We know D.C. Get our free newsletter to stay in the know.
SATURDAY
D.C. native DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid, aka Paul D. Miller, has been a darling of the experimental ambient scene the past few years because of his dense but inviting sonic cloudbursts Necropolis and Songs of a Dead Dreamer, his association with the genre-defining illbient Soundlab collective, and Abstrakt, his genre-defying club night. But Spooky is, as he often claims, a hiphopper at heart, for even if his music isn’t overtly beat-heavy, what he creates is a direct descendent of what hiphop composition was originally about—collage, reconstructing found sounds into new music. Now Spooky is coming out of the avant-garde and into mainstream: He scored the new hiphop poetry film Slam, and his major label debut, Riddim Warfare, attempts to connect Spooky’s Abstrakt dialectics with a wider audience through guest appearances by rappers Killah Priest, Kool Keith, Sir Menelik, and Organized Konfusion—and a heavier reliance on steady rhythms and bass-based hooks. “This is music made from fragments of the world ,” says Spooky on Riddim Warfare’s track “Rekonstruction.” This world consists of improvisation and songs, dub and mantras, blues and rock, jungle and hiphop, noise and silence. So does Riddim Warfare. DJ Spooky performs live with his backing group the Universal Robot Band (not the old-skool disco guys) and openers Plastilina Mosh and Gardner Post at 7 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 22, at the 9:30 Club, 815 V St. NW. $10. (202) 393-0930. (Christopher Porter)