Steve Elkins In Montreux, Switzerland

Seemingly nomadic by nature, Steve Elkins capacious understanding of beauty in relation to our oceanic depths and abilities for ultra-transcendence are exemplary to say the least. Through trek-exploration, Steve shares the transformative aspects in music—unveiling truths to both listeners and creators. His film, The Reach of Resonance, aspires to create a perfect amalgamation of the ways in which an individual’s relationship with music can have a profound effect on the trajectory of their lives and their place in the world. Through his work, he closely examines the intricate interconnection between musicians and their environment—both culturally and intimately.

FIXE: Walk us through a typical but intimate day in your life.

ELKINS: Most days, I get up early enough to read a book over coffee for at least 2 hours. For the last few years it’s mostly been non-fiction research into a wide variety of topics explored in my films, ranging from the history of prisons in Australia to Tantra.

Then I spend several hours booking screenings of my first feature film, The Reach Of Resonance, and preparing for upcoming production on my second feature. Recently, that has primarily involved a lot of phone calls with physicists working in scattered locations around the world and Buddhist monks in remote monasteries in Ladakh. One of the biggest challenges I’m working on right now is how to get my film gear into a very remote 800 year old monastery in Zanskar, which is a minimum four or five day drive into the Himalayas, part of which is on one of the world’s highest roads, followed by several days of hiking with the film gear on horseback to a monastery (with no electricity) jutting out from the middle of a nearly vertical cliff-face.

After pulling my hair out a bit over these kinds of details, I head out to one or more of my various freelance jobs, which could be painting boats at the beach, marrying people (as an ordained wedding officiant), recording sessions as a studio drummer, singing while rowing couples on romantic “Venetian” gondolas, writing articles, photo shoots, video editing, or occasionally guest lecturing at universities. I’ve also begun serving on the board of advisors for SASSAS (The Society For The Activation Of Social Space Through Art And Sound).

In the evenings, I like getting together with friends and cooking, which is pretty much my favorite thing to do. If I’m lucky, I’ll get a run or a swim in there somewhere.

FIXE: What inspires the art that you create?

ELKINS: First and foremost, being surrounded by so much beauty. The world never seems to run short of amazing people, beautiful places, inspiring conversations...it’s hard to hold that in and keep it to myself. There is a surplus gratitude that has to go somewhere, and sometimes it comes out as art.

FIXE: What is your earliest memory that propelled you to create?

ELKINS: I’m not sure what initially propelled me, but I’ve had a creative bent as long as I can remember. When I was 4 years old, I would tear apart pinwheels so I could use the handles as drumsticks to beat on my bed to the 7-inch records of the animatronic band at Chuck E. Cheese’s. My parents saw this and bought me my first drum set that same year, which is how I started playing drums.

In elementary school I was always doing things like writing sequels to books I had to read in school, or hiding stuff all over the neighborhood so I could send friends on scavenger hunts. I would collect materials to make my own board games to play with friends, in the style of Chutes and Ladders, Fireball Island, or Clue, which would often involve stacks of fake money and game cards that I drew and colored by hand. Sometimes I’d teach myself a repertoire of magic tricks and charge my parents admission to my room for a private performance of them. Or I’d teach myself basic orchestra conducting technique and charge my parents even more money to watch me conduct my tape deck as if the Tchaikovsky blasting from it was a real orchestra. I had much better business sensibility back then.

FIXE: Tell us a little bit about your creative process.

ELKINS: If it’s music, my process is generally to never practice, only perform. For me, music is a way to channel the most visceral and intuitive parts of me, and the best way to tap into them sincerely, is to make sure I’m not rehearsed.

If it’s film, on the other hand, it involves a tremendous amount of thought and preparation over a period of many years, so the process is the opposite extreme for me. I actually give minimal thought to most technical aspects of filmmaking, but spend prolonged time and energy researching and reshaping my films as they’re being made, by internalizing the epiphanies I have when a person I’m interviewing changes my perspective on my own subject matter. I make films primarily to learn, not to convince myself that my ideas about things were right all along. My films need to reflect my own long journey from my starting point, but in a way in which I become invisible. So that an audience will sense the internal harmony and cohesiveness of a singular journey, but still find before them a labyrinth they have to work their own way out of. If that awakens heightened sensitivities in people that may have nothing to do with the specific content of the film, I’d be happy. Getting a film to operate in that way involves a lot of work, but mostly on myself. It’s like Leonard Cohen said, “Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.”

FIXE: In what ways do you feel film differs from other mediums of art?

ELKINS: For me personally, it’s a way of integrating many of my deepest interests, without keeping them compartmentalized. I get to fuse my love of research, photography, music, writing, travel, and editing. I get to go deeper into my internal life through going deeper into other peoples lives.

Making Music At The Lightning Field (New Mexico)

FIXE: What was the catalyst for The Reach of Resonance?

ELKINS: There were many. One was being inspired by my close proximity to so many amazing musicians in Los Angeles who were radically redefining the way their instrument was played, including Nels Cline, who was initially the central focus of my film. The more I spent time with these musicians, it became clear that their unorthodox relationship to their musical instruments in turn changed their relationship to themselves. I saw in this an echo of my own relationship to music and sensed that this type of relationship was a window into a very deep part of what makes people tick that is rarely noticed and not easily articulated. I spent the next seven years traveling around the world filming a wide variety of musicians that I felt were probing that permeable membrane between music and life, even if they were not conscious of it. And then focused my film on four of them whose lives and personal transformations I found the most deeply moving, and from whose work emerged an underlying dialogue, despite wildly different creative paths.

FIXE: Give us a synopsis of the film.

ELKINS: Rather than a synopsis, let me just give you a couple examples of what I described in my last answer. The life of one artist in my film, Miya Masaoka, was significantly altered when she really took to heart an idea expressed by her koto teacher: that the human body is an extension of the instrument it plays. She began exploring the meaning of this idea from lots of different angles. Since traditional koto playing involves dramatic hand gestures (related to Tai Chi) as a visual extension of the music being produced, she built a “laser koto” in which koto “strings” made of lasers hover over the acoustic strings and trigger additional sounds based on the movement of her hand gestures across them. This was a way of making audible the music of her body as an extension of the koto. She went on to devise ways of making activities and rhythms inside the human body integrated live into the music performed onstage, from brainwave activity to the sound of blood going through veins.

Miya Masaoka

ELKINS (cntd): But she didn’t stop there. The traditional kimonos worn during koto performances are also meant to be a visual extension of the music in the way they continue to carry the performer’s body movements while playing. Traditionally those kimonos have a tremendous amount of information about the performer pictorally woven into the fabric, such as the history of their family, social associations, whether the performer is married or not, and other things. So Miya began taking this in a different direction by making her own kimonos out of conductive thread which electricity can pass through. Electrical signals of the music being performed are sent through the fabric of the kimono, as well as readouts of her own brain activity during the performance, which then become visible through more than 5,000 LEDs she stitched into the clothing, providing a visual and audible extension of the music in her own clothing. This way the internal workings of her own body and the harmonic spectrum her body is evoking through her instrument replace the typical “personal” information woven into the kimono.

This kimono will eventually have the ability to listen, make informed decisions, improvise and respond to its environment. She will be using it to interact musically with the bodies of other species such as giant squid which can internalize and imitate the physical environment around it on its skin to camouflage itself from predators. There are many other ways she explores the body being an extension her instrument, to the extreme of turning her own naked body into a musical instrument that cockroaches can play as musicians. Through interacting musically with more and more species of life, including plants, she begins to think differently about human nature and herself.

Jon Rose and Hollis Taylor (Strezlecki Desert, Australia)

ELKINS (cntd): All of the musicians in my film take a similarly long journey from a singular starting point, or question, about how they relate to their instrument, which eventually changes their relationship to themselves and their surroundings. The creative path of another artist in my film, Jon Rose begins when he smashes his violin into pieces on his kitchen table and rebuilds the instrument in countless mutated ways involving longer and longer strings. This eventually leads him to play, with his violin bow, the longest stringed instruments on the planet: barbed wire fences in conflict zones. By sabotaging the history of his violin (and its historical associations with preserving privileged classes within the European societies that developed the instrument), he was led inevitably to the largest instruments built to keep society divided today. Fences.

Over time, his relationship with fences turned inward to a reflection of how the mind divides the world into binaries, no matter how arbitrary, and projects them onto the physical world. By transforming the physical material dividing people into a musical material, he begins to explore music’s capacity to make people re-imagine the society that history has handed down to them.

Composer John Luther Adams is another artist in the film, who begins to hear his own musical voice through going out into the woods and listening to birdsong resonating through his body. I’ll let you guess where that leads him.

John Luther Adams and Dirk Lummerzheim (Fairbanks, Alaska)

FIXE: How do you wish for your art to transform the world?

ELKINS: I’m really only concerned with making sure that my art is transforming my own internal world. I think that’s the only way to create work with a sincerity and depth that stands a chance of speaking to others. And I hope I live on a planet diverse enough that certain cultures and imaginations find no meaning in my art, or any use for it.
But that said, I naturally hope my work resonates with some people because in those moments you sense that an invisible curtain has been torn and that the internal space between yourself and another has diminished. That’s certainly one of the miracles of art, and I’d rather that artists embrace that as their role in society than use it as a buffer between themselves and others, which we’ve all seen, for example, in that type of musician who measures the quality of their work by the distance between the stage and the ground. But for me to dwell on the transformation of others as a deliberate goal for my art smells suspiciously like when Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky said, “Artists want instantaneous and total recognition...immediate payment for something that takes place in the realm of the spirit.”

Fred Frith, one of the first musicians I filmed for The Reach Of Resonance, said something in Werner Penzel and Nicolas Humbert’s magnificent film Step Across The Border which deeply affected that way I think about art’s function as a transformative activity—and worth quoting at length. He said, ”I don’t have any illusions about what I do making any major social change. When I was younger I thought we could change the world. I don’t think so now, but I don’t think that’s a pessimistic idea. Now I feel much more encouraged by community activity on a small level. I don’t think I’m going to be a big commercial success. I don’t want it and I don’t need it, and I don’t think it’s going to change anything that way. But I think that if I do a concert and one person has their ideas seriously affected by what I did, and comes to me in perplexity or in some kind of changed state and wants to talk about what I did, that’s great...

There’s not much that can happen that wakes people up. People are very happy to receive, all the time, information. And this information is usually coming from some central source, like a television station or a government and people don’t question this at all anymore. But there are some things you can do in cultural terms that will make people react in a different way, finding something in themselves they didn’t know about. The kinds of concerts we do, or theater events, or dance, or anything like this...when it works it’s because it strikes a chord inside somebody and they have to look at themselves. And they have to look at themselves in relationship to the society that they’re in. And there aren’t many things that make people do that. Most of the time, people don’t even think about it.”

Fred Frith

FIXE: Do you feel people are born creative or is it learned?

ELKINS: I think anytime you observe children it’s clear they are born incessantly creative. I’ve watched countless people in my life transition into adulthood by cultivating habits, patterned thinking, and rituals for themselves that obliterates most of their creativity, or at least their belief that they can be creative enough to think outside the box they’ve built for themselves. Sometimes I’m amazed at how much creativity people put into ensuring they’ve killed any interest in new ideas or rethinking how to live. Myself included.

So I do think we are all born creative, but that the fostering or killing of creativity is learned. In the US, the arts are the first thing cut from public education, because it’s viewed as “extra- curricular”; in other words, a personal hobby compartmentalized from the skills deemed most valuable for functioning in our society. In most other cultures, music is understood to be a critical social communications tool that makes us human. In Bali, everyone makes art as a religious duty.

FIXE: Do you feel that there are limitations to what you want to create?

ELKINS: Aside from money and mortality? The only remaining limitation that comes to mind is my personal experience. My experiences form the borders of my language, and language is the house man lives in.

FIXE: What is your personal/artistic stance on technology in general. How it pertains to art?

ELKINS: I don’t think technology is inherently good or bad. It all depends on how we use it. And how we allow it to use us. It takes creativity to develop technology, but once it’s in our hands, it can make us either more or less creative. I think we’d know pretty quickly how we truly relate to it if a major solar flare ever wiped out our ability to use electronics, even for an hour.

But all art is made with technology, even if it’s very old technologies like a paintbrush or the human body. I generally avoid keeping up with electronic technology. I’m a slow learner, and it takes more time away from actually living and thinking about life than I’m comfortable with.
I’m one of those guys who has had the same dinosaur cell phone for nearly ten years. I probably won’t replace my computer until it literally stops working. Even though I put over 320,000 miles on my last car, I didn’t replace it until it was stolen.

Jon Rose's Viola-Cycle (Sydney, Australia)

FIXE: Do you feel art is vital to survival and if so, why?

ELKINS: I do. Art is language, and one only has to imagine how our species would survive without language. Perhaps more importantly, art is a language that has the capacity to speak to parts of us that verbal language can’t penetrate. And to improve the quality of the life we do have, no matter how short, which may be more important than survival itself.

To come back to Fred Frith, who I quoted earlier, he spent a lot of college vacation time, at the age of 19, working in a mental hospital where kids with untreatable conditions like Down Syndrome or cerebral palsy were left by their families to be pumped with enormous quantities of drugs and looked after. In an effort to “help the kids to live as much to their potential as possible,” he began having music sessions with them. “In this depressing atmosphere,” he described, “music was a force that created an excitement and well being that was almost shocking. We soon noticed that these kids, with little to look forward to beyond a regimented life in a rundown institution, would beam with joy and shiver with excitement when they heard music, especially music with a strong pulse to it...what I experienced in those moments is hard to put into words. Essentially it was an understanding of music as a pure force, a healing power, a joy of being...helped me to reconstruct my world from the bottom up, to redefine what it meant to be alive, to be human.”

I also think of the AACM (Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians), a nearly all- black musicians’ collective formed in the very segregated Chicago of the mid-20th century to “show how the disadvantaged and the disenfranchised can come together and determine their own strategies for political and economic freedom, thereby determining their own destinies.” I don’t see this as inflated language. Anthropologist John Szwed made a moving observation about how art can change relationships and transform community: “The esthetics of jazz demand that a musician play with complete originality, with an assertion of his own musical individuality...At the same time jazz requires that musicians be able to merge their unique voices in the totalizing, collective improvisation of polyphony and heterophony. The implications of this esthetic are profound and more than vaguely threatening, for no political system has yet been devised with social principles which reward maximal individualism within the framework of spontaneous egalitarian interaction.”

One active member of the AACM, Lester Bowie, recognized the study of communication itself as an essential part of the creative musician’s struggle, and articulated an experience with art that in my mind echoes Frith’s: “In order for any one people to dominate, suppress or otherwise control another people, they must first cut off (or at least control) the other peoples lines of communication between themselves. In other words, the oppressed people must not only have a complete lack of knowledge of themselves or anything else, but must be denied the means by which to find communication...most of all, they must be convinced that there is nothing to know about. They must be led to believe that they have no music, art, cultural sense or anything else... our music is the tool with which the burden of oppression can be lifted from the backs of our people.”

So yes, I think art is vital to survival, and not just literal survival: it is vital to recognizing and developing the best parts of ourselves that make survival worthwhile.

Steve Elkins And John Luther Adams In Alaska

FIXE: Any new projects brewing you would like to give us a sneak peek of?

ELKINS: I’m currently working on my second feature documentary. It’s about people devoting their lives to studying either the largest imaginable things or the smallest imaginable things. It contrasts people using either the most expensive and complicated technology we can build, or their own bodies, to observe things at these scales. It’s about the seemingly mundane daily rituals and habits we create for ourselves that actually affect how we perceive the world, and also what we don’t see. It is being shot in Chile, Siberia, Ladakh, Tuva, Death Valley, and the south pole. There was an article written about it in Alice Matters (a newspaper at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland where I was filming in January 2012), which talks about the film in greater detail.

FIXE: Tell us a secret, and obsession.

ELKINS: A secret: I am mentioned more than once by Justin Timberlake, playing Napster founder and Facebook co-founder Sean Parker, in the movie The Social Network. But you wouldn’t know it cause he doesn’t say my name. And I can’t tell you why because I’m under legal agreement not to.

An obsession: There is something I think about every day...maybe because I travel so much. That geographical distance from the people you love makes you realize, with an unexpected clarity, how much you carry your friends inside you everywhere you go. And that distance allows you to measure, in a more tangible way, how far those bonds stretch in a continuous line without breaking, and how your friends are really the ingredients that inspire who you are in every given moment. They make you realize that geographical distance is a fiction: to miss them is not so much to sense their absence as their presence. It’s no different from realizing that they’re right there.