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To me, the imagination is the ultimate renewable resource.

DJ Spooky

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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
Imagination
Renewable
Resource
Resources
Ultimate

More quotes by DJ Spooky

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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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You're only as good as your record collection.
DJ Spooky
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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
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The easiest thing I can say is simple, but paradoxical in this era of total sampling: Be original.
DJ Spooky
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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What I'm going for with the string arrangements for my Antarctic symphony is a pun here.
DJ Spooky
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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
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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
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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
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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