DJ Spooky
Our contemporary life is based on information that can change at any time.Collection: Information
If you don't understand the past, the future won't make much sense either.Collection: Past
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.Collection: Long
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.Collection: Creating
My work is all about creating new paths for thinking about the possibilities inherent in all art; another world is possible!Collection: Art
The world is a very, very, very big record. We just have to learn how to play it.Collection: Play
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.Collection: Technique
I think that the audience intuitively understands the idea of sampling and remixing stories. That's why electronic music is global.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Imagination
You're only as good as your record collection.Collection: Records
To me, the imagination is the ultimate renewable resource.Collection: Imagination
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.Collection: Ice
I think that electronic music mirrors the complexity of "information landscapes." You carry the terrain in your mind.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Data
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.Collection: Reality
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.Collection: Song
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.Collection: Iphone
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.Collection: Book
The most scarce resource we have these days is the idea.Collection: Ideas
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.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Clouds
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.Collection: Glasses
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.Collection: People
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.Collection: Book
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.Collection: Mean
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 thingCollection: Fun
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.Collection: Cities
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.Collection: Mistake
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".Collection: Writing
The easiest thing I can say is simple, but paradoxical in this era of total sampling: Be original.Collection: Simple
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.Collection: Art
I was never planning on being a musician. It's basically a hobby that sprawled out of control.Collection: Musician
I have to deal with some dumb folks. It's a real drag.Collection: Real
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.Collection: Fun
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.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Nice
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.Collection: Ice
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.Collection: Real
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.Collection: Nuts
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.Collection: Ironic
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.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Trying
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."Collection: Ideas
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.Collection: War
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.Collection: Artist
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.Collection: People
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.Collection: Running
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.Collection: Sleep
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.Collection: Reset Button