DJ Spooky, That Subliminal Kid

"I’ll bet you, if you find any culture anywhere in the last 80 to 100 years, half the battle is the artist struggling to deal with the financial mechanisms of rent."

Paul D. Miller, p.k.a. DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid,¹ came to prominence in the early ‘90s as turntablist at the center of Downtown’s short-lived but vibrant illbient scene. His music combined dub, hip-hop, minimalism, jazz, contemporary classical, techno, ambient, and musique concrète into a sound all his own, and he’s collaborated with everyone from Kool Keith to Yoko Ono to Metallica to Matthew Shipp. He’s also a highly-regarded writer (his book Rhythm Science is a favorite of mine), philosopher, and educator - as I discovered putting this post together, there are significantly more YouTube videos of him lecturing than playing music.

When we met up for coffee in November 2021 to do an interview for my book, Miller warned me that he “might be fuzzy on dates, because time is elastic.” And sure, he initially recalled moving into a notorious Alphabet City DIY space called the Gas Station in 1997, even though it closed in 1995. But I suspect that elasticity is inextricable from his brilliance. As we spoke, I could see his mind moving a mile a minute, jumping back and forth between timelines, concepts, and ideas, connecting all sorts of unanticipated dots. A remembered anecdote could suddenly pivot into a philosophical discourse about the role of algorithms in the contemporary music industry or an excited description of a forthcoming project with such fluidity that it all made sense. He was a fascinating person to be around, with an infectious energy that can’t be fully captured in print.

Throughout our interview, Miller would pause to text various contacts of his that he thought I should talk to, and in the weeks that followed he continued to generously dip into his rolodex on my behalf. His willingness to vouch for me opened several key doors that would have otherwise been closed, and it’s safe to say that the book would have been significantly worse without his help and enthusiasm - so much so that I pushed for Alice Arnold’s photo of him deejaying in 1997 to be included on the cover.

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When did you move to New York?

I moved to New York for a couple summers when I was in university, but I didn't like it. It was too hectic and really expensive. I went to Bowdoin College in Maine, and when I graduated [in 1992], I moved to Paris and lived there for a couple years. But then I came back [to New York]. I spent a summer looking for places, which is always a real drag. You'd find a place, then find another place, and there's always some issue or some real estate stuff.

I [wound up living] at the Gas Station [also known as Space 2B - ed.] at Avenue B and 2nd Street, which is a legendary spot. The guy who owned it, Linus Corragio, is a sculptor. Linus had been doing his crazy sculptures there, and they had [hosted] a lot of punk shows. The most notorious incident at the Gas Station was GG Allin dying there from a drug overdose.²

I was more into dub, art rock, and other kinds of stuff, and I wanted to do stuff that was more electronic. So I found my community of like-minded people and took it from there. If you want me to get more granular, I can.

How’s this for granular: Do you remember what the rent was?

Ha! I must have been paying around $700 a month, which at that time was still significant. But I had this whole crazy spot, I was the only person living there. There were parties every couple days when Linus would rent the space out to people. So I was living there, making art and doing stuff, and then I’d throw a party once a month to pay for extra rent money. That party was called Molecular, and we'd have different deejays, artists, and creatives do installations.

Can you describe the space?

There was a fence facing the avenue that had all this crazy metal and burned up stuff on it. That led to a courtyard, and depending on whatever anybody was working on, there’d be tools and welding gear. There was all sorts of crazy equipment, a lot of which wasn't even used. Linus was a hoarder, and he would just go around New York getting weird metal and then melt it into crazy shapes and throw it on the fence. There was a cut up side of a bus, there was some sort of melted [gargoyle] from the side of a building that was cut in half. He just kept adding to it, and it kept getting wilder. He would drive around New York at night with a truck and just grab stuff, like construction detritus.

You’d go past the courtyard, and then there was a [converted] garage. It had two doors that you could open, like a normal garage, and then to the left, where the office would have been, was where I was living. I built a loft bed, and I put all my records and books in there. I had a padlock door that was making sure that no one from these wild parties would come into my space. It was really wild to go from Bowdoin College, which is almost like an Ivy League school, to this wild, bombed-out spot.

In the ‘90s, the East Village was just Wild West. A lot of drugs, open sales of heroin or whatever, and a lot of people just didn't give a fuck. There was a scandalous guy who organized a bunch of the kids to sell cocaine and heroin; he was like the king of the Lower East Side cocaine and heroin [trade]. He had a group of kids - little dudes, probably 14-15 - always selling stuff on the corner. He did it on purpose, because they were young, so if they got put in jail it would be as adolescents and not adults. There was this moment where you started seeing more kids than normal, because there was always somebody on the corner selling stuff. You'd see three or four on every fucking corner; the guy had a small army of kids hustling.

But then he got put in jail, and after jail, he started doing health and fitness. Now he has a whole bunch of health and fitness stores. They made a mini doc about him on Vice: “I Was a Teenage Drug Lord Making Millions in NYC.”

Were the Molecular parties the first place you were deejaying in the city?

Yeah. I did parties at Bowdoin, but I was never really planning on deejaying being my main thing. It just slowly crept in and took over.

You were saying punk was the dominant genre around the Gas Station at the time, so how did you find the community of people who’d be interested in those parties?

I like punk, but I'm just anything goes. From my own perspective, I'm pretty much agnostic about style, and a lot of people are very partisan - they just like rock, they have that rock community, and that's what their thing is. Or you’d have the hip-hop community, and there was a techno scene at the time that was too white bread and hippie [for my tastes].

Do you mean the NASA raves, stuff like that?

Yeah. I knew the guys that were doing NASA. There's a guy named Carlos, DJ Soul Slinger, who had a store called Liquid Sky down on Lafayette. That was a really cool spot. When we met, we started throwing parties that were more drum-and-bass or jungle, and I like elements of that. But every scene was very partisan. That was maddening to me, because I really like a lot of styles.

But we put flyers out, we did word of mouth, we’d send out a quick email and people would pass it around. There were a lot of parties and events around that time, so there was a lot of overlap. You could walk around on an average Friday night and go to at least five to ten different events within several blocks, and each one would be a different style of music: There was the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, which was a famous spot that had avant-garde poetry. You might go there early, and then you'd go to some crazy noise or art rock thing at ABC No Rio. Then maybe you'd hear that there was a loft party on the Bowery or something, and you’d go down there. There was this guy, Josh Harris, who had a space at Houston and Broadway where a lot of tech people were hanging out, and they had a scene going as well.

Were you at the Gas Station during that final GG Allin show?

No, I was away. I heard about it when I came back. People were like, “There was some drama.” But at that time, there was always some crazy drama, because there were junkies and funky people around. I never got into heavy drugs, because walking around the East Village at that time was very depressing and grim. After I saw all of that, I was like, I can't mess with this stuff.

But [GG Allin’s last show] was a weird moment, because by the time I got back in there, everything had been cleared away. But it left a little bit of a psychological cloud. It was the equivalent of someone dying in your living room.

You were also involved in the Abstrakt Wave parties - did those come after Molecular?

Abstrakt Wave was a party that was just meant to be [a place where] you didn't have to play one style. I always wanted to encourage other deejays and other creatives to get out of the formula. But people love formula, man. Humans are disappointing and annoying.

Abstrakt moved around. There was a bar on 1st Avenue and maybe 4th or 5th on the corner, where you went down stairs. Then we moved it over to another bar. Then there was another party I would throw at the Pink Pony on Ludlow Street. I had a lot of friends who were coming into town from Europe, and we would say, “Hey, if you're going to be in town and you want to deejay, you're welcome to spin at this spot.” We'd always [match] them with a New York deejay.

There was a small group of people that were doing stuff, like DJ Soul Slinger. There was Soundlab, which was run by Beth Coleman and Howard Goldkrand, who are core friends of mine. Most of my stuff was very Manhattan-centric, below 14th Street.

Was there a point when you noticed Alphabet City starting to gentrify?

Until the early 2000s, the area was definitely not gentrified. One heard rumors, one saw stuff, but generally it was very organic. People had cool lofts or crazy spaces, most of which were relatively affordable. I also had a lot of friends who’d gotten their spaces years before and just kept them, and so they were paying a very small amount of money. After a certain point, I couldn't take it. There was gun stuff in the area and some stabbings, and I was like, I need to check out of here. I needed a change of scenery.

The gentrification stuff happened after I left. From 2001 through about 2005, all of a sudden the whole dynamic really changed, but I’d stopped being in that neighborhood. That's when I ended up getting another space. A friend of mine was like, “There's a huge space on 26th street by the West Side Highway.” It was the Starrett-Lehigh Building, which is a really cool building. I had the 18th floor there, a massive space, for a year and a half, maybe two years. We threw parties, we did all sorts of events there.

How did more traditional club spaces like the Cooler, the Knitting Factory, or Tonic factor into all of this?

Knitting Factory was a core spot. Michael Dorf, who owned it, is a friend of mine. It had no rules - it was like, whatever goes. I did a lot of experimental gigs there. There was one gig where me and Aphex Twin played, and he came out and played sandpaper on a turntable, and it made all this crazy noise. There were a lot of different rooms, and every room had a different flavor. There's one band playing Indian music, and there's another band playing hip-hop, and you go downstairs and someone's doing death metal. They were very open to all sorts of styles.

Tonic, I never got too involved with that. But I threw a lot of events at the Cooler, because Jedi, the guy who owned it, was a good friend of mine. I knew him before the club even opened. The Cooler was a cool spot, and Jedi was a truly eccentric and wild dude. [After it closed,] he moved and got an apple orchard upstate, and he just checked out of the whole scene. It's like, drop the mic, you're done, just move on. He’s in the countryside now, probably watching apples grow.

The Cooler was always freewheeling and hyper-eclectic. Mos Def and Talib Kweli did a series of parties there when they were called Black Star. Crazy jazz people like Bill Laswell would play there. But by the time Jedi really got the Cooler moving, I was deejaying a lot in Europe.

After [I moved out of] the Gas Station, things took off so much that I didn't do as many events in New York. I started focusing on Europe and other parts of the world. Doing events in New York is tricky, expensive, quirky, [and you have to deal with] a lot of politics. After a certain point, it was like, I make great money and I’m having a good life. Do I need to deal with all the politics? So I haven't thrown parties in New York in a while. Plus, there was a new generation, and a lot of stuff had shifted over to Brooklyn.

Was there a point when you noticed that shift from Manhattan to Brooklyn taking place?

There was one Soundlab event where they took over the bottom of the Brooklyn Bridge. There's this weird, massive space in there where you could throw crazy parties. I deejayed that, and there were about 5,000 people at that party. That's when it felt like everything had reached a good plateau. It was with the Brooklyn Museum and Creative Time, so it was a whole convergence of people doing stuff. But then a lot of museums started copying the formula, like they would do First Fridays, or MoMA P.S.1 had their Warm Up series. It became more and more of a formula: let's combine art and music and have deejays.

In New York, I think the real estate developers got in and locked down all the cool spaces at every level, and there was [nowhere left]. The thing that made our parties available and interesting is that we were always able to move around and find cool spaces. It got very sterile in New York. The 2008 financial crisis, that's when you felt everything get a little bit tighter and weirder. It didn't affect me as a deejay, because there's always people who still want to [party]. But in terms of finding spaces and stuff, that's when a lot of the energy shifted to Brooklyn. A lot of the young people just couldn't afford Manhattan, and the financial mechanisms of doing stuff in Manhattan became just ridiculous.

Music is now just one component of what I do. I've had a pretty long run as a global deejay who's independent. But we're in a time where social media has standardized people's tastes, even if they don't want to admit it. It's been a real sledgehammer to music, because whatever platform you're on - Spotify, SoundCloud, Apple - you're gonna have to think about an algorithmic relationship to your music and your fan base in a way that's like band-as-algorithm now, or deejay-as-algorithm.

As things get more and more digital, you have to realize that all these major platforms are profiting off of your engagement. Maybe there's a different kind of real estate now, which is the real estate of how people think about digital space. You're focusing on the legacy of physical space and how certain conditions generate certain kinds of music, but now most of that has now pivoted to a digital context. So many people are getting their entire cultural values from recommendation engines or social media.

In fact, I don't know if our [‘90s] scene could exist now without having to really reboot for an entire social media [landscape]. The DNA [of a scene] comes out of having access to an inexpensive space that doesn't have a high pressure on you to keep making money. I’ll bet you, if you find any culture anywhere in the last 80 to 100 years, half the battle is the artist struggling to deal with the financial mechanisms of rent. If you take that pressure away, it usually creates a huge explosion of culture.

This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity, brevity, and context.

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Learn more about DJ Spooky here

Order a signed copy of my book This Must Be the Place here

Book a walking tour here

And of course, if you haven’t already…

1. Like Steely Dan and the Soft Machine before him, “That Subliminal Kid” is a William S. Burroughs reference.

2. Allin played his final show at the Gas Station on June 27, 1993. The show lasted for all of three songs, after which Allin aimlessly led a group of fans around the neighborhood. He eventually ended up at the apartment of a friend, Johnny Puke, where he injected the heroin that killed him. Allin was found dead at Puke’s apartment the next morning.