Top 82 Quotes & Sayings by DJ Spooky - Page 2

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Downtown New York, I'm within certain styles of music and I'm also within certain cultural, you know, and literary context. So 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. You couldn't fit it into anything and that was the point.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."