Issue 0 - New Forms

DJ Spooky

SPOOKY HAS WRITTEN A RECENT PAPER, "MATERIAL MEMORIES," FOR CTHEORY.COM THAT DELVES INTO TIME (WITH ANOTHER CAPITAL "T"), SURREALISM, ART (FILM, VISUAL ARTS AND DJING).

C: There is a strange analogy at work between academics and DJs in their use of spliced references: (ab) using context and situation or trigger memories conscious or unconscious. A DJ pulls records out of a bag, an academic pulls quotes out of a text: and Spooky, he is doing both, often in the same medium.

S:í‚  A strange analogy between academics and DJs in their use of spliced references. I'd say that I have a couple. I wouldn't know where to start or stop, really. Definitely I would go back to early Greek stuff, Heraclitus, and the notion of flux and fragments and particles. Then there's people like Lucretius, a more Roman kind of scene, old-skool. then, Sun Tzu, The Art of War, the Chinese philosopher scene, the ideas around the notions of feng shui and the notions of placement. How you can have structures of relationships and how that affects the mind, and the body and stuff like that. In a more contemporary note I am looking at more and more people like KRS One, and just different angles of dealing with how he is trying to create a school of philosophy. I am fascinated with how he is dealing with oral culture. he started The Centre for Hip-Hop Culture, where he's doing all this stuff on the philosophy of rhymes. And of course, Saul Williams, he is aí‚  good friend of mine. so I like both of those two as contemporary philosophical kind of entities, you know.

C: As a DJ, do you see yourself placed in this power position in terms of being a "memory selector" - what sort of power-play are you playing with when you are selecting memory fragments to send out to an audience in almost unconscious ways?S: DJing, I can't say enough, it's like a reflection of what's going on, I don't necessarily think that it's a power-dynamic. But of course you have more powerful DJs like Funk Master Flex who's got a radio show with millions of people listening, or you have the VJ on MTV being able to guide the sequence which tracks to work. I'm an underground, artsy guy, you know,í‚  so I'm doing this more as a hobby and a kick.í‚  So it's not my core life-zone. A lot of people view it as a power dynamic, and that's not why I am doing it all. I am doing it mostly as a conceptual art project. í‚  í‚