DJ Spooky Quotes & Sayings

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

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

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. — DJ Spooky

I think that electronic music mirrors the complexity of "information landscapes." You carry the terrain in your mind. — DJ Spooky

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

You know we're in a planet surrounded by certain kinds of frequencies and noise. The earth's magnetic sphere makes weird sounds. The sun you know the heart of our solar system makes noise. Even interstellar phenomena like black holes. You know people have studied them and a black hole can emit sound in like the range of 20,000 octaves below B flat. — DJ Spooky

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. — DJ Spooky

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. — DJ Spooky

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. — DJ Spooky

If you don't understand the past, the future won't make much sense either. — DJ Spooky

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. — DJ Spooky

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. — DJ Spooky

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. — DJ Spooky

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

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. — DJ Spooky

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. — DJ Spooky

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 — DJ Spooky

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. — DJ Spooky

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. — DJ Spooky

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. — DJ Spooky

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. — DJ Spooky

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. — DJ Spooky

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. — DJ Spooky

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

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

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

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

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

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. — DJ Spooky

My work is all about creating new paths for thinking about the possibilities inherent in all art; another world is possible! — DJ Spooky

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. — DJ Spooky

I was never planning on being a musician. It's basically a hobby that sprawled out of control. — DJ Spooky

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. — DJ Spooky

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. — DJ Spooky

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. — DJ Spooky

Downtown New York, I'm within certain styles of music and I'm also within certain cultural, you know, and literary context. — DJ Spooky

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. — DJ Spooky

I have to deal with some dumb folks. It's a real drag. — DJ Spooky

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." — DJ Spooky

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". — DJ Spooky

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. — DJ Spooky

If 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

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." — DJ Spooky

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. — DJ Spooky

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. — DJ Spooky

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. — DJ Spooky

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 Spooky

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. — DJ Spooky

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. — DJ Spooky

To me, the imagination is the ultimate renewable resource. — DJ Spooky

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. — DJ Spooky

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. — DJ Spooky

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 — DJ Spooky

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 ... — DJ Spooky

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. — DJ Spooky

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. — DJ Spooky

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. — DJ Spooky

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. — DJ Spooky

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. — DJ Spooky

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. — DJ Spooky

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. — DJ Spooky

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. — DJ Spooky

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

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. — DJ Spooky

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. — DJ Spooky

On 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 Spooky

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. — DJ Spooky

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. — DJ Spooky

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. — DJ Spooky

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. — DJ Spooky

I wanted to do is kind of invoke that and then dive into that kind of repetition as a DJ thing because DJing you hear beats, like "boom, boom, boom, bap, bap." You know hip hop, house, techno. So how do you translate between those electronic motifs and the motifs of the landscape itself? That is what I wanted to go for. — DJ Spooky

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. — DJ Spooky

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. — DJ Spooky

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. — DJ Spooky

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. — DJ Spooky

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. — DJ Spooky

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. — DJ Spooky

And when I say permanent afternoon, you know, I'm talking like crystal clear, crispy blue sky. All the sudden you didn't need to sleep as much because it just was difficult. And how that translated into my creative process I still am not quite sure, but it made my relationship to sleep a kind of abstract you know bizarre. — DJ Spooky

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. — DJ Spooky

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. — DJ Spooky

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. — DJ Spooky