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.

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.

I like the idea of it as a trickster motif. You know like you're kind of just messing around with people's memories of songs.

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.

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.

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.

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."