Short Story: DJ Cheb i Sabbah: As Far As: A DJ Mix

The low red sun burned through the fog of the last few sleepless nights. I rolled out of the borrowed sleeping bag and onto the hard packed dirt floor of the tent. Camp coffee, cruel black gunk that burned like lava was all that we had left in the supplies so I launched a healthy dose down my throat and got dressed. The clothes I borrowed from Madin three days ago were stale and smelled like I'd borrowed them three years ago. We'd been waiting for almost a week to get into the Bhimbetka rock shelters to see the petroglyphs with our own eyes.

Moving to India in my early twenties was an impulse move. Tired of the relentless pace of Western life and the excesses it brings, I packed a bag and headed to the subcontinent with no real plan. How could I have predicted that that shit would follow me, even here. Now every corner of India is plastered with ads for American products, Internet cafes and cheap knockoffs from up north in China. Authenticity in the age of plastic is a fools dream, but I have always been a fool.

Thusly did I find myself staring at 10,000 year old human settlements squinting in the early morning with Madin, my friend and mentor. Well dosed on shitty coffee we parted the tarps covering the nearest cave and set up our mats just inside. I had been practicing my meditation techniques and learning from Madin since I'd arrived in India and I quickly stilled my mind and peered past the rock carvings and into the earth. I saw the hands of a thousand generations lain upon this stone, trying to see what the carvers had meant so many years ago.

As the glyphs settled into the back of my conscious mind the cave fell away and the scene opened up on the sea of green spread before me. The jungle went on as far as I could see and for the first time I saw the India I had come looking for. The land before even the times of Siddhartha Gautama. The rhythm of the land swept through my mind's eye and shook the last bit of disbelief from existence.

In a rush the world around me blurred as vision ans sensation fast forwarded. Time and space become concepts as I moved through Asia and into Arabia. Before I could catch my breath the mighty empires of the Middle East and North Africa rose and fell in front of me. Egypt ascendant, then nothing but wind blasted monuments to an era long past. The vision swept me north once more, to the high mountain reaches of Nepal. Past the endless expanses of the Tibetan highlands and into the Gobi. When I arrived here the journey stopped.

All of these visions came at once then, threatening to overwhelm me. Just when I thought I could take no more, I woke to the cool inside of these ancient caverns to find Madin smiling softly at me. I lay cold and shivering on my mat inside the cave and confused, my body stiff and sore from what felt like years of sitting.

There it was, in a moments flash. I realized then that this endless quest for the real was but one more illusion to strip from my awareness, one more bridge to cross in life. I bowed deeply to my friend, to the cave and to the thousand hands that came before me. Outside, the air had taken on a new lightness. I realized in that moment that it was I that had become lightness, laughed and put my feet upon the road once more.

Panthalassa - The Remixes: Miles Davis

We start this evening in a downtown lounge, sipping a drink and listening to the traffic roll by in it's muted thunder. The glasses on the bar start to shake along with the rhythm of the train passing overhead. Mystery surrounds you in an ever growing shroud, each tendril of brass an invitation to slip further into the embrace of endless dusk.

Soon, the scene drops you to street level, harsh lights passing overhead one after the other, the frenzied pace of a Saturday night. Every man and woman trying to get as much pleasure out of these brief moments that life allows them, wrenching out emotions strained under the weight of their own self doubt. Now this narrow beer soaked road spreads out into a broad street and the sheer size of the night becomes apparent to you. It is immense, and we are very small.

Miles Davis was relentlessly experimental in his musical career and this remix sounds to me like what the man would be doing if he were still around. He would be moving forward with the force of a typhoon and leaving most of the world confused in his wake. This album has beats the size of skyscrapers laced on top of some of the slickest tunes ever to grace my ears. Imagine a secret meeting between Bjork and DJ Shadow on top of a building in the dead of winter, exchanging vinyl like secret agents. I keep this one stacked in my secret vault of Forbidden Beats with Saul Williams, DJ Krush, Yuki Kajiura and a bag of instrumentals from MF Doom.

Good for: Plotting the getaway plan, smoking a cigarette in the moonlight from the veranda of your penthouse.

Man, this took some looking. Check out samples at Amazon.com (you'll need the Realplayer plugin to listen.)