Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
You're only as good as your record collection.
I have to deal with some dumb folks. It's a real drag.
The most scarce resource we have these days is the idea.
To me, the imagination is the ultimate renewable resource.
Our contemporary life is based on information that can change at any time.
If you don't understand the past, the future won't make much sense either.
The world is a very, very, very big record. We just have to learn how to play it.
What I'm going for with the string arrangements for my Antarctic symphony is a pun here.
I was never planning on being a musician. It's basically a hobby that sprawled out of control.
The easiest thing I can say is simple, but paradoxical in this era of total sampling: Be original.
I think science fiction and sound is a really interesting thing. You might as well think of it as sonic fiction.
I think that electronic music mirrors the complexity of "information landscapes." You carry the terrain in your mind.
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.
My work is all about creating new paths for thinking about the possibilities inherent in all art; another world is possible!
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'm passionate about the fact that this world that we live on is a stunningly beautiful place we have despoiled at every level.
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 think that the audience intuitively understands the idea of sampling and remixing stories. That's why electronic music is global.
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 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."
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.