Despite my crumbling health (I thought this shit isn’t supposed to happen to you in your 20s?!) I’m nearly ready to be working full-time on my MA Project, since I have to have it done before I start that whole PhD thing. I’ve been watching and compiling documentaries about music, specifically about electronic music for about a year now, so my plan is to give them some space on the blog. I just came across Speaking in Code by Boston-based director Amy Grill today, which considering my extensive lit/movie review last year disconcerts me. I tried to do some background research on her, but was unable to find anything other than a Twitter account and interviews about the doc. The most I got was that she and her husband were trying to make Boston a techno-town and failing and that the concept for this came early in the morning on a sweaty dancefloor in 2005 in Miami. This bothers me because I’m curious about her life history and what propelled her to get to this point. Perhaps I could probe her deeper than some of the other articles out there. In the XLR8R interview, Grill is fairly eloquent and speaks of the desire to be self-reflexive in the documentary (which I admit, I’m a sucker for!), but then she says, “This idea of a rock band with a lead singer and a guitar and drums is something that people are familiar with. That image has been glorified for decades because of the baby boomers’ stranglehold on mass media. So I’m waiting for the old white guys to die, basically. I think that once most of them die that we’ll be in better shape. I’m totally not kidding about that.” I agree with the first part, but I think in context of her next few sentences she’s engaging in a reductionist discourse that, instead of showing her openness towards music, further reiterates a musical bias, which at any level is problematic. And, the whole thing about ‘old white guys dying,’ really? Really?
Mind you I’m still really intrigued to see it, because there needs to be as many documentaries about electronic music as possible that present the topic to the public with more grace than Modulations. In the meantime, the whole film has been transcribed here. Pretty cool! I realized I haven’t said much, so I’ll get back to this after I’ve seen it.
The cast and featured artists of Speaking in Code are:
Modeselektor, Wighnomy Brothers, Monolake
Ellen Allien
Tobias Thomas
Marc LeClair AKA Akufen
Wolfgang Voigt
Michael Mayer
Reinhard Voigt
Sascha Ring AKA Apparat
Sascha Funke
Mario Willms AKA Douglas Greed
Miss Kittin
Dan Paluska AKA Six Million Dollar Dan
Mike Uzzi AKA Smartypants
The Field
Monolake
Michael Mayer
Gas
Jonas Bering
When I was young my tongue was on fire and lyrical expressions (of dissatisfaction) were my panacea. In the fall of 2002 I even got permission to go to New York to study feminism and slam poetry for an Independent Study Course. The Def Poetry Jam was so cool back then and gave stage to women like Yellow Rage.
“They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery/ so should we take as compliment this appropriated cultural chicanery/ that beats off on our sexuality?/ Well, personally, I feel this way — let’s untie our tongues and say “Fuck you!”
“I’ll knock the taste out of your motherfuckin’ mouth if I don’t like your behavior”
Last night I biked around Cherry Beach and Leslie Spit until I couldn’t feel my hands or my body. I was wrapped up in two pairs of tights and leggings and my leather jacket, a wool beret and a scarf. But I only have one leather glove because the other one went missing last year, and in the meantime my tire gave out so I had to fix it getting my hands all dirty so most of the time was spent without any gloves at all. The main Tommy Thompson Park closes at around five but you can get a bike through the side of the closed crossing bars. Other than the reflector lights at the entrance no lights are there, and the end of the spit goes as far as the Toronto Island, or I guess even further! My backlight was so faint, and eventually the battery gave out on it too. The winds were so strong; all I could hear was the trees and the water. They were yelling at me! “Magda Magda! Don’t do it! Just keep biking! Just keep biking and don’t stop!” I didn’t. A pair of cyclists biked past me, talking loudly about some deal at work and how it has to go through before the end of the month. Their lights were blinding and I thought it was a truck about to run me over.
Awareness doesn’t necessarily bring clarity. I used to have all these ideas about what it’s like to be an ‘adult.’ My brother is going to art school next year and he keeps talking about what he will do with his degree and I keep insisting he should wait till he’s there and take it in, because I spent so much time thinking I’m too old when I was a youth, mostly because I was constantly projecting into the future, and in the future you are always older. And now I’m an ‘adult’ or something and not much at the core has changed, or maybe it has. But maybe I will be me forever and there isn’t a specific time you enter into and poof! you start this new great life with a job, money, a partner & become too old, jaded & busy with day-to-day tasks to wake up crying & wanting to die.
Really feeling like receiving a mixtape/cd/usb stick/download link or whatever, you know, the ones you make for someone because you need to feel connected through music.
I am unable to pry Amsterdam open. There is a thick wall, a thick concrete wall that stands between us. I am not good with unmalleable material. I am a soft sponge - penetrable. Sometimes trying is pointless when you are unable to try in a meaningful way. Or do you just keep going? Amsterdam is raw and humid and harsh. I can thrive and relate to raw and sharp, but not when the rawness is dull and cold. Some of the people in my program are in love with Amsterdam and all it has to offer. I am glad. I do not feel this. I want to smell and touch Amsterdam but it’s not letting me. Why won’t it let me? I can get along with every city I go to, why now, why here? There is an energy, a really pushy energy that tourists exude on it, making its residents impatient, making the city impatient but unable to say no.
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MUSIC ::: Did you know Barry Lynn, also known as Boxcutter, also known to me as one of the most phenomenal musical artists of all time has a Soundcloud and he puts new unreleased music on there for us to listen to? When I listen to Boxcutter all of the cells that make up my existence re-articulate their existence and open up to the infinite possibilites. This all sounds cliche because it is how I always describe him, because his musical output’s great vastness permeates me that much.
I was in J’s music room in 216. It was early 2006. It was really bright outside. I was sitting in his lap on his gray oversized office chair that always swung back a bit too much and I was sure we’d both die this way. He played “Mossy” and I fell to the floor on his rug, closing in on my face with both hands the way I do when I hear music that overtakes me. I started crying and demanding the song be put on lifetime repeat. It was one of those moments that everything changed, that I heard something so new and so exciting that it made me want to keep being alive so I wouldn’t miss moments like these. I have those moments. They are rare, but they occur and when they do all of pessimistic insecure me seems implausible.
Mossy is one of the songs on Oneiric, Boxcutter’s first album on Planet Mu. When I hear oneiric in my head, I remember Mary Anne Hobbes talking about it when he did an exclusive session for the Breezeblock, and I managed to get myself in on the shout out as “Miss Riot” because that’s my handle on DOA from many many years ago. It mattered to be part of that moment so much then.
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Now I am here, in the moment. I’ve been spending hours every day in front of Resolume with my Korg midi controller imagining with my own hands how all my favorite music looks like.
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I sometimes post music links. If you want yours taken down let me know. & for the rest of you, if you don't buy music & just d/l links, you should feel like an asshole.
