Vincent Moon

Chal Ravens

Welcome to Red Bull Music Festival in Moscow. We’re about to welcome a filmmaker whose work is really unlike a lot of filmmakers working today. He became recognized early on for his Take Away Shows, which were these spontaneous music videos filmed on the streets around Paris, his home city. For the past six or seven years, he’s basically been a nomad, I guess, traveling to dozens of different countries, and making literally hundreds of films. Typically, they explore things like traditional music and folklore, but also religious experience, mystical experience, the relations between all of these things. A lot of the music that he’s collected on his travels he’s released on his record label Petites Planètes. I think he’s gonna have a lot of interesting things to show us today and talk to us about. Please welcome Vincent Moon.

[applause]

Vincent Moon

Good afternoon, everybody. Pleasure to be here with you in Moscow. I hope you are having a good time, and we’re gonna be here together for a little hour I guess.

Chal Ravens

We’ll have time for some questions at the end, so have a think. Before we get deeply into it, I wanted to ask you a bit about your background because I think you studied photography, right? And I wanted to ask a little bit about this approach that you have of recording in one take. This seems to be something that runs through all of your films. Where does that come from? Why do you operate in that way?

Vincent Moon

I guess from the beginning of my research into images I studied photography at first when I was in Paris. I was 18-19 years old. I really didn’t know anything. I didn’t grow up in an artistic environment or anything. It’s pretty late in my teenage years that I got interested in music, and cinema, and so on. When I got interested in that, I got pretty much obsessed, and I went full on. I tend to devour things. I feel like almost ten years, from 18 to 26, let’s say, while living in Paris, I would basically spend my entire time going out and checking stuff. Going to museums, going to concerts, going to cinemas, and trying to see and hear everything. My visual relationship started at around that time when I decided to make photography.

Early on, from the very beginning, my relation to photography was extremely DIY, extremely street photography, very influenced by William Klein, Robert Frank, Josef Koudelka, and Daidō Moriyama, and all those kind of photographers from the 20th century. A very much black and white, actually, aesthetic. Quite far from where I am, sort of, now. Little by little I realized that what I wanted was that incredible freedom of basically adding a little camera in my pocket, and going to the street and basically becoming a photographer, just like that.

I didn’t have to have a bigger team or a bigger form of production to do that. Very quickly I switched towards being attracted, actually completely devoted to my music, and I wanted to get closer to music. I started to take photos of musicians actually. Little by little I decided to find a way to bridge those still images to moving image.

I guess, early on, I should... even the photography I was interested about, there was a lot of movements even though it was always one image, in a sense. I’m talking especially about the work of people like Antoine d’Agata. I don’t know if you know him, his work of [unintelligible], sort of like turns of the century, a poetic type of relationship to society, and so on.

I wanted to approximate that movement in an image. I realized that to cinema I was sort of referencing that I was crazy about, and I’m talking about basically simple things, people like [Andrei] Tarkovsky or [Stanley] Kubrick. This aesthetic of cinema was often very much based on long takes, take Béla Tarr and all those people. I was really obsessed with, what we call in French, plan séquence. Unfortunately there’s not a good translation in English for that way to explain. This plan séquence was basically a way, I realized, for me to simplify my relationship to the subject, my relationship to reality, to try to keep that sort of like unbroken moment. Basically, little by little, I developed a way to dance, I guess, with the subject. It became a matter, very quickly, early on, my interest of cinema was basically based on this, it was the meeting of images.

I was coming from photography, but suddenly there was a sound aspect, which was also my obsession for music, and there was a third aspect, which was basically I will call it movement in space. How do you move in a social space? How do you create certain harmony with your surroundings? I guess it was basically with those very first ideas I started to make films, but I didn’t have time to think much more because I was making a lot of films, and every film, little by little, would give me a clue on where to go next.

I was using this ability to make a lot of films in a short time to progress. I was publishing all my work since the very beginning. I was publishing all the work on the internet, and I’m still publishing all my work on the internet for free under Creative Commons license. It’s very important. That’s why, in a sense, I’m much more present on the internet than in film festivals and so on.

I try to play another game. I try to expand how much can we use. I guess our talk will have a lot to do with this. How much can we use those digital tools to change the rules and to basically explore new ways to create simply, and to relate to each other? Then, little by little, yeah, I guess I started to create that and work around this language of those long shots, those long shots unbroken, which would basically sort of create, and I would realize that later, would create, in the eye of the viewer, something like a type of relationship where I would not basically try to create this kind of very cut, very impressive type of film where you, from the first second, you’re like, “Whoa.” You’re trapped in an intense way. It takes a little bit more time to get into my films, maybe, you know? One, two minutes of attention before you get into it. The desire, just to finish on that, was that with this technical language of long takes, I would basically try to make the technique disappear, you know? At some point you forget there’s a camera and you just stare into it.

Chal Ravens

That’s interesting. Yesterday, when we were talking, you mentioned this idea that your films, partly because you have so many of them I guess, function like your own memories because you were able to see things, see your own past through your films in a way, and I suppose that’s what a one take shot can do. It can put you in mind of just literally being there and moving in space I suppose.

Vincent Moon

Yeah, I like the idea, I guess, of one image being so powerful that it contains all over the other images in a way. I guess this idea, yeah we’re talking about this fact that I had a funny week last week, to be honest. I ended up in a chamber, locked in a chamber for a week. That was my desire. It was not a mistake. [laughs]

Basically I was alone with myself and my brain. I realized how much my brain was nowadays composed of my films. The way I relate to the past is through my own images. I guess my desire was always to create a sublime version of my life, or a sublime version of reality because actually that’s what I think we should really question... That’s the way we should use our images nowadays, to question our reality.

We know so well, we know very well now, and all of you know, that images have a massive impact on the way we relate to reality. The way we see society is actually through images, and the mass media is basically doing a terrible job because they’re not subliming reality, they’re destroying our psyche. We’re basically living in a world where mass media is based around images of violence. Those images of violence are basically destroying, more and more, the social tissue of society, the social relationship with all of us. Then my desire was basically: how can we use images in another way? How can we sublime reality because I know these images, in return, have an impact on the way we live together. It’s a very simple thing. Then that’s basically what I’ve been trying to do, subliming my own reality, creating things like long shots, which are basically so containing all of the other images that surrounded them in a sense.

I know it’s a new way to relate to memory, and I guess we are changing as human beings. We are completely changing in the way we relate to our own body. What is internal in terms of tools? What is external, you know? We have to find a balance. I’m talking a lot about this with friends because, as I am studying a lot of indigenous knowledge nowadays, you just realize, “Oh, those guys didn’t lose some things that we lost,” like telepathy, for example, and so on.

I have an iPhone, but those guys use telepathy. I’m like, “Shit, maybe I should rethink that relationship,” but that’s a long story. That’s where we are now I guess.

Chal Ravens

What do you think about the fact that, as technology has caught up, a lot of people choose to use their phones to do something kind of similar to what you do in just recording everything? Is the impulse that we all have to record things the same impulse that you’ve had to record things? Is there a relationship between that?

Vincent Moon

We have to be very responsible in terms of the images that we publish, I guess, very much. We have to realize that we are publishing so many images. We are all filmmakers in a sense. I do not think we educate people towards a certain language of images. I think we are... The language of images, nowadays, is getting more and more poor in that regard. I do not mean that everybody should see all the things of Tarkovsky, even though I wish [they would]. In a sense, we should really, really question that relationship we have with images and really think about anything we publish. Actually I’m not even talking about images, I’m talking about the way we use social networks and so on. I guess we mentioned last night – we had a long talk about the impact of images on the way we relate to our social fights. I was mentioning the work of someone that I really, really adore these days, Adam Curtis, who is basically putting his finger on the right spots.

Adam Curtis is an English documentarian, and was making archival type of films, quite long films. One of his very important sayings in his last film is, “Our society is designed to make people angry because angry people click more, and it feeds society in return.” I guess we have to really question the relationship we have with images and social media in that regard. How do we basically, again, create another relationship with reality through the images we do? Why do we just jump on all the time and record everything around us? I think it’s because we are getting excited like kids about new tools we have. Hopefully this is gonna change. I’m pretty sure this is gonna change little by little, but unfortunately, the system, the capitalistic world, is not going to slow down anything. It’s basically maintaining this issue of releasing new tools that we do not need actually because we haven’t been able to integrate the tools we had like ten years ago already, you know?

Those are extremely powerful tools, we just do not educate people to use them at their full potential, and then we have a new one on the market, and a new one on the market, and it never stops. Basically we’re kind of trapped into this rhythm, but I think, hopefully, people slowly are gonna change the way they relate to this craziness of recording everything.

Just to end up on that, a friend of mine did a very interesting film two or three years ago named In Limbo (Dans les limbes), which is a film on memory and the way that we relate to memory in the digital age, and the way that we use digital tools to record. I really realized, through that, it was interviewing a few people who record everything. I mean everything. There was a few guys just going around in their life and having something there recording every second of their life in image. You’re like, “Oh my gosh, this shows so much how much we are afraid of death.” It’s basically related to death. We are like completely freaking out because death. We think death is the end.

In return, I think, that’s kind of exactly why I’m exploring rituals and spirituality because there we have another take on reality. We have another proposal. That proposal, and which is the most ancient proposal of humankind, is basically death is not the end.

There is another type of relationship we have to create with our own reality, which is the exact opposite of where this globalized, westernized society’s going, which is freaking out. Everybody’s freaking out in front of time.

Chal Ravens

I guess the process of image making itself is to do with preserving a moment, and creating a form of immortality through an image. There’s this relationship between why humans make art, I suppose.

Vincent Moon

The thing is that we always relate to, especially in the field that you work on, [unintelligible] as well, working, recording music from so called, actually, disappearing cultures, but again that’s a term I will like to come back on because I disagree a lot with this. But we tend to use... WWe talk about Alan Lomax, we talk about great researchers of the 20th century, and how much this is important to record. But I think we live in a very different time. We live in a very different time where the amount of recording gets to a point that we’re creating a completely nostalgic society. We are basically obsessed with the past, obsessed with sort of like a better past. We always look back like, “Oh, shit, it was much better before.” Really, it’s getting worse and worse. I think that’s this thing we have to turn around in a way.

I think that’s also where anthropology is changing a lot these days, because it’s got to face the fact that basically we are not anymore in terms of preserving only. We are actually nowadays in the mission of creating new paths, creating new forms of cultures, new forms of music, new forms of rituals. That’s basically what I’m excited about. Because if we don’t create new stuff, we are dead. We’re just looking back and we are basically trapping everything into boxes and looking at things through the distance creating museums and being like, “Whoa, it was amazing.”

Chal Ravens

To kind of rewind a bit then, when you first started making films with people from other countries, traveling around becoming kind of a nomad, I’m interested in how you kind of started that project and if you knew what you were getting yourself into, if you like. Because it seems like you haven’t really stopped traveling and making films for the last seven years or so. And I wanted to know a bit about the actual process because... Do you basically make everything just on your own? You must need people to help you record sound or how does it actually work when you arrive in a new country?

Vincent Moon

Well, take the example of Russia. Last time I came here was six years ago. I’m going to try to slow down my rhythm because apparently it’s impossible to understand me when I talk so fast and my parents have always been telling me that. Six years ago I came to Russia because of that guy mostly, Bulat Khalylov. Wonderful. Thank you, brother, and pleasure to see you here really, man. He invited me to North Caucasus, [unintelligible] that’s where he lives. Basically, we talked about doing some recordings, and very quickly I explained to him that I could do most of the recordings by myself with his help. And so we went around for two months and something. We went to [unintelligible]. We went to Ossetia, went to Chechnya, went to Dagestan, went to Kalmykia and even more. And then I was in [unintelligible] with my friend Tatiana and all those recordings were made in a very simple way. Basically, I have a camera, and I have microphones. Bulat was helping me, of course, first to translate and go around. That is always a very important person, doing that bridge, you know, and it was kind of like channeling all this culture towards me, and in a sense he was also helping me, basically placing the microphone in space. And there we go.

And I love the accident. I love the fact that we are imperfect human beings. And I do believe that looking for perfection, in terms of cinema especially, has always been a trap to me. I never succeed to create a film that I have in mind. So I try not to have any idea, and create something that has to be created. It’s very simple. Much more like a ‘let it go’ way. I do not know what the film is going to look like, but if the film wants to happen, if the film had its own consciousness, it would happen and be created and I will help this to happen.

But basically, it’s trained to not have any preconceived ideas around this, and in that regard, all of theses riches we made we like very... I mean I remember arriving in Chechnya and then realizing, “Whoa,” next day we are able to shoot a ritual and then next day again we got invited. We did not really plan things much in advance. There’s a little bit of planning, but not too much, to not get trapped in it.

Chal Ravens

At what point did you realize that you wanted to film religious rituals? Not just music but rituals and events that had a kind of deeper significance? Or did that just happen?

Vincent Moon

While I growing up in Paris, and when I was in my twenties, I used to go to a lot of concerts obviously. Mostly rock, pop, indie music. And that was my relationship and my knowledge of music. That basically music was something that people play on stage while other people listen drinking a beer. That was it, basically. I would go see a show, you know, amazing stuff. I’d be like, “This is it. This is the greatest expression of music now. I’m so happy I’ve seen that.”

And basically, very simply, one night, especially one night, I was in Cairo in Egypt, and someone took me to a ritual. He was like, “You want to see something forbidden?” And I was like, “What do you mean forbidden?” “I’m going to show you something. I’m going to bring you to a place where people do something that they’re not allowed to do. It’s a trance ritual.” It was a Zār, Z-A-R, which is a form of Sufism that you find in Egypt, Sudan mostly.

And I remember entering that little street I could hear the music coming from farther, the percussion, and the voices. And then I entered this place, and it was not only musically stunning, it was something else. It was basically music played for the gods. It was music played for healing. It was music played for another reason than entertaining and it changed my life. It blew my mind, because I did not grow up with that knowledge that actually music was made for that.

But then I decided to be on the road, and to really question the fact, where is music coming from? Why do we play music? And then of course you realize, especially if you are lucky, that I had the privilege to go to all of those places... In a very punk way, though. I never had the real money to do any of this, but I always found a way to do it. Then you realize people play music basically to call the gods, that is basically why it is there from the very beginning. Music is there to harmonize with nature. Music comes from the fact that birds are already singing so at some point man had to do something, in nature you know, and the thing is, it’s a very simple thing, and that relationship is still extremely present if you look at it in most of the music we do. Sometimes, we’re just maybe not conscious about that. And I wanted to explore this deeply.

Chal Ravens

A lot of your films have been made in South America. There was a huge project called Híbridos, which is all the music and many religious traditions of Brazil, which is all available on a really nice website, which has it all available. And we’re going to watch a clip which is also from somewhere in South America. Are we going to watch that one?

Vincent Moon

Yeah, of course, we’re going to start with this one. I wanted to show... We did a little selection of short films. Of very simple ones.

Chal Ravens

So, the first one is, I think, from Buenos Aires?

Vincent Moon

Yes. And I actually wanted to start with a little film. Back in the days, I think it was like nine years ago I did that one. It’s part of the Global Take Away Shows project, which is a project I did with a friend of mine for some years, but I mean on that shooting I was basically alone. I was spending some days in Buenos Aires, and the story goes that I got invited into a show one of the first days I was there, and things got a bit chaotic for me that night. And all I could remember the next morning was this beautiful melody, which goes like [sings]. I was like, “Who was that guy playing? I want to film that song.” And it took me some days to find the guy and to convince him to do it, and then he called me actually. He said, “We can do the recording. I finally found a band. We are ready. We’ll meet you in two hours at this bar. And I just showed up at the bar, and we did this little song. So I hope you enjoy it, it’s one of my favorite songs actually. [uintelligible]

(video: clip from Take Away Show #104 – Tomi Lebrero)

[applause]

Vincent Moon

Beautiful people. It’s so simple, you know. Again the circle, that dance, all of us together in a grand circle. There’s something so ritualistic in that thing. And in a sense, which can encapsulate as well very much my entire experience in Buenos Aires, all compressed into one shot.

Chal Ravens

I’m really fascinated by how you can record the sound. Sorry to ask this technical question but, the sound is so rich, and it even seems to correspond slightly, it seems to be moving around. How do you do it? Do you have somebody setting up separately?

Vincent Moon

How do you do it Bulat? This was very simple, right. Every time people ask me that the first thing I say is, “I don’t know.” It has to be very simple. And I never get obsessed with technical aspects, and I think the trap, on many levels, is that we get obsessed. You could say we are all turning a little bit too geeky in our relationship to those tools. As I said before, a really deep education on how to use those technical tools, especially in the field of cinema, we should be very careful of not getting obsessed, of too much knowledge of the technique. When people ask me anything about camera, I have no idea. I don’t know any other camera than mine. And I don’t even know the name of my camera. I know it’s a Panasonic camera that I’ve been using for many years. Same thing for the microphones. I think you have to be very simple. I am using external microphones, recorders, mostly Zoom, the Japanese brand, and H2N and now H6 which is a very good one, and sometimes I’m using like lavalier mics depending on the situation. But it’s always very simple. Incredibly simple actually.

Chal Ravens

How much research to you tend to do when you go to a country? As your life-project has gone on, do you feel like you’re looking for specific things? Or do you try to avoid that planning?

Vincent Moon

Exactly. I think the goal is really to avoid any planning. So last week I was in Gabon in Africa. It’s a very crazy country. And the first thing those guys, when I went to the temple, told me was that, “You have to fucking stop planning your life. You know? You have to let it go. That is the problem of the white world. You’re obsessed with organization.” And I know what he was talking about because I come from such a frame, such a way to relate to reality, and little by little, I learned about improvisation. And when I used that word ‘improvisation’ I use it in a way that this is at the core of everything in my life now. Everything. This talk, the live we’re going to do with Rabih [Beaini]. Everything is like in a sense very carefully prepared on some levels, but to the point that it allows you this complete freedom on the spot.

And that’s the way I tried to research, by basically having access to a lot of information, asking many many questions to people everywhere I go, and then switching to the place, to the fact that basically, “Now, let’s see what happens.” And then magic happens.

And really, magic happens. In the way you are attracted to this place or that place without really planning it. People invite you into amazing things. And this magic happens only if you are really able to let it go at some time.

So it’s kind of like this funny game. How do we step on that? We have to... At least for me, I had to find this balance. And I’m still working on it. And working more and more towards sort of freeing myself from my intellectual relationship to reality. To shut off the brain, basically.

Chal Ravens

We’re going to have another clip. Well, let’s talk a little bit about Russia. You have traveled to all kinds of places around here, on several different trips right?

Vincent Moon

Well actually, I came here, I came to Russia the first time 19 years ago. I wish I could have shown that video. I’m not really going to have time. Let me check, actually. It’s not too long.

I did my very first photo work in Russia. It was in 1999 I think, or 2000. And I came to Moscow with a friend without having no idea except we wanted to go to Vladivostok. And in a magical way we found a way to get into the train, and then we traveled for like ten days towards Vladivostok. And I did my first work there at the time.

Chal Ravens

Did you know what you were going to find there? Or you just went first?

Vincent Moon

We had no idea. We were completely... We were very lost at the time. I was 18, and I was discovering the world. It was my very first big project. I’m not sure I’m going to find this anymore. I’ll give you the link. All of my things are on my website.

And then I came back six years ago, and then as I said, with Bulat we traveled a bit in the Caucasus, in the northern Caucasus, which is a place that is very delicate for the Russian mind. Very little explored in terms of music especially. So we found very much. It was an incredible adventure. We discovered so many things there on the spot. And I did a few films over three months. I guess I made something like 25 films over three months, so I did a lot.

Chal Ravens

Just as a pause, I think I read that over the period of about six years you made something like 50 films a year.

Vincent Moon

Yeah, something like that.

Chal Ravens

Can you just explain how that’s possible? I mean obviously, you are often filming in one take, so that editing is a little bit easier. But in terms of being able to keep that up, do you seek to keep making that many or is it that you have so much stuff that you just have to make?

Vincent Moon

There is a part of me that wants to slow down and a part of me that does not. A lot of people around me are mostly worried about that. Like, “Come on, you have to slow down, you have to stop making so many films.” The thing is that that is my way to relate to reality. To put it simply, it’s not a job at all, even though I do make a little bit of money on this now, very little. It’s basically my way to live, my way to engage in the social moment and live an incredible adventure. And so I don’t really want to slow down those adventures. I want to keep having them. I don’t know. I work a lot, and I guess I’m very organized, so I am able to go from one project to another.

This summer I made like four films one after another. One in Corsica, one in Calabria, one in the Faroe Islands, one in Berlin. And it was incredible. It goes very, very fast, and very demanding, but it works very well.

Chal Ravens

What do those films mean to you when you finish them? Because when you’re making so many, do you come back to them regularly? How do you relate to them after they have been made?

Vincent Moon

That’s interesting. So basically the first reason, maybe I should have started like that, but basically why I make those films is I want to create some very beautiful memories for the people I film. So the first thing is I give back the films to the people that I filmed. Especially in the Híbridos, the Brazilian project where we made 99 films, actually over four years, plus a long feature film and plus many other things. We sent back all the films to the people we filmed asking them for comments and critiques before publishing them, so it took a long time to get the feedback from everybody. But for me it was very important to find that balance. Basically, I want to create maybe... It’s like this old time family portrait, or maybe like this troubadour. Imagine like a photograph troubadour going from villages to villages documenting life, and basically giving a photo in exchange for a meal. So I guess it’s basically I was really, really excited about finding that balance. How can we [unintelligible], there is old term of potlatch, for example, which is very beautiful indigenous term from Northern America, which means this type of exchange between tribes where you would give something, then the tribe will give something else a little bit more important, and again, and again, and again.

So going back to this type of sharing, which means basically I do not pay the musicians that I film. I’m really trying to convince them to do these recordings for free, but in return trying to also explain very well why I am doing this. It creates very healthy type of relationship, I think. That’s what I loved with all those people I’ve been filming.

Then I publish, obviously, all the films on internet and I do not promote them. I do not really put away any promotion of my work, for different reasons. I cannot really go into details now, but basically, I like the fact that they circulate in a way or another. Some films are not going to be seen at all. Some others are going to hit a million views without me noticing, but they have their own life, and I really like that it goes with the flow in a way, no? Again, I do not really show my work in film festivals or so on. I’m just trying to use alternative ways to celebrate all this richness that we have created as humankind as a whole.

In a sense, personally then, the fact that I’m playing live now is a way... That’s the way I’ve been rediscovering my own films, actually, because when I play live I edit them live and mix them in an improvised way. Every time’s completely different, so tonight I’m going to play with... I prepared 150 films, so I don’t know how many I’m going to play. Probably a third of that, and going to slice them and edit them very fast, and it always creates a new story, and I love that.

Chal Ravens

So it’s like a DJ with their record bag. They choose 150 records to bring, and then you can just mix them together.

Vincent Moon

And every mix is always different in such a way. Again, I think also it’s the live experiment, which is obviously for me the most exciting part of what I’m doing now is also really based on the fact that I do disagree a lot with what we call storytelling, especially in terms of cinema.

Basically, for the past three, five to ten years, under the influence of TV and TV series, cinema has become something else, which is extremely based on storytelling and basically the efficiency of storytelling, which is basically how much you’re going to captivate your audience from beginning to the end. I think this is very effective. It works very well, and we see that, and the success of Netflix is obviously a way to show that, I guess, there’s a lot desire to get trapped.

But I do believe that we need so much to rethink our images in a different way, because I do disagree a lot with storytelling in terms that it is actually the tool of the system very much to get trapped again. It’s a relation to time, the matrix we explore. In a sense, when you go into rituals, into spirituality, into indigenous knowledge, you realize that people do have another relationship to time. It’s not a timeline.

Cinema, since the beginning, has been based on the timeline. I still have to go through the timeline to edit my films, and that’s a limit, in a way. I want to kind of think about a way... How can I work away from the timeline? How can I work away from the beginning, the middle, and the ending? How can I work in this constant movement of images and sound? That’s why I explore installations where there are films going on on multi screens for hours and hours, and there is no beginning and neither ending. It’s you as a human being who’s going to have your own experience. I want to create those settings where people do have something extremely intimate in relationship with all the images.

Chal Ravens

Well, on the theme of circles, then, do you want to show the next film?

Vincent Moon

So I’m going to show a little extract of it. I’m going to start playing the music of it now. So it’s part of a series of a few films we made with Bulat in Chechnya, and I name it The Great Jihad because... I will explain you after. Sufi rituals from Chechnya.

(video: clip from The Great Jihad / applause)

Chal Ravens

Can you explain a bit about what was going on in that scene?

Vincent Moon

Sort of quickly. Basically, such rituals are happening, as we discovered, very often, and basically a family will throw a ritual, organize a ritual mostly related to the celebration of the death of someone, and I do not remember who was getting celebrated, but I guess someone who died in the family one or two years before. There is obviously, then, the same in Islam, a person gets buried the day of his death, so basically there is Zikr happening right on the moment of that just after the person dies, and then a year, and two years, and a few years after, depending on the importance of the person, there is celebration of his memory in such a way.

So this is basically the main part, which is named Zikr or Dhikr, and obviously this goes for a long time. I guess it was going for an hour, probably, and hour and a half nonstop. Before this and after this there is prayers. What fascinates me with Sufism, ‘cause I’ve done a lot of research on this mystical part of Islam in different parts of the world from Indonesia to Ethiopia to Morocco, and is that they have such an incredible diversity of ritual, diversity of basically transcendental tools in a way.

We often, when you think about Sufism, we always have this very lovely version of the whirling dervishes from Turkey, but this is very much related to that part of the world. In other places, as you can see here, it’s very different, and people do not have [unintelligible] knowledge of those, and especially when you talk about Chechnya, when people think it’s radical Islam living there, which is not. Absolutely not, actually. It’s very mystical Islam.

Chal Ravens

All of these projects, I suppose, as you’ve gone on, it’s you exploring all the kinds of music that are so divorced from anything like an entertainment industry. It’s all to do with music as a ritual, and particularly this idea of entering a trance. It pops up frequently in all of these places that you go to, these kind of experiences where people kind of leave their own bodies almost in a group situation.

Vincent Moon

Because for me, I think it’s very important to, to put it very simply, I’m interested in how can we trance again? How can we recreate in the Western world as well this relationship to something that we all did at some point? We all come from that, and I think we live in a very complex time in terms of identities. To put it very simply, I think we’re getting trapped in seeing the world as a division of identities and cultures. If you sort of go back a bit more in time, rewind a little bit to the point that we all come from the same place and basically we’ve been... In a way, that’s the greatest lesson that those guys in Gabon, for example, last week told me is that, “You fucked up with this idea of basically divisions and you’re all fighting all against each other. You don’t realize it’s all the same thing. Everybody’s doing the same thing since the most ancient times. It’s just different dresses and different singings and different sounds and colors, but it’s all the same stuff.”

Now, our mission nowadays in this society is to basically bring it all back together, and to realize how much, wow, we have to take it easy and step back a bit and zoom on a larger scale in time, especially. Realizing that we are not going anywhere by treating the world as separate identities and people doing different stuff, that you cannot touch. You are you, you little white people going to Africa doing recordings with those guys. I’m like, “Fuck, I am myself basically saying hello to those guys trying to unify and getting to a trance.”

Because the trance is basically this most ancient tool to reach towards something away from your ego, obviously, and our society being trapped into an intellectual relationship towards everything, we are getting completely fucked by the ego. That’s why, I think, that rituals on many levels, many different forms of rituals, have to be reimplemented and sort of recreated almost to the point that we all trance again, and we all reaccess that direct knowledge.

Again, we’re not talking about religious relationship, because religion has been doing the exact opposite in a way by taking us away from the transcendence, by basically organizing this relationship to a god that you cannot touch. In the rituals, even in a Sufi ritual, even though they will never use the word trance, basically people are reaching a level where they let it go. They let it go and something else goes through them.

Of course, the project I’ve done in Brazil was very much based on that, because Brazil is the ultimate trance country. Everybody [uses] trance in a way, from Carnival to Candomblé, everybody uses crazy techniques to basically get out of their mind. I think that’s what we need to make a better world.

Chal Ravens

Astonishingly, we’ve got about six minutes left, so I think it would be better to have some questions than to show a clip, even though we have another clip, because all the clips are online.

Vincent Moon

I think it’s alright, because I will show a lot of things related to trance after in the live show, so maybe we can have a few questions to end up on. OK?

Chal Ravens

OK. Does anybody have a question?

Chal Ravens

There’s a microphone going around. No? If not, then I was going to ask you very quickly, if you could explain why you make all your work available through Creative Commons?

Vincent Moon

Yeah. It’s very simple. I think that basically there is something you learn as well in many of those spiritual traditions, even though I don’t use the word traditions much, but let’s say a spiritual lineage or something.

I would take the example of the Santo Daime Church. The Santo Daime Church is an incredible, very unique form of organization in Brazil which is not even 100 years old. We call it the ayahuasca Catholic church. It’s basically a Catholic sacrament using ayahuasca at the core. It’s very beautiful rituals and we’re probably going to show something after, during the live show about that.

The Santo Daime is very unique, especially because the music of the Santo Daime keeps evolving constantly. It’s very beautiful. It’s very refined. It’s very unique. It does not correspond to anything you’ve heard coming from any church. What they say, they say that they receive the songs. Basically, they do not write down the songs. Let’s say over one ritual you would sing the book of Mestre Irineu, but it’s not the book of the songs by Mestre Irineu, the master who created the doctrine. It’s the book of songs that he received, and it’s made very clear.

What I mean by this is that basically you do not create anything from scratch. You just remix something which was there way before you and which is going to be there after you. Basically you’re just there to tune that frequency and maybe turn it into something more beautiful, or at least maintaining the vibration of beauty. Right? So what I mean is that there is nothing you are the owner of.

The whole idea of the copyrights that is so much present in our society now is completely wrong in relationship to where this is all coming from. It’s an idea which is basically sustaining a system which slowly is preventing ourself from freedom and from free access to this gigantic knowledge that humankind have been created.

This whole copyright thing is very much related to a specific moment in time where we were basically trapped into materiality. From films themselves, the rolls of films, to basically vinyl and CDs and so on in music. Come the digital age. What is the digital age? The digital age is the reawakening of spirituality because basically the digital tools allow you to copy without limit the same thing without losing quality.

This is basically exactly how spirituality works. This is the way it goes. Knowledge can be copied and shared for free forever where there is no limit to that. So basically, obviously, why Creative Commons comes in the game at same point, because at some point this guy Lawrence Lessig and a few other guys just like realized this is going stupid with copyright now, because we are not allowing people to fully express their potential, and to fully share to another level.

I really believe that we have to get to another level. We have to get better at it, and I mean it, our society has to get better at it. Artists have to get much better at what we’re doing. We’re not good enough. We really have to get better at sharing stuff, at creating new forms of music, new forms of everything, and trying to create new forms of hybrids especially in between art forms.

Then Creative Commons and open source licenses are exactly there for that, in a way, and that’s why I’m very interested in the hacker movement as well, because this is where we have to go. We have to hack the machine, because that’s what the shamans have been doing from the most ancient time. This is the same stuff, and it’s not just a funny parallel. This is it. This is the reawakening of... this is the archaic revival, as [Terence] McKenna used to say. This is where we are in time. It’s like we are now realizing that those ancient tools, the shamanic tools, are not old stuff. They’re stuff coming from the future. We have to use those ones, combine them with those things to make an amazing form of living together. We’re just at the beginning of it, and we have to get better. It’s coming.

Chal Ravens

That’s a lot of things to think about for the future. Vincent will be playing lots of his films very shortly as part of the Live Cinema Project, so stick around and get to see more of these incredible shots, so thank you very much to Vincent.

[applause]

Vincent Moon

Thanks a lot, Chal. Thanks to you. Thanks to everybody, this beautiful place, and I hope you’re going to have a wonderful night. I’m sure you will, actually. I will try to be with you dancing. See you soon.

Chal Ravens

Thank you.