I think record cover sleeves really led towards, but at the same time the album as we know it didn't come into being until mainly after the Second World War because record labels realized they'd be able to make a lot more money putting all the singles of an artist onto one album and selling the whole album as a kind of a concept.
DJ SpookyDJ 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.
DJ SpookyOn 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.
DJ SpookyOne of the main things that differentiates them [artists of 70s] from artists before is that they made albums based on the fact that they didn't care about the band as a thing in its own right. They cared about manipulating the recording and that became the album.
DJ SpookyUsually 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."
DJ SpookyIf 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.
DJ Spooky