DJ Spooky Quotes

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

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.

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."

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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 ...

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

To me, the imagination is the ultimate renewable resource.

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.