SCREENING: December 2011

The holiday period usually means something of a lull in quality cinema, with the focus firmly set on family-orientated adventure romps and action blockbusters to shore up studio bank balances before the all-important end of year reports. However, breathing space for a plucky art-house contender or surprise indie hit can sometimes be found within this bustling arena, and this December looks to hold a fair few well worth your time…

Las Acacias

A sparse and slow yet rigorous and engrossing road movie from first time Argentine director Pablo Giorgelli. Fans of touching, personal films focusing on the intricacies of human relationships (and, as Mark Cousins says, ‘that focus on the human face’), like Central Station or Mid-August Lunch, should take note.

 

Surviving Life

Another foray into the subconscious wonder-realm with cinema’s most ardent surrealist (and one of our personal, long-time favourites), Jan Švankmajer, Surviving Life uses cut-out and stop-frame animation combined with filmed footage to explore the boundaries of dreams, desire and reality. It’s the best kind of weird there is.

 

Another Earth

A harrowing drama about guilt somewhat strong-armed into life as a philosophical sci-fi, this debut feature from writer-director Mike Cahill has drawn comparisons with the luminous films of Kieslowski and Tarkovsky. Despite dividing critics over its message, style and delivery, those two references alone should certainly make it one to watch…

 

Mysteries of Lisbon

A stunningly lavish period drama of epic proportions, this Viscontian pot-boiling melodrama seems to have bowled anyone willing to sit through its six hour running time completely over. It’s been hailed by many as the crowning moment of the late director Raul Ruiz’s career, topping even his seminal adaptation of Proust’s Time Regained.

 

The Artist

Come on now. You’ve heard of this. I don’t need to explain it to you. It’s going to win some Oscars and spur loads of publications to run articles pointlessly considering the plausibility of silent film as a major future genre. It is also going to be very, very good indeed.

Pete Swanson – Man With Potential [Full Album Stream]

As a very brief addendum to our earlier post, and because so many people seem to have fallen as swiftly and comprehensively under Pete Swanson’s spell as we have, here’s Man With Potential available to stream in full. Once you’ve listened and you’ve liked, please do pay a visit to the Type records website. It’s one of the best labels in the world and their unerring belief in digital publicity should be supported with your pounds, pence, dollars and cents.

Image is by another land artist, Andy Goldsworthy.

M. Geddes Gengras / Miko Revereza – Refractions

Just to round the day off, here’s a little segment of a new collaborative VHS project between psychedelic electro-wanderer M. Geddes Gengras and lo-fi analogue video artist Miko Revereza. It touches on a lot of the hauntologic, retrograde aesthetics of James Ferraro and Ducktails but with a matching visual athleticism to boot. Check out a sample below and, if you’re feeling flush, pick up a copy here. Preferably to watch whilst driving through a neon desert in your pink DeLorean.

Image is from Jane Thomas’ Flickr stream.

Pete Swanson – Man With Potential

As extreme anathema (tautology?) to our last post, here’s a terror-inducing snippet from Pete Swanson’s (formerly of Yellow Swans fame) killer new LP, Man With Potential. Fans of dark, industrial techno – a la Prurient and Blackest Ever Black fare – and eardrum-perforating extreme electronic noise – in the vein of Kevin Drumm, Pita or, well , Yellow Swans – should rejoice that something that so perfectly combines both styles has come along to wrench their lives into vivid, overwhelming darkness. However those not into the two aforementioned musical genres should probably hide themselves under their bed-sheets forthwith. Pussies.

Image is by Jim Denevan.

Olli Aarni – Ylitse

Some of you may be familiar with Ous Mal, the previous incarnation of Finnish soft-tone and tape-loop artist Olli Aarni (and his girlfriend Iris), as they’ve released a number of CDs and cassettes over the years on various labels. However, many of you may well not be. We’re not, for a start.

To remedy this crying shame you could do much worse than opening yourself up to their beautiful world by listening to this new solo offering, out now on Avant Archive. It’s some of the most elegantly simple yet breathtakingly affecting music we’ve heard for a while. Soporifically blissful and somnolently beautiful. So long afternoon…

Image is by photographer and filmmaker Carrie Schneider.

Pinch & Shackleton

As the weekend looms like an overbearing, bristly-bearded uncle telling you to ‘bloody well enjoy your game of Christmas charades’, what better way to partake in the festivities and shimmy swiftly and effortlessly into your new, uninhibited role than slapping on a spanking new track from the dark lords of the dancefloor, Pinch & Shackleton. After stellar solo careers the two have finally made the logical leap to a collaboration and dang was it a good step. The eponymous LP can be purchased from all good online retailers (JFGI) and the lead track can be streamed below (BWFNTY – (because we’re fucking nice to you)). Happy Friday every body.

Image is by El Lissitzky, a selection of whose work is currently showing in the Building The Revolution exhibition at the Royal Academy. It’s very good.

Grapefruit

Shout-outs due to the ever excellent 20 Jazz Funk Greats (the blog, not the recently re-released Throbbing Gristle album – that’s another story) for drawing our attention to Portland-based synthster Grapefruit. It’s like the soundtrack to a journey on an Amstrad PCW flight simulator to a distant intergalactic world populated by conceptual binary beings inhabiting a synergetic realm of pixilated flora, fauna and geologies. Or something like that. Listen below and decide for yourself.

Image is by Ben Aqua.

Vinyl Williams

We discovered the awesome Vinyl Williams (aka LA-based one man wunderband Lionel Williams) a few weeks ago via the just-as-awesome Altered Zones. It’s a gorgeous trip, evoking late 60s psychedelia with its blues riffs, reverb-drenched vocals and occasional use of the vibraphone (massive Gary Burton props right here), much like Flaming Lips’ stonking album Embryonic. But there’s more than simple nostalgic pastiche at work, as further synth and percussive elements are added in to give it a lush, warm sound reminiscent of late Creation Records releases and (dare I say it?) more recent Radiohead tracks.

A video for one of his older tracks was posted last week, handily giving us a viable reason to post the most recent LP and an incredible psych-pop collage video for the album’s lead single.

Image is Lionel’s own.

Huerco S.

We’re big fans of Huerco S here. After discovering him just over a month ago (can’t quite believe it’s only been that long) his position in our dance canon has been solidified in concrete and reinforced with foot-thick titanium girders. Blending hefty thuds ripped straight outta Detroit with woozy analogue effects, the sound is at once vibrant and somnambulant, penetrative and hypnagogic. In brief, it’s exactly what we look for in intelligent dance music. Hopefully a physical release, compiling all his best tracks into one, handy playlist, will soon be available to purchase. Until that day though, we’ll have to content ourselves with online offerings from the table.

A few new tracks, with accompanying mysterious videos, have recently popped up on youtube and have been posted here for your perusal. We hope they will be there for your enjoyment, too.

Image is by Arthur Siegel.

Grimes – Crystal Ball (Doldrums refix)

Here’s a nice little vid to get your day started off, courtesy of No Pain In Pop. It’s a remix of a Grimes track, taken from her excellent album Halfaxa, by abstract-psychedelic electronic outfit Doldrums. Accompanied by an awesome kaleidoscopic video, it should be perfect for clearing those bleary midweek peepers.

Check out more of Doldrums videos and a stream a couple of their EPs over on their site, by simply clicking here.

Image is from Montpellier-based photo stream le nompourflickr.

Patient Sounds Sampler Volume 3

A new sampler’s just been put together by Patient Sounds, a great little stateside cassette label with accompanying blog. It features a couple of our favourite artists – Kites Sail High, Petrels – and a fair few new and welcome discoveries. Help pass your final hour at work by streaming below, or click here to download and set yourself up with a nice bit of MP3 accompaniment for the journey home. Or just bookmark the page and save it for later. Or just do whatever you want. Although be warned, you will be judged for it. Quite possibly severely.

If you like what you hear don’t forget to nip over to the Patient Sounds site and check out their catalogue of cassette and DL releases. There’s some great stuff on there.

Image is by Jennilee Marigomen.

Ben Frost & Daníel Bjarnason – Solaris

Ben Frost’s set at Primavera 2010 is probably one of the highlights of my festival/gig-going life. The phenomenal intensity of his vicious, growling drones seemed to penetrate my very core in a way that little had ever done before. It took on a visceral, physical form, ceasing its existence as sound and mutating into a new form of destructive yet transcendental energy. Put simply, it was fucking incredible.

So it shouldn’t really come as much of a surprise that the announcement of new output is welcomed with open arms. However, this avowal of a consciously biased opinion shouldn’t serve to put any prospective listeners off, as the recent collaboration with Icelandic composer Daníel Bjarnason is but another sublime addition to his already impressive roster. The combination of Frost’s ominous, aggressive noise-palette with Bjarnason’s dissonantly elegiac arrangements feels totally and immediately harmonious, adding many and varied strings to both musicians’ bows. It’s a richly textured record of romantic bliss and existential angst that grows in complexity and profundity on every listen. It’s also highly recommended as a soundtrack to the onset of winter. Brrrrr, indeed.

Listen to two sample tracks from the collaborative album, Solaris, below.

Plus, as a special bonus to make the middle of your week a tad more exciting, here’s a solo album from each – Bjarnason’s majestic Processions and Frost’s terrifying By The Throat. Enjoy…

Image is the Polish film poster for Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris, by Andrzej Bertrandt.

Time Wharp – GRN

Ah, attention spans. We’re losing them apparently. We’re supposedly a generation away from being brain-dead technophiles who can’t concentrate for more than a nano-second without our eyes being seduced by a shinier interface.  As someone who contributes to this cerebral myopia by running a blog that actively encourages you to flit between artists without having to invest more than a few minutes of your attention at a time, I can’t help but agree. So thank goodness for EPs like Time Wharp’s GRN then; a snapshot of four sub-2 minute cuts, melding stuttering beats and languid melodies into a buttery mixture that will captivate Ritalin dependants and ADD sufferers alike.  Listen below. Or do something else.

Photograph is by Alexey Titarenko

Factory Floor – Two Different Ways

News that one of the UK’s finest live acts have signed to DFA and are soon to release a shiny new 12″ is pretty big. That they’ve uploaded the A-side to their Soundcloud just in time for the Friday send-off is even bigger. (Well, it’s not necessarily bigger news, but it’s come as very welcome news indeed – so subjectively the statement still stands.) Unfortunately the finest news – that they’re going to be releasing a full-length album – is still yet to come. But we’re holding out with all our hope…

Image is by Charles Swedlund.

The Soft Moon – Total Decay

The Soft Moon, probably the best industrial/cold-wave/post-punk group around at the moment, have recently released a brand spanking new EP via Captured Tracks. It carries on much in the same vein as last year’s awesome self-titled album, which can’t be a bad thing, considering that it’s (verbatim) ‘awesome’. To give the release a bit of a shout-out they’ve put together a video for the title track that perfectly encapsulates their style visually – all minimal-modernist aesthetics of analogue degradation. Watch the video below. And purchase the EP here.

Image is by Lois Field.

High Places – Sonora

We wanted to post something for High Places’ brilliant new album Original Colors when it was first released back in September but unfortunately there wasn’t really that much knocking about for it and the only album stream had been privately uploaded (damn you!). Thankfully Keith Musil has given cause to buck that trend and put together a fantastically bat-shit vid for their track Sonora. Its Popeye-influenced take on DIY body horror and Drive-esque levels of ultra violence is totally incongruous with the sound (a cross between Lykke Li style dream-glam pop, Macarena-era 90s chart house and psyched out hippy-dub à la Peaking Lights) but what’s creativity if not an amalgamation of juxtaposing elements to generate as yet felt emotions and as yet understood thought processes? That’s not rhetorical by the way. I actually want you to answer it. Go on. What is it?

We also just found this video, which we think is quite nice too.

If you like what you hear then nip over to Thrill Jockey to stream the album in full and, if you’re feeling flush, buy it too.

The above image is taken from High Places’ own blog.

SCREENING: November 2011

Oh, hi. Welcome to the first of a new, monthly feature, in which we’ll be looking at the cinematic highlights of the coming month. Well, we do purport to cover film as well, don’t we? So it only feels proper.

Oslo, 31st August

A beautifully shot, utterly Scandinavian look at the life of a recovering drug addict and the 24 hours in which he returns to Oslo. Expect existential wranglings and steely grey landscapes by the bucket load. Bergman for the 21st century.

 

Weekend

A tender, vivid and breathtakingly honest portrait of a short romantic encounter and its aftermath that features two incredible lead performances and which has taken international festival audiences by storm.

 

Wuthering Heights

This new film from one of Britain’s leading auteurs, Andrea Arnold (Red Road, Fish Tank), is a bold and brutal re-working of Emily Brontë’s classic tale of passion and cruelty. Emotions and characters as bare and raw as the windswept moors they inhabit…

 

Les Enfants du Paradis

The current trend for classic re-releases builds ever stronger with Marcel Carné’s masterful story of unrequited love in a French 19th century theatre. A beautiful, tragic film that anyone who’s been following Mark Cousins’ The Story of Film should make a beeline to catch.

 

Snowtown

There’s been some massive buzz around this new Australian family crime drama. The fact that it looks like Animal Kingdom directed by Harmony Korine and shot by Ryan McGinley is probably why. Massive hopes for this one. Looks fantastic.

 

Take Shelter

Part paranoid psychological drama, part apocalyptic sci-fi, Take Shelter seems to have sprung from nowhere and has generated nothing but hugely positive feedback. Can’t wait to see what the hype is really about.

 

Image is from Tarkovsky’s Stalker, which you can watch for free (along with ALL of his other films!) here.

Islet & Gentle Friendly @ The Lexington

There’s an absolutely storming gig coming up in a couple of weeks, courtesy of the wonderful people at ATP. They’ve managed to get probably the two most exciting, interesting and genre-defying up-and-coming bands currently playing in the UK both onto the same bill. Top marks chaps.

To see why we like them so much here’s a short selection of their more recent tracks (as well as a few older videos, just because we think they’re great). Hopefully you’ll feel the same way too. And hopefully we’ll see you at the Lexington on the 16th of November.

ISLET:

GENTLE FRIENDLY (including three track from their brand new EP):

Image is by Adria Canameras.

Pure X & Sleep ∞ Over @ The Shacklewell Arms

If anyone’s around and about in town tonight they should almost definitely try and head over to the Shacklewell Arms to catch Pure X and Sleep ∞ Over as it should be a very, very good gig indeed. For those that need persuading or otherwise informing, here are a few reasons why. Hopefully see you there.

Image is by Corey Arnold.

Oneohtrix Point Never – Replica

Children, rejoice! The new OPN is finally here and available for us to stream. I haven’t even listened to it properly yet, so I’m not going to try to pretend I can provide insight, but if lead single Replica is anything to go by, we’re all in for a treat. Aah.

Illustration is by Atelier Olschinsky