Magdalena O!

Certain I’d seen all the electronic music documentaries available, I discovered the incredibly informative techno documentary, Universal Techno done by the French production team Arte in 1996 through Mira Calix. The interviews are in-depth and focus on the building up of techno in Detroit and how important place is to not just creating a music community but also its impact on the musical aesthetic. Ken Ishii also discusses Detroit’s influence on him in Japan. The YouTube excerpts feature Juan Atkins, Derrick May, Kevin Saunderson, Jeff Mills and Ken Ishii. I love documentaries that aren’t all flashy flash and really get into a discourse about their subject.

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: