DJ Spooky Quotes

The world is a very, very, very big record. We just have to learn how to play it.

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.

First and foremost one, I was never planning on doing this as a long term, so Spooky, I was in college... It was a fun name. I thought it was you know just a fun thing

It's strange to think that culture is simply a matter of millions of files flying around, but we now think in terms of networks for everything.

Antarctica is one of the most remote and beautiful places on earth. I don't think that everyone should go there. I also think that we need to respect it as a kind of a national park for the planet. It should be you know put in parentheses.

Sleep is crucial and I tend to find when the sun is shining I find it much more difficult to get that sense of sleep.

Downtown New York, I'm within certain styles of music and I'm also within certain cultural, you know, and literary context. So 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. You couldn't fit it into anything and that was the point.

One 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.

Geography is crucial for my work. I went to Antarctica and took a studio to several of the main ice fields to make field recordings of ice to create a symphony - acoustic portraits of ice.

Antarctica, one of the things that was so remarkable about it was that the ice itself is a kind of pure geometry, so say, for example, if I was facing someone wearing I don't know, a Joy Division t-shirt with the mountains on it or something like that.

We live in a world so utterly infused with digitality that it makes even the slightest action ripple across the collection of data bases we call the web.

The planet isn't improvising, it's creating dynamic tensions between complex living systems in a planetary choreography, a balancing act between physical, chemical, biological, environmental, and human components.

I'm talking like just the beauty, but at the same time to get people to realize that we should treasure it. Maybe visualize it, but leave it alone. A

Try this experiment: one day go in a record store and just try and guess what the music sounds like by looking at the album cover.

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.

I felt like on one hand the clarity of thought was amazing, but on the other we went during Antarctic summer, so the sun didn't set the whole time we were there.

I can only wonder what astronauts must feel like or something like that when you're really in the space of silence and you are feeling and breathing in a way that you're really aware of your muscle and bone and the breath and the body and the movement and all of those things that just you take for granted in the urban landscape.

What I'm going for with the string arrangements for my Antarctic symphony is a pun here.

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.

The most scarce resource we have these days is the idea.

Whenever you play a song, you're basically playing with a lot of zeros and ones. These are Western compositional models that other cultures have explored in so many ways.

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.

It's like the iPod playlist has killed the way we think of the normal album, so let's think of this as just saying you go into your record store and all those categories and all those different ways of segregating music have been thrown out the window, so the difference between myself in real life in that is that I'm the opposite.

So Bach, Beethoven, Duke Ellington, Thelonius Monk, these are all people who would sort of rearrange or take riffs from people. Same thing with rock, if you look at the Rolling Stones doing a cover of Otis Redding or you know if you look at literature James Joyce is pulling fragments of text from other people.

For me, DJ culture - with its obsession with collecting records and archiving everything - predated the "cloud" concept with primitive material like the mixtape. Now we would call it "collaborative filtering" or something technical, but the impulse is the same - gather fragments, make something new. That is how you will bypass the climate-change skeptics: render them totally obsolete.

I think science fiction and sound is a really interesting thing. You might as well think of it as sonic fiction.

Music, art, and literature are inseparable for me. How does "composition" evolve in a music and art context? It's a question we can never answer: it only asks for more information and generates more questions.

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.

So the physicality of that and the just the sheer lack of urban noise and machinery - just the wind, the water and your breath, you know that kind of thing - it was pure poetry and you know I treasure that.

Our contemporary life is based on information that can change at any time.

Reality itself is [made up of] chance processes linked to sets of rules - this is what drives the world, the universe, and just about anything a human being can imagine.

Sampling is a new way of doing something that’s been with us for a long time […] The mix breaks free from the old associations. New contexts form from old. The script gets flipped. The languages evolve and learn to speak in new forms, new thoughts. The sound of thought becomes legible again at the edge of the new meanings.

You'll get this kind of psychological relationship to the imagery of the music, but that idea is translated to iPhone apps. It's translated to the small, you know, kind of icons on your computer. You name it.

I've tended to find that myths of the near future give people the ability to really kind of explore the present, so say for example if look at William Gibson and his book Neuromancer or if you look at J.G. Ballard or Samuel Delaney those are probably three of my favorite writers in that genre.