DJ DUBBLE8 (a.k.a Dr. Erik Spangler)

Erik Spangler (Ph.D. Harvard University, 2004) is a composer and electronic musician working within a wide range of listening environments. His compositions have been performed across the United States and internationally from Canada to China, by ensembles including the Atlantic Brass Quintet, Boston Modern Orchestra Project, and International Contemporary Ensemble.

As DJ Dubble8, Spangler performs “fizzy, angular susurrations” (Ann Arbor Observer) and patterns on diverse electronics, creating music ranging from “a skillful merger of recorded … phrases flecked with DJ turntable effects” (Washington Post) to “rigorous … improvisatory” (Gramophone) compositions with a range of chamber ensembles. His music may be heard on Innova Recordings, indie hip-hop label Nonsense Records, and live in spaces ranging from academic concert halls to art galleries, from clubs to sidewalks.

Recent performances as a turntablist include collaborations with Cornell Symphony Orchestra, Sonic Circus, Ithaca College Percussion Ensemble, and VJ Art Jones.

Spangler works regularly with saxophonist Brian Sacawa as the genre-bending duo Hybrid Groove Project. Along with Sacawa, Spangler is also co-curator of Mobtown Modern, a new music series in collaboration with the Contemporary Museum in Baltimore.

Upcoming Projects and Performances

Stay tuned for the release date of "South: Read, Riot, Race, Railroad ...Lamenting Loss of Industry", the final installment of "The Story of This Place: Charm City Remix" with Kianga Ford.

5/23/08-- Dubble8 solo performance and collaboration with Oxter, taking place at Joe Squared Pizza and Bar, 133 W. North Ave. in Baltimore. No cover charge.

5/24/08-- Performance with Sonic Circus Duo at Artomatic, Capitol Plaza I, 1200 First Street, NE Washington, D.C. 20002. 8 PM.

5/31/08-- Performance with Sonic Circus Duo at the Heaven Gallery, 1550 North Milwaukee, 2nd Floor, Chicago, IL 60622. 8 PM.

7/20/08-- Hybrid Groove Project performance at the Metro Gallery as part of the Baltimore's legendary Artscape Festival. 2:30 PM. Free!

New saxophone & turntablist compositions for Hybrid Groove Project in progress, including Self-portrait with Nancarrow , Grab It! (remix) , and a firefly in the belly (HGP remix) .

Production/co-composition in progress on upcoming album by DuYun, to be released next year by Tag Team Records.

Past Performances and Other News

May 9, 2008-- Mobtown Modern, the new music series that I am curating with Brain Sacawa, held its second concert in partnership with the Contemporary Museum. "not so much: minimalish music", featured works by Philip Glass, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Michael Gordon, and Nico Muhly. Classic pieces of the minimalist tradition, Glass' "Music In Similar Motion" and Riley's "In C", were given a new treatment by the inclusion of guest beatboxer Shodekeh and my use of a Korg KP3 to connect these pieces with a hip-hop aesthetic.

May 3, 2008-- Hybrid Groove Project provided the music for the Contemporary Museum's "Sustain-a-Ball" fundraiser at the Montgomery Park building in southwest Baltimore. Sampled environmental sounds, jazzy trip-hop, and spacey improvisations on saxophone and melodica underscored the most sustainable cocktail hour ever experienced in Charm City.

April 5, 2008-- DJ performance at the University of Maryland, College Park, for LevelTen Leaders in Action's "Global Champions Leadership Conference", working with high school and middle school youth.

April 4, 2008-- Hybrid Groove Project performance at the Metro Gallery in Baltimore, for the opening of the "Ironing" exhibition, featuring artwork by Okan Arabacioglu and Brian Payne.

March 20, 2008-- Performance with Sonic Circus Duo at The Lighthouse in Washington D.C., a unique down-home venue for experimental music in the basement of a residential house, 1421 Buchanan Street. Our multimedia performance featured works by Terry Riley, Judith Shatin, and yours truly, DJ Dubble8.

March 15, 2008-- Kianga Ford's "The Story of This Place: Charm City Remix" opened at The Contemporary Museum, with music composed and performed by DJ Dubble8/Hybrid Groove Project. MP3s of Kianga's recorded narrative and the musical score are available on iPods at the museum, along with a map to guide four possible walking routes through the city. The installation continues through May 11.

February 9, 2008-- Completion of soundtrack to Joe Zohar's experimental short, M9. I am feeling good about the sound and flow on this one, and I think it will work well with the beautiful metaphysical images that Zohar has put together. Look out for this one at upcoming experimental film festivals.

February 1 and 2, 2008-- I joined Sonic Circus (saxophonist Michael Straus, bassoonist Dana Jessen) on a Michigan mini-tour, performing at the Canterbury House Concert Series in Ann Arbor and (SCENE)Metrospace in East Lansing. I performed my solo "Iraq Mix", my piece for Dana Jessen entitled "a firefly in the belly", and improvising roles in Jessen's own "Eshtyn", Judith Shatin's "Grito del Corazon", and Terry Riley's "Dorian Reeds". At the show in East Lansing, I also discovered that my "pastlife laptops and attic instruments" had been played there at Michigan State just two nights before!

January 29, 2008-- A very successful inaugural concert of Mobtown Modern, a Baltimore new music series at the Contemporary Museum, curated by Brian Sacawa and Erik Spangler. Presented in conjunction with George W. Bush's final State of the Union address, this first concert featured provocative politically-themed music by composers including Frederic Rzweski, Vinko Globokar, Erik Spangler, Steve Reich, and Louis Andriessen. Acclaimed NYC video artist Art Jones mixed images to accompany the compositions. We received excellent press coverage in the Baltimore Sun and the Washington Post.

January 19, 2008-- Dubble8 performance at Talking Head in downtown Baltimore. In addition to a solo set, I joined jazz-funk fusion group Oxter for a few songs. Other performers included Satabdi Express, and Dominique Leone.

December 21, 2007-- DJ Dubble8/Hybrid Groove Project performed at the afterparty for "Unsilent Night", a boombox parade piece by NYC composer Phil Kline. Joe Squared Pizza & Bar. The Unsilent Night event, organized by HGP co-conspirator Brian Sacawa, drew a crowd of near-100 participants who formed a boombox procession up Charles St, through indoor spaces including Penn Station and the lobby of the Charles Theater, and up to North Ave. Now known as "Baltimore's newest holiday tradition".

December 2, 2007-- Cornell doctoral student Chris Gendall’s "Holy Rollers", for turntable soloist and orchestra, was premiered by DJ Dubble8 and the Cornell Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Chris Kim.

October 31, 2007-- Dubble8 Halloween show at Joe Squared Pizza & Bar. Solo DJ set and guest turntablist appearance with Oxter.

October 4, 2007-- HGP performance at Gallerie Icosahedron in Manhattan, as part of VIM: TriBeCa concert series. Coinciding with Brian Sacawa's birthday, this concert was listed as a Critic's Pick in Time Out NY.

September 8, 2007-- HGP performance at the opening reception for the "Broadcast" exhibit at The Contemporary Museum, Baltimore, MD.

August 30, 2007-- Dubble8 performance at Current Gallery in Baltimore, with local funk/fusion group Oxter.

August 18, 2007-- HGP performance at Joe Squared Pizza & Bar in Baltimore.

July 22, 2007-- HGP took it to the streets with a sidewalk performance for ARTSKATE, a guerilla art & music event hosted by Pramus skate shop to coincide with Baltimore's Artscape 2007 festival. DuYun travelled down from New York to join us as guest vocalist.

July 20, 2007, 7:00 PM-- Hybrid Groove Project performance as part of Artscape 2007's Exotic Hypnotic showcase, curated by John Bernt. Langsdale Auditorium, University of Baltimore.

July 9, 2007-- Hybrid Groove Project w/ DuYun took NYC by storm at Monkeytown in Williamsburg, Brooklyn (at least having attracted a crowd of 25-or-so on a Monday night in midsummer, to a remote Brooklyn hipster venue). The inclusion of DuYun on vocals and gu zheng (Chinese zither) took our sound to new heights and made for a most memorable performing experience. We all felt that this performance was the beginning of a new chapter. A fantastic audience and amazing space were a great help in making my first NYC show a happy one. Thanks to Art Jones for posting some great photos from the show. Mr. Sacawa's lovely assistant also took some nice profile shots of HGP in action.

June 25, 2007-- My family and I have moved from Southwest Florida to Baltimore. I will be building a music program at a new charter high school, Maryland Academy of Technology and Health Sciences (MATHS), and taking Hybrid Groove Project to the next level with Baltimore saxophonist Brian Sacawa. Please visit our new HGP website www.hybridgrooveproject.com to view our upcoming performances and to hear some tasty sound clips.

May 26, 2007-- Conclusion of my Florida chapter. While living in Cape Coral, local performances were not plentiful for me... although a few shows will always be remembered for their lovely setting and relaxed vibe. Many thanks to Julia's Arts gallery in Matlacha for hosting me there, and to the members of Dreadnot roots reggae band (now Misgana) for inviting me to jam. From my time in Gainesville, I am much indebted to Electronic SubSouth for hosting me on their concert series and promoting my shows. Big up also to Tim & Terry's Music Cafe for being my regular performance venue in Gainesville. Thanks for the free beers!

May 21, 2007-- Completion of an EP entitled Childrens' Stories and Soundscapes. This features a few projects with narration that I did in collaboration with my students at Oasis Charter Middle School, along with some other pieces inspired by issues of childhood and the environment.

April 25, 2007-- First show in Baltimore, MD. Hybrid Groove Project (DJ Dubble8 and saxophonist Brian Sacawa) perform pastlife laptops and attic instruments at An die Musik LIVE. Program includes other saxophone and electronic pieces by Jacob ter Veldhuis, David T. Little, Alexandra Gardner, Michael Djupstrom.

April 24, 2007-- Hybrid Groove Project lecture/demo at Peabody Conservatory, for the Computer Music Department. Stanton (makers of Traktor Final Scratch) and Propellerhead (makers of Reason software) should really be paying us to promote their products in academia like this, don't you think?

April 19, 2007-- The premiere of a firefly in the belly for bassoon and electronics took place at Franklin Pierce College in Rindge, NH. Bassoonist Dana Jessen (a graduate student at New England Conservatory), who commissioned the piece, did a fantastic job with both her written part and an extended section of improvisation in the second half of the work. I improvised on turntables, mixing a pre-composed electronic part with scratched fragments of Dana's bassoon part and other prepared samples. Although Dana and I had never met in person until the evening before the premiere, we quickly connected in our vision of the piece and our improvising styles. Following the premiere, we performed the piece at The Lily Pad in Cambridge, MA, and New England Conservatory as part of the Boston CyberArts Festival. These concerts were organized as a mini-tour for Dana's duo with saxophonist Michael Straus, Sonic Circus.

December 14, 2006-- [Cape Coral, FL] As the culmination of my first semester as music teacher at Oasis Charter Middle School, I am hosting a Digital Music Expo featuring original student compositions from my classes. This accompanies the release of a compilation CD featuring a mix of tracks created in my 7th/8th grade class in Digital Music Composition, as well as a contribution from my after-school Instrument-Making Club. It is a great reward to see the dedicated kids who really start to take pride in music that they have made themselves.

October 17, 2006-- Celebrating the birth of a beautiful daughter, Mila Marie Spangler, I feel blessed beyond all comparison to any previous experience. Mama Marie creates an unending thread of new lullabies to mark every phase of baby Mila's days. I see all my other daily struggles and concerns fade to the background, every day that I come home to my wife and daughter. All praises due to the Most High.

October 2006-- Commissioned film score completed for Chalk Outlines, a 21st Century version of classic film noir by Joe Zohar, Moving Box Studios. Look for the official release of the film, and accompanying soundtrack, in Fall 2007.

July 1, 2006-- Moving to Cape Coral, FL, to begin a teaching position at Oasis Charter Middle School. As the charter school is completely new, I have the privilege of building a music program from the ground up. I will be teaching grades 6-8, offering a variety of courses including Digital Music Composition, utlizing Reason software.

June 15, 2006-- pastlife laptops and attic instruments performed by saxophonist Geoffrey Deibel at Northwestern University.

April 10, 2006-- UPCOMING CD RELEASE: Hybrid Groove Project saxophonist Brian Sacawa's new album, entitled American Voices, has been picked up by the Innova record label. This album includes a live recording of my pastlife laptops and attic instruments, from our premiere of the piece at the University of Michigan. "American Voices" should be available by mid-summer.

March 31, 2006-- Performed as a Guest Artist at the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival, hosted by Ithaca College. For the opening reception of the festival, I mixed for three hours in a black-draped ("requiem-themed") lounge that also contained a video installation by post-conceptual artist Tony Cokes. Attendees were able to move between multiple rooms containing different types of music including a Gospel choir and a Javanese Gamelan from Cornell University.

March 24, 2006-- Performed at the University of Arizona music department, presenting the second concert of Hybrid Groove Project with saxophonist Brian Sacawa. This concert included the premiere of my Every Time -- Tucson remix, which also featured Brian Ellis on Hammond keyboard and Brian Ten Eyck on didjeridou. The previous day I presented a lecture for the composition students, detailing my current compositional practice and the digital influences on the shape of several new works (using software such as Reason and Final Scratch), along with a description of my collaboration with Sacawa and its impact on the evolving music.

February 4, 2006-- Performed on Chamber Music Now! concert series in Philadelphia, sharing the stage of Ethical Society Hall with Grammy award-winning saxophonist Brian Sacawa, in a program entitled "Hybrid Grooves". Following my opening DJ set, Sacawa joined me to perform a program combining original music that I have written for him alongside "borrowed" pieces by composers including Philip Glass, Eve Beglarian, Jacob der Veldhuis, and Richard Belcastro. This event marks the first full concert of Hybrid Groove Project, a saxophone and turntables duo that Sacawa and I have started as a way to present modern chamber music in a new context of live remix and cross-cultural reinterpretation.

January 17, 2006-- Shared the stage with some truly phenomenal musicians: Bleubird, S.K.I.P., DiViNCi, Skyrider, and DJ ROD-1, on "Push Tuesdays" at the Orlando Island Oasis. "Push Tuesdays" is a new weekly event dedicated to presenting regional artists in hip-hop, the forms of music that gave birth it, and the forms that have expanded from it. Marie and I previously attended the first of these events and both considered it one of the best shows we've been to. Anyone in the Central FL area, come out and support this event!

January 14, 2006-- Completed a "rough cut" version of a new album, Fourth World Nyabinghi , which brings together some older unreleased tracks alongside new experiments, featuring collaborations with Du Yun, Ithaca College Percussion Ensemble, S.K.I.P., Thousands of One, and others. To read more about this project, visit my page on myspace.com and check out the blog area.

December 5, 2005-- Premiere of a commission from the Ithaca College Percussion Ensemble, entitled Glacier, Stone, Lake , scored for percussion quartet with an improvisatory part for myself on turntables. Whalen Center for Music, Ithaca College, 8 PM.

November 24, 2005-- Saxophonist Patrick Posey performed my pastlife laptops and attic instruments , for alto saxophone and electronics, in Halle, Germany.

November 2005-- Composed soundtrack for a short film, Repentance , directed by Joe Zohar (Moving Box Productions, Ithaca, NY). Zohar created the film as a 6-minute film noir short, influenced by 1940's-era noir as well as recent films in the genre, such as Sin City . The soundtrack was composed to set the mood as a blend of spectral Spangler orchestral samples, "street corner" jazz saxophone phrases, and down-tempo breakbeats.

Fall 2005-- Since moving to Gainesville, my geographic area as a DJ has obviously expanded, with upcoming events in Philadelphia and Tucson, AZ, as well as increasing numbers of shows in the Central Florida region. I plan to keep coming back to the Northeast to perform on the regular, and to develop a tour path up the East coast, across to the Midwest, and down through the South to Miami. I may be able to reach the West coast when I go out to perform at the University of Arizona in March 2006, with saxophonist Brian Sacawa.

October 7, 2005-- Presentation of my Iraq Mix (from afar) , on a Tabula Rasa concert at the First Unitarian Church in Ithaca, NY. My mix (a blend of sound elements from the Dismantling War project, featuring samples of traditional Iraqi music) was part of an audiovisual homage to the people of Iraq and the Middle-east in a time of cultural dissonance, a collaboration between myself and artist George Sapio. This event was held in conjunction with an ongoing exhibit on the human cost of war, entitled Eyes Wide Open .

October 2005-- Dubble8 Productions has moved! In the first days of October, Marie and I relocated to Gainesville, Florida. While looking for change of scenery and job prospects, our main reason in coming to Gainesville has been to assist and seek refuge with the Rinkoski clan, Marie's family, who all moved here in the last couple of years. We ended up moving a bit earlier than expected when our only car died, the trusty 1997 Saturn having been our only mode of transportation while living out in the holler of Ludlowville. The length of our time here is undetermined (in both the particular and the cosmic sense).

September 12, 2005-- Performance of a live mix for a multimedia project entitled Dismantling War , at the Park School of Communications, Ithaca College. My "live musical score" was commissioned for Ithaca College's First Year Reading Initiative, as part of a remix of subject matter related to a book by Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried , dealing with the Vietnam War. The Human Studies Film Archive of the Smithsonian Institution provided hours of amateur film footage from around the world, focusing on locations which have since been drastically changed or destroyed by wars. This footage was remixed live on two screens by VJs Art Jones and Simon Tarr, while a team of students and professors provided a "libretto" of spoken-word quotes. I mixed samples from Japanese, Vietnamese, and Iraqi music, plus electronic music by Jonathan Harvey and Reed Ghazala, with original beats and samples from my own recorded concert music, to create an 80-minute soundtrack. Allusions to the current war in Iraq were strong in both the music and the visual imagery, while the spoken-word layer focused more on Vietnam. More than 200 people attended this event.

Summer 2005-- Increasing DJ performances at various locations throughout upstate NY, from Ithaca to Alexandria Bay (on the border with Canada). I was given many opportunities to perform in Ithaca through collaboration with my friend DJ canGURU , who has helped me learn the nature of public DJ performance more than anyone else. Since Marie and I worked for a winery this summer (Thousand Islands Winery), we organized several events at local venues which paired wine tasting with original beats.

July 2005-- Trip-Hop song collaboration with fellow composer (and now singer) Du Yun . Between e-mail and phone discussions and a 2-day session in NYC, four new tracks were created. In August, Du Yun and a small ensemble of Jazz musicians performed a show at a prominent club in Shanghai, where they also recorded a few of the songs in the studio. The electronic tracks that I produced were to provide a basic framework for improvisational development by the ensemble. The songs that were recorded in Shanghai have led to an offer for an album release through the Indie record label Tag Team Records.

May 2005-- Debut electronica album as DJ Dubble8 , entitled Tompkins County Organic: homegrown beats, vol. I , is completed! While I have composed a large body of notated music that has been performed by various ensembles, this is my first album in the electronic medium and my first large-scale music project in the world beyond the academic concert hall. The music on this album consists of original beats (layered, loop-based compositions, for those friends of mine from the classical world who aren't familiar with this definition of "beat") which incorporate samples from my own acoustic compositions, as well as samples from many other sources. The diverse samples in each song are united through the groove frameworks of Hip-Hop, Jungle, or Downtempo drum patterns. The album contains 16 tracks (15 full beats and 1 interlude) which are collectively designed to dissolve the walls between the various cultures that influence the music.

May 14, 2005-- First performance of No te amo como si fueras... (from Five Love Songs ) at the wedding of our dear friends Paul Lovelace and Garrett Graddy in Versailles, KY. Using the text of Sonnet XVII by Pablo Neruda (in Spanish), I sang the vocal part (an octave lower than the original mezzo-soprano designation) while my wife Marie played clarinet. The ceremony took place outdoors, under a huge tree at the entrance to a walled garden, on the ancestral farm of the Graddy family. The song was performed as the bride entered and circumambulated the interior of the circle formed by the assembled community.

April 20, 2005-- Completed Five Love Songs , for mezzo-soprano, clarinet, cello, and piano. Combining new material with several songs that had been left unfinished for some years, this cycle brings together texts from Baha'u'llah, Song of Solomon, Rabindranath Tagore, Pablo Neruda, and Alfred Lord Tennyson. A bilingual song cycle, the set includes two settings in Spanish. These songs are dedicated to my wife Marie.

April 2, 2005-- Second performance of Tahirih , for soprano saxophone and percussion. The performance took place at the First Unitarian Church in Ithaca, NY, on a concert given by Tabula Rasa, an organization committed to the performance of music by Ithaca composers. Ian Jeffress- soprano saxophone, with Cayenna Ponchione- percussion.

February 4, 2005-- Completed Inner Circle , for four duos. This piece had been performed as a work-in-progress back in 1999, and then left in that state as I picked up other projects. As it was one of the first satellite pieces to my cantata, Mandala of the Four Directions , it has come full circle in its completion and become a type of condensed Mandala suite. Duration is around 18 minutes, with no breaks between movements.

Fall 2004-- Last semester of teaching at Ithaca College, with 19 students taking my Introduction to Composition class. At the same time, I taught two three-week sessions for the Ithaca community at large, on the topic of Beatmaking and Sampling With Software . I organized these classes at the WOWnet Digital Cafe in downtown Ithaca, taking the form of workshops on basic composition techniques while learning how to use Reason music software, along with the shareware multitrack program Audacity. After teaching the class for two months, the sessions were cut short when the cafe went out of business.

October 20, 2004-- Saxophonist Brian Sacawa and I gave the first performance of pastlife laptops and attic instruments , for alto saxophone and DJ, as part of the multimedia concert whatWALL? , at the University of Michigan. Sacawa commissioned five composers to write pieces for saxophone and electronics for this event, to compliment an earlier piece written for him by Ken Ueno-- whatWALL? , for alto sax and quadrophonic tape. Central to the experience of this concert was the layered live video projection and 3-screen layout by New York-based video artist Jonny DeKamm. I performed on turntables in my own piece, as well as in a group improvisation with Sacawa, Ken Ueno and Hillary Zipper (of ONDA) around a pre-recorded electronic part by Matt Tierney.

June 19, 2004-- Happy Day! Marie Rinkoski and I were married at the First Unitarian Church in Ithaca, NY. I wrote a song for the ceremony, The first call of the beloved , which was performed by our friends Wendy Richman- voice, Jaime McGill- clarinet, Charlotte Whitman- cello, and Du Yun- piano. Marie also arranged a piece for the ceremony, for the same instrumentation, based on Debussy's Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun . Following the ceremony, we had a wonderful time with friends and family at Taughanock Falls State Park, Lakeside Shelter, with our friend DJ canGURU keeping the party jumping.

June 10, 2004-- Commencement at Harvard University. I received my Ph.D. in music composition, after completing my thesis composition, Mandala of the Four Directions : a ritual cantata for 4 singers and 4 ensembles , in April.

May 29, 2004-- As part of the 3rd annual Chicago ICE Fest, International Contemporary Ensemble organized a childrens' concert and workshop with toy instruments, "Toy Piano Zoo". I was asked to write a short piece for this event, for toy piano + another instrument (I chose double bass). My contribution, entitled Green Callaloo (in homage to a recent trip to Jamaica), was performed by Phyllis Chen- toy piano, and Randall Zigler- double bass.

February 21, 2004-- The yesaroun' duo (Eric Hewitt- saxophone, and Sam Solomon- percussion) premiered the piece which I wrote for them, entitled Tahirih , on a concert at Harvard University. This was my last performance in Paine Hall as a Harvard graduate student-- the end of an era!