Dj Spooky

US hip-hop spinner DJ Spooky isn’t your average ‘turn up, play tunes, get paid, fuck off’ kinda guy. His projects tend to be a little more cerebral, take a lot more time, and a fair few risks.

The latest is an audio-visual remix of one of the most influential – but evil – movies ever made, DW Griffiths’ 'Birth of a Nation', which mythologised the beginnings of the Ku Klux Klan and became a huge US blockbuster, almost 100 years ago. He told Clash about its rebirth.

How did the idea for this project come about? Can you remember the exact moment it came to you?
“A couple of years ago, [when] the Bush 'election' rode into Washington DC like a huge tsunami cesspool: it seems like a millennia ago, but yeah, it was eight years, and Obama has only been in office seven months. There were so many irregularities with the black and liberal vote throughout the country, and the way it all unfolded reminded me of Birth of a Nation - it was pretty much that simple. It was a reversal of so many things that I thought were behind us.

I'd say the exact moment was when I woke up on November 5 and realized that the kind of presidential situation we could look forward to would be a turbulent and truly paradoxical situation. Flip the script, and you realize that almost everything in the last eight years - the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the artificially high price of oil, the market collapse of 2008, is due to a combination of political and psychological circumstances based on a manipulation of people's fear, and you get why 'Birth of a Nation' is still relevant.”

How familiar were you with the film originally, and did your views on it evolve as the process went on?
“It was one of those films that you saw in college for film history. I thought it was a kind of joke.”

So are there any particular headaches with a project like this: licensing, legal stuff? You didn’t have to get the OK from Griffith’s ancestors?
“The film has pretty much been smooth sailing. There was one odd incident where some of the ancestors of [famous slave owners] the Camerons invited me to the ruins of their plantation. I accepted and went. The whole time, there was a kind of nervousness in the air like they were apprehensive about what I'd think. That was kinda funny, but beyond that, people have taken the film in stride. Remember, it's an art film, folks. Not Terminator 7 or whatever.”

Where did you draw the most inspiration for the music in your new soundtrack?
“From little things like Alice Randall’s remix/satire of 'Gone with The Wind' that was called ‘The Wind Done Gone’ or Robert Johnson's ‘Cross Road Blues’ - the whole soundtrack was scored like a DJ mix of blues, but through the filter of ironic hip-hop. It's played by Kronos Quartet, which is one of my favourite string ensembles. My compositions – I write music - are usually based on collage, and this was no exception. Collage, repetition, unexpected juxtapositions of key signature and tempo: think DJ Premier meets Howling Wolf, or something like that.”

How long have you been working on this project now, and do you have further plans for it in future?
“It's been ongoing since 2004! That's a long time as DJ culture goes. You all in England have had about 20 different styles of music in the same span of time. I like to think of this project as "Director as DJ" - it's the DNA of where I think film making will be going: fragmented, hyper subjective, YouTube of the mind. Look a little deeper, and you can see that so many experimentalists of the past: Leni Riefenstahl, Sergei Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov, all of them saw and were influenced by Birth of a Nation. The basic idea for me is to break the loops holding the past and present together so that the future can leak through. Even with Obama, you can see how the Republican narrative is still reaching for the same narrative tools of fear and disinformation. I guess the film remix still has a long way to go.”

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DJ Spooky’s 'Rebirth of a Nation' is at Liverpool Waterfront, 25 September 2009, part of the Abandon Normal Devices festival. Find out more about the festival - http://www.andfestival.org.uk/