Immer­sive and inspir­ing music doc­u­men­taries to look out for in 2021

One symp­tom of the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic has been the feel­ing that we’re caught in an end­less loop. The repet­i­tive nature of lock­down, and the abil­i­ty of music to restore us, was a recur­ring theme at this year’s CPH:DOX, none more so than in David Wexler’s Dis­in­te­gra­tion Loops.

Back in Sep­tem­ber 2001, while digi­tis­ing some old ana­logue loops of audio, Amer­i­can com­pos­er William Basin­s­ki dis­cov­ered that these tapes were grad­u­al­ly decay­ing as they passed through his recorder. The sub­se­quent sound­scape would become ​‘The Dis­in­te­gra­tion Loops’, a haunt­ing com­po­si­tion of mourn­ful horns that became an ele­gy for the Sep­tem­ber 11 attacks. Draw­ing com­par­isons between the post‑9/​11 land­scape and New York in 2020, Wexler’s film opens with images of a desert­ed Man­hat­tan as Basinski’s music con­veys the repet­i­tive­ness of life in lockdown.

Com­posed of Zoom con­ver­sa­tions in which Basin­s­ki sits in his speedos and dis­cuss­es his cre­ative process, Wexler’s film is more of a long-form inter­view than a biopic. You could argue that a doc­u­men­tary about such an avant-garde com­pos­er deserves a more imag­i­na­tive approach, but Basin­s­ki is a flam­boy­ant inter­vie­wee, and the film’s dis­cur­sive style drifts from anec­dotes about grow­ing up in rur­al Texas, to how the process of rep­e­ti­tion can become a form of composition.

In the 20 years since ​‘The Dis­in­te­gra­tion Loops’ were first released, the music indus­try has changed dra­mat­i­cal­ly, with the rise of stream­ing plat­forms forc­ing record com­pa­nies to adjust to this new social media-dom­i­nat­ed era. Two films at CPH:DOX explored this phe­nom­e­non by tak­ing a clos­er look at the Sound­Cloud rap movement.

For any­one who remem­bers buy­ing CD sin­gles, Justin Staple’s Amer­i­can Rap­star is per­haps the best intro­duc­tion to this DIY sub­genre of hip hop. Play­ing out like a com­pre­hen­sive lon­gread arti­cle about this new gen­er­a­tion of musi­cians, com­plete with plen­ty of hand-wring­ing about the facial tat­toos and phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal drug use that has become syn­ony­mous with the genre, the film expands into a heart­felt inves­ti­ga­tion into the psy­cho­log­i­cal impact of social media fame and the men­tal health issues many of these young artists strug­gle with.

Adopt­ing a more impres­sion­is­tic approach, Marnie Ellen Hertzler’s Cre­stone fol­lows a col­lec­tive of Sound­Cloud rap­pers who moved to the Col­orado desert to grow weed and make music. ​“This movie is about the end of the world” she declares at the start of the film. Not that you’d guess by the actions of her fuzzy-head­ed sub­jects, who con­tin­ue to tat­too each oth­er and make baloney sand­wich­es as emer­gency alerts on the tele­vi­sion warn of an encroach­ing wild­fire. The line sep­a­rat­ing fact and fic­tion blurs in a cloud of sand and smoke, but Hertzler’s film is real­ly just a hang­out movie about col­lab­o­ra­tion and friend­ship attuned to the feel­ings of dis­place­ment and indif­fer­ence that pre­oc­cu­py many youngsters.

Richard Peete and Robert Yapkowitz’s Karen Dal­ton: In My Own Time also focus­es on an artist who refused to play by the rules. Raised in dust-bowl Okla­homa, Dal­ton pos­sessed the earthy beau­ty of a Dorothea Lange por­trait and a weary voice that saw her com­pared with Bil­lie Hol­i­day. Her many iden­ti­ties – ruth­less­ly focused artist, ambiva­lent wife, drug addict – all come through in the vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty of her voice, but despite being one of the most influ­en­tial fig­ures to emerge from the Green­wich Vil­lage folk scene she only released two stu­dio albums before dying of an AIDS-relat­ed ill­ness at 55.

Part biog­ra­phy, part autop­sy, the last­ing tragedy of Peete and Yapkowitz’s film is not that Dal­ton was ill equipped to han­dle fame, but that her great­ness wasn’t recog­nised until it was too late. Some peo­ple turn to music to for­get their trou­bles, oth­ers to bet­ter under­stand the world around them. From an ambi­ent com­po­si­tion about death and decay, to the trag­ic demise of a blues folk genius, these four films demon­strat­ed that while music may not have all the answers, it might be the one thing to help us through the pandemic.