Doc Music: Humanizing Music Through Discussion

— Program Highlight
FFD 2017
FFD 2017

We do not know since when music becomes not only about audio, but also visual. The 21th century is also having its own dynamics about the merging of both elements with the emergence of several names; The Beatles, art-rock decade that was giving the music industry fresh air through Pink Floyd, The Velvet Underground, up to Andy Warhol. To the point where industrialization through the hands of MTV, alienating the music itself from human. Music then becomes so shallow and trite. It needs explore spaces which has never been entered to move forward.

Discover: Music Documentary and Community presented by FFD this year in the form of Doc Music Program, is trying to make documentary as medium to talk about music. How “Ruang Rupa Radio of Rock Tour Serial 2” (Henry Foundation, 2017) serves that music is not stopping on what the audience is watching in the stage. More than that, it involves reciprocal interaction between its elements.

“Metal in Egypt” (Luca Tommasini & Ralph Kronauer, 2017) which recorded a reality where music as an entity crashed with social-cultural values prevailing in a society. How music can not separated from taste, and taste is never be born just like that. It is a construction of a power, a political, social class, and economy battle rides. So, alienation is an inevitability, in the form of stigma and persecution. Bringing music to total different level, a resistance.

Music is not limited in its form as a performance. It is raised in “A distance Echo” (George Clark, 2016). 82 minutes long contained soundscape and desert images that is contemplative, the film is trying to construct a meeting between an archaeologist and local community about negotiation process of ancient tomb that lost in the middle of the desert.

Up to the narration about the born of Electronic Dance Music scene in Norwegian in “Northern Disco Lights” Ben Davis, 2017). Music was born as a response towards individual and collective anxiety inside a room. Bringing change to the most personal level on each individual in that space.

Music is too great to just dwell on Alex Turner’s hairstyle. It presents so close in every aspect of human’s life. From the narrowness of an alley full of wine vomit smell in the pressure of replicas of Babel Tower, up to snow land under Borealis Aurora’s light. Through the discussion over this program’s films, FFD is trying to not reducing music by not isolating it from involved elements. From human, society, culture, up to social, political, and economy situation that occurred.