DJ Spooky Quotes

#1. I think that electronic music mirrors the complexity of "information landscapes." You carry the terrain in your mind. - Author: DJ Spooky

#2. 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. - Author: DJ Spooky

#3. 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. - Author: DJ Spooky

#4. 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 - Author: DJ Spooky

#5. Downtown New York, I'm within certain styles of music and I'm also within certain cultural, you know, and literary context. - Author: DJ Spooky

#6. 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. - Author: DJ Spooky

#7. What I wanted to try and figure out was, okay, in contemporary 21st century life the alienation between the self and the land around you or the self and even the urban landscape. You name it. - Author: DJ Spooky

#8. 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. - Author: DJ Spooky

#9. When you think about a composer you know like Wagner or Pier Boulez or something like that most of the issues a composer is working with are about discreet, notated music that someone else will play. - Author: DJ Spooky

#10. 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. - Author: DJ Spooky

#11. You know, in the sentence of humanity this place needs to be a parentheses. And when I say parentheses I mean I'm talking like you go around it. Leave it alone. Let it exist. And what I want people to see with this film is not only a respect for this place from the bottom of my heart. - Author: DJ Spooky

#12. 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. - Author: DJ Spooky

#13. Try this experiment, closing your eyes and navigating with your ears. It's eerie because walls, you can actually hear your footstep maybe bounce off of or you can feel the vibration of your voice and help that ... use that to navigate. - Author: DJ Spooky

#14. 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. - Author: DJ Spooky

#15. 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. - Author: DJ Spooky

#16. I have to deal with some dumb folks. It's a real drag. - Author: DJ Spooky

#17. 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. - Author: DJ Spooky

#18. 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. - Author: DJ Spooky

#19. 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. - Author: DJ Spooky

#20. 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. - Author: DJ Spooky

#21. My work is all about creating new paths for thinking about the possibilities inherent in all art; another world is possible! - Author: DJ Spooky

#22. 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." - Author: DJ Spooky

#23. 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. - Author: DJ Spooky

#24. 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. - Author: DJ Spooky

#25. 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. - Author: DJ Spooky

#26. 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. - Author: DJ Spooky

#27. 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". - Author: DJ Spooky

#28. 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. - Author: DJ Spooky

#29. Our contemporary life is based on information that can change at any time. - Author: DJ Spooky

#30. 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. - Author: DJ Spooky

#31. 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. - Author: DJ Spooky

#32. 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. - Author: DJ Spooky

#33. 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. - Author: DJ Spooky

#34. When you're coming up with different ways of getting old memories to transform - you're scratching, you're doing all this kind of sampling - what ends up happening is that you're becoming a kind of writer with sound. - Author: DJ Spooky

#35. 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." - Author: DJ Spooky

#36. 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. - Author: DJ Spooky

#37. The world is a very, very, very big record. We just have to learn how to play it. - Author: DJ Spooky

#38. I'm passionate about the fact that this world that we live on is a stunningly beautiful place we have despoiled at every level. - Author: DJ Spooky

#39. The easiest thing I can say is simple, but paradoxical in this era of total sampling: Be original. - Author: DJ Spooky

#40. 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. - Author: DJ Spooky

#41. 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. - Author: DJ Spooky

#42. The most scarce resource we have these days is the idea. - Author: DJ Spooky

#43. 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 - Author: DJ Spooky

#44. Whales, for example, also navigate with sound, but they're now beginning to be beached because the ocean is getting too noisy. Weird things like that. I mean this is very real. Like, if you look at the satellites in the sky at night you know it's an eerie sense of we're ... - Author: DJ Spooky

#45. What I'm going for with the string arrangements for my Antarctic symphony is a pun here. - Author: DJ Spooky

#46. 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. - Author: DJ Spooky

#47. 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. - Author: DJ Spooky

#48. 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. - Author: DJ Spooky

#49. If you don't understand the past, the future won't make much sense either. - Author: DJ Spooky

#50. I think that the audience intuitively understands the idea of sampling and remixing stories. That's why electronic music is global. - Author: DJ Spooky

#51. 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. - Author: DJ Spooky

#52. 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. - Author: DJ Spooky

#53. In fact, if you look at the root word of phonograph it just means phonetics of graphology, phono-graph, writing with sound, so graphology. You know graffiti, same root word. - Author: DJ Spooky

#54. 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. - Author: DJ Spooky

#55. I think science fiction and sound is a really interesting thing. You might as well think of it as sonic fiction. - Author: DJ Spooky

#56. 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. - Author: DJ Spooky

#57. To me, the imagination is the ultimate renewable resource. - Author: DJ Spooky

#58. So yeah, how do I think of my environment and what happens with sound art? I love to play with the idea of elusive and intangible things. That could be psychological. It could be perceptual. It could be just the way your ears help you just navigate around. - Author: DJ Spooky

#59. Antarctic symphony has a geometric relationship to the landscape. It's saying that this landscape and the minimal kind of, you know I'm talking like seeing ice, is visually kind of eerily minimal. - Author: DJ Spooky

#60. 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. - Author: DJ Spooky

#61. I was never planning on being a musician. It's basically a hobby that sprawled out of control. - Author: DJ Spooky

#62. 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. - Author: DJ Spooky

#63. 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. - Author: DJ Spooky

#64. 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. - Author: DJ Spooky

#65. 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. - Author: DJ Spooky