serial consign

I first encountered the writing of Alex Munt while doing research for a post on David Lynch last summer. While googling various ephemera related to Lynch's recent work I came across the article Inland Empire: The Cinema in Trouble?, which stopped me dead in my tracks. This text, which Munt penned for Flow TV, is indicative of his dynamic reading of cinema and related analysis of emerging methods of production and distribution. Alex is a Lecturer in the Media Department at Macquarie University (in Australia) and his focus is on digital low-budget cinema and new directions in screenwriting and feature filmmaking. Alex and I have been emailing back and forth for the last several weeks and the transcript that follows provides a fascinating window into his research.

One of the most recognizable characteristics of your writing about film is that you spend quite a bit of time "off the screen" addressing new means of distribution (i.e. YouTube) and production techniques (i.e. pro-am gear). A binary that turns up in your Feature Film: A ‘You Tube Narrative Model’? article is the divide between 'Elite Digital' and 'Democratic Digital'. Could you discuss the difference between these paradigms and speculate as to what commercial cinema can learn from YouTube?

In terms of staying ‘off the screen’ (at least part of the time) – I think it is important space to occupy, in order to think about ‘the digital’. The digital is a quantity that needs to be situated for each particular medium. For the cinema, there has been two main digital forces – and in opposite directions. That is, the evolution of high-end digital visual effects (as CGI) in Hollywood and the experiments in digital low-budget cinema, since the mid 1990s. (This is not a new idea in itself, one noted by Lev Manovich, who uses the term ‘Digital Realism’ to situate the work of the Dogme95 brethren, and their ‘lo-fi’ approach to digital feature filmmaking). In each case, via altogether different digital production and post-production pathways, we arrive at the long-form narrative feature film. So the digital, for the cinema, is less a revolution, and more of a remediation, or mutation, often subtle – so we need to pay particular attention to what’s going on with the scripts, behind the camera, with the crews and digital kit and then in the edit suite. Hollywood CGI is not a big part of my own research, but there is a lot of interesting work here. Shilo McClean in her book Digital Storytelling argues that digital visual effects (she calls DVFx) far from being extraneous - are actually having a decisive impact on Hollywood narration, scripts, story and style, for CGI Hollywood cinema. And by the same token, for new low-budget cinema – I see the digital as a real catalyst for a reconsideration, and opportunity for innovation, in narrative, film form and aesthetics of the moving image. In this domain, transformations are evident in film-practice: from ‘open’ scriptwriting, to the use of micro-crews and the shift to HD digital cinematography and affordable digital colour-grading, with software like After Effects. I’ve referred to this digital as ‘democratic’ since as film-practice, it is relatively accessible. And what I think is new here, is the evolution of the digital aesthetic for the moving image, at the low-budget end. In the first Dogme wave, the digital aesthetic got harnessed to a polemical, and rather limiting, single aesthetic dictated by the Dogme95 manifesto, and realised as grainy, shaky cinematography cut to abrupt editing patterns, with minor post production treatment. However, in the current wave of micro/low-budget, small-scale digital cinema, since around 2000, ‘the digital’ is given more room to move. For example, iconic directors like Kiarostami and Lynch both rework their distinctive brand of cinema, the Indie movment goes digital – with Mumblecorps in the US or WarpX in the UK, together with the impact of a wider digital culture on cinema - Web 2.0, social-networking and of course the video explosion, synonymous with YouTube. And for me, this is all really exciting stuff.

[jason eisener / hobo with a shotgun (faux grindhouse trailer) / 2007]

Which gets me to the second part of your question – what can commercial cinema learn from YouTube?, which I would re-phrase this ‘what can narrative cinema learn from YouTube?’, since it casts a wider net. For me, there are three main lessons. The first lesson is at the level of film form, or cinematic form, there is an opportunity to (productively) explore the fragmentation of the long-form feature. This could work, for example, as a reconsideration of a modular, or tableaux, approach to the feature film - something explored by Jean-Luc Godard (among others) in the 1960s. And using fragmentation as part of a low-budget filmmaking process. Then, this idea lends itself to questions about the distribution of features. Once you have a feature, accumulated in parts, in a rigorous cinematic experiment, then film collides with an array of new, and presently immature, narrative models such as webisodes and mobisodes, deployed within a clip-based culture. The second lesson is to engage with the YouTube aesthetic. As audiences become more and more conditioned to an uncontrolled aesthetic of the moving image – then film can be remediated in interesting ways. This is evident in the surge of ‘proteur’ productions, where film professionals exploit the amateur process/aesthetic. Be Kind Rewind, Look or Cloverfield are but a few recent examples. The third ‘learning from YouTube’ lesson for the cinema is to rethink the feature film theatrical experience. In particular - how it ties in with the ‘participatory culture’ (Jenkins) spawned by Web 2.0. One interesting case here, is the original (double-feature) Grindhouse from Tarantino/Rodriguez. For the SXSW Film Festival, Grindhouse engaged with clip culture/participatory culture by seeking to splice a series of faux-trailers inbetween the two features (essentially YouTube clips sandwiched in a theatrical feature experience). And I think that this kind of thinking (whilst of course, being part-marketing) is also innovative in looking at a crossover between the very big screen and the very small….

[david lynch on the iphone (on the iphone) / via damien mully]

In S, M, L, XL: The Question of Scale in Screen Media, you talk about screen-anxiety, which speaks to the shifting sands of aspect ratios and the multiplicity of screen sizes we engage on a daily basis. In reading this article, I couldn't help but think of David Lynch's recent freak out over the idea of the iphone as a device on which one could view a film. To get even smaller than the 11 x 8 cm size of a youtube screen do you have any thoughts on the screen space of mobile devices as an arena for a personal cinema?

The Lynch clip gained a lot of hits, but I do think that as it was taken out of context (as I understand it was remixed from one of the DVD extras from the Mulholland Drive disc) it is not representative of Lynch’s engagement with the digital. For Inland Empire, Lynch risked it all: no-script, got behind the camera and acted as self-distributor (in the US) – which is pretty bold. Also, in his book Catching the Big Fish – while Lynch does give his reservations about the precession of the tiny screen - he also engages: “But digital is here; the video iPod is here; we’ve just got to get real and roll with the flow”. Here, he makes some strong points – that sound (as the repressed element of the cinema) will challenge image on the small screen. He also raises a concern for the successful creation of screen ‘worlds’ on such a small canvas.

To my mind, the central issue for mobile media, and personal cinema, is the issue of scale – where scale is taken to mean both narrative scale and the size of the moving image/sound design. In think the challenge will be to get both these things right. The 4th screen, of mobile media, needs some time to find its own space, within the constraints - and the webisodes, mobisodes and precession of clip-culture will see to this. I often find the direct comparisons to the big-screen cinema odd - since I really think it will be a question of both/and and not either/or. That is, new mobile media should steal, borrow, remix and remediate the language of cinema: using a range of shot sizes, framings, ideas on screen space, performance and mise-en-scene – but not replicate it. The most interesting work will be the result of media mutations. I am of the opinion that our 100 plus years of cinema (silent audiences in a dark room, watching a projection of light) will not vanish in a hurry. Certainly, celluloid will disappear (from the mainstream) when the theatres go digital. But in terms of narrative, feature-form and cinema-going (as a cultural activity) the big screen will hold its allure. One interesting crossover – is the migration of the extras bundled with a feature film – to the mobile media screens: the interviews, trailers, remixes, social-networking portals etc. This is part of the ‘cinema of complexity’ (Harper) where a plethora of supplementary media are consumed alongside the feature itself and obviously lends itself to clip-culture. In terms of movement between the small to medium (television) screen – I think the Quarterlife webisodes provide a good example. While this 8-minute drama worked on the small screen (on Quarterlife.com and MySpace TV) when transplanted to NBC - it got the worst ratings for the network in 17 years. And this takes producers/distributors for new and old media back to the drawing board and signals that distribution across the screenscape will not be a mere roll-out of content.

To turn back to Lynch, could you expand on your comments about Inland Empire and his engagement with the digital? In your essay Inland Empire: The Cinema in Trouble? you touch on Lynch's transition from the "picture perfect" cinematography of Mulholland Drive to some of the wonky, overexposed shots in Inland Empire. Could you contextualize a specific shot or sequence from this film that embodies the essence of the "digital" David Lynch?

Inland Empire works as an ‘all at once’ kind of approach by Lynch –its alternative scriptwriting, digital production basis and model of self-distribution (I think this explains the very instability of the film itself). Lynch worked as writer, cinematographer and editor. Saying this, Inland Empire is not an entirely DIY ethos – since it was partly funded by French production company StudioCanal. But in the US, the marketing and distribution has been undertaken by Lynch himself (apparently funded by proceeds from davidlynch.com and sales of his Lynch coffee). Here, Lynch has been visiting individual theatres across the States, introducing himself, then checking his picture/sound on each screen. Given the strength of the Lynch ‘brand’ - I imagine this will be prove a profitable experiment in self-distribution.

In terms of specific shots or sequences – let me answer this in two parts. At the level of the shot: Lynch is always keen to remind us of his start as a painter, and art-school training, prior to his transition to ‘moving paintings’ (his term). Lynch has manipulated the texture, grain, contrast of celluloid in his move from canvas to screen. Think of: the high contrast black and white chiascurro of Eraserhead, or the voluptuous, decadent textures in his subsequent films (those deep, colour saturated, heavy curtains come to mind – which surface in multiple films). But Lynch’s new leap - to the grainy and pixelated images of handheld DV in Inland Empire is a big one. And for consumers of analogue-Lynch, is one that requires some effort, and perhaps patience. The type of shots which I think represents digital-Lynch are the portraits of the characters of Inland Empire captured with a Sony PD150, using a wide-angle lens, up-close to the actors: the lighting is harsh and unforgiving, the background rendered in auto-focus, and the colour palette muted, flat and low-contrast. But the images remain distinctively Lynch – in the extreme camera angles (which come closer to his canvas portraits) and because of the consistency in Lynch’s focus on design/set-construction in the film. This is interesting, since it places Lynch, as artist/auteur, in proximity to other amateur image makers – in that, the limitations of prosumer digital technology ensure a consistent digital image aesthetic: from our digital home photos to the cinema screen. I would love to see Lynch take the next step, towards HD digital video for his next project where I think the capacity of the digital as a painterly medium is enhanced, particularly with DIY colour-grading software. And his comments point towards an evolution of his digital cinema when he states “I’m totally embracing the digital world in sound and picture, and I just can’t believe how much control and how many tools are available to us. It’s really beautiful” (Interview with David Lynch by Michael Joshua Rowin).

But for Inland Empire - I don’t think that it is the images/sounds that are most radical – it is the form of the film itself. This gets me to the second part of your question on the identification of particular sequences in the film. Inland Empire is an unwieldy object, one might say ‘masquerading’ as a feature film. In the past, Lynch has actually worked (however idiosyncratically) within reasonably tight parameters of cinematic scriptwriting and narration (see J.J. Murphy’s reading of Mulholland Drive in his book Me and You and Memento and Fargo as evidence of this). But the Lynchian worlds of Inland Empire are something different – they almost seem assembled at random. In my article in FlowTV, I said that it’s a futile exercise to attempt to represent the narrative structure of the film. The closest thing I end up in providing is the metaphor of the wormhole – to connect the worlds/spaces of the film. In fact, it is precisely the radical film form of Inland Empire that has been confronting for some viewers (that is, not the DIY-digital production aesthetic). For my part, I think it the film is very liberating – since it moves narrative cinema towards a condition where the feature film (form) becomes a kind of ‘container’ for moving image media. And it is precisely the extreme episodic cinematic form of Inland Empire that produces some fantastic sequences: when the whores do the locomotion (embedded above) or the LA street scene set to Beck’s Black Tambourine, to name just two. The idea of the feature film as a narrative container – allows a loose assembly of sequences that mimic other contemporary media: the music video, sitcom (the rabbits) and daytime tv. It also makes for a very entertaining theatrical experience – I saw the film at a midnight session at the Sydney Film Festival where it received an enthusiastic reception.

I also want to quickly discuss the script. It was initially reported that Inland Empire was produced without a script – but in a recent interview with Lynch at ReverseShot.com he provides an account of an alternative scriptwriting process used for the film: “So I would script a scene and then go shoot that scene, then write another scene and go and shoot that scene, not knowing if there was going to be anything more than just that scene, or those scenes’ (Lynch interviewed by Rowin). And this is interesting – since it reveals a logic to the distinct ‘container’ form of Inland Empire, as a collection, or assemblage, of random sequences. It also seems to have currency in a digital culture of competing, colliding and intersecting media forms.

This is a bit of a tangent, but I noticed in your writing about Abbas Kiarostami's Ten you accompanied that text with a diagram (detail above) to aid in mapping out the structure of that narrative. Have you worked with graphics to represent any other film narratives? Is this practice common in film writing? Could point us in the direction of any other work along these lines?

This is a kind of David Bordwell-esque mode of thinking about the cinema – as an anatomical breakdown of film narration and structure. My own interests in new digital cinema fuelled the ‘cinematic diagram’ of Kiarostami’s Ten - as way to understand the film. And in Ten (and with Lynch) two of my instincts have been confirmed – firstly, that digital filmmaking allows a rethinking of narrative and cinematic form and secondly, that scriptwriting remains central to the process – for a digital cinema beyond a simple engagement with the latest, smallest prosumer digital camcorder. At present I am working on another cinematic diagram - of Jean-Luc Godard’s 1964 film Masculine Feminine – again, to understand its peculiar form - caught between oppositional documentary and fictional patterns of narration. This is based on a paper given at the Telling Stories conference in the UK in 2007 and suggest that a good idea for new cinema may be to look backwards to (what I term) ‘retro-modular’ narratives of International Art House cinema.

A key interest in graphic representation of cinema is: if you can understand film form by a visual mapping process – then this may also become a generative device for feature film scriptwriting/form. In terms of others doing similar things – there are the narrative diagrams in Steven Johnson’s Everything Bad is Good for You (mostly for television). Also, I recently came across a site on Cinemetrics (a link from Bordwell’s) which is free software that you can download which allows you to gather data (in real-time) whilst (re)watching a film – it accounts for the number of shots, average shot length etc. Cinemetrics would create a database for a particular film and provide data for and in-depth anlaysis of the film, and more interestingly, may point to new ways to consider film form/narration.

The other influence on my thinking on the cinema comes from the design world. I was fascinated by Rem Koolhaas’ diagrams for the OMA Seattle Central Library project. These revealed a design-by-diagram approach with direct correspondence in built form – the result being an unwieldy architectural object (recently seen as the backdrop in TVC advertising for European car brands). I was also attracted to one of your own recent posts at Serial Consign about Ritwik Dey's Lifemaps. These kind of things already have a big impact on more experimental modes of screen media, such as media arts projects, VJing, database cinema, video installations etc – but I am most interested in how this new info-culture will effect the cinema, within the boundaries of narrative, feature film. For example, the Lifemaps suggest a potential to meld narrative (in this case autobiographical) and cinematic form – as a new, generative approach to screenwriting/screen media. This could also work across the documentary/fiction divide. Also, these diagrams/maps also reveal the precession of a new aesthetic of information. Lev Manovich has his new book on ‘Info-Aesthetics’ in process – which details the cultural impact of generative, parameter-based software: across new media arts, music-video, advertising, design, architecture and the cinema. Manovich provides the term ‘hybrid media’ to reveal how the old media is today remixed/transformed/mutated towards dynamic forms. This points to an exciting future for cross/inter/hybrid modes of cultural production in a digital environment.

[harun farocki / deep play / photo: juan freire]

Your response is making me kick myself (once again) for missing out on an opportunity to see Harun Farocki’s Deep Play earlier this spring. One of the things I find so interesting about media theory right now is that the word “convergence” which was being tossed around so freely within net culture in the late 1990s feels not only plausible, but pervasive. To get hyper-specific in regards to an “info-aestheticized cinema”, can you recommend any specific work or sequences which hint at what might loom on the horizon?

I’ve only seen excerpts of Deep Play on YouTube. In a wider context it is part of the currency of the video medium – not only due to the explosion of online video portals but also in a media arts context. It seems to me that video (in particular the digital moving image) is the medium of the moment. In answer to your question on the info-aesthetic I’m going to limit myself to the object of my own research at present – the feature film – in an age of media convergence. Here, Deep Play resonates with that idea in new digital cinema that there is a spatial reconfiguration underway – an idea from film theorists Adam Ganz and Lina Khatib. This transition represents a shift from a traditional 2D mode of ‘coverage’ of cinematic space to the mapping of 3D cinematic ‘zones’. I have cited the Beastie Boys’ concert film Awesome; I Fuckin' Shot That! as a good example of cinematic space as ‘zone’. The film is introduced as ‘An Authorized Bootleg’. In one interview Adam Yauch/MCA talks about how the film was inspired by a fan’s mobile phone clip taken from one of their live performances and uploaded to the message board on the band’s official web site. The concert is generated from DIY, amateur recording of the event shot simultaneously by fifty fans. It exploits the low-light, unobtrusive/ lightweight and long-take recording functions of consumer cameras. Similar to the mapping of the stadium by the surveillance cameras in Deep Play – the Beastie Boys exploit Madison Square Garden as a cinematic zone: where the ‘story’ of the live concert unfolds not only on stage – but backstage, in the mosh-pit, the bars and (even) bathrooms of the venue. The shift from filmic planes to filmic zones is also evident in the work of UK director Paul Greengrass in his Bourne films – he exploits handheld, run and gun cinematography and rapid-cutting to effect. In his use of ‘live’ locations Greengrass mode of working also represents the hijack of guerrilla filmmaking aesthetics for big-budget cinema. Cloverfield (produced by J.J. Abrams) is another example – where the handheld mapping of a fictional story space (a post-apocalyptic NYC) drove audiences from the theatre with nauseousness. It is important to note that the spatial configuration is not entirely medium dependent: the Beastie Boys opted for Hi-8 ‘retro’ camcorders; Greengrass uses 35mm; and Cloverfield doubles 35mm production for a handheld digital video cameras built into the story. So – the convergence here is one between the broader digital culture (not just the digital medium) and new approaches to filmmaking and film aesthetics. It is interesting to speculate whether the ‘zone’ approach and the mapping of 3D cinematic space will simply be a trend for the cinema or perhaps become the dominant mode of production/aesthetic - and relegate the traditional 2D filmic zones of classical cinema as a twentieth century concern.

Throughout this discussion you’ve mentioned a few online sources for film writing. Can you consolidate a hotlist of media theory blogs or online journals for interested readers?

That’s a big question, but recently I’ve been returning to these sites to (re)consider some of the things we have discussed here:

• J.J. Murphy Blog
• David Bordwell Blog
• Senses of Cinema
• Flow TV
• SCAN
• Bright Lights
• Rouge
• Reverse Shot
• FilmMaker Magazine

Last fall I posted about espaceSONO, a sound art show at the SAT in Montreal curated by Tobias c. van Veen. Tobias is an old friend who is active as a musician and DJ, curator and critic and in his spare time he plugs away on his Ph.D in communication & philosophy at McGill. I have wanted to interview Tobias about his creative practice for a while, but we have held off having this dialog for several months so we could specifically address his new turbulence-commissioned project, 'til death do us a part. Tobias will be performing this piece and participating in the Programmable Media II symposium in New York City tomorrow at Pace University.

[tobias in the mix at noplacard feb. 2008 / photo: cato p.]

Your recently launched turbulence piece 'til death do us a part is decidely lo-tech. Not only is underlying reel-to-reel technology slightly archaic but even your references are coated with a fine layer of dust. Listening through the piece, it feels very much like an autopsy for "dead media." Could you talk about the inspiration for the piece?

Only in the 21C would recording technology scarcely dated -- the magnetic tape, still in use, of course -- be called 'archaic'. Yet perhaps 'archaic' & 'inspiration' traffic together at this moment when using reel-to-reels to call forth the voices of the dead. If a reel-to-reel is dead media, it is because when, at the height of its use in the 1960s, it was already being used to conjure the spirits of the dead by Konstantin Raudive. Blank tapes, a kind of virgin media, thought Raudive, could capture the transient souls lost on their way across the River Styx. He called it Electronic Voice Phenomenon or EVP. Raudive devoted volumes of research to the recorded phonemes of dead spirits that had to be intrepreted & deciphered from the background wash of hiss & hum that make up the line level noise of virgin media. This virgin media of the blank reel was, even at this time, in the 1960s, already dead, or rather infused with the dead. So perhaps dead media has been with us since its virgin birth.

Inspiration, then, for this project, 'til death do us a part, came from Raudive, but perhaps it was breathed into me from the start -- from Latin 'inspirare', to breath upon, already means to be guided by divine influence, to communicate with the otherworldly. If there is a muse to the 21C soundpoet, perhaps it is with the inspiration of technics, then -- the secrets that technology whispers gently into our ears while caressing our fingers with delicate wires.

Wires is perhaps where it all began in any place, when called upon by Turbulence.org to create a piece that addressed the theme of the 'network', in terms of the ongoing investigation of technological networks by Turbulence with their blogs & events dedicated networked sound, networked performance, and networked arts. From 'network' led me to two propositions:

• that any network is a relationship of reciprocity between machines, i.e., that of love, wherein love contains all the gamut of affective responses from anger to eroticism;
• that if, as a human partially wired in the network, I must be able to engage in this affective economy of reciprocity, that is, to love the machines, and be loved back.

...and frankly I am no coder nor programmer; for me, artistic practice is anti-WORK, it must not be WORK, it must be PLAY... which is not to say that there is no thought nor investigation to the practice (on the contrary); rather, I sought to set-up a network of machines in such an intimate setting that their subtle frequencies could be touched, literally, in the crossings of wires & bent circuits, caressed to gentle joys by organic hands. Thus (and art never produces 'logical' conclusions, nor conclusions, for that matter): the reel-to-reel machine diptych, or wiring of two R2R machines into each other, with a small mixer, and a Roland DSP to spatialize monophonic signals.

Keeping art-making as PLAY-based as possible is commendable, that is no small task. To provide counterpoint to this statement, could you talk a little about your WORK (i.e. your academic research) and how that relates to and informs your creative practice?

I would like to continue living under the illusion (please excuse me) that life itself should press PLAY. We all know work is unavoidable. If I may rewind an old tape from the late 1940s: "Entertainment is the prolongation of work under late capitalism. It is sought by those who want to escape the mechanized labor process so that they can cope with it again" (Adorno and Horkheimer, _Dialectic of Enlightnment_, Stanford: Stanford UP, 2002, p. 109). My illusion is such that I cannot discern if my work is an escape from the reduction of art to entertainment or vice-versa. If artplay is mere catharthis, then perhaps workplay serves as a reset button so I can try again *not* to entertain people.

The lines between PLAY and WORK are not only blurred under the 'production of labour' but under two further factors: (1) what Derrida saw as the play of the text -- which is to say, of all meaning, framing, context -- that nonetheless operates by way of a 'certain' (which to say, calculable) economy (which is to say, a 'certain labour') and (2) that any art which demands of me to once again remain seated in front of my screen, fingers on the keyboard, reduces any radicality of its content to the repetition of mechanized eye-hand coordinated movement indistinguishable from the gestures of research. Hakim Bey has something going on when he calls on the occult forces to disrupt the wires & lie once again breast-to-breast. 'Reach out and fuck someone'. The computer-screen interface reduces much of the differential play to be found between WORK and PLAY into a rote repetition wherein the content is subsumed to the constraint of the same movements. ART must interject at the level of affect, which is to say, it must replay the body, but only if the brain also slips out of gear and into the great roaming state where one is irrevocably drawn to what Hunter S. Thompson called 'The Great Magnet'. Given that onscreen re-presentation somewhat taints the affective force of the exhibitionist machine-love that is a performance, the dead sound itself is the last hope in tearing through the barrier from the zone of the dead to the last living alive. Which side 'we' are currently on is unclear.

To bring to bear all that would fall under WORK to this PLAY would be a challenging task. Some would say it is philosophy of technology. 'It' encompasses texts on turntablism and sampling as a practice of upsetting the force of the 'proper', thus deconstituting the limits of property law; ontological anarchy and strategies of disappearance in rave culture, preforming the conditions under which any 'exodus' (such as in Paolo Virno) must be thought (or Zizek's 'act' of alternative society); the question of technoculture, or rather what AfroFuturism has to teach 'Western' philosophy (a lot); deconstruction as a kind of graffiti, or rather, graffiti as tagging up of Derrida (RAMM:ELL:ZEE and Derrida have some throwing-up to do); the question of technics -- is it not the 'essential' supplement to humanity, that which is excluded to render us (more human than) human? It's all a lot of noises from the dead too.

In terms of providing an arena for exploration, how would you compare reel-to-reel machines to turntables and DJ culture? Given your background in the latter, I'm curious as to your perspective on what each of these tradtions offer.

Turntables were never meant for the production of live remixing, the collapse of conductor to studio producer in the performative realm. The Technics SL1200 was taken as an object & accelerated into an interface for gatherings of flesh, facilitated by rhythm. This was done by tilting the deck sideways for scratching, weighting it down for tracking, laying it with a felt slipmat, and conjoining it at the hip with a mixer capable of contouring the eclipses between the grooves -- vinyl. The hands had to learn a new instrument in the caress of technics: the drifting finger on the rough spinning platter to slow the tempo, the sharp intake on the record label to accelerate, the delicate dance of fingertips on the vinyl to scratch the needle. The turntable-record-mixer apparatus is a tactile instrument requiring the ears of a violinist, the focus of a conductor & the inventive approach of a jazz player. The ears had to relearn how to hear: the headphone in one ear, the mix in the other, the blend in the hands on the knobs & the cut. Of course it falls prey to the formulae present in all of these domains and more; it is too easy to become an addict of START/STOP, the slow fade, and the dull choice in beats. But once challenged, the turntable opens itself to a new language -- which can be, and has been, put into symbol.

It is my intent to seek out combinations of machines that open themselves through touch, machines never designed for the performative intervention on their surfaces or intimate interiors. The R2R machine, this performing network known as EAROS, to hear the erotic life of machines, in the attempt to listen-in on the voices of the dead, this is the urgency of 'TIL DEATH DO US A PART. This urgency is such that I am performing this improvisational tango with the mechanical as the TACTICAL TAPE LOOP DIVISION (EVP-UNIT) on several occasions, including as official entrant in the World Telekinesis Competition in May 2008. On my team are Konstantin Raudive & William Burroughs (both deceased, respectively).

[william burroughs poses for andy warhol / photo: bobby grossman]

Well then, from bent-circuit to beat poet. What specifically caused you to "draft" Burroughs to your team? His tape loop experiments with Brion Gysin? The cut-up method in general? Any specific moments in his fiction? Beyond that, and on the topic of "dead voices on air" did you ever see The Ghost of William Burroughs? Perhaps it is a distant cousin of 'till death do us part...

Burroughs asked to be on the team. That polite yet persistent junkie kept drifting across the blank media demanding a piece of what he (along with Gysin) sought. Via a cut-up that took some time to decipher, Burroughs revealed something of the erotic to be found in cutting-up the dead. Jouissance through cut-up is something of a scarcely erased technecrophilia. Raudive was already drafted, though he keeps insisting that telekinesis has little to do with EVP. He's stuck in the Reel, though, so its tough titties for him.

Since moving to Montreal in 2002 you've been quite active promoting sound in a variety of forums including events, radio broadcasts and sound art exhibitions. Montreal has slowly developed a mystique quite similar to that of Detroit, where people in other cities have a romanticized perspective of the "local scene" in the city based off one or two festival visits a year (i.e. Mutek, Elektra, etc). As an insider, and something of a outspoken statesman, what are your thoughts the local audience and cultural infrastructure for adventurous listening in Montreal?

A city deserves to be tasted on foot: drunken staggerings from the bar, eyes rolled back in the sockets, feet on fire, hailing cabbies in poor, broken Quebecois gleaned from failed attempts at late-night love. This is Montreal. Montreal seduces you, embraces you with tropical warmth, then buries you under 8 months of glacial winter. And what is a 'scene'? If a 'scene' is a series of physical spaces, havens of culture, then Montreal remains a vibrant, if not one of the most vibrant, places for arts experimentation in North America. It is a city of venues and festivals. But, alas, things are changing: rents are going up; lattes are coming in; SUVs are zipping by; a few venues are disappearing (RIP, The Spectrum). The physical infrastructure of a vibrant arts scene has been stamped with its due date. New neighbourhoods will break out (the shift is on from the Plateau and Mile End to St. Henri) and perhaps old politics will intervene (if the pro-separatist Parti Quebecois gets in, the economy tanks -- which is good for artists), but world economics is intervening now, and the City of Sin won't last as the City of Cheap.

But let's talk about the most significant component of a scene, as other cities, from NYC to Toronto to Vancouver to SF, are expensive yet produce good art. What is necessary for a scene is a collective of people supporting each other, or rather, lines of fracture that connect various kinds of people to each through informal networks. This kind of scene existed for adventurous techno & house when I moved here in 2002: it was personified when I attended a lazy-afternoon BBQ, listening to unreleased tracks on the stereo while the smoke from blunts mixed with the friendly talk of three dozen of the city's artists, DJs and promoters... mutually supporting remixes were struck; wax circulated; invites to play granted; articles partially written in the heads of the scribes present. This is a functioning scene.

The breakpoint for me was in 2003-2004 when many musicians began fleeing to European climes (read: Berlin). When Force Inc.'s Montreal office folded the writing had long been etched in the run-out groove. Montreal is a great festival city, but it simply isn't self-sustainable for many performing artists in the electronic arts: there's not enough places to play, and the places that exist are controlled by rather short-sighted cliques. What I say here doesn't hold for every kind of music; some forms fare better than others (such as musique actuelle, noise, improv, and so on). But electronic musicians don't fare so well here, and for the most part, the myth that Montreal is all about avant-garde beat-driven techno and house is exactly that, a myth. Toronto and Vancouver both have far more engaged scenes that support local events. Most clubs here remain entrenched within the logic of 'beer & broads' -- both at cheap prices.

But this is an old story... and yet the story could have been different: if some festivals had accepted DJs into their line-ups earlier on, recognising the historical role the DJ has played in disseminating electronic music, but also as an artist in their own right (and at stake here is a much-needed education in techno-turntablism: the electronic scene could learn from hip-hop here, most techno DJs being glorified jukeboxes); some festivals could have opened themselves to collaboration and a diverse approach to events rather than aiming at a brand-name monopoly; and connections to the AfroFuturist heritage, much lacking in the popular culture though omnipresent among the producers, needed to be rendered explicit.

But Montreal never understood the music that came from Detroit -- Montreal is all about what I call 'poutinehouse'. The galaxy-to-galaxy mythos of the offworld futurist, the political wiring of Underground Resistance, the cyborg of sci-fi: these are not the imaginaries of Montreal, though they be those of electronic music's most challenging, innovative and politically inspiring aspects. Thus there often remains a profound disconnect between the moods & atmospheres of interplanetary electronic music (and its politics) and the cozy, neighbourhood feeling of Montreal and its quartiers that somehow leads to a barricading of the status quo. The exodus imparted the unfortunate effect of leaving behind the detritus that now defends its 'hometown hero' status. More significantly, the threads that once connected the improv-experimental scenes and the beatculture are almost severed. Is it any surprise that under these conditions the experimentalists look upon DJs with disdain? In Montreal, being a DJ means being affiliated with beat-driven music as a cash-drawn culture. Very few aesthetically radical & skilled DJs exist, and those who do are shoved aside to the margins.

The indie scene fares better here, whether it be home-taped noise music or the post-rock scenes that continue to trammel the globe. In the indie scene, collective situations, from living to recording to playing, are more or less the norm. And for a time, I'd say this collectivity infiltrated the electronic scene here too, with VJ and DJ collectives (mix_sessions comes to mind, as well as tri.phonic), particularly orbiting around SAT circa 2002-2004. But this is no longer the case in the electronic scene, where the remaining DJs compete tooth-and-nail for bottom-of-the-barrel slots playing music to people who, high on coke, prefer a persistent stream of regurgitated electrotrash, and where, for the most part, DJs who have control of the clubs defend them for the petty fortresses of irony they are. Montreal is all about irony, in this regard -- ironic retro-fashion, ironic microhouse music, and ironically disastrous abuses of coke. Detroit's AfroFuturist mythos, Berlin's bunker jouissance and the West Coast's technoshamanism are all far too transcendental for Montreal's urban hipster.

What this city needs is someone to come in & shake some shit up. But why should anyone expend the energy when Berlin continues to thrive? I have hope for Montreal, but it comes from all the other vibrant music scenes that are too busy incorporating the innovative sounds and techniques of electronic music into their palette to give a damn about the petty politics of the clubs and festivals. The global culture has shifted too: the Dionysian rites of rave culture are long dead, and technoculture no longer thrives alongside a rebellious counterculture; these are all factors in the wasteland that is the 21C. The time is nigh to regroup & rethink what a 'new music' might mean, today, and how the experiences of jouissance that *do continue in great festivals all over Montreal* can be expanded to mean once again a general infection of everyday life with the renegade spirit, rather than just a weekend catharthis that keeps the wheels of the machine grinding down this fragile sphere...

What have you got in the works for the rest of 2008?

The art of disappearance.