wish—familiar from DJ Shadow's 1996 EndÂtroducing. Instead of the bright lights of Wave Twisters, the unstoppable exuberance of someone finding his voice for the first time, everything notable on Psyence Fiction comes slowly, deliberately—after all, death has all the time in the world.
DJ QBert can leave you giddy over his delirious scratching, zigzags that at first seem to make no more emotional sense than a bad Eddie Van Halen guitar solo and that after three listenings sound as clear as a good one. DJ Shadow sneaks up on a listener. He's following you. You hear his footsteps behind you, turn around, hear nothing but silence, start walking again, catch that queer echo. The mood comes most strongly out of long, inexorably built percussion sections.
It's all made out of samples—DJ Shadow is the Keith Moon of virtual drummers. His drums are his lead instrument; vocals are sound effects. So Thom Yorke sounds almost female, calling up the unpleasant, rotting atmosphere of a British no-way-out film like Sapphire or Mona Lisa. Alice Temple breaks the action like the nightclub singer in Kiss Me Deadly, offering a respite that soon enough turns creepy in its own right.
QBert offers a whole masturbation suite, finÂishing with a transfixing cutup of a woman's gasps and sighs—and for a moment in the middle of the event she turns into a small animal, scurrying out of sight. But there's no argument here about what language a woman speaks, what language a man speaks—the kind of argument that is implicit in any record by Whitney Houston or Luther Vandross, or for that matter Sally Timms or Neil Young.
On Wave Twisters and Psyence Fiction a body achieves form only to turn into another body. A voice signifies gender only to fade into a question mark. You don't want the records to end, to announce themselves as mere constructs of fixed duration. You want to be able to take their abstraction, frantic or still, as real life, because in that abstracÂtion is a liberation from the everyday burden of knowing who is who.
Originally published in Interview Magazine, February 1999