Speaking in Code
McGill University, Canada
You can still smell the revolution a bit, you know.
—Modeselektor
With the proliferation of digital film technologies, I’ve been waiting to witness a film that captures the obsession and exuberance of the worldwide technoculture. By techno I have a specific meaning in mind. With the collapse of North American rave culture thanks to 9/11—which, among other things, disrupted vinyl distribution as well as introduced draconian police powers that were deployed everywhere against autonomist enclaves—DJs, producers and adherents of the house and techno sound fled the States. This remains an undocumented exodus of creative luminaries. Though Montréal served, for a few years, as a nexus of technoculture thanks to the MUTEK collective—many of my Canadian comrades moved to Montréal around 2002—it was Berlin that soon overcame all comers. Easy travel within a united Europe, cheap living and the fierce protection of personal freedoms made Berlin not just an inexpensive and convenient place to live, but made it (along with Barcelona) the place to imagine collective cultural anarchism. The jouissance of deep, psychedelic, minimalist or maximalist techno betrays not only this yearning, but its reality, which is what few North Americans realise. Berlin and Barcelona, though each fighting their battles against gentrification, are singularities of the way things could be. Perhaps even should be.
Amy Grill’s film captures something of the meaning of techno to Berliners. Techno is not just clubbing catharsis; it is the soundtrack to the fall of the Wall. As a few interviews (and deleted scenes) explain, when the Wall fell in 1989, the centre of Berlin opened into unoccupied and stateless space. Ravers crept in, setting up technoclubs in bunkers and buildings. The infamous Tresor was such a space; today Berghain upholds the tradition. Signs of this sociocultural renaissance appear everywhere in this film, where modernist-inflected graffiti, inside and out, signifies resistance to speculation in property values.
Already, there is much to film: the relation of a free Europe to the policed urbanism of North America; a thorough updating of the AfroGermanic Detroit/Berlin Axis wrought back in 1990; and the development of the later cross-Atlantic dialogue with Montréal, diving South in this regard, with MUTEK’s Mexico and Chile editions.
Though digging into Berlin, and touching upon Barcelona, Speaking in Code falls somewhat short of investigating the planetary potential of this techno matrix. Focusing on Grill’s hometown of Boston, and her ex-husband David Day’s struggle to produce technoculture in a town that mostly doesn’t care (like the rest of the conservative US), the film often forgets to provide some much-needed context to this mini-cultural revolution. After a few starts, it settles down on German labels BPitch Control and Kompakt, as the personal lives and meteoric careers of Modeselektor and the Wighnomy Brothers become central to the narrative. Both duos have to deal with celebrity and stress, as they find themselves gigging constantly, with Modeselektor playing to tens of thousands at Barcelona’s Sonar festival. The massive scale of Sonar is well contrasted to David Day’s burnt-out efforts in Boston, where Day eventually loses track of his community, driving his new afterhours loftspace into the ground (at one point, he talks of putting on events night after night after ‘getting everyone else [i.e. his fellow artists!] out of the building’).
A few other technorati make appearances, including the ever eccentric and incredibly inventive Monolake, aka Robert Henke, prime programmer of Ableton Live and dub techno composer, whose spartan, all-white loft matches, without irony, his all-white techno outfit. Annother memorable appearance is that of music journalist and DJ Philip Sherburne, who strives to explain, in an incredibly touching moment—he breaks down on camera—the true significance of hearing and what it means to him, thanks to his relationship with his deaf father, who received a hearing implant a few years before his death in 2005. Indeed, Philip’s ever articulate and composed persona is a highlight of the film; one wishes there was more from this evocative American writer. Likewise, the ever elusive Wolfgang Voigt—an acid house-era techno producer and owner/operator of the Kompakt empire—appears in fine form, situating “cultural techno”as not only still a part of ecstatic rave culture, but as a step beyond—a form-of-life.
You will find more years to say something without words.
—Modeselektor
The artist set-pieces of Speaking in Code are beautifully composed. Each taps deeply into the ups-and-downs of living-and-breathing technoculture. The Wighnomy Brothers are exceptional; they live in the six person “small communist collective”of Freude-am-Tanzen, sharing equally in profits and running their own label, work/live space and distribution out of the small, mostly rural town of Jena in former East Germany. Yet one wishes that the film went deeper still. When the very lovable, teddy bear-like Robag Wruhme of the Brothers decides to take a breather from the relentless touring schedule, his absence remains something of a mystery.
As a former technoculture journalist, I can’t help but think of what to ask him. I’d ask him if he misses his commune—surely, because he has spent his life, up to that point, working and living in an autonomist collective? To be thrown headfirst into the hypercommercialism and opportunist corporatism of mainstream European techno-pop culture must have been a dilemma—if not a cultural shock to the system. At Sonar, massive digital billboards advertise alcohol, as if by bastardized simile they have overcoded the absent artistic visuals (look closely during Modeselektor’s set). I’d hypothesize that Wruhme’s retreat signifies that not all are comfortable with what “successful”technoculture has become. Yet, the film only glances over divided yet interconnected levels of technoculture in Europe. Some are quite literally underground; the incredible MUNA club in Jena reclaims a WWII-era rocket factory. An entire dimension of the ritual denazification of this space through dance is left uncommented.
Then there are the arena festivals of cigarette sponsorship bound by chain-link fences.
The very opening of the film, for reasons that are left unexplained, rolls with some rather uninspiring footage of a Dutch techno festival. As the camera enters through the VIP gate, a sea of garbage and burnt-out bodies meets the eye, everyone seemingly unaware of the destitution of their camp-like surroundings... this is a fenced-in wasteland of the wasted, yet it is presented, without critique, as a tease of what’s to come. Is this wasteland symbolic for something else in this film?
Well, yes. The evident struggle between technoculture’s collectivism and its commercialism, its schizoid, yet symbiotic relationship with corporate entertainment, is sacrificed to Amy Grill’s focus on her disintegrating relationship with David Day. Choosing to narrativise her failing relationship with an always-omniscient voice-over, Grill never places herself before the camera, even as she captures Day in all his darkest moments. The film’s gaze does not match its voice; the director indulges in a selective narcissism, revealing only a strangely affectless narrative to what is left unseen. By the end of the film the pair are divorced and what begins as an aside becomes the film’s peroration. Their disintegration into divorce eschews cinema verité, embracing instead the conventionality of Reality TV.
What is more intriguing is all that is left unsaid. For example, why is Montréal only mentioned once and the MUTEK festival never mentioned at all? North America is depicted as the graveyard of electronic music, yet there is no mention of the cities where technoculture has survived. Also absent are Vancouver’s New Forms Festival and Seattle’s Decibel. And then there’s Detroit—its festival and heritage left unheard and unmentioned. The same can be said for San Francisco, Chicago, NYC and the Midwest.
This not only leaves the average audience unawares of the States’ founding as well as continuing contribution to electronic music, but it also leaves the current depiction of Berlin’s technoscene and Boston’s lack of it—despite Day’s valiant attempts at a brief flowering—as somewhat hollow and meaningless. The United States lost something with 9/11—the total expression of a generation, silenced off the airwaves, policed and beaten down, denied even the nostalgia granted to punk. Rave culture was not only underground; it has now been buried in the US, as if it never existed, as if the blurring of gender and colour and dance never happened.
Which brings me to the inevitable but essential question of representation. Though Ellen Allien appears as head of BPitch Control, speaking wonderfully of the emotive aspect of techno and the supportive atmosphere she strives to create in her label collective, she remains the sole woman onscreen. But most embarassingly, there is not one single black person in the film. One would think techno was invented and played solely by white people in Berlin. In fact, the only reference to techno’s heritage in black Detroit is a symbol, worn as a badge of respect by Modeselektor. During their massive but ad-ridden Sonar concert, Sebastian Szary wears an Underground Resistance t-shirt. Good for him.
Full disclosure. I like others am a ghost in this film. I saw it being filmed. I’ve DJed in many of the same places. I know and love most everyone in it. I love the music. It is difficult, in this respect, to write critically, especially given the usual laudatory press. But ditch the melodramatic divorce narrative and you have a documentary of profound intimacy and insight into the fragility of collective creation. Speaking In Code is a snapshot of a radical soniculture attempting to achieve a strange kind of equilibrium in the 21C. Both Henke and Voigt say the same thing: they don’t see the need for change. But it’s more than that. Speaking in Code shows that technoculture can be a communal, lifelong adventure in art, music and living, achieving escape velocity, at least for the inventive, from its youthful escapism and burn-out hedonism. Sometimes divorce is necessary for radical togetherness.