Modulations <cinema for the ear > - Summer Screening - 1

Modulations <cinema for the ear >
(1998)
Director:Lara Lee
Runtime:75 min

"One of Kraftwerk's key innovations was to say that as soon as you enter your car you’re in a musical instrument, once you travel in a train you're in a musical instrument"

Kodwo Eshun

“According to Descartes the way to solve a problem is to break it up in to little pieces so we developed a culture in the west particularly that is exceedingly good at breaking problems down in to tiny little bits and pieces"

Alvin Toffler

________

      A vast number of Native American tribes at one point in their own respective histories shared the belief that a part of an artisan’s soul lives on through everything she may fashion with her two hands from clay, granite or sandstone. If this metaphor for the manner in which these elements of the self in transit that may, in their totality constitute the very identity of a given member of our human species, if the inherent qualities of the very same may actually be transferred outside the confines of our corporeal selves and if this phenomena were to be taken as analogous and applicable to the current status quo in a post-industrial society then the human essence would rightfully be present in both the loom-spun cotton, vegetable dyed block print and the microchip alike.

      So then, what implications does this stark juxtaposition pose on the contemporary individual? How then has the musician/composer become a different animal as a result of this constant need we possess as a species for impressive yet precipitate advancements in the field of technology which often seem to be made purely for advancement’s sake without seeking a deeper and more holistic understanding of the direction in which all of this progress is actually leading? How will the inevitable snowball effect be curved eventually, if in fact it ever is? How does the machine become the chosen instrument for this new breed of musician? How does this musician then choose to mould this instrument, which is programmed to ‘think’ within certain predetermined parameters, with its own intrinsic formulae and even paradigms? These musicians often setting up bedroom studios where they may lead their introverted lives, immersing themselves in the intricacies of their various laptops, software varieties, microphones and chaos pads, thus demystifying the pop idol of the vary same period in which they live and work. How is the aesthetic and in fact, the very mental framework within which this class of composer operates to create a piece thus moulded by the tools they utilize in the process?

      Musicians in the 21st century are quickly realizing that sound can be cut up the same way that their culture is being pieced together in a mosaic of crumbling fragments around them and though globalization is a force to be reckoned with, so is that of the international underground and now, the question does not concern common culture as much as it does address the sub-cultures that are created thereof. How has the human impetus towards movement set to the cyclical rhythms of those ancient, prehistoric invocation and divination ceremonies subsequently been pushed to the peripheries of mainstream society and on to the dance-floor? Ironically, it is the machine that provides sustenance and succour for our need to beat that proverbial drum, hidden under miles of wire and binary codes that could in all probability wrap themselves around the earth a million times over.

      We hear from a wide range of artists who comment on these phenomena, from the likes of Schtockhausen, Cage and Pierre Henry, figures who are credited for being pioneers in the radical expansion of what was then known to be ‘music’ to the urban underground dance music Dj, turntablist and producer, break-dancer, club goer and those inhabitants of the sprawling rave cultures of Western Europe and North America.

|{r:sh|NA|

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