DJ Spooky was meant to be a kind of ironic take on that. It was always meant to be kind of a criticism and critique of how downtown culture would separate genres and styles because it was ambiguous.

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 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.

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.

You know you don't really need the band or the singer/songwriter in the same way, so you look at everything as part of your palette.

Phonetics, you know speech, all this kind of stuff, phonograph, simple, but when you unpack the meaning it actually kind of expands out and that is what I was going for in my book "Sound Unbound" was to try and get people to figure out how do we unpack some of the meanings that go into these kinds of sonically coded landscapes.

DJ Spooky was meant to be a kind of ironic take on that. It was always meant to be kind of a criticism and critique of how downtown culture would separate genres and styles because it was ambiguous.