TRANSCRIPT
Question: Where did you get your stage name?
DJ
Spooky: The name 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. So he called this "the
uncanny" and he also referred to cities as well, like the idea of
walking through the city and the way the urban landscape could lead you
to a sense of disorientation and to a kind of, you know, sense of
repetition. And the way a city can unfold as you walk. So stuff like
that. It was basically meant to be like when you press play and there
nobody there.
Question: How is DJ Spooky different
from Paul Miller?
DJ Spooky:
First and foremost one, I was never planning on doing this as a long
term, so Spooky, I was in college... It was a fun name. I thought it
was you know just a fun thing. 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. 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. 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. 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.
Recorded on April 8, 2010