1. The Broken Compass (Intro Theme) 1:292. A Nation Divided 5:16

3. North Isnt South 2:58

4. The Most Dangerous Woman in America 3:17

5. Stoneman 3:24

6. Cameron 4:10

7. The Parallax Waltz 4:44

8. Gettysburg Requiem 4:35

9. What Would Moses Say? 6:12

10. Lincoln and Booth Get Acquainted 5:50

11. Dixie As Anti-Utopia 4:13

12. Blackface (We Are All Sharecroppers Now) 5:4513. Getting Biblical 3:33

14. The Election and Results: The New Montage 3:39

15. Gus, Elsie, Silas and The Klan 6:03

16. Black Militia 2:06

17. Ride of The Klansmen 6:13

18. The Next Election 3:41

19. Ghost of a Smile 2:04

All music published by Subliminal Kid Publishing (BMI)

The film remix version of Rebirth of a Nation presented here was created with a newly acquired print of the original D.W. Griffith film The Birth of a Nation (1915). The score has been remixed, remastered and resynced accordingly.

Effects: PanopticAdditional arrangements and edits: Howard Kenty

The live performance of Rebirth of a Nation was commissioned by and performed at The Lincoln Center Festival (NYC), the Festival dAutomne a Paris, The Vienna Festival, and the Spoleto Festival USA.

Executive Producers: Michael Gordon, David Lang, Kenny Savelson and Julia WolfeLabel Manager: Bill MurphyCantaloupe sales manager: Adam CuthbertArt direction: John Brown @ cloud chamber

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky Management: Sozo Artists, Inc. @sozoartists

For more about everything you hear on this CD, visit djspooky.com, cantaloupemusic.com and bangonacan.org. To get specially priced advance copies of all our new releases, as well as catalog discounts and other perks, join the Cantaloupe Club at club.bangonacan.org, or join our digital subscription service, the Cantaloupe Patch, at drip.fm/cantaloupe.

Rebirth of a Nation A film score and composition by Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky Performed by Kronos Quartet

Produced by Paul D. Miller and Steve Cohen for Subliminal Kid Productions Composer: Paul D. Miller Studio recording engineer & additional engineering: Howard Kenty

Kronos Quartet recorded February 2, 2007, at Fantasy Studios, Berkeley, CAEngineered by Scott FraserAssistant engineer: James Willetts

David Harrington - violinJohn Sherba - violinHank Dutt - violaJeffrey Zeigler - cello

This album is dedicated to the memory of my father.

Rebirth of a Nation

A film score and composition by Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky

Performed by Kronos Quartet

Produced by Paul D. Miller, Steve Cohen, Subliminal Kid Productions Composer: Paul D. Miller

Studio recording engineer & additional engineering: Howard Kenty

Kronos Quartet David Harrington - violin

John Sherba - violinHank Dutt - viola

Jeffrey Zeigler - cello

Birth of a Nation: A Parallax View An interview between Edith Chiu, Curator of Film (Hong Kong Arts Centre) and Paul D. Miller for Rebirth of a Nation, featuring the Hong Kong New Music Ensemble (2011)

Over the last several years, Rebirth of A Nation has been presented everywhere from London IMAX to The Acropolis, and various art-house and gallery spaces like MoMA, Harvard and beyond, but one of the most intriguing concerts for me took place in Hong Kong. I wanted to include excerpts of the interview I did there with Edith Chiu as a way of showing the all-too-familiar scenario of racial politics, occupied territories, and reclaimed histories that countries outside of the U.S. relate to when they see my remix of D.W. Griffiths work.

In effect, global audiences can relate to this. In an era where the NSAs PRISM program and whistleblowers like Julian Assange and Edward Snowden have shown us that perspective can truly alter global events, we need, more than ever, to see the context that early cinema offers us from the viewpoint of showing us that, as my old friend Saul Williams liked to say: Another World Is Possible. A remix of a film as deeply important and problematic as The Birth of a Nation reminds us, in the era of Trayvon Martin and Ferguson, that many of these issues still linger with us at every level.

I hope youll enjoy the soundtrack as much as I enjoyed making and composing it.

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky New York City, 2015 @djspooky

First of all, thank you for your HK trip. We are so excited to see your performance. Having been engaging with Rebirth of a Nation since 2004, what differences and adaptations will be your artistic treatments when you do it here, in terms of our political and cultural situation?

For the show in Hong Kong, Im really excited to see how the audience can respond to the theme and topic of an occupied territory that generated the idea of Rebirth of a Nation. The dual political systems of mainland China and Hong Kong (city-state versus mainland nation-state) are really interesting to me. On the other hand, Ive worked with historical material from Chinese ancient history, like what can be considered one of the first compositions to focus on noise Ambush from All Sides [

], one of the most famous Chinese classical compositions and my remix of it that I did a while ago in New York.

Ambush from All Sides is a sonic metaphor which was composed on the basis of the decisive battle in 202 B.C. at Gaixia (southeast of todays Linbi County, Anhui Province) between the two armies of Chu and Han. The whole music gives an incisive and vivid depiction, in the form of musical narrative, of the fierce, desolate, solemn and stirring scenes of the battle. The unique techniques of lute performance have been brought into full play in this situation of music as acoustic metaphor. For the Rebirth of a Nation show, I explore the relationship between geography, sound, and new forms of compositional strategy: in blues, but in China, you have had a long tradition of composition that engages the idea of the cinematic imagination.

The composer John Cage once wrote in his book, The Future of Music: Credo (1937): I believe that the use of noise to make music will continue and increase until we reach a music produced through the use of electrical instruments which will make available for musical purposes any and all sounds that can be heard. Photoelectric, film and mechanical mediums for the synthetic production of music will be explored. When you listen to Ambush from All Sides, the beginning sections of the music focus on the description of the battle array of the Han Army. The music in these sections is high-spirited and powerful, accompanied by the sounds of drums and horns. The beat of drums quickened gradually to create a tense explosive atmosphere before the breakout of the full-scale battles. Then comes the main body of the music, which is changeable and rapid. The techniques of flipping, sweeping, circular fingering, wringing, rolling, and halting are employed to represent the furious battle between the armies of Chu and Han. Imagine in Rebirth of a Nation this kind of epic style, and you realize that the original version of the films soundtrack was a remix of Wagner, and you can get the same idea. As a digital media piece, it gives you a good idea of how long music in China and East Asia has been a deep support for the creative arts in general. The U.S. is just catching up, perhaps.

How about the physical and technical conditions? What will be your site-specific requirements when the theatre is different from IMAX like London or outdoor ambiance like Athens? What are the aesthetic reasons for the tri-screen?

Abel Gance did his 1927 version of Napoleon and it set the tone for multi-media immersive cinema ever since. When you look at modern filmmakers like Mike Figgis and his film Time Code or the fact that renowned directors like Peter Greenaway, Jim Jarmusch and Francis Ford Coppola are all DJing now, you can see a strange dialectic at work. Repetition and recursive logic are the core of beat culture. But when you look at editing in our world, its come full circle. Editing and making loops are art forms in their own right.

For me, its all about making unexpected connections, and looking for links rather than compartmentalizing things. What is out of sight disturbs mens minds more seriously than what they see. [Julius Caesar] I kind of dig that quote a simple, direct link to the hidden archives of the possible hidden in plain sight: in peoples minds. Thats where everything starts: with the thought of an idea. Thats the real multimedia. My books, writings and artwork are all about that kind of network effect, but with culture. So yeah, propaganda, the media environment, strange loops a la Douglas Hofstadters Godel, Escher, Bach and the hip-hop take on collage and appropriation art these inspire me as much as going to places that are pure poetry like Antarctica and making compositions there. From almost every angle, this kind of creativity celebrates collage, a willful breakdown of boundaries, and a playfulness that would aggravate almost anyone. Thats kind of the point. Thats where I looked for inspiration for .

When The Birth of a Nation celebrates its centennial commemoration in 2015, will you be doing another updated version? What subject matters will you consider to include?

The curatorial statement for one of my favorite museum shows is Paola Antonellis Talk to Me at MoMA: Thus far, 21st-century culture is centered on interaction: I communicate, therefore I am is the defining affirmation of contemporary existence, and objects and systems that were once charged only with formal elegance and functional soundness are now also expected to have personalities. So we go from Descartes cogito ergo sum to the network self.

Multi-disciplinary art is crucial these days. Its the way we live now. The year 2015 is science fiction for me, but we are still using the imagination of a different era to describe a cultural milieu that has evolved more rapidly than anyone anticipated. Thats kind of like using an old bicycle to race an F-34 Joint Strike Force fighter jet. Its apples and oranges; it doesnt make sense. Thats the paradox at the heart of my Rebirth of a Nation film project. One of the most fun shows I had was when we got the Greek government to give us the Acropolis (Herod Atticus Theater a major landmark) for a live concert of the film. It was incredible. But thats kind of the point: the paradox of playing a remixed film at the heart of Western Civilization.

How important are the issues of race and equality in this project? And what changes have been made when Obama was elected, both within this work and the real world?

Hmm...Obama is a pastiche, a living collage. I try as much as possible to trust my first impulse on issues, and then to look to the hidden links that impulse was drawn from. Its like having your eyes see something, then filling out all the details with spectral analysis or something. Original work is the DNA; how you unpack it all is the genetic material made into new sequences. The rest is data flow. I think that Obama understands that. The Republicans dont. Also, how do you address the death of Osama Bin Laden and the aftermath of the relationships between America and the Muslim world?

The world is a super-complex place, and getting stranger every day. Thats the simplest explanation I can give. America is at the epicenter.

In view of international relations, what are your opinions of the rising China as a strong nation? The title track of The Secret Song has the narration about the contemporary China phenomenon. What do you think is the paradox of its rapid growth? Is the recent high-speed train accident a mirror to reflect some of the problems there?

China is the future and the past, simultaneously. Its a country made of the fragments of many kingdoms, and thats something that most Westerners dont really get. Theres not one monolithic China. Adam Smith once wrote All money is a belief. We live in a hybrid world, and thats just the way it is. Dub and tape collage understood this intuitively at a very early point in the 20th century, and the rest is just an extension of everyday life.

When you get to the point that editing itself is an art form, in the way we fold space and time into samples, then upload that kind of stuff to social networks, you realize that this is the real information economy. I look at economists like Raj Patel, who has a great book like The Value of Nothing, where he is trying to come to grips with the idea of free in a market-driven society, and what hip-hop and reggae, etc. would update with the idea of cultural capital Twitter feeds and your followers are a good example of the attention economy. Believe it.

Right now, Im listening to a lot of music from Asia, Africa, Brazil not the obvious stuff, but things from underground or art music. Ive been doing sound art and digital media installations for the last 15 years. So I guess I never thought of anything as separate. Brian Enos whole idea of using the studio as an instrument was explored by the Jamaican scene before the British rock scene, and King Tubby is pretty much the inventor of the whole way we look at audio editing in a modern bass minimalist mode. Paola Antonellis Talk To Me show at MoMA is basically a visual update of almost everything I just mentioned. Dub aesthetics is GPS of the mind. Thats modern China...

You have mentioned that this project is about appropriation art like Duchamp and Warhol. What do you think is the most gratifying part you have found from this project?

Rebirth of a Nation is a mirror held up to societys racial politics. If you look at the riots that were going on in England, you can see a deeply fractured society where kids feel like anything goes. Theres a kind of nihilism that goes with that. With my film, you can see a lot of paradoxes going into it: President Woodrow Wilson was raised by KKK sympathizers, yet tried to start the League of Nations. Teddy Roosevelt, who presided over the massive creation of public parks throughout the U.S., is carried by a black slave and a conquered Indian Chief in front of the American National Museum. Bush...well, dont even get me started about Bush. All I can say is that the echoes of the past are samples from the vast palette I think of as my archive.

As much as any one issue facing humanity over the next 15 years, I think that finding quality information in the middle of this info overload will be one of the ways people make sense out of the distinction between truth and fiction, fact and form, function and faction. Lets call it a politics of perception for the attention deficit disorder generation. The Birth of a Nation was the first film to really tap the emotional logic behind how people perceive the other. With the rise of blackface and the minstrel show, we saw a century rise of the entertainment-military-industrial complex. These are industries where, like soma in Aldous Huxleys Brave New World, or George Schyulers Black Empire or his novel Black No More, you can see an anti-dialectic at work.

I look at modern pop and collage music (basically everything made in a computer) as the inheritor of the same science-faction update: and yes, thats science-faction instead of fiction. Pick a point of view and wrap yourself in it. Ask any Republican, and they can tell you the same thing. The problem with our post-Obama election wasnt that he was an African-American, but that he actually believed that the power structure could accommodate a certain kind of realism. Instead, we saw The Birth of a Nation as a catalyst for the right wing, just as if there was no intervening time. Thats why I wanted to do the film. If I could remix a more current film, Id probably say Avatar or Transformers, with Captain America left as a runner-up. At lesser points of an already low expectation of cinema, they still try to be honest. Also, you have said that given the digital revolution, communications and appreciations of films should be changed. Where do you reckon the future of music and image will be heading?

I guess I always naively think that if you put information in front of people, theyll get it. They dont. The Book of Ice project is Utopian in that it seems like the bleedingly obvious fact that our species might not get out of this century in too good condition is being ignored. Ice sheets are melting. Water is scarce. Global weather patterns are the most complex phenomena weve encountered. Again, Adam Smith wrote all money is a matter of belief. The realm of the possible is always greater than the realm of the real. I try to navigate between the two: thats art. Digital media is just a tool to arrive at the same conclusion. But the tools are an extension of the creative process, so the future of music is tied to the future of technology at every level. In the pop music world, hip-hop and rap music have been embraced worldwide as the trends and chic styles. How do you feel about it when you have been promoting it for so long?

Im not really pop oriented. My peer group is people like Amon Tobin, Coldcut, Kid Koala, Anti-Pop Consortium, DJ Shadow, DJ Krush, RJD2, Z-Trip, Cut Chemist, Peanut Butter Wolf, Shabazz Palaces, etc. i.e., not mainstream. Being a versatile creative and academic person, what are your philosophies of balancing your spectrum of thinking?

Hybridity and inter-disciplinarity are the code words for total creative flux. I want to feel like a fish in the ocean of information. What will be your next projects, and who will be the collaborators?

Most recently, I took a studio to Antarctica and did a project about the sound of ice. Its a new book called The Book of Ice and I worked with a quantum physicist named Brian Greene, who wrote the book The Elegant Universe. Its a book about the sound of ice. The Book of Ice started as graphic design music scores taken from my Terra Nova: Sinfonia Antarctica project. I wanted to fine-tune the book as an extension of some of my obsessions with climate change. The first soundtrack and symphony written about Antarctica was by Ralph Vaughan Williams in 1948, but other works Handels Water Music or John Luther Adams Arctic compositions, or even more close to home, John Cages first composition for turntables Imaginary Landscape (1936), Charles Ives Central Park in The Dark, or Cornelius Cardews graphic design scores are all influences. I guess you could say The Book of Ice is an inter-connected, hyper-expandable/scalable museum/gallery show, book and symphony. Simple!

Who will you choose to work with in HK and in China? Do you have any impressions of HKs pop music and indie music scenes?

Hmm...Ive checked out some of the more avant-garde film scene from Hong Kong. For example, Jimmy Howe, a talented cinematographer did the film A Visualist, and Im looking for more! Ive been to mainland China, Macau and Hong Kong before, and Ive worked with Chinese musicians like Min Xiao Fen and Jing Zhou, so Im aware of some of the more avant-garde Chinese mainland scene, and have checked out composers like Huang Ruo and Du Yun. Im always checking out international styles. Ive also heard some of the hip-hop and turntablist stuff from DJ Wordy and the Beijing Dub Soundsystem, and Modern Skies Records in mainland China. And in Hong Kong, there are actors like Edison Chen who DJ too! Thats cool. Ive never really been into pop I prefer more underground stuff. Ive checked out some of the historical music of Buck Clayton, who influenced the start of the Shanghai jazz movement of the 1930s through Li Jinhui, whose student Nie Er wrote the Chinese national anthem. Cool!

What is music to you?

I like to say over and over: for me, music isnt music. Its information. I took a studio to several ice fields and glacier fields in Antarctica to make a symphony and gallery show project combining multimedia and music compositions. Its a music installation and string quartet I wrote based on the geometry of ice. I looked at a lot of archival footage and material from the collected expeditions of several countries Germany, England, Russia and Norway and they all had different graphic design strategies for the explorations. I sampled a lot of the old graphics and updated them. Antarctica is the only place on Earth with no government, and I wanted to reflect that in the graphic design, plus show material to create more of a climate change literacy in art.

What is (moving) image to you?

The way we think about editing, whether its sounds or images, has taken on a new function: collage is the collective unconscious. Sound is a phenomenon thats totally open, so there are no real boundaries unless you make them. I like to think of all sound as just patterns, so theres no reason to think about how we could just add patterns, subtract patterns. Its a scalable logic, I guess. So the way video combines sound and image is just an update of the same thing. At the end of the day, its all about editing processes. Thats where the real art is these days.

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