Pauline Anna Strom is a San Francisco composer. Blind since infancy, Strom says she felt like “a loner and a heretic” growing up Catholic in the South. During the Seventies, she moved to San Francisco, where she heard Tangerine Dream, Eno and company on FM radio and was inspired to experiment with synthesizers and a TASCAM four-track. (DM is reliably informed that, despite all the other changes to the city, she still resides in SF with her long-lived iguana, Little Solstice.)
Strom’s music is not for the disco. At once soothing and disorienting, it’s her means of sailing in the timestream, conjuring up the frozen past and the (apparently) populous future. Her first release, 1982’s Trans-Millenia [sic] Consort, took its name from Strom’s time-traveling alter ego, according to the press materials for the new retrospective of her recording career (such is its futurity, it comes out tomorrow):
She believed that humanity was confined by its inability to access the people of the future, therefore suffering in a kind of group solipsism. Designing a world of music that rooted itself in all times but the present, Strom’s alter ego, the Trans-Millenia Consort, became a musical activist for triggering this state of heightened consciousness.
Pauline Anna Strom (photographer unknown, used with permission of Archie Patterson’s Eurock Archives)
Strom’s first LP has inspired a new film that also mixes the familiar unsettling and the unsettling familiar: Ether Antenna, set in Nepal. There are no human actors, only robots portraying incidents from the lives of Avalokiteśvara and Shakyamuni Buddha. A five-minute excerpt from Ether Antenna, set to music by Pauline Anna Strom, appears at the bottom of this post, and the director, Michael Candy, kindly agreed to answer a few questions by email.
It strikes me that the prayer wheel that appears at the beginning and end of Ether Antenna is a kind of robot, and that Tibetan prayer flags are automata, too. Why do we find machines in a 1,200-year-old religious tradition?
The idea of automata originates in the mythologies of many cultures around the world. It’s almost an obvious outcome of a technology-enabled civilization; as digital automation continues to penetrate our daily life, it’s easy to overlook the analogue counterparts and machines that have made modern living possible.
A few years prior to my residency, I traveled to Ladakh and spent a few weeks exploring the Indian Himalayas. One of the most striking things as a (foreign) engineer was to find ancient mechanical infrastructure still functioning and valid in society. It’s like, none of those complex folding walls, trap doors or snake pits Hollywood seems so fond of would ever function without a good amount of oil and snake food. But here, in this ancient mountain range, you can find and touch a several-hundred-year-old spinning drum embossed with text and with the flick of a finger have it praying for you; some even use water, wind or solar to complete their eternal journey clockwise.
Nowadays you can’t catch a taxi in Kathmandu without a plastic solar powered prayer wheel whirling away on the dash. For me, these are simple machines doing man’s spiritual bidding—to pray; ether machines keeping you connected to the cloud, from a time when people actually knew where the cloud was.
What was your source for the Buddhist stories that inspired the film?
Initially I had a few ideas, but no solid content or story; the project started as a series of visualized scenes and environments provoked by the astral soundscapes of Pauline Anna Strom’s Trans-Millenia Consort. (Long before I even had the rights or intention to use it in the film.)
In Kathmandu I was connected with Chelsea Wiebers, an American Apprentice of Lok Chitrakar, “the last” traditional Paubha painter of the Newa people of Kathmandu Valley. This guy can take up to 16 years to finish a painting and seeing as Chelsea has only been there for four years I’m not sure she’d have seen one complete yet. She was fluent in Nepali and well versed in the cultural and historical tales of Kathmandu Valley. She became my conduit to Lok, and through them, we began to figure out a sort of narrative that I could work with.
The final film is only based (ever so loosely) on two Buddhist tales, as it seems ever more appropriate to explore the most ancient documented beliefs of Nepal with modern technology as Kathmandu rapidly develops into a techno-metropolis.
The plot follows a perversion of the story of Avalokiteshvara who accidentally killed an enlightened deer while hunting, then wore its skin as a symbol of compassion. And later draws on the tale of the Sakyamuni Buddha who sacrificed himself by diving from a cliff to feed a starving tiger who was unable to feed her cubs, and again, I twisted it to be much less compassionate than the original tale.
A still from ‘Ether Antenna’ (via Michael Candy)
How did you wind up working in Nepal?
I had been working towards a residency in the Himalayas for a few years. Something about the geopolitics of Tibet, the Himalayas and Nepal have always fascinated me. And so after a few attempts I got lucky with a grant to initiate a residency with the Robotics Association of Nepal for three months. From the beginning the purpose of my residency was to explore humanity’s spiritual synergy with machines. Looking to build some sort of roving vehicles to indefinitely travel through and co-inhabit traditional pilgrimage routes and areas of religious significance; introducing an almost gnostic new form of life into the complex social geography of Nepal.
When I went over, I just packed raw materials, my 3D printer, a bunch of tools and some robot gizzards. My host was the Robotics Association of Nepal (that’s an actual thing) and I was hoping to develop some collaborations and figure out what kind of tangent the project was going to take. The group turned out to be much more engineering-focused than anticipated and the room for collaboration in their company began to deteriorate. Though from friendships gained mutually I found myself becoming imbedded in the local arts scene, eventually leading to me being invited to return for the Kathmandu Triennale.
Does Ether Antenna take place in a post-human world?
Well yes and no. Maybe it’s not post-human but a world in which humans never existed. Since the project was about exploring the significance of machines in religion it didn’t seem necessary to bring man into the equation. But let me tell ya it was real difficult to make that possible, I had to mask out a lot of pedestrians in post.
How did you become familiar with Pauline Anna Strom’s work? How did you select the music for the film?
I stumbled upon this mix put together by Christina Vantzou and something about Pauline’s “Emerald Pool” really enchanted me. I just couldn’t shake the spine tingles, and from then on Trans-Millenia Consort was on high rotation in my studio.
Though I make robotic artwork for some reason music has the ability to drive me and direct my work… And never before has it been more apparent than the use of Pauline’s music in this film.
Why do you think synthesizers are so prominent in New Age music? On the surface, New Age spirituality does not seem like it would be particularly friendly to technology.
Oh man, technology is like the backbone of new age spiritual crap. And the crossovers are crazy too… Like old crystal radios… Those use actual crystals! And don’t even get me started on the free energy crowd or magnets.
The whole idea of new age might have been pushing for a more prosperous and free future, one in harmony with science and technology, hence using the most cutting edge tech at the time to create their music. Alas, corporate interest has led us astray, and we are faced with a much more deceitful present state of technology.
In all honesty, digital technology terrifies me. I believe in humble machines used as human aid rather than inhibition and control; machines that cannot betray you, penetrate your securities or condition you for mass manipulation. When everyone uploads their soul to the cloud I’ll be the one with the aluminum foil hat driving a bio-diesel tractor through the computers at your server center.
Tomorrow, RVNG releases Trans-Millenia Music, a compilation of selections from the LPs and cassettes Strom released between 1982 and 1988. Below, courtesy of Michael Candy and RVNG, see an exclusive excerpt of Ether Antenna that includes Pauline Anna Strom’s “The Unveiling” and “Virgin Ice.”