Aliases are the thing of the moment in electronic music, I guess, since every DJ has about twenty of them. Strangely enough, DJ Spooky's using his real name as an alias for Viral Sonata. Now, I personally hear very little difference between the styles of music created by DJ Spooky and Paul D. Miller, so I'm not sure why he went along this route. Maybe he just doesn't want people to get burned out on Spook.

And as spooky as this DJ isn't, Viral Sonata is a pretty impressive release. Weighing in at a hefty seventy-four and a quarter minutes, there's a lot of space noise to wade through here. That's not a bad thing.

See, regardless of the bad rap he's always getting, Paul is an innovator. He's not riding MTV's "next wave of electronica" and he's not on that infamous "generic techno" bandwagon. He's creating soundscapes that are literally unlike anything we've heard before. In the silvery liner notes, he claims to have sampled Jupiter's magnetosphere, sound of the rings of Saturn, sonograms of the ocean's depths, twenty layers of television static, an audio analogue of solar wind, audio translation of human DNA, among other things. Not that I've ever heard what any of these things sound like, so I wouldn't know. All I can tell you is, if you can weed through the pretension, Viral Sonata houses the most ethereal, shimmering (perhaps even spooky) soundwaves I've ever encountered in my life.

-Ryan Schreiber