Interview: John Schaefer with Frank J. Oteri & Paul D. Miller, "The Art of Noise"

On 15 May 2009, WNYC radio's Soundcheck program hosted this radio interview between announcer John Schaefer, Frank J. Oteri (composer and editor of NewMusicBox) and Paul D. Miller (a.k.a. DJ Spooky, That Subliminal Kid, sampling extraordinaire and member of faculty at the European Graduate School) as part of their "Sound Off" Friday Series.

While the "noise versus music" theme which underpins this radio interview continuously threatens to flatten the complexities of the conversation, Oteri and Miller nonetheless manage to conduct an informed and eloquent auricular tour of the relationship between noise sampling and the music industry of the twentieth/twenty-first century. The Futurists, Public Enemy, sonic algorithms, Merzbow, Rhys Chatham, and the ancient Chinese composition Pipa all cycle through the discussion along with a myriad of other topics which test the limits of music recognition and the possibilities of sonic en/de-coding.

"Repetition and giving things a sequence changes the way you hear. ... I think the hidden architecture of the twentieth century was the uneasy tension between noise and repetition."

Paul D. Miller

 That interview, along with other recorded segments of Soundcheck are archived at the WNYC radio website.