DJ Spooky Quotes

Watching 40 mile chunks of ice break off of Antarctica will change your life forever, but realizing that driving a car, or flying a plane, or having a nice steak, or drinking from a plastic bottle all contributed to the destruction of the environment - it's a bit complex, but music needs to pave the way for getting people to think about this kind of complexity. I'm just doing my share.

When you're coming up with different ways of getting old memories to transform - you're scratching, you're doing all this kind of sampling - what ends up happening is that you're becoming a kind of writer with sound.

To me, the imagination is the ultimate renewable resource.

You know we're in a planet surrounded by certain kinds of frequencies and noise. The earth's magnetic sphere makes weird sounds. The sun you know the heart of our solar system makes noise. Even interstellar phenomena like black holes. You know people have studied them and a black hole can emit sound in like the range of 20,000 octaves below B flat.

I think that electronic music mirrors the complexity of "information landscapes." You carry the terrain in your mind.

When you say what is the difference between me and my stage name the idea is that as a musician you always think of yourself as inhabiting a certain cultural space in the kind of a cultural landscape, so when I say cultural space what I mean to imply there is that you exist within certain parameters of how people think of culture.

Now if you think about the 20th century and the idea of visual vocabulary the album occupies a really important space in the cultural landscape and, above all.

Whales, for example, also navigate with sound, but they're now beginning to be beached because the ocean is getting too noisy. Weird things like that. I mean this is very real. Like, if you look at the satellites in the sky at night you know it's an eerie sense of we're.

With multimedia, everything blurs. Software takes the concept of the imagination and makes it something you can edit, tweak, and transform with digital techniques. Everything becomes an edited file.

So, one, that DJ Spooky is a lot you know this sort of wilder persona and then Paul Miller is more of a nuts and bolts kind of person, meaning just making sure all these things work.

Freud is usually viewed as the person who linked psychoanalysis to some issues in the environment, usually man-made. So I thought it would be fun to throw that in the mix.

The idea of a visual icon that gives you a sense of information very quickly and that you can easily just say "That's what the style is."

If I take that person and play them as a record I'm becoming not only a conductor and composer of collage, but at the same time I'm looking at a whole layer of what goes into copyright law, who owns those memories, who owns the way that that sound gets remixed and transformed and above all how much fun it is to actually just mess with other people's stuff.

So yeah, how do I think of my environment and what happens with sound art? I love to play with the idea of elusive and intangible things. That could be psychological. It could be perceptual. It could be just the way your ears help you just navigate around.

In my book "Sound Unbound" we traced the guy who actually came up with the main concept for the graphic design of the record cover sleeve. His name is Alex Steinweiss. And one of the things in my book that we really tried to figure out was the revolution in graphic design that occurred when people put images on album covers.

I wanted to do is kind of invoke that and then dive into that kind of repetition as a DJ thing because DJing you hear beats, like "boom, boom, boom, bap, bap." You know hip hop, house, techno. So how do you translate between those electronic motifs and the motifs of the landscape itself? That is what I wanted to go for.

There is a complexity and layering that goes on with this kind of thing, so the music is slightly repetitive and when I say repetitive it's in the same tradition as people like Steve Reich or Erik Satie or even WC.

The name [Spooky] comes from well back in university I was doing a series of essays and writing about Sigmund Freud's idea of the uncanny and I was really intrigued by this idea of "The Unheimlich".

So sound art I'm always intrigued with how little we use of other senses and we just prioritize the eye and you just want to see everything and navigate. You know the art world is similar. Like I wish people would use their ears a lot more.

It's an essay that Sigmund Freud wrote about E.T.A. Hoffman's short story called "The Sandman" where someone mistakes an inanimate object for a living, breathing human being. And one of the things that Sigmund Freud really felt was that in modern life people assign qualities to objects around them that may not exist there whatsoever.

I'm passionate about the fact that this world that we live on is a stunningly beautiful place we have despoiled at every level.

And when I say permanent afternoon, you know, I’m talking like crystal clear, crispy blue sky. All the sudden you didn’t need to sleep as much because it just was difficult. And how that translated into my creative process I still am not quite sure, but it made my relationship to sleep a kind of abstract you know bizarre…

Sound... if you look at bats you know that navigate with sonar, they're like you know they're very precise. They can even see a bat head towards a building and swerve away, but you'll see a bird that doesn't... you know smash right into a glass window. It's very funny.

When you think about a composer you know like Wagner or Pier Boulez or something like that most of the issues a composer is working with are about discreet, notated music that someone else will play.

If you don't understand the past, the future won't make much sense either.

All the major social movements of the 20th century had great soundtracks - We need that. The left needs better propaganda, because we don’t have the Koch brothers. It takes a different kind of capital to fight that stuff.

On one hand you have a string quartet, which is not a symphony. On the other hand is you have me sampling them and making it sound like there is many more people playing, so the whole notion of, kind of, sampling applied to classical music is very intriguing to me because composers throughout history have borrowed motifs and quotes from one another.

When I was a kid, I looked at art as a way of blending everything. One of my favorite composers is Wagner - who coined the term "gesamtkunstwerk," or "total art work." That's what was going on in the 19th century, and the 20th century just kept it going.

So by the time the 60s rolled in that became a huge art form in its own right with bands like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and Hendrix doing total concept albums, same thing with Pink Floyd.

So he [Sigmund Freud] called this "the uncanny" and he also referred to cities as well, like the idea of walking through the city and the way the urban landscape could lead you to a sense of disorientation and to a kind of, you know, sense of repetition. And the way a city can unfold as you walk.

I'd say most of my work is just trying to make sense of the disorienting and overloaded world that we inhabit. We're bombarded with sound at every level.

I was never planning on being a musician. It's basically a hobby that sprawled out of control.

The easiest thing I can say is simple, but paradoxical in this era of total sampling: Be original.

What I wanted to try and figure out was, okay, in contemporary 21st century life the alienation between the self and the land around you or the self and even the urban landscape. You name it.

In fact, if you look at the root word of phonograph it just means phonetics of graphology, phono-graph, writing with sound, so graphology. You know graffiti, same root word.

My work is all about creating new paths for thinking about the possibilities inherent in all art; another world is possible!

Usually bands would make a song to record for an album, but what happens with the deejays you say "Well the album is everything we need. Thanks band. You can go away now."

Try this experiment, closing your eyes and navigating with your ears. It's eerie because walls, you can actually hear your footstep maybe bounce off of or you can feel the vibration of your voice and help that... use that to navigate.

I have to deal with some dumb folks. It's a real drag.

Antarctic symphony has a geometric relationship to the landscape. It's saying that this landscape and the minimal kind of, you know I'm talking like seeing ice, is visually kind of eerily minimal.

I wanted to do with Antarctica was say let's hit the reset button on that and see what happens to your creative process. Let's go to the most remote place that you can imagine, set up a studio and see what music comes out of it.

I think that the audience intuitively understands the idea of sampling and remixing stories. That's why electronic music is global.

DJ culture is all about collage - sampling, splicing, dicing - everything is part of the mix, and there are no boundaries between sound sources. When you apply the same logic to the environment, there's a lot of room for mapping sampling techniques to the environment itself.

You're only as good as your record collection.

Most people walk around with headphones on. They're barely encountering or dealing with their fellow person, or if they're in a car they're in this kind of cocoon, stuck in suburban rush hour traffic or something.

I usually am very specific about how I engage information, how I engage people, what context I'm engaging and, above all, the research that goes into each of those.

Randomness has an incredibly powerful place in our culture. If you think about it, you can see it driving the algorithms that run our information economy, patterns that make up the traffic of our cities, and on over to the way the stars and galaxies formed.

You know, in the sentence of humanity this place needs to be a parentheses. And when I say parentheses I mean I'm talking like you go around it. Leave it alone. Let it exist. And what I want people to see with this film is not only a respect for this place from the bottom of my heart.