Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

DJ Spooky
Age: 54
Born: 1970
Born: September 6
Composer
Disc Jockey
Musician
Record Producer
Washington
District of Columbia
Paul D. Miller
That Subliminal Kid
Ideas
Essays
Wells
University
Well
Series
Writing
Name
Sigmund
Really
Names
Uncanny
Idea
Spooky
Comes
Freud
Back
Intrigued

More quotes by DJ Spooky

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