The Surging News reporter Qian Lianshui
The Matrix Resurrections hasn't been released domestically yet, but the subject isn't a movie, it's an important part of the Matrix universe: Techno music.
Stills from The Matrix 4: Matrix Reboot
Today's world is another big step closer to the future predicted by The Matrix. As long as we continue to run, we will easily run into that world. Before all this happened, there were already precursors. It exists in the form of a techno with the soundtrack tone of the series of films. Director Lana Wachowski is a regular at the Berlin Techno club Berghain. People volunteer to enter the club of power station transformation and experience the supernatural feeling of isolation and self-forgetfulness in the black hole of "bang bang". Techno producer Marcel Dettmann, the club's artist-in-residence, invited Wachowski to be the soundtrack to The Matrix 4 because the music was in keeping with her fantasies about the future.
Lana Wachowski entered the future ahead of schedule at the techno club. There's a line in the movie: "We can't see it, we're all imprisoned in these weird and repetitive loops". Techno music is a repetition of industrial sounds, eliminating melodies and harmonies and dismantling the structural form of traditional songs. Some people think it is incomparably cold, rigorous and respectful, and some people think it is full of emotion and free. Apparently Wachowski was the latter. In the world of Techno, people can be willful, impulsive, arbitrary, take off the symbol category, and obey the heart.
When techno clubs rose in Detroit in the 1980s, African-American musicians turned the post-industrial city into the prototype of a futuristic fantasy. "Detroit, ruined city." The city where I studied was more than an hour's drive from Detroit, and before I went, a Chongqing girl pronounced the word "abandoned city" in dialect, and the voice was tactful, which was particularly impressive. The city of Detroit is empty and the buildings are well developed, but not a single white walker is seen when walking the streets. White people move in iron shells, black people scatter throughout the city, the noise of the factories has long ceased, and the scene is very strange.
Influenced by German director Fritz Lang's classic film Metropolis (1927) and The Tokyo of Yellow Magic Orchestra's single Techonopolis, detroit-born electronic music group Cybotron created the dystopian single Techno City (1984). Cybotron's Rick Davis used the term Matrix earlier than the Matrix to describe it "in the gap between the brain, soul, and cyberspace," illustrating "the need to extend the human spirit to automated matrices."
The names of the characters in the film: Neo, Trinity, Morpheus, and the techno gods' nicknames (Function, DVS1, Cadency... God-like. In the "Matrix" universe, how people see themselves and what they will become when they enter the matrix. There is no doubt that these people will transform into the members of the Berlin Techno Club, wearing PVC black clothes, heavy boots and ultra-narrow sunglasses.
Techno obsessed people, trying to turn the flesh into music. Techno musician Jeff Mills told The Wire: "Through music, I feel like I'm becoming someone else. He likens his work to robots exploring space, entering entirely new territory with a calm attitude. Mills is a co-founder of the Detroit Techno Alliance Underground Resistance (UR), whose mission is to use Techno's anonymity to protect people from being slaves to the "dominant mind bunch."
He argues that the mass media forces people to accept false self-perceptions. At that time, "Who am I?" This fundamental problem will never be discovered by the individual in the exploration and introspection of the world. Everyone lives in a programmed virtual world, fed by entertainment and producing value. Everyone is reduced to slavery to the "dominant bundle of thoughts." A year before the release of the first "Matrix," UR had already warned on the album Interstellar Fugitives: "Everything you see is not real. Maybe it's a mirage. ”
The Techno Club is a big belly, which provides a place for people to explore "who I am". By escaping from the external world visible to the naked eye, you can change your identity at will. People who play the game are familiar with this charm of the virtual world. Choosing a character is a rebirth. Underground parties are the rebirth of transgender and queer people who experience another gender at the border of hell at midnight, stripping identities from their identities. Lana Wachowski explained to the New Yorker after her transgender that "I chose to change my appearance to bring it closer to my heart."
In The Matrix Reloaded, the dance party in the underground human city of Zion was the hottest topic of the film that year. Morpheus told the thousands of people in this last human territory that they were about to be destroyed. An impromptu party replaces the doomsday panic. The sharp dance lasted only six minutes, and included Morpheus's speech. But it's loud and far more than six minutes. As the last revelry before man is destroyed, it is spontaneous and will jump to exhaustion. All the sweating flesh is beautiful, and all souls are immersed in Fluke's Techno dance song "Zion."< Techno music contains both remnants of antiquity and glimpses into the future. Before its appearance, jazz was a symbol of freedom and sexual liberation, poetry that made the soul out of the box. The Futuristic Techno is another hallucinogenic force that derives its voice from the everyday life of industry, yet fierce in temperament, dragging humans into the workings of machines and crushing them all over again.
Why do the Wachowski sisters love Techno? Because it is a substance born from a tense nothingness, it stands alone and has nothing to do with history, nation, or individual identity. The two Wachowskis, who went from male to female, experienced a painful rebirth and shared Techno's spiritual temperament.
In Berlin and many other regions, Techno is seen as an important ally of the counterculture. The massive sharp dance party in "The Matrix 2" that year was an outlier in science fiction movies, resembling the sacrifice festival scene of the ancients. Its retro is meant to separate people from machines/programs, so don't confuse it with the futuristic scenes in Black Mirror. You don't see half-hearted dancers here, half-focused on the self-image shaped by social media. The authentic Techno Club prohibits visitors from bringing electronic devices, mobile phones, etc. in the cloakroom. Such clubs have rules: "Destroy your self-perception, destroy your social image, and you can enter." ”
Zion's Sharp Dance Party in The Matrix 2: Reloaded
Before the launch, the Wachowski sisters listed Keanu Reeves with three books on postmodernism, one of which was "Imitation and Simulation" by the French sociologist and philosopher Jean Baudrillard. The book reads: "There will be no more fictional stories." Science fiction will never again be a mirror of the future. They will be a reproduction of the illusion of despair in the past. ”
The Matrix insists on pursuing ancient philosophical propositions in a nested, cyclical, and complex future. Unlike the sages, the reality of the future world is difficult to identify due to the lack of references. The Matrix is a collection of postmodern anxieties and hopeless emotions, suggesting that it is no longer possible for humans to escape from an ever-evolving system. It's like a Techno club, where people trapped in dark theaters can't touch the outside world and are forced to face the conundrum of "who am I?"
Race, gender, information, jobs, the spirit of the city squeezing people, the Techno Club may be the last refuge. This place, devoid of rules, controls, and boundaries, "is a world where anything is possible" (Neo's original words).
Editor-in-Charge: Chen Shihuai
Proofreader: Yijia Xu