New York artist Paul D. Miller, aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid, insists he never meant to become a musician and his new album isn’t really an album at all. Rather, he says, “it’s a manifesto about the place of history in our scrambled, sampla-delic-to-the-core, mega info-overloaded, modern digital culture.” The always symphonically inclined Macao International Music Festival would seem an unexpected place for an experimental hip-hop turntablist to turn up. Yet on October 28, Spooky arrives as the first solo DJ to play the annual month long music series.

“I started as a writer, publisher and artist, and only later began experimenting with my ideas in sound,” explains Spooky. “Somewhere along the way I became known as a DJ.” For a DJ by accident, Spooky has done quite well for himself over the years, exploring idiosyncratic musical preoccupations since the mid 90s, while collaborating with an impressive array of critically exalted figures – Thurston Moore, Kool Keith, David Byrne, Chuck D, Patti Smith, iconic film director Bernardo Bertolucci, and Grammy winning composer Ryuichi Sakamoto, to name a few. “One of the really interesting things about globalisation and the way the world’s cultures have been put in this swirl of digital media is that collaboration becomes a window into remarkably different creative processes,” he says. “Cultures collide into new musical structures, and this keeps things fresh.”

There could be no better place to hear a DJ whose music consists of cultural montage (a collage of various national flags covers Spooky’s new album The Secret Song) than in the belly of Macau’s Mount Fortress, a 17^th-century Portuguese castle. When asked what Macau audiences might expect to hear from his challenging and diverse catalogue, Spooky offers a characteristically enigmatic assurance: “You’ll be caught in a cloud of samples and sounds from radically different cultures – partly dance, partly experimental, with interesting videos – it’ll be enjoyable.”

Supporting Spooky are MILK & JADE, by Dana Leong, a hip-hop-inspired jazz fusion group featuring Leong on electric cello and laptop. Other than the Portuguese classic rock band, The Delphins, the bulk of this year’s MIMF is composed of internationally esteemed orchestras, jazz ensembles and choirs, as in years before.

Stand-outs include the opening performance by the Macao Orchestra of The Butterfly Lovers Concert, commissioned in Commemoration of both the 60th Anniversary of the People’s Republic of China and the 10th Anniversary of the establishment of the Macao SAR. Renowned violinist Yu Lina, who debuted the Butterfly Lovers Violin Concerto 50 years ago, returns as soloist, this time under the baton of eminent Chinese conductor Chen Xieyang. The festival ends on a high note, with Mozart’s opera buffa, Le Nozze di Figaro, produced by the esteemed San Francisco Opera. Patrick Brzeski

For full MIMF programme see www.icm.gov.mo.