The movie ‘We Don’t Care About Music Anyway’ is set to show at Incubate 2011. Jantien Borsboom (Incubate) interviewed Gaspard Kuentz, who co-directed ‘We Don’t Care About Music Anyway’ with Cédric Dupire.

1. Can you please introduce yourself?
“My name is Gaspard Kuentz. I directed the film “We Don’t Care About Music Anyway…” with Cédric Dupire.”

2. Could you tell us something about your film ‘We Don’t Care About Music Anyway’?
“We Don’t Care About Music Anyway…” is an experimental documentary confronting the work of 8 japanese musicians of Tokyo with the environment they live in. Featured musicians are turntablists Otomo Yoshihide and L?K?O, cello performer Sakamoto Hiromichi, voice and installation performer Yamakawa Fuyuki, post-punk bands Kirihito and Umi noYeah !!, and laptop performers Numb and Saidrum, plus guests.”

“The first idea of the project came out in 2006, and we started to write it down with Cédric Dupire and Noa Garcia-Kisanuki. It has been one year in pre-production before the shooting took place in Tokyo late 2007. The film eventually premiered in Locarno film festival in 2009.”

3. What created your interest in Tokyo’s avant garde music scene?
“I have been living in Tokyo since 2003, as the musical director of the film, Noa Garcia-Kisanuki. We met several musicians when we started living here, and spent lot of time in improvised, punk, noise, hip-hop or electronic music gigs… or whatever label you can put on free music. We were astonished with the vivacity of the music scene in Tokyo, as many before us, and soon wanted to work with the musicians we liked the most. What interested us the most was the live performance of these musicians, and their ways to use conventional instruments or genres to create something totally new.”

4. What was your goal by creating this documentary?
“We wanted the film to be more an experience of the music than a reflexion of what it could mean. Free music is a sound experience, something physical that words or classic documentary forms could hardly describe, and we wanted the film to be an audiovisual experience as well. But we knew at the same time that the music doesn’t come from nowhere, and that the featured musicians have deep bonds with the world they live in.”

“I think the film is somewhere between these two approaches, documentary and improvisation. It allows to feel the sound of the music and the city at the same time, not really the way they are in reality, but more the way we felt it. It doesn’t explain anything, nor it really “documents” the way free musicians live in Tokyo nowadays. But I hope that it is somehow in harmony with their music, and that it gives insights on how they create beautiful sounds.”

5. What is your view on the development of worldwide Independent /  DIY culture?
“I am not sure of what you mean by Independent / DIY culture, but I think creation is certainly better when independent and free. As for the DIY part, I don’t see how anyone could create something without doing it himself a way or another.”

“I think it is a good thing that one can have access rather easily to means of creation. But I am not sure it is enough to “develop a worldwide culture. It is still very hard to finance projects, and if some projects can be done without money, some just won’t. As for the means to show one’s work around, if some projects can look perfect on Youtube, some would just look (and sound) like shit on a computer screen.”

6. What are your plans for the (near) future?
“I am now working on a new documentary project about divination in East Asia.”