The Mechanical Bride (2011)

A Note From The Director

I met multitalented composer and filmmaker Rich Ragsdale in 2003, when we both had circus sideshow-inspired short films screening in the same program at the Coney Island Film Festival. His short (which won best experimental film)—a macabre assemblage of animated snapshots, archival and silver gelatin prints, pinhole photographs, Muybridge motion studies, and xerography—inspired me to seek him out as the composer for The Mechanical Bride, a documentary that explores the strange world of life-sized silicone sex dolls and robotic women, and the men who build and love them. Although the artificial women in the documentary are part of a contemporary cultural phenomenon and are built using state-of-the-art technologies, they are only the latest incarnation in a long line of uncanny female bodies—bodies that peddle at the border zones of sex and death, the real and the fantastic, science and spectacle—which have performed for the viewing pleasure of audiences over the course of history. Their predecessors include the Waxen Venuses that put female anatomy on display during the Enlightenment, the mechanical and clockwork women that served as popular entertainment in the late nineteenth century (the "Golden Age of Automata"), and the hysterical female patients at the infamous Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris who, around the same time, performed their convulsive symptoms for groups of artists and writers (and were one of the primary inspirations of the Surrealist movement's "automatic" art and writing practices). While the documentary couldn't fully elaborate on this history, I wanted it to haunt the soundtrack like a ghost in the machine, and I knew that music produced solely by a computer, however manipulated, could not conjure the right spirit.

Although I had an intuition that Rich's aesthetic sensibility was right for the project, I didn't realize just how perfect a match he was until I tracked him down at his home in Venice, CA, an old Victorian and veritable cabinet of curiosities hosting a museum-quality collection of antiquated scientific instruments and medical displays, animal skeletons and taxidermy. On my first visit, he gave me a tour of his upstairs studio—whose rooftop cupola features a psychedelic galaxy scene painted by hippies who once owned the house—and his extraordinary collection of new and old acoustic and electric  instruments—mostly old—including celestes and accordians, electric organs, a schill piano, ukelin, dulcitone, marxophone, mellotron chamberline rhythmate, and theremin. It was a sideshow and b-grade sci-fi film lover's dream orchestra, beyond anything I dared imagine for the score. One of the instruments that I fell in love with immediately was the optigan, a toy "optical organ" created by Mattel in the 1970s, which plays instrumental sounds encoded as analogue waveforms on clear changeable celluloid discs and decoded by an optical reader inside the organ. The sound has a low-fi, warped quality reminiscent of the soundtracks on old film stock. It's so wrong, it's right, particularly on the two country songs for which Rich used it, Take Me Back to Texas and Dream of a Doll (the latter described by Rich as "a torch song sung by an old discarded sex doll to her owner" and crooned to perfection by local LA country alt singer Lynda Kay).

Rich and I agreed early on that not only should the score invoke the prior history of clockwork and mechanical objects and humans, but also that female vocals should have a phantasmal presence throughout, giving voice to the mute dolls and robots that populate the documentary. One of the more difficult challenges was the track for Tabo, a Tokyo doll collector whose proclivities toward schoolgirl uniforms and Hello Kitty accessories are both disturbingly pedophilic and strangely innocent. Rich was able to strike the perfect balance by recruiting his musically-talented extended family. On a trip home to Nashville, he took a toy piano borrowed from his sister to the local elementary school, where his cousin is the music teacher, and used it to accompany his cousin's two young daughters on Tabo's Song (sung half in Japanese and half in English). He and his cousin then built up the track using the toy xylophones and bell instruments that were lying around the classroom.

Rich's improvisatory approach to instrumentation is also evident on the Opening track, which features a programmable music box mechanism through which cards (reminiscent of old computer punch cards or player piano rolls) are cranked by hand. He went through numerous iterations hand punching the cards, experimenting with the pace at which to run them through the mechanism, and achieving the right acoustical dynamics for recording. The resultant eerie wind-up melody, coupled with breathy female vocals, helps establish the twilight state of the entire score.

I am so pleased that 2m1 is making these tracks available, for this is the music of spectral dreams and liminal visions. Like the mechanical brides of yesteryear, they will lure you in from across the divide between the fantastical and possible, reality and imagination.

Allison de Fren
Director, The Mechanical Bride