DJ Spooky remixes soul show

Here's why DJ Spooky is an artist and you're not: He can look at anything, whether it's racist propaganda or a music documentary or even an iceberg, and see a blank canvas.

The last time Spooky (real name Paul Miller) was in the Triangle was to show "Rebirth of a Nation," his multimedia "remix" of D.W. Griffith's 1915 love letter to the Ku Klux Klan; and his next project is "Terra Nova: The Antarctica Suite," a film about "the sound of ice."

In the meantime, there's also "Video Soul: Wattstax to the Avant Garde," which deconstructs the 1973 concert movie "Wattstax." Spooky gives it a world-premiere showing Saturday night in Durham as part of Duke University's "Soul Power" series. Preceding that, he'll give a talk at UNC-Chapel Hill this afternoon.

"It's a meeting of soul and avant-garde, a conversation between old-school soul and what's going on with video stuff right now," Spooky says in a phone call from Maine. "The approach of using collage, mixes, layers and sampling has all come home to roost in the visual field, and I've been evolving more and more into videos as well as music."

Billed as the "black Woodstock," Wattstax was a one-day music festival in 1972 featuring Isaac Hayes, Staple Singers, Bar-Kays and other top R&B acts of the period playing the Los Angeles Coliseum. Organized by the legendary Memphis label Stax Records, Wattstax was an attempt to mark the seventh anniversary of the Los Angeles Watts riots with something positive. Tickets were only $1, to encourage community attendance, and the Rev. Jesse Jackson did the invocation.

Director Mel Stuart's film of the event has an unusual touch, a then-unknown Richard Pryor doing comic routines illuminating the black experience in America for a Greek-chorus effect. "Wattstax" disappeared soon after its 1973 release and was out of circulation for 30 years until it was finally reissued on DVD in 2004.

Obviously, "Wattstax" has very little in common with "Birth of a Nation." But Spooky uses both as raw material for a common theme in his work.

"They're totally different projects, but linked by the politics of race in America," he says. "Soul was part of the black response to oppression, and it had such resonance with old blues and rock, bridging the two. To me, the whole idea of a 'black Woodstock' was very moving, the idea of how much people needed a new definition of self. I went through a lot of archival material, amazing video stuff, seeing how changes filter into art. You never can predict how that will play out. Who could have predicted soul music? Or that Aretha Franklin's hairdo would be this signature statement?"

Told that Franklin has canceled Triangle shows three times in recent years, Spooky laughs.

"Well, she'll be there in video," he says. "And even just on video, Aretha Franklin is pretty powerful stuff."

Spooky's other major project in the works is "Terra Nova," a meditation on planetary ecology through the prism of ... ice. It involved spending a month in Antarctica, filming and recording his surroundings.

"It was mind-blowing, the sheer volume of distances down there," he says of his time in the Antarctic wilderness. "I mean, I'm a city kid, but the scale was incredible. While I was there, a 30-mile-wide iceberg broke off and became this huge navigational hazard. You really see the effects of global warming down there, shattered ice is everywhere. My whole issue is making mixes out of any material, whether it's soul or ice. It's always about sampling, that's the key thing to it all.

"Culture is an evolving process, but there are still people who want to lock it down and I don't know why," he adds. "The world is constantly in transformation. A 30-mile piece of ice breaking off, that's pretty wild. We're facing a planet where we might not be around too long. But meanwhile, we'll make some good soul music."