"Modulations" – Film + Talk mit Lynnée Denise

silent green presents

In this talk, music and cultural critic Lynnée Denise draws on her framework of Turntable Epistemology to engage with primary themes in the film Modulations: Cinema for the Ear. Referencing the Black British cultural film and video collective Sankofa, Detroit techno, Jamaican dub, and the intersections of race, gender, class, and technology, Denise explores how turntable culture in the 1980s shaped place-based practices and spatial production, generating new sites of knowledge and cultural intervention.

The talk will be held in English.
 

Lynnée Denise
Lynnée Denise is an Amsterdam-based writer and interdisciplinary artist from Los Angeles, California, and a global practitioner of sound, language, and Black Atlantic thought. Shaped by her parents’ record collection and the 1980s, her work foregrounds the intimacies of underground nightclub movements, music migration, and bass culture in the African Diaspora.

In 2013, she coined the term DJ Scholarship to explore how knowledge is gathered, interpreted, and produced through a conceptual framework that shifts the role of the DJ from party purveyor to archivist and cultural worker. A doctoral student in Visual Culture at Goldsmiths, University of London, Denise’s research examines how sound system culture builds a living archive and refuge for a Black queer diaspora.
 

Modulations: Cinema for the Ear
Directed by Iara Lee (Cultures of Resistance Films)

“We are not entertainers, we are sound scientists” – Kraftwerk

Modulations is a feature-length documentary that captures a moment in history where humans and machines are fusing to create today’s most exciting sounds.

It traces the evolution of electronic music as one of the most profound artistic developments of the twentieth century. By cutting back and forth between avant-garde composers, Kraftwerk’s innovative synthesizer drones, Giorgio Moroder’s glacial Euro-disco, Afrika Bambaataa’s electro-funk, and Prodigy’s current worldwide superstarstardom, Modulations celebrates, replicates, and illuminates the nomadic drift of the post-human techno sound.

The film examines the kids who have turned the turntable into a musical instrument, disillusioned disco lovers who created acid house out of primitive synthesizers, Motor City mavericks who saw the drum machine as their escape route out of urban neglect, and a generation of British youth who transformed these blips and bleeps into dance floor anthems of their own alienation.

Modulations provides a sense of history and context in which today’s electronic music can be understood. It entertains the converted and remixes the mindset of electronica’s nay-sayers.

Featuring a stunning collage of interviews, cutting-edge visuals, in-studio footage, and live performances, Modulations moves at a pace that matches the energy and innovation of the music.
 

Wednesday, October 29
Kuppelhalle
Doors: 7 pm / Start: 8 pm
Tickets
The talk will be held in English