Words by Emma Warren

The documentary Underplayed threads together an unfamiliar timeline of electronic music, connecting today’s mega-festival headliners NERVO and influential underground DJs like Sherelle with the iconic women of the mid 20th century like Delia Derbyshire and Suzanne Ciani. New Zealand-born director Stacey Lee knew she needed a skillful composer to sonically connect this complex and multi-layered story, but she also knew she needed someone who was deeply schooled in the culture.

Enter Kate Simko. She’s the founder of the London Electronic Orchestra and professor of Composition for Screen at the Royal College of Music. She’s also an experienced producer, engineer, and DJ, fully immersed in underground dance music and culture since her teenage years dancing to house and techno originators in her hometown of Chicago.

Simko’s soundtrack fills almost every second of the 87-minute film, stepping and sliding between disparate characters, genre styles, and a timeline that stretches seven decades. It’s a nuanced container for a story that needed careful telling. 

“There are these layers: the sonic moods, or dips in the flows and this larger arc. We were traversing the 1950s when these women were tinkering around in scientific labs creating plinky-plonky sounds versus where we are now with someone like Rezz who is heavy and aggressive,” she says. “Kate can move within the scene from Suzanne Ciani to someone like Tygapaw. The authenticity was so important.”

How did you two end up working together on Underplayed?

Stacey Lee: I had a playlist on my phone of different scores that I’d use when I was coming up with new ideas. There were four tracks by this woman called Kate Simko and the tracks came up all the time when I was driving to and from the LA Freeway. Her name came up when I was thinking about the composition for Underplayed and I thought, ‘well, this is serendipitous’. 

How common is it for a composer to have that connection and relationship with dance music?

Kate Simko: I don't think it's that common. I got into electronic music from the underground scene, before it was mainstream. I really lived and breathed it. I know the faces and the nuances. I know what kind of snare hip hop would use versus dubstep versus house versus techno – actually, techno doesn't have a snare.

I use the phrase dance music because a lot of the music that appears in Underplayed is primarily experienced on the dancefloor. How much of the music which is considered classical, sit-down music, actually began as music you move to? Was classical music dance music in the past?

KS: That’s a very interesting question. I'm thinking of Viennese classical where people dance to that sort of music, right? Or Bartók, who did a whole series of different dances that were essentially European – Hungarian dances and Romanian dances. The difference is classical music came from a high culture, establishment place. It was often the kings and the court that had the funding to pay Mozart to create music.

Who were the DJs you grew up with? 

KS: A lot from Detroit, and Chicago at the time. Jeff Mills, Richie Hawtin, and then from the house side, Derrick Carter and Green Velvet. Some European DJs – we had Sven Väth one time. But it’s Chicago. Chicago is still all about Chicago.

Stacey, what about you? What was your connection to the material?

SL: Isn’t it interesting, as you’re saying those names, how many of those men have had such long careers? They’re still on the top DJ lists. This goes back to the theme of the film, but I just think about how few women are actually ever able to have that longevity in their careers. With women there’s a use-by date, there's a natural dropping off, that sustainability of not being able to be relevant from the industry terms or just keep touring. Richie Hawtin, when we were filming, he was still everywhere. I wanted this film to present a portrait of electronic music, but also I wanted it to have parallels with other industries, the film industry included. 

How did all of this relate to what you wanted from the composition?

SL: It was very important to me that it wasn't all pity party, doom, and gloom. Sonically, you have to be able to be at the club, having this epic stadium moment, and within a minute or two, we're talking about the depth of anxiety and depression – there are some very personal, intimate, and vulnerable moments in this film.

Kate, what was your compositional response to this brief and how did you approach it?

KS: I wanted to try to create a neutral score, not in a genre box. To be able to use an electronic toolkit: a synth that Rezz might use or that Suzanne Ciani might use, but do not have it being an EDM score. The first thing I did was I invested in some synths that the artists would be used to produce, just figuring out what kind of sound people have, and collecting the right palette. Stacey was really good about expressing what the music needed to do. The music did need to uplift or at least, not become whiny. Music can do that: if you put a sad viola under anybody they start whining.

SL: No one wants to watch that film, right? We tried to inject moments of comedy because no one would take this film seriously if we were doom and gloom the entire way through. It’s very complex. That point was so ingrained in our heads throughout the creative process.

KS: Serum was one of the synths that I invested in, that’s in a lot of EDM and then I used the Moog One analogue synth for a lot of Suzanne Ciani scenes when we wanted a lot of rich bass. That became important in a lot of the scenes. We wanted richness and grittiness, across the score, we didn't want it to be very clean and digital-sounding. The rawness of what they were saying was coming in the score through the raw edge of the music.

You've just mentioned a couple of the synths you invested in. But what else were you using? Talk me through your studio setup.

I use Logic Pro to compose. We decided at the beginning it made sense to be fully electronic, not to record new live instruments. I have an RME interface in my studio and a lot of different synths: the Juno-106, the Jupiter-8. Alison Wonderland and Rez, they’re 10 years younger than me and they don't use the same synths that I use. If they [the producers in the film] would not have used a sound, I wasn't going to use it. I think that helped the unity and the sound of the score. 

Stacey, what do you want when you're working with a composer?

SL: That collaborative experience is everything to me … I'm always conscious of the language you use with a composer because often it's not actually about instrumentation or anything like that. It's actually about very abstract things. So very quickly, when you're working with a composer, you develop a toolkit of language. There’s a shorthand. By the time you’re on your 15th composition, she knows exactly where I'm coming from and I know that she's understanding it. I knew we had a good collaboration because very early on, scenes were enhanced emotionally or visually, just by something that we’d put underneath. That is very hard to come by. Oh, and the transitions! Oh my god, the transitions alone, right, Kate? It was like, ‘OK, you’ve got five seconds to get out of this. Go, go, go, go, go!’.

KS: They were really fast. The cues are mostly less than two minutes, you know? I was like ‘Oh, my gosh, will the soundtrack even stand on its own, it’s so short’. But when I listened back, it brought me back to all these conversations we had. When I listen to it, I am feeling what these women went through. My personal empathy was expressed through the music and these different scenes and I was happy about that. It was wall-to-wall music but the score wasn't annoying. You don't want a score where people are like, ‘oh, the score’s back again… and again and again’. 

Underplayed features the stories of the women you featured, they’re your stories and they’re the stories of many of us who’ve been involved in the music and culture. What did you learn from the women in the film, and what if anything, have you brought into your own working practices?

SL: I was incredibly inspired. What came to me over and over again, was this notion of female entrepreneurship. Every single one of them had this ability to create their own worlds when something challenging came up, rather than being defeated. Tygapaw is the best example of this. When no one would represent her on a label, she created her own. When no one would give her a club night, she created her own.

KS: Suzanne Ciani really inspired me, just how cool she still is, and everything that she's done. She’d be addicted to looking up – she was on David Letterman in the ‘80s. She let a lot of things roll off her back as well. There’s a scene where she says [early synth pioneer] Don Buchla didn’t want her in his class. Recently she’s been demo-ing Buchla synths. She wasn’t somebody who said, ‘you disrespected me so that door closed.’ She’s just kept this bubbliness and she just inspired me, that she doesn't let people bring her down. 

Kate, how have the London Electronic Orchestra had to reorganize itself during the pandemic?

KS: We did one event, outside, on Regent’s Canal. I have the funding to write and record a new London Electronic Orchestra album, which is great because we have not been able to perform and I haven't felt comfortable rehearsing. I've really followed the lockdown rules.

Stacey, what's next?

The release of the film was exceptionally challenging. We were supposed to premiere at Tribeca with this huge closing night party with Tygapaw and a Vogue thing. Two weeks before that, the pandemic happened. We eventually had a release in Toronto, in a drive-in movie theatre. I had my baby one week later, so I wasn't able to go. Now I'm in New Zealand and last week I was able to sit in the movie theatre and see and hear my film on the big screen for the first time. Even though the film was obviously made and finished last year, it's actually only now that the world's opening up that I'm having this second life with it. It’s a difficult time with COVID. I'm also in New Zealand, and I have a newborn baby. So there's a lot of challenges, but I'm working on new things. And hopefully, something will come to fruition in the second half of this year, once everything starts to get a little bit more normal.