Magdalena O!

“Suis-je amoureux ?”- Oui puisque j’attends.”
L’autre, lui n’attend jamais. Parfois, je veux jouer à celui qui n’attend pas; J’essaye de m’occuper ailleurs, d’arriver en retard; mais à ce jeu je perds toujours: quoique je fasse, je me retrouve désoeuvré, exact, voire en avance. L’identité fatale de l’amoureux n’est rien d’autre que: je suis celui qui attend.”
– Roland Barthes

Being in love is the best and most important feeling in the whole world. Nothing motivates unless I am in love. My friend D teases me about this a lot. Many times I will bring something or someone up to him and gush about how amazing and wonderful it or they are.

— “You think everything/everyone is amazing!”
— “No! I am so critical and judgmental! But I am also unabashedly in love with a lot, and want to express it as much as I can.”

Funny (sad?!) that most people think I am an ice queen, selfish, and unapproachable. Probably, because I’m sure I come off that way. Physical face-to-face interactions are weird. I never know how to be or what to say, so I usually just end up promoting myself as a spectacle. I am easily amused by myself, and so an adventure always follows me around.

I tan a lot. People have a lot of judgmental things to say about tanning. People have a lot of judgmental things to say about a lot of shit. HELP ME BE LESS JUDGMENTAL!

Oh, yes, back to being in love. Being in love is like this special sheath you get to wear and it gives you magical powers!

like…

being able to see clearly and with the saturation on +10, having the ability to focus on all your work, having enough energy to do ANYTHING even if you haven’t slept because you’ve been making love for days, having beautiful skin because  the blood is racing through your body constantly making everything glow, finding inspiration in everything, forming a world with your lover, seeing the world through their eyes…

I remember when I fell in love the summer of 2010 with my documentary project, before I even contacted anyone, before I even knew what it would become. I wanted to devote all of myself to it, and the love grew and grew and grew and I was so willing to give myself to it, willing to give all of my time, all of my energy to it, and it, in turn gave me so much of itself back.

Why did I not finish it? Why did I get carried away with my doctoral work as if that can be finished later? Why do I discard my work so quickly? FOLLOW THROUGH.

New loves again & again – disposable – New loves turning over make me full of unrequited love for the past, make me intensely sentimental and regretful for the past projects I was in love with and gave up because something else became more convenient. Now my shoulders slouch from the weight of the unresolved past, and my scoliosis keeps curving in. Moving on like this is never moving on, but stuck in all the places all at once, never being able to be in the ‘now.’ Like Erica Jong writes, “I look forward and see myself looking back.”

france 2004

Bérangère Maximin is a French electro-acoustic composer. She is a student of Denis Dufour’s (a member of the Groupe de recherches musicales (GRM)). She is one of the women featured in my upcoming documentary, microfemininewarfare. Please buy her album Tant Que Les heures Passent (As Long As The Hours Go By). It was released on John Zorn’s Tzadik Records label in 2008. I discovered her while staying at my friend’s house in Paris last year while working on the project’s proposal (serendipity yo!) while he was on the typical gone-south, Parisian vacation with his wife and daughters. I think music really defines a person (many people consider this childish of me) and I went through his music collection and this album caught my eye. I liked the name of it, and put it on to listen on his stereo system not too loud because it was a small residential building in Saint-Cloud.

I like when an artist can sweep me up into their world, and she was able to immediately. It is a strange vibration of musique concrete and an aesthetic of a woman filled with darkness. I can’t really say – I don’t appreciate the ‘music critic’ language so I will stop, but maybe you can be surprised by her melodic arrangements too!

It was obvious I would ask her to participate in my project because I was so fascinated by the narrative in her music. Bérangère and I spoke a lot about the music creation process and how difficult and painful it is, but I will leave that for later. One thing that surprised me was her attitude of wishing to bring together groups of electronic and electro-acoustic and jazz musicians together; something she is having difficulty with in Paris, because some people part of these groups are vocally exclusive and dogmatic. It is not surprising after meeting her, and that most of the women in my documentary discussed their desire to merge communities, and to create communities and collaborations of support networks that aren’t based on stylistic aesthetics. I hear many people mention this, but I don’t think as many people go through with it. Music politics; they are overbearing sometimes! OK, I will leave you with some out-takes from the photo shoot. Bérangère was quite generous, and I hope I served her well. The documentary, photos and interviews will be available sometime this year. They have to be.

Some out-takes:

Another unfamiliar ceiling.

Hi blog readers and friends!
I have a request!

So, there’s a bunch of electronic music documentaries out there, anything from the beautiful and generous Delian Mode about Delia Derbyshire or the rough faster-than-light-speed Modulations…. I’m curious what are some themes you wish would be discussed in electronic music documentaries that aren’t? (I have a few ideas but I’d love to see if any missing themes come out). What are some things. visuals, information, etc. that would captivate YOU about an artist and their work? Because you are (hopefully) my target audience!
If you could answer that would be really helpful, as I am in the final stages of piecing together my questions/themes for the documentary I’m shooting featuring women composers and would love your sincere input.

I love you!

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.

After being in the Lab at Ryerson til about 3:30am editing last night (as has been every night the last while),  I woke up at 7am and met up with J at York, hand-processing my 16mm film for almost eight hours in the darkroom, then I went straight back to my Lab and worked on Final Cut with my other movie until now, and it’s nearly 2am. We didn’t take enough breaks or drink enough water and my head is feeling pretty fried from all the chemical fumes. I can’t wait to see what I shot on Wednesday. A large portion of it was underexposed, so I messed around with the bleach and made crazy streaks, washing out many frames, because I didn’t realize that you have to dip bleached film into water immediately or else it keeps eating away at the frames. Seems obvious! I’m making mistakes all over the place and it’s really helping me learn (like actually take in information and process it into knowledge, not this half-ass skill acquisition that I usually do when learning new tools because I get sidetracked by …. the Internet!!). I love that working with analog there’s nothing to be distracted by like when working on a computer, because you’re in this dark room with lots of chemicals, time constraints and your work on the line & when you get into a groove & the fumes start kicking in, it gets proper meditative. We did listen to a lot of jungle to keep us going though. Next up is in-camera edits and superimposition. I really want to have enough material to incorporate it into our Bangface Weekender performance. I am addicted to the Bolex.

I can’t seem to work on video unless it’s dark out. Do you get that too? I don’t think I’m sleeping until I get to London next month, and then it’s all VJ, documentary shooting and RAVE.

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: