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.
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.
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.
The world is a very, very, very big record. We just have to learn how to play it.
My work is all about creating new paths for thinking about the possibilities inherent in all art; another world is possible!
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.
I think that the audience intuitively understands the idea of sampling and remixing stories. That's why electronic music is global.
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.
You're only as good as your record collection.
To me, the imagination is the ultimate renewable resource.
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.
I think that electronic music mirrors the complexity of "information landscapes." You carry the terrain in your mind.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The most scarce resource we have these days is the idea.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
