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.
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.
One of the main things that differentiates them [artists of 70s] from artists before is that they made albums based on the fact that they didn't care about the band as a thing in its own right. They cared about manipulating the recording and that became the album.
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."
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'm passionate about the fact that this world that we live on is a stunningly beautiful place we have despoiled at every level.
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.
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.
Whales, for example, also navigate with sound, but they're now beginning to be beached because the ocean is getting too noisy. Weird things like that. I mean this is very real. Like, if you look at the satellites in the sky at night you know it's an eerie sense of we're.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I have to deal with some dumb folks. It's a real drag.
I was never planning on being a musician. It's basically a hobby that sprawled out of control.
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.
Watching 40 mile chunks of ice break off of Antarctica will change your life forever, but realizing that driving a car, or flying a plane, or having a nice steak, or drinking from a plastic bottle all contributed to the destruction of the environment - it's a bit complex, but music needs to pave the way for getting people to think about this kind of complexity. I'm just doing my share.
The easiest thing I can say is simple, but paradoxical in this era of total sampling: Be original.
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.
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".
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.
