music art film review - REDEFINE magazine

Sam Songailo Artist Interview: Sci-Fi Futures & Electronic Beats (Geometric Spaces 001)

Digital Wasteland, 2014 - Photography by Emily Taylor

As Songailo creates, a number of concepts and miniature rules emerge, which serve as a guiding and linking thread throughout his work. One can find much of this wrapped up in his close relationship to music. Looking as far back as 2010, one can see that Songailo openly took a number of cues from electronic music through his Paintings About Techno series and his interdisciplinary exhibition, Media Centre, where blacklit neon walls of geometries engulfed anyone who entered it. Electronic music and sounds have always played a huge role in Songailo’s life, and it seems only natural that they would inform the sci-fi futurism of his work.

"I remember someone playing a hardcore techno tape at a party in high school from their car. It was the most alien and exotic thing I had ever heard," recalls Songailo. "When my brother and I were growing up we would have to spend hours playing in our parents printing factory. I used to make up songs to the machines and sing them in my head. I attribute my love of electronic electronic music back to those days. The emptiness and coldness of electronic music is a feeling I try to impart into my work."

Media Centre, 2010 - Photography by Sam Roberts

Yellow Room, 2012 - Photography by Emily Taylor

Opening, 2012 - Photography by Emily Taylor

Yet despite the emptiness and coldness found in much electronic music, there is also a bold, explorative human element to it which Songailo's work also manages to capture. In a brilliant piece from May 2010, journalist Matt Huppatz describes beautifully the ways in which the work of Songailo connects with the colors and vibes one finds at underground electronic music parties, and a related spiritualism and ecstasy that comes from being wrapped up in the multisensory awe of it all.

By nature, visual art is often full of artist statements and explanations written for onlookers to better relate to an artist's ideas – and that is why Songailo, who cares first and foremost about the general "feel" that his work imparts on visitors, sometimes finds music to be a much more soothing companion.

"Music makes sense to me much more than art," he says. "It doesn't make any claims to anything, it just is."

Songailo's gridded walls certainly impart a feel– but given their obvious connection to electronic music, one can't help but wonder if there are correlations between the sounds he is inspired by and the distance between the lines he paints, or the colors he chooses. On an internalized level, it seems that Songailo indeed has systems in place for creating associations between the visual and the aural.

"There are algorithms I use when I make things and after a while, I get sick of them and feel like I want to do something else, but I also feel like I am in some way bound to look at what I have done before and create something that fits into the strange little journey I am on," Songailo explains. "Change happens slowly. I have to remind myself that I am working on a long-term project."

A confusion of perspective and frustration with scale seems to be a very natural side effect of working on projects to laborious, detailed, and time-consuming.

"When I am working for long periods of time, I get to a point where I think that what I am doing is ridiculous and stupid," Songailo admits. "At that point, it's time to go home and come back tomorrow... There is always a point in the process where I really hate the work and think it is stupid and also usually a point where I sit back at the end of the process and take in that intangible aspect of the work that makes me feel like it was worthwhile."

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Zen Garden, 2013

Splendour Arts, 2013 - Photography by Emily Taylor

New Sound, 2013 - Photography by Sam Roberts
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music art film review - REDEFINE magazine

Sam Songailo Artist Interview: Sci-Fi Futures & Electronic Beats (Geometric Spaces 001)

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music art film review - REDEFINE magazine

Alice Cohen Animator Interview & Music Video Retrospective

Archie Bronson - "In White Relief" Music Video

When creating a music video for a band, Cohen's process begins initially with a discussion where both parties offer up their own ideas and expectations. Following that, an amount of trust is required, as Cohen uses her instinctual approach to interpret a band's musical ideas in a visual way.

"I... assume that they trust my instincts, since they've seen my work already and have an idea what it looks like..." explains Cohen, who says that she follows a similar process of creation for her own work as well as those of others. "I've never had to explain or translate to any of the people I've worked with; if they don't like the way a section look, I will change it or take it out. But we will decide ahead of time the vibe we are going for, and then the details develop as we go."

Cohen had been fascinated with collage art from a very young age, but it was around 2007 that a friend suggested she "make the collages move". He told her then of an Intro to Animation class at the School of Visual Arts; Cohen ended up attending the same class for several years, and all of her first animations and music videos were made at SVA. Eventually, this class led her to create a studio at home, where she currently works.

Most of Cohen's videos have their basis in stop-motion animation that is then processed extensively with color-keying and layering. Equal parts raw, vintage, and feminine, the bulk of the found images she uses are drawn from thrift stores, flea markets, old books, and random objects left on the street. Like her process itself, which is most often guided by a "feel" as opposed to rigidly planned processes, Cohen prefers to leave the bulk of her process up to random discovery and experimentation.

"I don't print things out from the internet but instead like to find the actual raw materials, 'by chance'," she explains." Then I cut out the images right from the book, or take the books to a copy shop and make tons of copies -- blow things up, or reduce them, colorize them, all on the copy machine. Once I have the cut outs, I plan scenes -- make backgrounds, and see how I will arrange the cut-outs on top."

Because animation is an extremely time-intensive project, Cohen generally keeps her videos close to heart until they are in their final stages, at which point she offers them up for critique.

"I will often do one or two revisions... but since it's animation, and a very time-consuming process, I'm not willing to completely overhaul a video," Cohen says, "but luckily have never been asked to... It's usually just a matter of taking something out, or adding a bit more of something in."

Up until recently, Cohen's work has been fairly lo-fi and only minimally incorporates footage she has shot herself, but her process and visual style are slowly changing. Her most recent music video for Archie Bronson's "White Relief" shows a fine degree more polish that her previous efforts, for which Cohen is glad.

"I consider the way I work to be pretty primitive and intuitive, but I do try to put as much finesse as I can into the way I do things," she explains, crediting much of the polish to being able to hire an assistant this time around. "I conceptualized different sections for the video... a city street scene, a garden with statues, a jungle scene, and an outer space section – so this allowed me to organize these various groupings of cut-outs and backgrounds. I also put together some long, scrolling backgrounds, which allowed for longer, continuous pans of certain scenes, which made it a bit more interesting I think."

In the near future, one can expect Cohen's work to become even more expansive and deliberate, as she has newfound desires to work more with film, costumes, actors, and make-up, as well as create semi-narrative pieces and impressionistic documentaries. Her short film, "Perfumes of Venus", has been released recently, and fans of her music can expect a new release in 2015.

Alice Cohen's Retrospective Music Video Gallery

Below, we run through a hand-picked selection of Cohen's music videos as she gives small insights into their creation.

Archie Bronson – "In White Relief" Music Video (2014)

"The words 'white relief' were what stood out visually to me at first. My initial thought was to have live human faces with white make-up, but later came up with the idea of white marble statues, which appear throughout the vid. There was also a line about sand, so I got actual sand to animate... coming out of the statues' eyes, and having statues arise out of sand, or crumble away to nothing was a running theme in the video, which seemed to fit with the lyrics."

music art film review - REDEFINE magazine

Alice Cohen Animator Interview & Music Video Retrospective

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music art film review - REDEFINE magazine

Brian Reitzell Retrospective Feature: From Film Soundtracks to Auto Music

Soundtracks of Our Lives: Early Curations

Based on the bleak Jeffrey Eugenides novel set in suburban Detroit in the mid-1970s, Coppola's The Virgin Suicides (1999) called for a soundtrack of soft-ish hits from bands of the era. Reitzell delivered with an assemblage featuring the likes of Heart, 10CC, and Todd Rundgren. More subversively, Reitzell also slipped Nova Scotia's finest '90s indie rock band, Sloan, into the mix. Whether or not that placement brought the band significantly more attention in America, the choice was demonstrative of Reitzell's ability to understand the tastes of his audience, and also cultivate them, connecting the dots that they may not have connected on their own otherwise.

BUY THIS SOUNDTRACK

Lost In Translation (2003)
BUY THIS SOUNDTRACK

BUY THIS SOUNDTRACK

The Stuff (Bad) Dreams Are Made Of: Recent Experimental Collaborations

Through the years, Reitzell has continued to be Coppola's go-to guy, with recent projects including The Bling Ring (2014); he has also overseen the soundtracks for indie films starring big-name leads like Shrink (2009) with Kevin Spacey and Beginners (2010) with Ewan McGregor. Recently, he has even gotten into the realm of video games with Red Faction: Armageddon and WATCH_DOGS. Overall, Reitzell's work on soundtracks has turned more toward the composing side--in particular, and perhaps surprisingly, in the horror milieu. In late 2007, the year following Marie Antoinette and Stranger than Fiction, the soundtrack for David Slade's vampire film 30 Days of Night (2007)--which is based on the graphic novel series by Steve Niles and Ben Templesmith--was released; it featured an eerie and jarring score of original music created by Reitzell.

30 Days of Night (2007)
BUY THIS SOUNDTRACK

Red Riding Hood (2011)
BUY THIS SOUNDTRACK

Lost And Found Highway: An Expansive Solo Project

Around the time of Lost in Translation, Reitzell began slowly and steadily assembling Auto Music. Along its journey, the album brought on board a number of contributors, including frontmen like Kevin Shields ("Last Summer"), Jim James (chorused seven times over on "Ozu Choral"), and other, more behind-the-scenes operators, such as his colleague Roger Joseph Manning, Jr. The result is an organically unfolding collection of (mostly, save for the occasional use of voice) instrumentals that resembles more the work of a collective than the typically more tightly wound compositions of a lone artist. Despite it being his baby, and one that took a decade to gestate, Reitzell himself has expressed that he sees Auto Music as being not just a solo record, but a collaborative effort. The album exudes that loose sense of control. Though sonically sculpted and polished, and usually grounded by steady percussion, the melodies on Auto Music are allowed freedom to roam and swerve, build momentum and glide to a halt.

Discussing his creative process in an interview with NPR, Reitzell explained that when organizing the music for a film, he likes to pick music for scenes before they are shot, preferring to get a mood from reading the script alone. To get inspiration for Auto Music, he went in almost the other direction, selecting a variety of DVDs to play in his studio, which provided a visual theme to each song.

"Gaudi", for instance, was guided by Hiroshi Teshigahara's 1984 documentary on the architecture of Antoni Gaudí, whose dream-like vision during the turn of the 20th century came to define the singular look of Barcelona. Having perhaps a greater effect than any other architect on a single city in the modern age, Gaudi's Modernisme movement had a wide surreal streak running through it, from Barcelona's Sagrada Família cathedral to the Parc Güell, fluid rendered in stone. Teshigahara's documentary captured Gaudi's creations on film by allowing them speak for themselves, relying on visuals, not voice-overs, to tell the real story. In accord, Reitzell's "Gaudi" is appropriately minimal, representative rather than instructive, a fitting accompaniment to drifting through the inimitable Catalonia capital.

Antonio Gaudí (1984)

The Spirit of the Beehive (1973)

As though flipping through the "Spanish" section of the Criterion Collection, Reitzell also pulled Victor Erice's 1973 film, The Spirit of the Beehive. Erice's debut heavily cloaked its critiques of Franco's regime in symbolism; the tumult and upheaval of the Spanish Civil War battlefields were replaced by the inner life of a young girl and the dynamics of her disjointed family. The brief, circular "Beehive" is one of Auto Music's most soundtrack-like moments, akin to the interlude feel of Squarepusher's "Tommib", or Reitzell's own "Shibuya", from Lost in Translation. Watching Teshigahara's film and flipping back and forth between "Gaudi" and the film's actual audio, it's not unreasonable to find Reitzell's work a more agreeable accompaniment, at least by the standards of modern taste. Similarly, striking a tonal balance of spare melancholy and curiosity, one can easily imagine "Beehive" having a place in Erice's film. Reitzell is not just adept at arranging soundtracks for new films; he also has a knack for reimagining the music for old ones.

Auto Music is not just meant to float entirely in the background, however. The barreling "Ozu" and "Oskar" have shades of recent-era Mogwai, riding on steady swells of noise. "Auto Music 2" has a gentle lilt unique amongst an otherwise more mechanical-oriented vibe. "Last Summer," with Shields' guitar fingerprints all over it, is also an obvious standout.

Yet, instead of resting on Auto Music and soundtrack work alone, Reitzell has already announced his next plans: to work in Japan with Daniel Lopatin of Oneohtrix Point Never and then Yamantaka Eye of the Boredoms. The prospect of that is a promising combination of set and setting, as it is in such collaborations that Reitzell's own songwriting often feels most naturally at home.

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music art film review - REDEFINE magazine

Brian Reitzell Retrospective Feature: From Film Soundtracks to Auto Music

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music art film review - REDEFINE magazine

Mark Dorf Artist Interview: Scientific Approaches to Artistic Practice

The Parallels Between Artistic Creation & Scientific Rigor

Dorf's most recent series, Emergence, grew out of a residency at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory in central Colorado, where he was given the rare opportunity of working alongside biologists and ecologists to experience the scientific process firsthand.

"I would spend many of my mornings and afternoons assisting and helping with the resident scientists field research; this spanned anywhere from counting flowers in a given plot that populations are measured from over time to collecting bee samples from hives set up in a certain area, or even tagging hummingbirds in order to track their migratory patterns," recalls Dorf. "Through these experiences I was given a glimpse into how the landscape is broken down, dissected, and reassembled into other forms within their studies."

The dominant theme of Emergence is drawn from such hands-on learning, after which Dorf realized that the trajectory some artists share with scientists is more similar than he would have imagined.

"At the most basic level, a scientist asks but one question then spends time doing research and collecting data on how to answer this question. This question, of course, can spawn new questions that need to be answered before the original question can be solved, so the process can become quite complex very fast. But at the end of the day, a scientist is merely describing our surroundings in an analytical and quantitative fashion," he says. "I find that artists do nearly exactly the same thing, albeit in a less quantitative fashion (sometimes)."

When Dorf begins a new body of work, it typically comes from a specific interest that he finds himself researching continually over a span of time. Before he knows it, though, he gradually begins to create new work based on the subject he has been researching.

"It's the happiest of accidents that seems to keep happening over and over again," he explains. "[Scientists and artists] both describe our surroundings and our existence; it seems just to be in a different language."

Through the years, Dorf's process has changed, and his experience at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory marked a big turning point.

"In past bodies of work such as Axiom & Simulation and Environmental Occupations, I would actually draw every composition before I ever picked up a camera. I would draw the landscape I desired to find in full, with all of the digital and composited materials and forms included, then search for a landscape that fit the mold that I had created – a real labor of love, as if something was just a bit off in the landscape I would move on and not even take the photograph," explains Dorf. "The end result, though, is far more rewarding, as there is an incredible sense of achievement when you see the final work fully realized just as you originally intended."

"In my most recent series, Emergence, my process was a bit different," he continues. "I would spend my days hiking, exploring, and finding landscapes in the Rockies without the final composition in mind other than that I knew the image would eventually be cropped square. I took a more scientific approach since I was working with scientists while I was out there; I collected my 'data', the photographic image, then began asking questions afterwards with the added elements that are included in the final composition, just as a scientist might do with the collected data set."

MARK DORF - EMERGENCE SERIES

Endless Landscapes of Form & Inspiration

Environment always been important to Dorf, who moved fairly recently from Hudson, New York, to Brooklyn. Despite the fact that Hudson provided a more naturally beautiful landscape and was the basis for most of his entire series, Axiom & Simulation, Brooklyn offers an artist community and a degree of idea exchange that the more remote city never did. Nonetheless, though Dorf says that every city he has lived in has supplied something uniquely valuable, he now finds traveling more important than ever for his artistic practice. A 2012 visit to Iceland, which gave Dorf the opportunity to work on Axiom & Simulation through the Nes Artist Residency, introduced him to what has been the most inspiring landscape he has visited thus far: the Westfjords of Iceland.

Dorf still has many landscapes to visit; he has never been to the desert and the Middle East is near the top of his list -- but a visit to Iceland in 2012, which gave Dorf the opportunity to work on his Axiom & Simulation project through the Nes Artist Residency, introduced him to what has been the most

"It's just so vast and empty out there with endless lava fields covered in the softest moss you've ever touched in your life," he explains.

Iceland peaked his interest in visiting northern Norway, Svalbard, and Greenland, and Dorf is excited about someday seeing the desert and the Middle East -- yet despite the obvious benefits of traveling for one's craft, there can sometimes be unforeseen challenges, as well.

"It's always scary when you travel to make a project, and then once you're there, all of a sudden you hit a creative bump in the road that you didn't see coming. Then the landscape becomes this sort of torturous element -- everything around you could be perfect for what you are trying to make, but because your creative compass had been knocked for one reason or another, it's rendered worthless," Dorf recalls, about a segment of his trip to Iceland. "When this happens, it's hard even to enjoy the landscape for its sheer beauty and environment."

MARK DORF - AXIOM & SIMULATION

Technological Artistic Futures

Though it may lack a consistent geographical space in the physical world, Dorf sees his works as a part of a connected "strange fictitious environment", even as it spans many mediums. As a part of his //_PATH series, which merges 3D renderings with photography and primitive 3D scanning technology, Dorf has also utilized his schooling in Sculpture and Photography to create luminous sculptural works under the subseries //_RUBY. //_PATH has a notably more digitized look than other series like Emergence and Axiom & Simulation, and appropriately, it comments on the pervasive dependence of the internet and how "it is no longer about logging on or off, but rather living within and creating harmony with the realms and constructs of the internet for our newest generation of inhabitants."

Dorf also takes this merging of technology one step further with his Parallels series, which he created in part with glitch artist Adam Ferriss.

"A lot of my work has to do with science and technology, but I would by no means consider myself a developer," says Dorf. "I can navigate my ways through the Processing coding language a little, but that's about as far as I get."

With a clear vision for interactive pieces in the series but lacking some of the technical abilities, Dorf decided to contact Ferriss, knowing that they had similar artistic trajectories. Both studied photography in college, only to take what he calls "a pretty far turn into the world of technology and digital media."

"Knowing his earlier works I could see that our minds would align well, and sure enough they did," says Dorf.

MARK DORF - //_PATH SERIES

//_PATH featured the use of primitive 3D scanning techniques, and for PARALLELS, Dorf wanted to take that technology one step further, but incorporating the possibilities of motion and movement found within the 3D rendering space.

"I was then commissioned to make new works for Neverlandspace, an online venue for web-based digital art, which is really what started the rock rolling downhill," he explains. "All of the figures that are seen are raw 3D scans of my torso and head. I then composited them together with animated elements that I created in a 3D rendering program."

With Ferriss's help, the PARALLELS series (view it HERE) features a number of .gif-like moving images, alongside generative forms coded in a language called three.js, that turn pixel clusters into exploding constellations at the click of a mouse. Together, they are an exciting look into the cross-pollination of art, technology, and science that is ever-expanding in more complicated ways, and are merely a hint into the scope of Dorf's future work. Though it is too early for him to reveal the projects he is currently working on, Dorf does guarantee one thing.

"You can expect a stronger tie with technology," he promises. "I can say that much."

MARK DORF - //_PATH SERIES

www.mdorf.com

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music art film review - REDEFINE magazine

Mark Dorf Artist Interview: Scientific Approaches to Artistic Practice

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music art film review - REDEFINE magazine

I Origins Film Review & Interview w/ Director Mike Cahill: Notes on Spiritual Subjectivity and Artistic Magnetism

When I initially set out to write this feature, I thought I would simply weave together a film review of I Origins with quotes from director Mike Cahill -- but, given the metaphysical nature of the film and the rather curious circumstances that have led to my watching it, I figure a personal anecdote is in order.

Back in April, I was on tour with a band, and we happened to have a day off in Albuquerque. We filled it with a number of activities, from bowling to thrift store shopping and milkshake drinking -- so when evening came and most others were ready to relax, one friend and I debated over watching Jonathan Glazer's Under The Skin, which I had been hyping all day. He was being wishy-washy, though, and, unable to decide, he finally concluded that I should draw a tarot card to settle the issue. For those unfamiliar with tarot cards, they are more often used for more in-depth divination, but each card can also be assigned yes or no values, with varying degrees of power. The card I received in response to whether we should go watch the film was "The Sun", which is generally known as "the happiest card in the tarot", with very few negative aspects. Hence, drawing it symbolized an emphatic yes to our question.

Under The Skin was a fine film, but remarkably, what actually resonated with me more was the preview trailer for I Origins, which revolves around a series of synchronicities involving the number 11. As Michael Pitt's character, Dr. Ian Grey, narrates for the trailer: "I look at the date; it's 11:11. I look at the time; it's 11:11. I start to see these 11's, everywhere; when I followed them, I found these eyes. I'd like to tell you the story of the eyes that changed this world."

Such synchronicities, staggering in their coincidental unlikelihood, ultimately bring Grey to meeting his incendiary love interest Sofi, played by the beautiful Astrid Bergès-Frisbey. The themes struck home immediately, in a spine-chilling kind of way; I, too, have had similar cosmic moments that have led to the discovery of significant individuals in my life -- including the one I went to see the film with. Hence, given the nature of I Origins, which assigns meaning to every small symbol that leads to the larger unfolding of our colletive lives, that circumstantial flip of the (tarot) coin, so to speak, really did provide a fascinating continuous build-up to my watching the film. (And it gets better...)

The Views Are Subjective -- And Polarizing.

Like many of my favorite movies (Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain comes to mind), I Origins is damned polarizing. It presently has 47% on Rotten Tomatoes, and reviews have critics gasping for air in both the blissfully astonished and offended, incredulous sense. Among the skeptics, one can see comments such as Josh Bell of Las Vegas Weekly's bitter remark of, "The movie's musings are disingenuous at best and infuriating at worst, delivered with a hollow solemnity that the flowery story never warrants."

It is clear that, as with many a metaphysically-minded film, the value you gain from I Origins depends on your relationship to the world at-large, which includes your spiritual sphere of knowledge and, perhaps, whether you think "flowery" is a good or bad thing. As a director, though, Mike Cahill also knows that the true purpose of art is not necessarily to please everyone.

"If they didn't feel it, they didn't feel it. No biggie," says Cahill. "If three people respond to it, then I've found those three people that I want to have dinner with, and those are my like-minded spirit kind, like-minded peeps. And I'll hang out with those people and engage with them with those ideas. We kind of live in cynical times, and that just comes with how it is."

Indeed, we are no longer in the era where Carl Sagan's Cosmos thrives with quotes like:

"We are the local embodiment of a Cosmos grown to self-awareness. We have begun to contemplate our origins: starstuff pondering the stars; organized assemblages of ten billion billion billion atoms considering the evolution of atoms; tracing the long journey by which, here at least, consciousness arose. Our loyalties are to the species and the planet. We speak for Earth. Our obligation to survive is owed not just to ourselves but also to that Cosmos, ancient and vast, from which we spring."

Instead, we are in the era where Neil deGrasse Tyson's Cosmos sees censorship on prime time television. Given this environment, it serves a scriptwriter well to do his research, which Cahill did.

"Modifying color-blind mice to see color; modifying worms that don't have vision to have vision: those are real experiments done in labs today," Cahill explains. "The idea of an eye being irreducibly complex and scientists proposing theories about the evolution of the eye have existed for a long time; Richard Dawkins is the one who sort of mapped out the evolution of the eye. But it's in laboratories today that we can actually create physical, genetically-modified versions... I worked very, very hard, and very closely with molecular biologists to make this as accurate as possible."

A number of small details contribute to the interpersonal development of the film's characters, as well as tie in Cahill's real-life filmmaking experience with the cinematic narrative. In one scene, Grey sits in a diner and his gaze lands upon Steve McCurry's famous 1985 National Geographic photo of the green-eyed Afghan girl, which provides the original inspiration for I Origins' explorations into locating human beings through iris biometrics.

"When [McCurry] took that photograph, she came through a refugee camp in Pakistan... and every year, after that picture became more and more famous, people would write into National Geographic and Steve and ask, 'What's her name?'" Cahill details. "Seventeen years after that photograph, they went to go and try and find her, and the most striking feature they had was her eyes... scientists from this iris biometric company used this biometric algorithm... and eventually they found her..."

Cahill then began wondering, "What if you could find a person after they died, through the same method?", thus spawning the point where the film's metaphysical ideas begin to connect with its earlier scientific ideas. Its sci-fi label finally begins to poke through once Ian Grey sets out on a search for the reincarnated Sofi. Considering the unlikelihood that iris patterns actually extend through multiple lives, some suspension of disbelief is definitely required during this second part of this film, and the barrier to entry is vastly different for everyone. One such as myself, who already believes in past lives due to personal anecdotal evidence, might easily get on board -- while less accepting critics without such experiences would need to jump over a mighty large hurdle. The fact that I Origins is set in a near future so closely resembling the present only increases the difficulty of suspending that disbelief.

The Details Unfold By Themselves.

What's beautiful, though, is that the polarized reception to I Origins is a meta commentary on the subjective nature of spirituality itself, which is very much experience-oriented. Yet those who say that I Origins is full of "sloppy screenwriting" and "sloppy cinematography" are truly missing the film's incredible attention to detail, which is anything but.

"This film is very carefully constructed to try and achieve a feeling," explains Cahill. "It's not a science paper, but it's certainly a very well-researched work of art..."

Everything is well-contemplated to an unbelievably impressive degree, and peppered throughout the film are a number of markers to back up that assertion. Take, for instance, the film's most ambitious shot -- a double Vertigo shot which concludes during Grey's dizzying journey through the number 11. A homage to Alfred Hitchcock's invention of the Vertigo shot, and to Stanley Kubrick, who Cahill says "was innovating in every single movie ever", the shot is damn near perfect on a conceptual as well as technical level.

"It's rare that you would find yourself with an opportunity to do [a double vertigo shot], but because of the sort of blocking and construction of the shot -- because there's a reflection in the bus and there's a billboard [behind the character] -- it lent itself to [it]," explains Cahill, who had the luxury of using robotic Technocrane, a device where all settings and positions of a camera can be keyed in and replicated over and over again on a memorized timeline. "A vertigo shot just makes you feel literally like, 'Whoooooa, I'm feeling this momenttttttt,' and to do it and then 180 around to reveal what [the character is] looking at... I was using the right tool at the right time; it actually had a purpose.

One can also look to other subtle hints found throughout the film, similar to that of McCurry's photograph in the diner; for example, due to the band's futuristic leanings, Cahill purposely included Radiohead posters in the scene description of Grey's apartment.

"All those little details were written in there as a characterization of Ian's character. [Radiohead] in particular -- Kid A is dedicated to the first human clone, whether it's alive or not -- and it's very sort of instructive of what a real scientist is like today," explains Cahill, who is related to scientists. "They're not necessarily a stiff cliché version of people we see often in Hollywood movies. Scientists are interesting people. They can talk about music; they make love; they are passionate about the world; they just happen to put discovery on a higher scale of priority than things like making money or you know, whatever. They're very noble, extraordinary, ordinary, relatable people, and capturing that is important."

When Cahill was tracking down the rights to use the Radiohead poster, he soon found himself in talks with Radiohead's manager, Bryce Edge, who was a fan of his previous film, Another Earth.

"Radiohead gave us all those songs to use for free, because -- you know, the last film that I did, which was also kind of polarizing, apparently -- they appreciated that. And that was a really reassuring feeling of: when you're making art, you're connecting with people maybe on the other side of the globe, and when I was writing, I was really grateful for that and felt really, really lucky. I still feel really lucky about that with the new work," says Cahill, who expresses that, as an indie film, they could never have afforded a big-budget song.

The film's soundtrack choices definitely lend quite a bit of weight to the film itself. "Dust It Off", by French indie pop arteurs, The Dø, provides a wonderfully dreamy counterpart to the film's romantic moments in a lyrically subjective way. Radiohead's "Motion Picture Soundtrack" plays during the final moments of I Origins, but twas a stroke of incredible luck and synchronicity that the track ended up where it did.

"The part that's weirdest is that I didn't actually have it in mind for the final, final, final scene... We watched the movie, and Bryce said, 'Do you ever think about Motion Picture Soundtrack for there?'" Cahill recalls. "And I took it, and literally placed it right there, where it was sort of silent. It was very temp at the time, and the break in the song, where it starts moving louder, occurs exactly when it cuts to the stairs, and when [Ian Grey] walks out the door, it says, 'I will see you in the next life,' and then it fades out. The timings were so precise that I didn't have to change the cut; and we all looked at each other and said, 'Alright, this was meant to be,' and he was like, 'Alright, you can have it.'"

The Meanings Are Self-Assigned.

The day after I watched I Origins at the Seattle International Film Festival, I was riding the bus home from Seattle to Portland. When I awoke from a nap, I Origins was fresh on my mind, and I pulled up Radiohead's "Motion Picture Soundtrack", plotting how I might fit it into my FM radio show later that day.

Throughout I Origins, doors, both open and closed, are representative of one's willingness or unwillingness to enter into the great spiritual unknown. I thought again to Cahill's story about how the sentence, "I will see you in the next life," fit perfectly into the end of the film, when a set of doors open into a white void of sunlight, symbolic of personal transformation. It dawned on me then that the I had just done the same drive from Portland exactly one week prior, with the previously mentioned band, who I have always felt an intense past-life connection with. For a moment, I debated over whether that feeling was mutual, and whether that thought was rooted in reality or merely my own twisted fantasies. Yet right when I remembered that we stayed at a hotel near Emerald Queen Casino, I looked up to see the casino's green and yellow billboard passing by in a blur. In my headphones, Radiohead's "I will see you in the next life" line rang out, its exact timing within milliseconds of this locational specificity.

With such curious life happenings, what can I say about a film like I Origins, which polarizes to such a huge degree, except that it's important that films like this are being made. The gap between the spiritual and the scientific may not be as big as we might think, especially as quantum physics makes it increasingly clear that we know much less than we ever thought about the way of the natural world. Perhaps the importance of art and sci-fi is to draw attention to this subjectivity.

"Science fiction is the literature of ideas, and you're really able to use analogy to explain feelings that we have..." explains Cahill. "In the beginning, or at least in the way she's presented, [Sofi] has one toe on the ground and the rest is sort of in the clouds, but she actually has a great deal of wisdom. That's shown in the laboratory and she's talking about the worm. She says, 'You know, they have two senses and you modify them to have three; so it follows that our five senses are by no means the limit.' So in a way, she uses his work as an analogy for her point of view, and all of a sudden, and he realizes that. And I think that's kind of, in a way, what science fiction does; it uses analogy to get it closer to some truth, hopefully."

"The same sort of thing is in this great book called Flatlands by Edwin Abbott... in it, a line falls in love with a sphere, and the line can only experience the sphere as a line that grows longer and shrinks shorter, based on whether the sphere is going in or out of the plane," Cahill continues. "It's a beautiful book to explain perception and how many dimensions we can perceive. Any scientist that is trying to grasp with coincidence, or intuitive feelings of, 'Oh, I feel like I've known you forever,' or whatever sort of inexplicable things that often are the fuel for conspiracy theories or religious narrative: it's very easy to just say, 'Wait a second; our perception is limited to these five senses and things we can test with scientific method, but there's totally a domain beyond that.'"

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music art film review - REDEFINE magazine

I Origins Film Review & Interview w/ Director Mike Cahill: Notes on Spiritual Subjectivity and Artistic Magnetism

Related posts:

1. Dub Thompson – No Time Music Video (Interview w/ Director Vinyl Williams)
2. The Miracles Club – “The Wheel” Music Video (w/ Vocalist Honey Owens Interview)
3. Four Corners Film Review (South Africa, 2014)

music art film review - REDEFINE magazine

Chad Wys Artist Interview: Colorful Blurs of Digital & Analog (Colorburst 003)

What was the first readymades piece you ever experimented with? How did it come about?

The first I can recall is Thrift Store Landscape With A Color Test [which was completed in 2009]. It was an important event in my life because it introduced appropriation and stark minimalism to my repertoire; prior to that experience, I'd been painting relatively traditional, and fussy, abstract compositions and expressionistic landscapes. It was a turning point because it meant I could finally address so many of the philosophical concerns I'd been examining elsewhere, like in my academic work and in my writing. That really was the impetus: my experiences as a student, especially as a grad student earnestly studying art theory, visual culture, and art history.

I can recall having visited Goodwill and exiting the store with the massive framed landscape that would serve as the "canvas" for that readymade. I was fairly embarrassed because I knew how kitschy it was and I was concerned what others thought of this young man buying such an ostentatious decoration. That insecurity has since faded considerably. And although I was ultimately satisfied with the result of my first attempt, I recall being insecure, unsure of how anyone would receive it as an artwork. Years out, I couldn't be more confident in that decision. My work has been more mature and more thoughtful ever since.

Thrift Store Landscape With A Color Test (2009)

Throughout the years, you've used a lot of the same types of props and patterns in your readymades series. How, if at all, has your approach to it changed throughout this time?

I think my marks have become more confident over time because I'm more comfortable with imperfection. When I first started crafting readymades, I was relatively unsure and insecure about what marks to make, where, and to what extent. I feel more confident about appropriating materials that serve my conceptual framework, and I feel more confident about my process of intervening with those materials. I've learned to regard mark-making as a poetic experience -- at times, unexpectedly quite moving. Applying paint to an object or an image with a presence and history of its own can be quite emotional, especially if I feel strongly about the material. At times, I can't bring myself to make a mark. The marks have come to mean a great deal to me and I'm not always prepared to make them. But at the same time I face this occasional reticence, I feel more confident about my process overall precisely because I have these deeper and more elaborate feelings about my craft.

Sight Line (2013)

a pair of faces (diptych) (2013)

It is common in your work -- and the work of many other artists -- to manipulate the human form in ways that block out physical features, especially different aspects of the face. What do you suppose it is about creators that makes this such a recurring trend?

For many centuries, the goal of art making was to render the human form as faithfully as possible. Art was regarded as a window into the world, a great illuminator of the ultimate "truth" of human existence, a way to both capture and reveal the wonders of our world. This was always a lie, of course. There are no ultimate truths and there is no way to capture reality without imperfection. Once we attempt to depict reality, the depiction is tarnished by the intrinsic subjectivity of the attempt; be it an imperfect word that is selected to describe the human face, or an imperfect color to depict skin tone, an imperfect choice is made and the rendering is instantly a subjective experience (and historically presented as truth).

I think modernism, and to an even greater degree post-modernism, has been about the rejection of art as truth-teller. The necessity to capture a portrait precisely no longer intellectually exists because the value of such a rendering is seriously disputed by what we understand about ourselves and our world. A likeness is always inadequate no matter how skillfully rendered, and intellectually speaking, what is the achievement of rendering a likeness anyway? I think artists who impede the ability of a viewer to observe a would-be likeness are remarking on the futility of portraiture. Ostensibly, faithful portraits impart very little substance about their sitters, despite the feeling of a complete experience ground in the superficial/aesthetic. It's a false kind of experience because we project many of our own experiences onto the observable likeness, sometimes fooling ourselves that the experience has been intrinsic to the familiar likeness. I think artists who eliminate visual clarity where the human form is concerned are reacting against, or for, or because of the artistic convention of likenesses. We artists like to eliminate clarity to draw attention to the absence of clarity in the first place, as well as the presence of a false sense of clarity that's housed in the superficial.

Some of your work uses digital painting to manipulate existing reproductions of paintings. This is a dizzying thought. What do you find to be the appeal of this?

On a technical and aesthetic level, I enjoy conflating media. I like digitally replicating analog (wet paint) techniques, and, vice versa, I enjoy manifesting digital "copy and paste" methodologies in analog applications, like collage. I think there's a great deal to be learned for each kind of medium, both virtual and physical. Appropriating a digital reproduction of an antique painting and proceeding to digitally alter it -- with trompe l'oeil techniques that mimic the physical application of paint -- potentially brings attention to the malleable nature of reproductions in general. Once something is replicated, it's out there, being used in all sorts of contexts. Images lie; images tell confusing stories and obfuscate the journeys they've taken. In different hands and under different conditions, objects and images can impart vastly different meanings. This is why I appropriate in the first place: to draw attention to the reproductions that surround us.

My interventions with these replicas are merely my way of recontextualizing the conversation, or asking the viewer to consider the literal nature of what I've sourced, what they're seeing, and, by extension, what they observe on a habitual basis; the Internet, and digital data, is ripe for this exploration of reproductions.

Select works from Chad Wys' American Tapestry Series

What do you find to be the major pros and cons for working in the digital versus the physical?

The digital work space generally offers an "undo" option, whereas the analog work space generally does not. I prefer the digital because I feel freer to experiment without the threat of an irrevocable accident, whereas in physical space the pressure to get things correct the first time is heightened... particularly when one works on relatively unique surfaces as opposed to a blank canvas. I think viewers tend to respond more favorably to analog work because of the mythical permanence, or the finality, of the material object, the existence of a concrete "original," and because there is no "undo" option. Analog media requires a level of impulse and spontaneity that digital media transcends; and I think this is why I've found viewers preferring my material work, despite my personal preference for the digital. Viewers seem to favor the suggestion of artistic spontaneity (analog) over artistic deliberation (digital). I think analog media inherently offers that sense of spontaneity because paint waits to dry for no wo/man, it's there and it needs to be manipulated quickly or else it's useless. There's no urgency with the digital because the digital is limitless.

The bulk of your work builds off of the past and found objects; do you or have you ever considered experimenting with only the present or future in mind? (If that makes sense.) Why or why not?

Although the referents in many of my works are aged and suggest art historical motifs, much of the material I source is literally contemporary in nature, or distinctly modern in their association with the industrial revolution. I generally source reproductions. It's the reproduction I fixate on conceptually and I think reproductions are a contemporary concern. The way we receive and understand reproductions is at the core of my concern and at no time in history has our visual culture been more saturated with replicas or simulacra. Through my marks I intend to draw attention to our receptions of copies. The Internet has made the issue pandemic and constant. I like the juxtaposition of antique imagery and contemporary technology, or the idea of the mechanical reproducibilty of history.

My understanding is that a lot of your work is created on the fly, rather spontaneously. Is this true? Is this analogous to how you generally live your life? Do you have any personal rituals to help you get in the creative zone?

Aspects of my process are impulsive, but sometimes I plot out a particular project precisely before hand, even attempting to account for paint drips and the locations of those drips. It's not uncommon for me to photograph a sourced object and experiment with various application in Photoshop prior to executing the physical work with wet media. However, often, especially where analog materials are concerned, the need for adaptation and spontaneity arises -- as one cannot predict precisely how paint will react to every surface, and sometimes one is incorrect about a particular color scheme and modification ensues. I think my craft is equally about deliberation, impulse, and adaptation. Some projects are more dependent upon chance, where quick applications of media can cause spontaneous results, while other projects are more carefully deliberated, with every crop and every element strategically placed. I think I enjoy the hybridization of these methodologies best of all, when spontaneity and deliberation are brought together.

A work dependent on chance

A work carefully deliberated

Your work has been promoted quite well through social media recently. Is this a sphere you devote energy to, or has this momentum been out of your hands?

I think social media is vastly out of any single individual's control, but I think it's possible for individuals to proactively engage and that can cause others to respond in kind. Years ago, I began by simply sharing my work online, and I was fortunate enough to be seen and shared. I think if I have any presence online it's through word of mouth and through sharing outside of my control. I haven't been very good at promoting myself because I don't personally relish or seek the limelight. I'm likely the shyest person you'll meet. The Internet has made it possible for me to come out from hiding, so to speak, and to share my ideas with a generally quite kind and generous audience. I'm honored every day when people care enough to share my work. I can't tell you what a privilege that is.

You're very interested in how your art affects others, and what kinds of meanings others derive from it. What are the types of reactions you hear most often? Are there any you find particularly surprising?

Much of the time I think people respond to the aesthetic I create with my marks and the materials I source. That can be quite a shallow reception, and I think it's possible for the deeper concerns of my work to be missed for the bright colors and the effect/affect of the aesthetic. But to me, that's also a hopeful and encouraging form of reception on the part of the viewer, because I think all art is first experienced superficially/aesthetically, and only later do we journey beyond our sensory experiences to a philosophical dialog (with oneself and/or with others).

I'm not easily surprised when it comes to the reception of art, but I am often taken aback when someone vehemently rejects my work. A frequent criticism is that I've stolen other artists' work, or that I've "vandalized" something precious and beautiful. This is not in itself surprising -- I shared similar responses to appropriation art when I was young, later to grow out of such dismissals and then outright embrace the methodology for my own -- but I am upset by these sorts of reactions because I think they manifest out of fear and confusion (and I say that from experience with a level of respect). Obviously I haven't actually "vandalized" an original Raphael oil painting; I've merely found a reproduction and proceed to draw your attention to it by reconstituting it as a new experience. The "vandalism," if we should use such a term, might have taken place when the original painting was initially processed, produced, and manifested into an infinite array of replicas for disposable consumption.

A manipulation of a Raphael reproduction

As you have an interest in the role art plays within a capitalist society, as a luxury versus decorative good, etc. -- what are your reactions to changing models of distribution because of digital technology? Do you view it as easier or more difficult to be a working artist in this day and age?

Oh, I imagine it's infinitely easier. There are problems associated with the use of technology, like the Internet, to share and to sell one's work -- not the least of which is competing for attention among an enormous pool of an increasingly greater number of artists and amateurs (not that the distinction is worthwhile) -- but the ability to share one's work instantly, before the paint has even dried, with anyone, anywhere in the world is beyond advantageous... it's a game-changer, and I think vastly for the better.

I'm excited about the Web and the bringing-together of disparate creatives from around the world. I think the future of art is going to be brighter and better than ever. Important thinkers from diverse cultures are going to be able to share ideas with one another like never before. It's going to be a global art world rather than art worlds sequestered in a few key cities. Diversity is never a bad thing. Decoration vs. fine and high vs. low be damned.

Select works from Chad Wys' Collage and Works on Paper Series

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music art film review - REDEFINE magazine

Chad Wys Artist Interview: Colorful Blurs of Digital & Analog (Colorburst 003)

Related posts:

1. Illustrator Alberto Cerriteno and His Digital and Analog Prowess
2. Torkil Gudnason Photographer Interview: Hot Bodies & Electric Blossoms (Colorburst 002)
3. Brian J. Hettler Finds The Tradition In Digital Art

music art film review - REDEFINE magazine

Captured Tracks Record Label Feature: Keeping The Artist In Focus

One of the label's first notable releases was the first Dum Dum Girls EP in 2009; they have since signed buzzy bands such as DIIV, Wild Nothing, and Beach Fossils. Sniper tells us that when the label first started, it was just a one man operation that released new artist EPs and 7"s and relied on favors from friends.

"We [first] started doing releases with The Soft Moon, Wild Nothing, Beach Fossils, etc., and I decided to build the label off the A&R rather than working with known entities," explains Sniper. "It was just a bit more exciting."

In the past decade, the trend of "big indie labels" like Sub Pop, Kill Rock Stars, and Merge has died down, but record label culture still thrives on the internet, and labels like Captured Tracks are still able to create subcultures around their bands with social media.

"I'd say on the one hand, we were/are the most ambitious of the 'smaller indies', if you could still call us that. I immediately hired people, paid office rent, re-invested all capital while I worked full time at another job when we started, and I think making that initial plunge really forced us to become a bigger label," recalls Sniper. "If we are now a 'big indie' -- and I suppose we are with our growing staff -- we're definitely the smallest of those, but that's because we don't have the catalog. You know, I'm of course envious of Matador or Merge or Domino with this amazing catalog of releases that sell all the time. Stores will always reorder Pavement, Cat Power, Neutral Milk Hotel and all that. We're getting there, but we have a ways to go."

Discerning Curation

Captured Tracks is not always looking for the next big thing, however. They're looking for bands that round out the label's roster in a constructive, innovative way, and that are in it for the long haul. One can look to the fact that many of the musicians they sign weren't looking to be signed at all as a testament to the label's diligent and deep-digging nature.

"It felt like cosmic intervention when C/T contacted us," recalls vocalist and songwriter Charlie Hilton of Portland's Blouse. "We were such a new band and we really needed mentors, but we didn't want to jump into anything too formal, so they seemed like a good fit."

"​I come from a really small area in California where getting signed to a record label is almost a miracle," explains Justin Vallesteros, vocalist and band leader of Craft Spells, who joined the label in 2011. "I went from working at a shitty coffee place to traveling the world to share my music."

Likewise, Olympia, WA-based Naomi Punk weren't necessarily looking to sign to a label, but due to the "good vibe" that they got from Mike Sniper and Katie [Garcia], they weren't hesitate to bring their punk sound to a NY-based label without a heavy punk roster.

"They were like, 'We love your band keep it as it is; we want you to keep your weird website and play punk shows, [and] we just want everyone to be able to hear it.'... [the label is] approachable, and they really take care of their artists. We feel like kings," Naomi Punk explain.

Sniper insists that they don't want a label of musicians that sound exactly the same; Captured Tracks strives for a diversity of music on its roster. They're not looking for certain bands to fit into certain slots, and don't want it all the be in the same genre. Quality music is the goal, not following trends.

"We're looking for a disparate group of musicians; we don't want to have a label sound. We tend to get a lot of demos that are kind of heavily influenced by Wild Nothing, DIIV, Craft Spells, Beach Fossils.. but we already have those bands, you know? Our newest signees, like Perfect Pussy, Naomi Punk, Chris Cohen, Axxa/Abraxas, Donovan Blanc... they are all vastly different," Sniper explains. "We're looking for artists who are good songwriters or make interesting compositions who may be a little, maybe diamonds in the rough? We're looking to try to get them to a level that would otherwise be difficult for them, give them a platform. We want them to come to us with their own vision realized and intact, not like 'I'm a C/T artist so therefore I sound like 'x' and my LP art looks like 'x.'"

Naomi Punk is one of the bands that respects the label's curatorial approach and diverse billing. "We didn't wanna be some random band on a 100-band roster full of hip-hop comedy groups or something stupid... no disrespect to that at all to anyone doing that... but yeah, like indie rock labels are just clearinghouses for putting out whatever nowadays I guess," says the band. "I knew if we did sign to a larger label, we would only try to do it if it had the right energy and focus and was run by someone who cares about records and building their own world."

"I think being on a label that's so well-curated helps all of the bands because we're given exposure to the right audience," explains Charlie Hilton of Blouse, whose second album, Imperium, came out last year on Captured Tracks.

Family Relations

What makes Captured Tracks notable as a label is their ability to put together a cohesive roster of previously unsigned bands, and make them not only a success, but a family. In speaking with six out of the seventeen bands on their roster, all of them had the same praises for the label: they were supportive and helpful in business endeavors, but also provided a source of strength during troubling times.

Joseph Black, one half of the indie pop duo Donovan Blanc, agrees that the support the label offers beyond basic label functions is important. C/T's help with release, distribution, and touring have been specifically instrumental.

"We enjoy writing and recording, so I mostly appreciate that they allowed us to make the record we wanted and still offered us that much support," says Black. "It's nice to have a great team like that behind something you've made. They're also more accessible to us in New York than other labels we've worked with. But the most valuable thing that we've gained was Mike Sniper's insight into making the perfect marinara sauce."

For touring musicians, this can be of serious import, and Sniper sees his relationships with bands as a partnership.

"It's totally 100% a partnership. I didn't write/record the record so they aren't indebted to me. Sure, we found them in whatever state they were and hopefully elevated them..." says Sniper, and he continues, using Mac DeMarco as an example. "... I think when [Mac DeMarco] got signed and did the first EP, he saw that there was a a lot of people talking about it so he reacted with "2," which is an amazing album. That was obviously always in him to be able to do, but maybe if no one gave him the green light to go for it, to be like "you will now for sure be heard" than maybe he wouldn't have hunkered down and made that classic. It's hard to really sink your teeth into a long term project like making an LP when you're not sure if it's just going to be a Bandcamp and 100 cassette release."

Juan Wauters, who put out his first solo album, N.A.P.: North American Poetry, on Captured Tracks earlier this year, plays a style of quirky, playful folk, and often performs with a revolving cast of international musicians. As a former member of The Beets, Wauters had experience working with other record labels, but that doesn't take away from the enthusiasm he expresses about Captured Tracks.

"I like how they have always supported me as an artist and they have always encouraged me to do the work I do the way I want to do it and they never tried to shape the way I work," explains Wauters. "This working relationship we have had it is what has encouraged me to continue this working with them."

Captured Tracks places a big emphasis on artistic freedom, which keeps the bands signed to their label happy and thriving. Every artist needs their own space to grow, create, and evolve, and Captured Tracks understands that sometimes needing space means actual physical space. They happily sign bands from around the country, splitting their roster between home coast bands and west coast bands such as Craft Spells and Blouse.

"Captured gives me overall control with all creative efforts," explains Vallesteros of Craft Spells. "I wasn't rushed during any of my releases, it's been relieving to be given the time to write the record I want to write. I like the idea of being able to communicate well with the label and be as distant in proximity so it never feels like a day job. Also makes it more special each time I get to visit."

For example, Captured Tracks is still putting out cassettes for a bunch of their artists, including Axxa/Abraxas and Craft Spells. Solo musician Axxa/Abraxas, who has a self-professed penchant of maintaining a "really tight aesthetic for releases", uses screen-printed art for his inserts, which are all influenced by the music itself. As Ben Asbury of Axxa/Abraxas considers this largely a curatorial project, he greatly appreciates that Captured Tracks supports the artistry behind what they're doing.

"The best thing about having a really awesome team of music business folks behind me," says Asbury, "is that they take care of that stuff for the most part which allows me to focus on the art of it rather than the business of it. [I also appreciate] the ability to have my music available in more formats and available more widely."

What's nice about this methodology is that because Captured Tracks isn't look for the "next big thing" but just interested in releasing high quality music from high quality artists for the long haul. When asked what was next for the label, Sniper responded that, "Captured Tracks as a label will stay a steady course. Probably not sign too many bands. We have a ton going on outside of that, though."

Ω

music art film review - REDEFINE magazine

Captured Tracks Record Label Feature: Keeping The Artist In Focus

Related posts:

1. Flicknife Records Label Feature: Retrospective on a Legendary UK Label
2. Arbutus Records Label Profile: Friends Supporting Friends in the Montreal Music Scene
3. Saâda Bonaire – Self-Titled Album Review (Captured Tracks)

music art film review - REDEFINE magazine

Multicultural Sounds: Warm Winds From Latin America & The Caribbean

Lucho Bermúdez (Colombia)

Lucho Bermúdez was a musician I discovered completely by accident on YouTube a few years ago. He's one of the most famous cumbia musicians in Colombia, but finding his CDs and recorded material in the United States is maddeningly difficult. Finding more than cursory information about him in English is also extremely difficult. Nevertheless, time spent on a few Colombian music blogs shed some light on his life and activities. He was born in El Carmen de Bolivar in 1912 and by age nine was already able to play the saxophone, the trombone, the trumpet and the flute. Bermúdez studied with a music professor who was interested in the jazz coming out of North America, and he soon began combining big band styles with Colombian cumbia music. He first recorded for RCA Victor in 1946 and proved to be wildly popular, appearing in the first Colombian television broadcast in 1954. He played music for the remainder of his life, eventually dying in 1994 after a long life of music, tours and honors from his country.

Part of what I love about Bermúdez is the way that he combined the jazz coming out of the United States with Colombian musical traditions. "Fiesta de Negritos" was the first Lucho Bermúdez song that I heard, and I thought I'd include it here. It also nicely shows off his clarinet playing. "Salsipuedes" and "Colombia, Tierra Querida" are both good big band numbers, and whoever Bermúdez had as his lead singer is great here.¹

[audio:http://www.redefinemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Lucho-Bermudez_Fiesta-De-Negirtos.mp3|titles=Fiesta De Negirtos]

[audio:http://www.redefinemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Lucho-Bermudez_Salsipuedes.mp3|titles=Salsipuedes]

[audio:http://www.redefinemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Lucho-Bermudez_Colombia-Tierra-Querida.mp3|titles=Colombia Tierra Querida]

Arsenio Rodríguez (Cuba)

Arsenio Rodríguez is one of the great Cuban son musicians who had a hand in creating modern mambo and salsa. Born in 1911, he was blinded at a young age by a kick to the head from a horse. Rodríguez learned to play the tres, a Cuban stringed instrument, and began to alter the rhythmic structure of the son genre, making it more contrapuntal. He added trumpets, the piano, and conga drums to the standard ensemble, giving the rhythm a strong place in the music and making it suitable as dance music. Rodríguez moved back and forth between Cuba and New York, eventually leaving Cuba for good in 1953. Though he saw some success, his popularity began to dwindle as interest in mambo music waned. His last years were not in poverty as some have alleged, but he only made a modest living off of royalties when he died in 1970.

"Carraguao Alante" is one of my favorite Rodríguez songs, written as it was at the height of his popularity. All the elements of good son and mambo are here, with solos for the tres, piano and trumpet throughout the song. "Mami me Gusto" is another good song off of Sabroso y Caliente. Finally, I get a kick out of Rodríguez' cover of "Hang on Sloopy," a quirky version of the 1964 rock song.²

[audio:http://www.redefinemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Arsenio-Rodriguez_Carraguao-Alante.mp3|titles=Carraguao Alante]

[audio:http://www.redefinemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Arsenio-Rodriguez_Mami-Me-Gusto.mp3|titles=Mami Me Gusto]

[audio:http://www.redefinemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Arsenio-Rodriguez_Hang-On-Sloopy.mp3|titles=Hang On Sloopy]

Joseph Spence (The Bahamas)

Joseph Spence has been called the Thelonious Monk of folk guitarists because of his unusual tunings and playing style, which often sounds like two guitarists playing at once. He was born in 1910 in the Bahamas and spent most of his life working as a laborer.

Spence played at various community functions for most of his life, but he did not become a professional musician for some time. He wasn't recorded until 1958, when folklorist Samuel Charters visited the Bahamas and recorded him on his front porch. The music that he played was popular, but adapted to his own idiosyncratic play style and singing. He achieved some limited fame in the United States and became a cult favorite among rock groups, particularly the Grateful Dead, who played "I Bid You Goodnight" frequently in concert.

His standard playing style involved Drop D tuning and the use of moving bass lines to drive along his music, which was usually improvisatory. His singing, whenever present, turns into growls and mumbles that complement his unusual playing. "Out on the Rolling Sea" gives you a good idea of what Spence's playing and singing was like. I like "The Glory of Love" because Spence subverts a traditional pop song and puts his own stamp on the tune. Finally, "I Bid You Goodnight," recorded with the Pinder family, is one of Spence's best known tunes.³

[audio:http://www.redefinemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Joseph-Spence_Out-On-The-Rolling-Sea.mp3|titles=Out On The Rolling Sea]

[audio:http://www.redefinemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Joseph-Spence_The-Glory-Of-Love.mp3|titles=The Glory Of Love]

[audio:http://www.redefinemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Joseph-Spence_I-Bid-You-Goodnight.mp3|titles=I Bid You Goodnight]

Perez Prado (Cuba)

Perez Prado was known as the King of the Mambo in the 1940s and 1950s and did a great deal to drive the Latin craze in the United States. Born in 1916 in Cuba, Prado got his start working in casino orchestras before relocating to Mexico. After moving to Mexico, he began recording mambos which eventually exploded in popularity, leading to a series of tours in the United States. His songs often shot to the top of the Billboard chart in the United States, and his public persona, which included behaviors like grunting in this middle of his songs, made his music even more popular. Brassy, fiery, and easy to dance to, his music led to popularity that eventually waned at the end of the 1960s, but he remained a beloved figure in Mexico and was in high demand until the end of his life.

Prado's orchestra was home to numerous musical luminaries, including the Cuban vocalist Benny More and the trumpeter Maynard Ferguson. In the years since his death, his songs have become popular again, including (unfortunately) "Mambo Number Five." To offer a better sense of Prado, though, here are a few of his lesser-known songs: "Muchachita," "Martinica," and "Anna La Polaca."⁴

[audio:http://www.redefinemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Perez-Prado_Muchachita.mp3|titles=Muchachita]

[audio:http://www.redefinemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Perez-Prado_Martinica.mp3|titles=Martinica]

[audio:http://www.redefinemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Perez-Prado_Anna-La-Polaca.mp3|titles=Anna La Polaca]

Dandy Livingstone (Jamaica)

The last musician in my mix is a Jamaican ska singer, Dandy Livingstone. Livingstone was born in St. Andrews, Jamaica in 1943 and moved to Great Britain in 1958. He was initially uninterested in a career in music, but was eventually drawn in by the music his friends were listening to. In the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, West Indian immigration to Britain exploded, and there was a burgeoning market for ska music. Livingstone was able to tap into this, first as a musician doing singles and then as a producer at Trojan Records. As his music became less popular, Livingstone disappeared from the music scene for several years and eventually returned to Jamaica in 1982. His last albums were recorded in the 1970s, but the ongoing popularity of ska and the 2 Tone movement in Britain kept public memory of Livingstone strong. Livingstone has since largely disappeared from the public eye and has not performed in public for several decades.

"Rudy, A Message to You" was one of Dandy Livingstone's big hits and I've included it here. I've also included two songs from one of his later albums, Conscious. "Black Star" was released as a single and has a funky feel to it. "Check Out Yourself" is another good ska jam and I really dig Livingstone's vocals here.⁵

[audio:http://www.redefinemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Dandy-Livingstone_Rudy-A-Message-To-You.mp3|titles=Rudy A Message To You]

[audio:http://www.redefinemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Dandy-Livingstone_Black-Star.mp3|titles=Black Star]

[audio:http://www.redefinemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Dandy-Livingstone_Check-Out-Yourself.mp3|titles=Check Out Yourself]

References

¹ Cronología de la vida de Lucho Bermúdez, El Universal. (This is in Spanish, but has some of the most comprehensive, easily accessible information on Bermúdez)
² Arsenio Rodríguez Biography, AllMusic.com
³ Joseph Spence, Smithsonian Folkways
⁴ Perez Prado Biography, AllMusic.com
⁵ Dandy Livingstone, Answers.com

Ω

music art film review - REDEFINE magazine

Multicultural Sounds: Warm Winds From Latin America & The Caribbean

Related posts:

1. Multicultural Sounds: Ojos De Brujo And Niyaz Draw From Middle-Eastern, Indian, Latin Influences
2. Multicultural Sounds: Sun Araw, M. Geddes Gengras, The Congos (Jamaica) + Sidi Touré (Mali)
3. Supermoon Spirit Shifts Mixtape (#19) Stream & Download

music art film review - REDEFINE magazine

The Bug (Kevin Martin) Producer Interview: Exploring Duality on Angels & Devils

Kevin Martin has been at the forefront -- and the margins -- of extreme electronic music and bass culture for over two decades. He's worked in genres as diverse as jazzcore, industrial, grime, dub, and dubstep, while staying rooted in the punk/post-punk ethos, making some of the most adventurous and aggressive music across a staggering array of monikers, pseudonyms, and collaborations.With this year's Angels & Devils, the highly anticipated follow-up to 2008's London Zoo, Kevin Martin has resurrected one of his most beloved and influential projects, The Bug. London Zoo employed an arsenal of extreme bass weight, grime-y urban vocals, and abstract sci-fi electronic to reflect the paranoid, claustrophobic world of CCTV London, and the album caught the attention of the wider world at a time when the simulacrum of the internet and social media was really building a head of steam. This brought Kevin Martin's dystopian worldview to a wider audience than ever before, right in the midst of the dubstep explosion. While the rest of the world was busy subverting dubstep's militaristic potential into a formulaic commodity, The Bug sounded fresh, distinctive, weird, warped, and wonderful.

As electronic music has become increasingly codified and quantifiable in the mainstream, this placed Kevin Martin in a precarious position and raised the question: just how would he build the follow-up to London Zoo?

With Angels & Devils, Kevin Martin has decided to make a document of his personal world, and how it reflects the wider global climate.

"For me, the album marks the third part of a triptych. If Pressure, was based around 'Friction', then London Zoo was reporting on 'Incarceration', now Angels & Devils tackles 'Escapism'. I wanted to tackle the bigger picture, above and below," explains Martin. "The more I thought about that comment, the more [Angels & Devils] made sense as a potential album title, as it was a record that hinged on duality, and the points at which opposites collide..."

"And the more I worked on the album's narrative structure, the more the title helped me focus on the contrasts I wanted to explore within this record," he continues.

Heavenly Partnerships

Collaboration has always been hugely influential to Kevin Martin's music, from his work with Justin Broadrick in Techno Animal, to his dub-influenced King Midas Sound. To bring this personal vision of heaven and hell to life, Martin worked with a series of surprising collaborators both new and old. The collaboration that has perhaps raised the most eyebrows is with Grouper's Liz Harris; on "The Void", Harris invokes the celestial vibes of the angel side with her signature ethereal vocals.

"I asked her via email if she would be interested, expecting zero response from her -- fully thinking she would have no idea who I was or would be really NOT into my sound..." Martin says, recollecting his own surprise at the reality of the collaboration. "... but it was beautiful, because she replied within a day, saying she 'had been playing 'Skeng' to her mum in her car the week before' and was totally into the idea of collaborating...."

The collaboration was so successful that Harris can be found again on "Black Wasp", the single for Martin's second release of 2014, which is entitled Exit.

"It was an honour for me to work with someone who I feel is at the very top of their game. She is truly sublime... and I LOVED the fact people were SO stunned we had worked together," Martin enthuses.

Another high profile pairing can be found with now-defunct noise rappers Death Grips, whose shocking approach can be seen as both abrasive and significant.

"I think artistic electro-shock therapy is crucial to jolt us all into new ways of thinking. It's good preparation for the shock of everyday life in all its gloriously chaotic madness... I think Death Grips were/are crucial square pegs, who BURN brightly with life/energy/questions," Martin says of the trio's style and influence. "If everything in life was easy, it would be nullifyingly boring. The cliché of 'No pain, no gain' is based on a truism."

And this truism seems to reflect the polarizing music of The Bug, as well.

"I think we are all techno animals now...I always feel its primitive impulses struggling in a post-modern apocalypse that lead to the greatest art," Martin muses.

Some longstanding collaborators make a repeat appearance on Angels & Devils, including London MC Flowdan, one of the founding members of the Roll Deep crew, and dancehall sorceress Warrior Queen, who has also worked with influential dubstep producer Skream. Both were featured on London Zoo, and Martin has much to reflect upon from years of shared musical evolution.

"Flowdan is only just beginning to peak. He was raw and mic-hungry when I first met him, but now he has become a true artist and is admirably flourishing in his own right outside of any crew or genre," says Martin, who aadmits that he can hardly think of a better MC in the UK at this time. "I'm gobsmacked by just how good he is, and how great he has become... He is killing it lyrically and tonally right now... Truly a vocal Don Dada."

From London Zoo

By contrast, Warrior Queen's track on Angels & Devils is in fact a rehashing of a recording which had been done at Martin's studios years prior, for her solo album which had never been released.

"It had always been one of her very best recordings,as far as I was concerned," says Martin. "She agreed I could put it on my album, and I had to try and outgun Kode 9, who had already wrote a great tune for the original version... it was a tough ask and extremely difficult to match the jaw dropping stun appeal of her vocal performance."

"I'm still not sure if I matched her toe to toe!" he adds.

Shapeshifting Identities

Reggae and dub sound systems are an integral part of Martin's aesthetic - the sonic potential of deadly bassweight, the echoic infinity of the dub chamber. This is less problematic in the UK than in the States -- where racial lines and musical styles blend and meld in all manner of fascinating mutations -- thus leading dubstep, and countless other genres, to become possible in the first place. Kevin Martin is unabashed in his love of the African diaspora, and doesn't feel weird spreading the riddims with pale skin.

"Race separatism seems to be a bigger hang up for Americans, where social life seems more ghettoized than in Europe," muses Martin. "For sure race, racism and prejudice exists blatantly as an issue and reality over here too, but in London, I ended up forming [King Midas Sound] with a Trinidadian and a Japanese girl -- plus many of my best friends were from various ethnic groups. Many people want to see clearly and separately in black and white, as it makes the search for answers simpler, but the world is kaleidoscopic, and I feel very much part of the polyglot, chaotic epicentre."

"For me, it's a question of quality and motive," Martin continues, citing El-P, Eminem, and Adrian Sherwood as artists who would not feel inferior in their craft due to their skin colors. "I didn't set out to fake being Jamaican. I grew up in London surrounded by Jamaican music [and] hip-hop, so it would have been more questionable to try and avoid that exposure."

Nonetheless, Martin has always made it clear that his first introduction to music was through punk and post-punk, and that further influence from other genres is always impacted by that initial framework.

"My inspiration from other areas is always filtered through my own personal roots, trajectory, [and] history, and the astonishing headfuck of those post-punk pioneer's addictive experimentation," Martin explains. "And as a child of John Peel, who was in the middle of jungle, grime and dubstep explosions, it's the dazzling, dizzying friction caused by cultural detonations which I am drawn to most."

This polyculturalism is just one example of how The Bug points the way forward, for both culture in general and in electronic music.

Electronic music is famously forward-looking; anything that sounds vaguely dated or old-fashioned -- outside of whatever the flavor-of-the-moment may be -- is generally ignored out of existence. In that sense, it is vital to note how Martin handled "the albatross of the dubstep label" around the time of London Zoo.

"The urge to reinvent myself is strong, and the big question after London Zoo was, 'Do I want to break away totally from my past, and the albatross of the 'dubstep' label...?' The more I thought about it, the more I realised I had the most respect for artists who had found their individual voice, and then managed to extend their sound thereafter as a craft to be bettered and mastered," says Martin. "I decided to fight my initial kneejerk reaction to destroy the blueprint of London Zoo and the media's misconception of me and that album, and instead, made the decision to try and use London Zoo as a foundation to build outwards from, whilst still acknowledging [its] relationship to [dubstep]."

Martin realized that he had managed to carve out his "own individual voice in electronic music" by elaborating upon the past instead of destroying it completely. He had created an entity which was recognizably identified as The Bug, but he readily admits that "to develop that voice still further was the challenge."

By creating something personal, yet connected to the wider cultural climate -- ensconced in tradition, yet distinctive and progressive, Angels & Devils manages to further develop The Bug as a singular project. Martin is bridging the gap between the tactile world of analog machinery, lavishly layering a wide array of classic synthesizers, while still utilizing the full sonic potential available in a digital environment.

"I love getting lost in the machines and the alchemical magic of FX processing, but emotion and soul fire are far more important in my overall aim. It's essential that I find a concept to explore and continue to use music as a cathartic release -- so therefore, I feel I have no choice in that idea of music as therapy, and I will continue to do so whatever the tools I possess," says Martin, who explains that he is happier with his current studio setup than he has ever been.

"The mixture of analog texture and digital mangling is the key to this record," he explains.

This seems like a way forward, cutting through the line noise. Finding the soul in the machine. Using technology to have a more human experience.

Angels: devils; heaven: hell; analog: digital; personal: cultural.

The Bug is full of contradictions, which likely indicates his music and ideas will remain intriguing and relevant, no matter what trends rise and fall.

Ω

music art film review - REDEFINE magazine

The Bug (Kevin Martin) Producer Interview: Exploring Duality on Angels & Devils

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3. Kevin Earl Taylor‘s Eerie Animals

music art film review - REDEFINE magazine

Phebe Schmidt Photographer Interview: The Plasticity of the Mundane

When placed within Schmidt's neatly crafted displays, everything from a fine pair of shoes, a potted house plant, a seafoam dish sponge, or a vinyl surgical glove begin to bend one's conception of everyday life, while simultaneously evoking the sparseness of Scandinavian design.

"I want people to feel that same sense of lack when looking at my work as they do when looking at an advertisement," she says, "then re-examine that sense of lack when they notice the imperfections that wouldn't be present in a typical advertisement. I think that feeling means different things to different people, so I'd rather not dictate a clear set of ideas that are essential to the viewing of my work."

Schmidt's work falls in nicely with current trends in brightly-colored still life photographies as well as vaporwave aesthetics -- but Schmidt is very much marching by the beat of her own drum. First and foremost, she creates to satisfy herself, in contrast to the need for acceptance in mainstream beauty and consumerism.

"I am not concerned with how my work falls into trends," she says. "I don't make it to satisfy the latest trend; I make it to satisfy my own obsession with plasticity, colour and artificiality. If you think my work is representative of a zeitgeist, great, but honouring my aesthetic is about creating a framework that then frees me to focus on the process and play with subject/objects and props."

Nonetheless, Schmidt is "not opposed to exploring different aesthetics [and] frameworks", though change in her visual world is slow-changing and she has no plans to dramatically shift her visual scope in the near future.

"In the past, my work has gradually progressed over time, and I believe it will continue to do so in the future. I feel this is a natural progression," she explains. "I am currently experimenting with a portrait series, using a modified lighting technique to what I have used in the past. The series, much like my past work, is exploring themes of a contemporary obsession with homogenised, generic beauty ideals that conform to gender, social and cultural norms."

&nsbp;

Selected Works & Series from Phebe Schmidt

About Face

About Face was an exhibition curated by Michelle Dylan Huynh and Stacy Jewell exhibited at No Vacancy Gallery, incorporating still life photographs and video works of seven Melbourne photographers. I exhibited my Surgical Series -- works that play with ideas associated with correcting imperfections/deformities and the equipment used to perform these procedures.

Browser

Browser, curated by Alexandra McCloud-Gibson was a project that connects fashion designers and artists in a collaborative capacity. I exhibited my Hermetically Sealed series - an investigation of the body as object.

It's That Sometimes You Move Too Loud

Curated by Sharon Flynn, It's That Sometimes You Move Too Loud, explores uncertainty in the creation of one's identity. My series, Entrapment, explores the pressure to conform to the norm.

Ω

music art film review - REDEFINE magazine

Phebe Schmidt Photographer Interview: The Plasticity of the Mundane

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3. Dean Zulich Photographer Interview

music art film review - REDEFINE magazine

MSHR Art & Music Collective Interview: Pathways In & Up

MSHR

What new elements or techniques are you exploring with Resonant Entity Modulator?

Birch Cooper: This show and the show we just finished in Switzerland are sister shows. We sometimes work in series, and this continues the new series.
Brenna Murphy: Our previous series revolved around an audio feedback system that can be manipulated by visitors who are invited to move the sensors around.
Cooper: Across a table - very interface oriented --
Murphy: And this new series takes that system of feedback but now we're incorporating it into static arrays that aren't moved but will be affected by the presence of the visitor. More of an unfolding cybernetic system. We think of it as a quantum computer.
Cooper: That's the metaphor we're using. What you observe changes by you observing. Everyone who visits the show is inherently plugged in to the cybernetic ecosystem. There's a conceptual purity that I like. You don't need any "directions" to experience the work.

What's similar and what has changed since Switzerland?

Murphy: Well, we just finished a five-month residency at Eyebeam in New York and we developed both shows during that time. A lot of the elements are the same, but the spaces are different. When we arrive at the space, that's when we decide how things will be arranged and how the lights interact with the sensors. It's not pre-composed.
Cooper: And they're not made quite in parallel. We're building on what we learned. In Switzerland, it was horrifying for a few days because we were using a new system we had never used before. We had to learn what we were doing quickly before doing it in front of an audience.

What's an example of the troubleshooting you encountered? I imagine there's a beast to tame as you're working with the feedback systems...

Cooper: In the Swiss show, we usually use two separate mixers for audio and light. In this case, we only had one mixer for both, so if you EQ the sound, you're impacting the light too. It reveals how sensitive and organic and responsive it is. We spent so much time moving the sensors – like, one millimeter at a time.
Murphy: Our goal is to get it so that the lights are bright enough and the system is fluctuating, active and interesting. You have to play with positioning for a few days.
Cooper: We've never done this before but, because we couldn't EQ without changing everything on the mixers, we EQ'd by covering the tweeters on the speakers to roll off the highs. That's the first time we manipulated speakers in a physical way. And I kinda want to keep doing it!

Ceremonial Chamber and Solar Helix Installation & Performances (2014)

Brenna, the way you were just describing having to manipulate the system over time reminds me of the ways you have described your digital workflow in the past. At what point in both of your processes does work come out of the computer and enter the physical world?

Murphy: Yeah, all these sculptures we design together in a computer. One of us will be drawing a shape and then give it to the other person and they'll flip it, add another thing and send it back.
Cooper: A lot of heavy feedback. They're all totally digital. We also generate a lot of video using these shapes.
Murphy: At Eyebeam, we had two laser cutters that we could use directly. For the first time, we had total control over the digital fabrication process. That allowed us to go deeper in the digi-fab -- see the limits and work with them.

Liquid Hand (2013)

There's improvisation to your music -- the feedback beast is going and you're manipulating it -- and I'm guessing there's a sonic language you learn along with the instrument. What are those sonic details you find that you want to let ride when you arrive at them?

Cooper: When we first began improvising together, we tried to have a verbal language to talk about what we were doing. One of the things we talked about a lot is the idea of rooms we are going into. There are rooms that have certain characteristics. We got to do this performance for a new sound series at New York's American Medium gallery. We were fortunate enough to perform with Aki Onda who I think has performed at TBA twice before? Anyway, it was great to perform with him. The Q&A afterward involved some leading questions where I think people were implying that his performance was happening in the sonic realm and ours was happening most in the visual realm. Getting back to the question -- I think for us, although our work has a visual component, our work is more about a virtual realm. There are these invisible, virtual hyper-chambers that are there.
Murphy: On a more specific note: with this system, we've been playing with light/audio feedback, but it's weird because our role is to shift and manipulate the system live. "Okay, this sound needs to change now, and this sound is good; I'm going to let it go for a while. I'll move this over here." When the light and the sound are really active, I like that the audience can see and enter into the system. When we get to that place, I try to ride out those intense moments so the audience can see what we're doing.

You're describing a wabi-sabi kind of approach to your performances. “This goes there. That's just right if I rotate this here…" Can you guys think of other ways in your life, when you're not working on the work, that you resonate with that process? Health habits, food... that sort of thing?

Cooper: Yes! Honestly, it's aaaaaall I do!
Murphy: We joke about feeling like monks. We shape our whole day and lives around our work. So our meals, for instance, are the same thing every day. Quick to prepare. Healthy.
Cooper: Everything we do in our day is trying to hone our minds, to get ourselves prepared to do the art we do.
Murphy: And the whole point for this practice, for me anyway, is creating a method to train my mind to be more expansive and more balanced.

The monk metaphor makes me think about mythology and there seems to be a self-mythology that you're creating here. Is that fair to say?

Cooper: I think the question of the shaman comes up a lot in the conversations we have. Our culture is lacking in shamans, but our culture does have artists and musicians, and that's somewhat analogue. When we go to a rock show, that's from a similar impulse...
Murphy: And where we're at right now, it doesn't make sense for us to join a preexisting community or culture that has a set of rules or traditions. That can't happen for us, but we want that -- everyone wants that -- and with this project, we're creating our own sacred spaces and traditions. Pathways in. And up.

Being based in Portland, who are some people that have been teachers for you?

Cooper: Going back to the earlier question, my greatest teachers have been people I've collaborated with. Members of Oregon Painting Society. Other bandmates. Michael Stirling is of course a great teacher and raga has influenced our work a lot.

How so?

Cooper: If you abstract the form of raga -- how it begins with a tonal centering, an alap -- and we use a conch shell to make this tonal centering. In raga, these vocal or instrumental melodies begin unfolding. In our music, we don't use conventional tonal systems, but we do inherently have natural harmonic relationships as with raga.
Murphy: It's a touchstone. A place to refer back. For me, working with Michael Stirling was the only time I've taken music lessons. That was expanding for me to have this formal entrance into focusing on sound. I was already very influenced by raga through Terry Riley and Pandit Pran Nath but actually learning the techniques taught me how to listen closely to sound.
Cooper: I also want to mention The Tenses (Rick and Jackie Stewart). We have an ongoing practice with them every Tuesday night. They've taught us so much in terms of improvised music and formal approaches.

Sacred Tuesdays strike again! So you're post-tour -

Murphy: And pre-tour!

Exactly! How do you hope to evolve the work for the next round?

Cooper: Now that we're post-tour, I'm looking forward to hitting the studio and mutating.
Murphy: Because when you're constantly traveling and presenting, it's hard to be innovative because you're always in front of people.
Cooper: But the risks that you take when you are in front of people also can have the biggest payoff. That's why it was so rewarding to take a leap with our last installation.
Murphy: Even the start of MSHR was invented while we were performing. It was totally improvised on our primitive setup.
Cooper: Our ethos is to start from the most radical point you can. The most “ground zero", to quote Benjamin Boretz. Start from the place with the least amount of social constructs and you're more likely to be innovative.
Murphy: Ever since that first MSHR show, it's just been trying to make patterns out of noise.

Ω

music art film review - REDEFINE magazine

MSHR Art & Music Collective Interview: Pathways In & Up

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music art film review - REDEFINE magazine

Nathan Hayden Artist Inteview: On Nature, Ritual Dance & Induced Visions

what was meant to be here was no longer, 2014, ink on industrial felt

Inducing the Visions Through Body Movement

Hayden's artistic style is one influenced by patterns and designs across a number of times, cultures, and walks of life – but how these influences are not always easily identifiable. Scrawled in nooks and crannies within Hayden's loose and flowing linework are images that seem to reveal different reference points based on a viewer's own experiences with history. Geometries pay homage to any number of cultures long, lost, or imagined, and within their hard edges and squiggly lines, some might discern floral motifs reminiscent of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics while others might see sci-fi blueprints for peculiar spaceships. The pattern bed from which Hayden draws is fertile, but his use of them is far from clearly plotted.

"Patterns are easy to find," he says. "[It's] harder to figure out which ones you want to use."

While Hayden readily identifies Navajo rugs, the massive Bayeux Tapestry in France, and Aztec artwork as particularly influential, his methodology fortuitously removes a good portion of the "choice" for him.

"The way that I start working is -- I dance an hour a day to 'induce the visions', as they say -- just something that gets the blood going to the head," Hayden reveals. Dancing is his main jump-off point for creation, but Hayden admits that any activity which gets the blood pumping will work, whether that be taking long walks in the mountains near his house or swimming in the waters near his hometown of Santa Barbara.

"I close my eyes after I dance really hard, and I let whatever comes to me come to me; I try to draw as quick as I can. I think that it's a hallucinogenic state that's very subtle that most people don't pay a lot of attention to, but I think that most people have it," explains Hayden. He goes on to describe similar mindstates that others have shared with them after they've had a long day at work and are just about to fall asleep.

Linking dance with his visual art practice was something that emerged naturally during a trip Hayden took to Europe years ago. After graduating with an MFA from UC Santa Barbara, he and his now-fiance and fellow artist, Hannah Vainstein, stayed in the English countryside where Vainstein had lived for four years. It was an idyllic period; they spent three weeks gorging on the small town's abundance of fresh milk and cheese as well as celebrated blackberry season by making a blackberry apple cobbler nearly every other day.

As lovers of dance who had stuffed themselves to the brim with tasty treats, the two joked that they would tour Europe as a dance duo called Crumble Baby and the Mistress of Cosmic Crisp -- "for the very reason that we liked crumbles", according to Hayden. The two decided to bring an iPod and dance for an hour a day, no matter where they went around the continent.

"We started doing this and started sort of getting more and more into it," Hayden recalls fondly, "and as I started to dance harder and harder, I found it was a really, really fertile time after I would dance for me to draw. The ideas and images would come really, really easily -- so it became a part of my daily routine."

Transference From the Earth

Not unlike a vessel for automatic writing, Hayden takes these dance-induced visions and scrawls them roughly onto small pieces of index card-sized paper, which he uses as mini soundboards for his ideas.

"I carry them with me everywhere I go, and that's where I sort of put an idea as soon as I have it..." says Hayden, who will often have between five and twenty of the small card drawings going at once. Some of these cards are completed and some are not -- and while all of the recent cards bear some similarity due to their use of blacks and whites, thin lines, and patterning, their styles are actually quite many and varied.

"I think it's primarily gleaned from things that I look at in life sort of falling together," explains Hayden.

It is perhaps this random coalescing of objects that leads to the difficulty of discerning Hayden's visual references. Take, once again, what seem like obvious sci-fi references found in the spaceship-like technical drawings that appear throughout his work. Hayden does have some interest in sci-fi, but its influence is minimal to him at best; if anything, such parallels are actually more likely attributed to his exploratory childhood in West Virginia's backwoods.

"For the first eight years of my life, I grew up in a really remote part of West Virginia; my parents were sort of '70s 'back to the land'-type people. They bought this little piece of land that was behind a state park; you had to walk a mile back in just to get to where we lived. Living out there, there weren't a lot of kids to play with. I went out there to the woods and the nearby creek and was always messing around with insects and staring at different barks..." Hayden describes.

"My dad was interested in learning how to identify different things, so he taught me how to identify different trees by the bark, and different flowers; different plants you could eat in the wild... so I had an early interest in biology," continues Hayden, "and I think that that sort of biological reference can look very sci-fi -- but if you spend enough time in a creek bed, you're going to come across things that are pretty science fiction-looking."

expert team true believer, 2013, pen and ink on paper, 3 1/2 x 2 ½ inches

One need only look to the plate drawings of biologists like Ernst Haeckel or stare at the forms sandwiched between microscope slides to realize that in the natural world, organisms can take on shapes that are plenty technical and mechanical. Hayden takes this type of naturalistic referencing one step further as well, through his use of materials and mediums. After returning from that trip to Europe, he began sourcing his own earth pigments by digging into the ground; he emerged with colors such as that from the plant wode, which creates the same blue that is referenced in Braveheart. Likewise, since his small cards contain the initial ideas that he synthesizes for more refined projects, Hayden decided to study them like a scientist, in order to find an analogous texture for his larger works.

"I looked at the [cotton] watercolor paper under a magnifying glass to see what its texture was like, and it's actually little fibers that come together and look a lot like felt," Hayden explains. After searching for a suitable source, Hayden came upon a company in Michigan which manufactures huge pieces of industrial wool felt, and asked them to sell him smaller pieces -- which can still run up to five feet tall. Using a new material, however, has presented its challenges.

"The black and white ones are just ink -- a shellac-based ink -- and it's a pain in the ass," he says of these larger painted pieces. "Right now, they're my least favorite things to make, because it's a process that's not too dissimilar to tattooing; it's like a cross between painting and tattooing. I use brushes, but you're kind of smashing the pigment into the felt, or the ink into the felt, because the felt is slightly water-resistant and the ink itself is water-based."

Nonetheless, Hayden is so resolute on their feel and effect that he is learning new techniques in order to work with them.

Intersections of Personal & Global Histories

With his latest creations, a ceramics series loosely titled Shapes for Shadows, Hayden's interest in earthly materials intersect with his personal visions and cultural anthropology in even more fascinating ways.

"I don't even remember how I originally had the vision for the first ones, but I had wanted to work in clay for a while, because it's, again, the sort of thing that you dig out of the earth," explains Hayden, who loves how "forgiving" clay can be, as well as the potential of finding his own source for the material. In making these sculptures, Hayden is also finding a more solid alternative to his previous sculptures, which were made of wire and string.

"I just started making these objects that started coming to me, and later on, I discovered that they looked like ancient currency..." Hayden recalls. "I was flipping through a book of old clay objects and I forget what culture it was -- but in this old Mesopotamian culture, they dug up this old little shapes that had holes in the middle, and a lot of mine have holes in the middle for various reasons..."

"They think these objects were maybe used for some sort of currency or an early alphabet of sorts," he continues. "I found [that to be] an interesting way to think about them, especially since we sell our art for money -- so there's some sort of trade there -- and it's interesting to think about trading an ancient currency for a current currency."

The way that happenstance and induced visions led Hayden to this age-old cultural practice makes it almost feel as though these inclinations are set deep within him, only to be let loose slowly through life discoveries. Even his practices in ritualistic dance seem to be an indicator of this.

"I think that it's not even a new idea or anything to think about how many cultures danced for all types of things... they wanted rain, crops to grow well, bounty, fertility, the list goes on forever and ever..." says Hayden. "I think that moving your body and your brain sort of syncs up with that. It's a really powerful way to bring things into the world."

just because you talk the talk doesn't mean your molecules are shifting, 2013, pen and ink on paper, 3 1/2 x 2 ½ inches

embracing the dark, 2012, pen and ink on paper, 3 1/2 x 2 ½ inches

Analyzing and synthesizing the knowledge of yore into modern creative practices is natural for Hayden, as is giving powerful events from his life -- such as his trip to Europe and his childhood spent in nature -- their due credit. Nonetheless, there are aspects of Hayden's work and life where, like the patterns in his art, influences can't exactly be traced with much clarity.

"Since I was little, I was always making, drawings and objects that had a psychedelic nature to them -- so I feel like when I ate psychedelics in my early 20s, it was kind of a verification that what I was doing was there, just given more confidence, maybe. I don't know that I would be making the same thing I I'd never encountered psychedelics, but I might be making something along the same lines," Hayden muses. "It's really hard to tell; you can't really separate all these things out. I feel like if you eat mushrooms or whatever, that sort of becomes part of you and part of your lexicon, so I can't say that it hasn't influenced me, but I'm not sure exactly how it has influenced me, either."

Yet part of the beauty of Hayden's type of art -- which truly gets pulled out of the ether to become manifest in the real world -- is that its influence can be significant and feel significant, even if its influence is not consciously elaborated upon.

"I'm just trying to access the possibilities of other things –" Hayden explains, "-- and in the same way that I look at art throughout history and nature for little pieces of those other realms, I'm hoping that I can be a part of that process and for people to get a peek into other realms by looking at my stuff, that might bring about stuff that I can't even imagine."

Hayden will be the first to admit that hoping for such an influence might be lofty -- "a lot of people, I think, don't really even really look at the work," he comments -- and so, he understands that sharing his own experiences might be an even more important and direct way to supplement the viewing experiences of his art.

"Maybe it's better for me to tell stories about encountering things that I didn't realize would affect me so profoundly until later," he speculates. "When I was a little kid and I was out in nature, I just thought it was fucking boring because there were no other kids to play with... but now, I realize that I don't think I would even be making art if I hadn't had years with nothing to do except stare at nature."

Ω

www.nathan-hayden.com

music art film review - REDEFINE magazine

Nathan Hayden Artist Inteview: On Nature, Ritual Dance & Induced Visions

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2. Mark Dorf Artist Interview: Scientific Approaches to Artistic Practice (Geometric Spaces 002)
3. Chad Wys Artist Interview: Colorful Blurs of Digital & Analog (Colorburst 003)

music art film review - REDEFINE magazine

Kiev Band Interview: Iconoclasm & Possibility in a Prescriptive World

Audio-Visual Mixers & Matchers

Part of what's exciting about the hyper-recombinant, mix-and-match world of 2014 is that eclecticism can thrive under the radar in its own scrappy ways before someone assigns a catchy name to it and puts it in line with the establishment's rank and file. Kiev, still a young band despite having formed in 2007, exist in this eclectic space, having been described by recent tourmates Bad Suns as "gypsy hippies, but metropolitan techie hi-fi nerd guys." Or, as Brinkerhoff himself puts it, "hybrid models". That means they hang out in Joshua Tree and throw "aleatoric happenings," but those happenings include electronic instruments and visual projections against desert mountains. Brinkerhoff's film school background — he went to Orange's Chapman University — lends itself to the quintet's ace in the hole, the use of live, stereoscopic 3-D projections in their concerts.

The 3-D projections were "designed by our immediate community," explains Brinkerhoff, "which is some of my family members who work in the world of theater design and projections and media design. Our really close friends are also animators and filmmakers. Pretty much, we just rounded up all of our friends and said, 'Hey, we've been playing around with this technique lately; let's try and do something for the band. Let's try and use it as an opportunity to research and try new things'."

Kiev - "Be Gone Dull Cage" Music Video

The band debuted the 3-D experience in 2011 at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, and have since won accolades. Their live shows, when possible, involve projection mapping, which involve manipulating the contours and geometries of specific projections so that they match a wide array of unconventional projection surfaces. Unlike more widely-employed 3-D technologies which Brinkerhoff now thinks "kind of seems played out", Kiev believe they're using the technology in "creative ways, for expression's sake.

Kiev are posing the question, "What can you do with a 3-D space for visualized music?" – and given that they make such heterogeneous music (Brinkerhoff calls it "layered"), projection mapping and infrared sensors only add to the varied streams of information that reach concertgoers' brains.

"Ideally, we want to make a fully immersive, crazy experience that people can walk out of and go, 'Holy crap. What was that? I don't know, but it felt good'," explains Brinkerhoff.

That positive reinforcement from fan feedback is important to Kiev – much more than anonymous click-throughs or manufactured virality.

"We spend so much time working in isolation and chipping away at stuff in our warehouse... when people genuinely connect with what you're doing, they always take the time to tell you what you're doing is meaningful to them or why it's meaningful to them or why they enjoy it," says Brinkerhoff. "If you're basing your career on likes and plays and how many hits a particular video has, it's really impersonal. But when it's that grassroots thing, you get so much more mileage out of looking someone in the eye and having them tell you, 'Wow, this song did this for me', or. 'This album puts me in this mindset that I can't get anywhere else.' That kind of stuff gives us the chills and gives us the juju for the next year."

Filling Out and Filing In

The band's iconoclasm extends to the unusual arc of filling out their lineup, and how that has extended to the evolving palettes of their sound. It began as Brinkerhoff and drummer Brandon Corn, along with a close friend. They found themselves at a crossroads after spending years playing in "more straight-ahead rock bands," and wanted to explore their interest in synthesizers and electronics.

"But when the sound started to take shape is when we met the next member that got added, [saxophonist Andrew Stavas,]" says Brinkerhoff.

Prior to joining, Stavas had been playing saxophone at a church in Compton, which excited Brinkerhoff. "I love all sorts of music, and it was the polar opposite of many other players in Orange," he says. "When [Stavas] came in, he brought all the gospel influence, and then he connected with our drummer about his jazz background."

The addition of Stavas led to an influence in improvised jazz and American roots music taking form, combined with the rock and electronics in their existing arsenal.

"And then we kept gaining a member a year. Our bass player and our electronics guy, Derek [Poulsen] — when we met him, he was just finishing a degree in music composition, so he came from this new music, 20th-21st century classical music world. But then we also connected on all these other things, like world music that grooves, and Afrobeat," Brinkerhoff explains.

Kiev's sound kept changing as they brought in new members, and once the final puzzle piece was added — keyboardist Alex Wright — they were able to focus on songwriting, instead of just demos put together while feeling one another out.

"The sound, to this day, is still evolving, because it took a long time to form and it took a long time to, not ferment, but cohere. To solidify. And hopefully, it just keeps changing," says Brinkerhoff.

Although Falling Bough Wisdom Teeth is not Kiev's first time at the rodeo — they self-released their first EP in 2010 — most of their media attention still comes out of their native Southern California. Brinkerhoff says the decision for Kiev to establish themselves as a local act is not calculated; rather, it is just the result of "where we are geographically." The band members hold down day jobs, as music teacher, and "guys that make music for placements and whatever industrial applications." Touring the greater United States is difficult for financial and practical reasons.

"There are also just amazing people [in L.A.]. I feel like people not from Los Angeles – they come and visit Los Angeles; they come pass through Los Angeles, or even Orange County... and you can't really tell from the surface that there are tight-knit communities and there are amazing, really personable interactions going on. But when you pass through, it just kind of looks like, 'Eww, L.A.'s spread-out and everyone's full of shit, and it's all about ego', but there really are amazing benefits other than L.A. just being a music city. There are so many people that, by proportion, there are amazing people there as well. And I think we're lucky to find that." - Robert Brinkerhoff, Kiev

Turning Over Stones to Find Gold

Kiev probably wouldn't be so crass as to use words like "penetrate" or "markets" to describe playing in other towns, but insofar as they're working musicians in 2014, it's up to them to promote their art, and some cities react differently than others, which can either be a relief or a hard truth for a touring act.

"Any band that lives in Southern California, and definitely the L.A. area, if they've never been out, once they do go out, they get the same response," notes Brinkerhoff. "They go, 'Holy shit, everybody's so into music. Everybody's so into dancing.' You're playing for a room with fewer musicians in it. When you're playing in L.A., you're playing for other musicians, other writers, other producers, all these people in the same rat race you're in. There's more competition, and there's more arms folded, and gazing, and observing, whereas when you play Salt Lake City, you get these people that are fucking thrilled that there's music coming through. And they just want to dance and sing along and get really into stuff."

In an interview Kiev gave with the California State University, Fullerton student newspaper, the band namechecked Nels Cline, Adrian Belew, and minimalist composers such as Steve Reich. When asked in our phone interview whether fans came to Kiev already knowing about those artists or whether the quintet was a stepping stone for further exploration, Brinkerhoff replies that many of the people who come to their shows are older fans – "guys in their late twenties to mid-forties," typically male, fitting the classic record store clerk stereotype. These "music nerd guys" know about Nels Cline and Steve Reich, and "always get excited to talk about '80s King Crimson, and how it was better than Talking Heads."

"But at the same time," he continues, "we go out on the road with Bad Suns, who have a demographic or a crowd that's 16-year-old girls, or 20-year-old kids, and that is the most interesting thing, because you get people coming up to you, describing things they're experiencing or things they're hearing. 'Yeah, it kind of gets hypnotic and it just kind of rolls along, and I get lost in it, and then these crazy computer sounds come in.' – and what they're describing is Adrian Belew solos. They are describing repeating patterns that you hear in Steve Reich music. They just don't know those names. So, that's when we get super stoked: 'Oh, you have to check this out, and this out, and this out'. And the best part is, when you revisit that town, and you meet that 21-year-old kid, or 18-year-old kid that's a drummer, and he's like, 'Oh my god, I checked this out, and I love this now. Have you heard of this?' And they've gone even further. It's amazing these days, with algorithms and the internet, you can give someone a name, like Steve Reich, and if they're interested, they'll just keep going deeper and deeper. It's awesome when you see people get turned on to all this music that's under the surface, but super important."

In the pre-web era, one had to leaf through magazines or record guides to special-order obscure music from a store or a print catalog, and then wait for it to arrive. "I caught a little bit of that," Brinkerhoff remembers. I had the internet in my house when I was in high school, but still, even then it was a totally different thing. Knowledge had to come from someone telling you, or you read something, and you'd excavate it. And nowadays, you just plug in and you just go to fucking town. There's benefits to both. I think it's a good thing, but there's something nostalgic about the old days, where you had to be like Indiana Jones and discover some dusty old record and go, 'Holy shit. What is this?'"

Brinkerhoff doesn't look at Kiev's future in terms of career arcs, but more as growing with the possibilities the future brings.

"The dangling carrot is always dangling, and it's always ahead of you. There's so much we haven't done. One of the things about music cultures and technology moving so fast now is we're constantly introduced to new things. Some people can get a little bit stuck in their taste, and then have an adverse reaction to things like Spotify, or an adverse reaction to new instruments, or people using instruments in different ways. And we're quite the opposite," explains Brinkerhoff. "I feel like the world's been opened up over the last 10 years, and it continues to move faster and new things present themselves. It's a really long way of saying that we'll never be satisfied, not because we have a desire to be more quote-unquote 'successful' — it's just there's so much to incorporate and so much to learn and so much to learn to utilize and mix up and try new ways."

"Fuck, how could you ever be satisfied as a musician?" Brinkerhoff questions. "You can either choose to be down with it and super-productive and explore all sorts of things or you can get paralyzed and be like, 'Ahh, too much stuff. I'm going to stop making things.'"

www.kievband.com

Ω

music art film review - REDEFINE magazine

Kiev Band Interview: Iconoclasm & Possibility in a Prescriptive World

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music art film review - REDEFINE magazine

O’Death – ROAM Music Video Premiere (w/ Q&A Interview)

O'Death - "ROAM" Music Video

Q&A with Director Gabe Darling

The music video for "ROAM" clearly goes along with the title of the album, Out of Hands We Go. What inspired this theme, and what does it represent, exactly?

The album title has a feeling of release and possible journeys into the unknown. I know it's a time a transition for a lot of the band personally, so it's appropriate. I wanted to build something that had that feeling of venturing into a mysterious space. The song contains a lot of that lyrically and has a distinctly dark carnival vibe, so it seemed like it should turn into some dark fleshy party by the end. Which it did and maybe got out of hand. (Oh god, murder me. Murder me now.)

Hands have made quite a resurgence in visual art in the past few years. Have you noticed this trend, and if so, why do you suppose it is? What draws you to using them as a visual object?

I feel like it would be strange if they weren't a huge part of visual art. It's what we see in front of us all the time. They are our means of manipulating our world, so I think they occupy a lot of our subconscious thought. I feel drawn to them a lot because they're such a hugely expressive part of our bodies. Outside of a face, what's more expressive? You ever try to communicate with a foot? It's a disaster.

Can you tell me about the process of filming this piece? What techniques were used, and how much time was spent filming versus in post-production?

It was a simple shoot setup in my tiny apartment of just a bluescreen, a Canon camera, and a slider. Also there was a rotating stool to get turning faces and arms. There's a fair amount of stop-motion in there. A lot of stuff shot was lit by just a flashlight so I could get hands coming out of stark darkness more easily.

The majority of it was spent in post, though. Compositing and rotoscoping are time-consuming processes, but I feel like I zone out into that stuff. It's almost meditative.

What appeals to you about using black and white for all of this record's visual collateral?

There's something great about the limitation involved in black and white. Also, things can jumble together in comfortable ways when you take away their color. It's purely by chance that the video and album art are both monochromatic. I was gonna go black and white when I started conceiving this thing because I had been really wanting to do something that felt like old spirit photography. It definitely wound up in a different place then that, but some of the original inspiration remains.

What are the emotions you are hoping to conjur with the imagery, and how does it tie in with the themes of the track itself? Is the cyclical nature of the music video purely an aesthetic choice, or were there philosophical motives behind it as well?

I just wanted the imagery to mirror the feel of the song. That there's a strange mix of fun and revulsion in the darkness. That discovery can be rewarding even if it slightly monstrous. That's why I wanted to escalate the imagery so that it would get a little overwhelming. And then you're out again.

I liked the idea of coming back at the end, because it's ultimately about journeying out from your comfort zone and knowing you can return. You're just a tourist in this fleshy-hell-party. It's a "nice to visit; wouldn't want to live there," sort of situation. Although I'm not sure "nice to visit" even applies.

Ω

music art film review - REDEFINE magazine

O’Death – ROAM Music Video Premiere (w/ Q&A Interview)

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music art film review - REDEFINE magazine

Yoshi Sodeoka Video Artist Interview: Psychedelic Apocalypse in the Digital Realm

Manipulating Audio-Visual Perception

A symbiotic relationship between the aural and the visual experiences of sound can often be seen in Sodeoka's videos. From the minimalist white static and pulse-lines of Aditi (2005) to the electric vortex of Disc: Void (2009), and the more recent object-oriented visuals of the ongoing Sibyl series, Sodeoka reveals an experimental tendency towards the ways in which images can express sonic elements: how they can reflect one another aesthetically and also in a more visceral, experiential sense.

The aesthetic parallels play with the distinction between simplistic geometric shapes and complex, layered visualizations; both often rely on interlacing light to assail the viewer. The visualization of the sonic experience can also be found in Sodeoka's rhythmic multiplication of objects within an otherwise still frame, and in the alternately sustained or jittering movements of this miscellany in response to recorded sound. This accompanying musical component is a primary element in Sodeoka's work, as opposed to being an incidental addition onto the visuals.

The high-voltage shock of Bloodless, Empty Socket, for instance, exemplifies Sodeoka's compression of bleeding color and image so that the undulating electronic sounds seem to direct the visuals. As the screen flares up into quickened heartbeats of venous blue and arterial red, a low reverb seems to circle inwards. Against the abstraction, images are revealed in a subliminal volley of detonations, Illuminati symbolism, and barely decipherable suggestions of a world that exists between the eye and the digital sphere of computer and television screens. Striations of colour, visions of laced acid, struggle into view as the oscillating sounds of Bloodless, Empty Socket evoke alien voices, flickering channels, and finally, photographic evidence of the human gaze. As an X-ray skull blinks across the image, the soundtrack makes fleeting reference to musical organization and harmony. Sodeoka's visualizations gasp for clarity in the same pattern as the rise and fall, fade and emergence of the sound. In its own harmony with the conclusive drone, the turbulence comes to rest in the form of an electric orb--an all-seeing eye, an inhuman gaze, vacuous and overwhelming.

Universe / Calibration

Sodeoka’s videos may at times appear deceptively simple -- almost child’s play with their shimmering orbs, splashes of watercoloured pixels and gleaming lines that appear to indiscriminately cut through the frames. An initial glance at the video Universe / Calibration divulges not much more than an inexplicable ring hovering in a stream of fluorescent clouds. There appears to be no narrative, yet Sodeoka manipulates the quizzical, eerie qualities of psych visuals to, again, create a spatial experience where the video's sound defines the progress in the viewer's approach toward the object.

Divested even from the interpretive potential of the accompanying Sibyl videos, Universe / Calibration relies on musical tropes to express a self-containing symbolism through the choice of vocals and wooden instruments. Sodeoka assigns significance to his objects with sonic allusions to ritual and awe, worship and incantation. The meditative quality of Universe / Calibration allows Sodeoka to create a video of mystical development with an absolute minimum of event. A synchronization of stuttering light and sound further implies the potential ominous role of the hovering circle, or perhaps the disbelief of the approaching viewer; magical qualities are imagined by the increasing urgency and interruptions of the soundtrack -- and yet, Sodeoka's video contains no such nuanced narrative that can be taken independently of this development in the sound. The representational simplicity in Sodeoka's visuals is more often a method to explore these relationships between moving images and sounds, from within the artist's preferred psychedelic aesthetic.

Sound Fragmentation in Sodeoka's Animation

The cross-pollination of visual and sonic elements in Sodeoka's work often responds to the role that technology has in creating cultural artifacts. While not aggressive in exploring this discourse, the scope of Sodeoka's projects includes questions on how the technical execution of animated videos can manipulate a viewer's connection to the significance of the original content, as well as how tense distortion can amplify expression in even the most abstracted works.

Discourse around the role of technology in the preservation of memory—be it of an explicitly historic, personal or artistic context—is present in some of Sodeoka’s earlier work. In an interview with Triangulation, Sodeoka explains that his visual work derives from elements that are unique to computers. One such tendency is his use of RGB color schemes of a computer, which are created by artificial lights and are not experienced in the same way through natural vision. In his audio work, he exploits the corruptible nature of technology for aesthetic and conceptual purposes, creating the potential for meaning in the both the original content and the processed disruption.

The recent collaborative Algo-Rhythms exhibition at Sonos Studio (NYC) featured Yoshi Sodeoka’s animation ASCII ROCK, which is one half of a mini-series that is completed by ASCII BUSH. The Sonos exhibition was curated around the exploration of perceptual and participatory aspects of sound, including the ways in which sound can be experienced visually. While a large part of Sodeoka's videos do explore this relationship, it is equally important to consider the social commentary that is subtly expressed by the artist in the ASCII series. In ASCII ROCK, Sodeoka made use of the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII)--generally seen as a combination of the letters, numbers and symbols on a computer keyboard, but with a long history of being used for more complex imageries. ASCII BUSH, which was not featured at Sonos, presents a broken audio version of two speeches delivered by George W. Bush in 2003 and George H. W. Bush Sr. in 1991--significant historic artifacts that preserve fragments of a destructive agenda, of aggressive political motivations.

In his chosen medium, Sodeoka continues a legacy of digital media artists who use technology to create disruptions of cultural artifacts as they increasingly become localized to bit-form. The visuals of ASCII ROCK and ASCII BUSH first comment on the production of artistic objects and messages through the use of media that was not intended for aesthetic purposes. More specifically, Sodeoka describes the concept behind the two ASCII videos as recontextualizing social "debris" as artistic content. ASCII BUSH is especially clear in affirming a parallel between the corruptibility of the digital form, the subject, the historic significance of his words.

When considering the audio's substance in the ASCII works, the superficial simplicity of these two early videos reveals instead a greater comment on the presumption of fixedness in historically significant events and their memory. The grandiosity of celebrity culture is reduced to the basic ASCII vocabulary: each symbol a primitive pixel, limiting not only the ability to create a complete image, but to assign particular identities and values to the otherwise comical animations. The transformation of the sound in ASCII BUSH similarly results in an absurd displacement and distortion of social symbols, and their perceived significance in personal and public contexts.

This use of fragmented audio--and the methodological emphasis on corruption--is especially powerful in encouraging the audience to reconsider the significance of digitally preserved history—a processed memory that hovers in an intangible void. It is in this way that Sodeoka veers, however momentarily, towards a personal inquiry into the ability for electronic sound and technological disruption to be experienced as criticisms of social mechanisms. By stimulating a schism between the intended meaning of digital artifacts and the meaning that results from being processed through the given technology, Sodeoka reveals a predisposition towards radical principles that are also present in the influences of noise aesthetics on his audio and visual work.

music art film review - REDEFINE magazine

Yoshi Sodeoka Video Artist Interview: Psychedelic Apocalypse in the Digital Realm

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music art film review - REDEFINE magazine

Peaking Lights Band Interview: Deciphering Cosmic Logic

With ever-shifting digital technologies and the slow restructuring of arts consumption and dissemination models, it seems that almost everyone knows an aspiring musician these days. The veiled mystique of what was once an untouchably debaucherous lifestyle is now becoming thinner and thinner. While musicians of decades prior were tasked with demi-god status, now, even the most established acts seem very human as they use social media to share very mundane details about their lives. Thus, the tides of change beg the question: what does it take to "make it" as a musician in this modern day and age?Southern California's Peaking Lights can serve as a fascinating case study for this question – a representation of a new wave of music-makers that look quite unlike those of decades past. Between their personal projects and their production gigs, the husband and wife duo of Indra Dunis and Aaron Doyes does make a living off of their music, but they've paid plenty of dues through years of profitless musical pursuits. And neither is their current rockstar lifestyle particularly glitzy nor glamorous. Touring has become less an exercise in debauchery than it is a family outing; whether throughout North America or Europe, they take a nanny and their two young boys, Mikko and Marlon, along for the ride. This is one face of being an indie musician in the 21st century. In order to survive, one must be adaptable, in one's craft and in one's lifestyle.

Whereas Lucifer was recorded in two weeks in a New York studio, this record is the result of full-time music-making at the duo's new home studio in Los Angeles, where Dunis and Doyes spent a year-and-a-half researching, experimenting, recording, and reviewing their work. They even went as far as creating a minimal and stripped down version of the existing record for comparison, but in the end, the fuller version of the record emerged victorious. It seems that Peaking Lights' transformation from lo-fi to more hi-fi is not a sell-out move so much as it is the result of changing circumstances and revised intentions.

"We intentionally recorded it with more clarity and used the sounds in a different way..." explains Dunis. "I think we also wanted to write shorter songs, and it was sort of a challenge for us to try to write more of a pop song."

Yes, the band's trademark wash of transcendental stonerism might be gone and replaced by more traditional pop music structures, but the fact that it is pop does not make it any less artful. Cosmic Logic is full of fascinating rhythmic moves and is ear candy galore for those who are looking to discover an interesting and unparalleled sonic palette. This time around, the duo really hunkered down and explored their long-standing love for "music that makes you move", by focusing extra intensively on rhythms and basslines, and by custom-making almost every drum sound on the record.

"[It's mostly homemade synths] that I rewired, and noise machines that I made. I took Indra's drum set and I recorded her kick drum from a live set, so I took the attack from one and the decay from another and kind of mixed them together, and then took other sounds and kind of layered them in with it," Doyes says.

"Some of the more noisy sounds that we've used on our previous recordings, we used as more rhythmic sounds rather than more atmospheric sounds," Dunis adds. "We were sort of experimenting with a lot of the same kind of gear, but in a different way."

In that manner, Cosmic Logic builds off of the band's past, both musically, thematically, and spiritually. One can look towards the album title as another prime example. Cosmic Logic just came into Doyes' mind one day.

"[At first,] we were spelling it C-O-S-M-I-C-K... I ran it through the numerology calculator, and it didn't come out as anything significant," he recalls. It was then that Dunis suggested they spell the word in its original form. "We did, and then it came out to 936, and 936 was an earlier record that we did, so we're like, 'Oh, we gotta use that.' It was just random coincidence."

"It's cosmic logic," Dunis adds, laughing.

Similarly, titling for 936 emerged from a traditional work day. During a one-hour commute to work years ago, Doyes joked that most 9-to-5ers would be ready to trudge back home by 9:36 in the morning. What started out as a random comment soon became another numerological example of playful ol' "cosmic logic", which unravels in ways that slowly become meaningful over time.

"It started developing into more things," Doyes says. "9 is the number of humanity; 3 is the number of creation, and 6 is kind of the number of family and balance of two things, like the six-sided star or something, with the positive and negative aspects of something, and of being in balance. And then when you add them together, it comes out to 9, which is [again] the number of humanity."

On Cosmic Logic, Peaking Lights decided to deliberately incorporate themes and ideas that are universal and relatable. As usual, they wrote their lyrics late in the process, after all of the songs had melodies, and then bounced ideas back and forth so that there was a lot of intermixed collaboration. This time around, thanks to an inspiring conversation with Sonic Boom from Spacemen 3, the duo decided to include idioms and metaphors throughout the record, resulting in songs that are a combination of expectedly cryptic and strikingly obvious, as though mirroring such duality in the cosmic universe.

Of the more obvious tracks is "New Grrrls", which is a "new take on feminism or a personal take on feminism," according to Dunis, who began playing drums during the Riot Grrl movement of the early '90s.

"[It's] reflecting back on that and where I am now, and how there's a lot of things that still need to change for women. Still a lot of things, still a lot of issues," says Dunis. "That one's actually less about the idioms and metaphors; that one is actually pretty straightforward, and that's pretty unusual for us to be so straightforward, but I feel like the subject needed that."

Other lyrical themes may be less obvious, or may apply a universal idea to many circumstances or situations. "Breakdown" is about "being on the edge of losing it", and "Hypnotic Hustle" is about the "hustle of trying to follow your dreams, and the ups and downs of that." In general, Cosmic Logic is intended to be open-ended, and Peaking Lights haven't shied away from doing what they please. Album opener, "Infinite Trips", was a last-minute add-on that was jammed out in twenty minutes as a punk-style recording, and while the song may be seem out of out of place -- "Like, what? Are we a garage band again?" jokes Dunis -- that was 100% the idea. Peaking Lights wanted to kick the record off on an unusual note as the rest of the record gained in clarity, only to end it again on a similarly confusing note; the last track, the mellow and lullaby-like "Tell Me Your Song", sounds more like a lost cut from 936 or Lucifer than one constructed newly for the new record.

These types of playful moves and expressions are the foundation for Cosmic Logic, and may not be immediately understood or appreciated by everyone. In a humorously striking example, Pitchfork reviewer Stuart Berman suggested that "Telephone Call" was a "dumbstruck" commentary on modern communications, when in fact the song's meaning could not be more different.

As a very amused Dunis explains, "It's kind of more of the idea of – sort of ties into Cosmic Logic, too – being open to messages from anywhere, from the universe, and opening your heart and mind to those things."

Just as the universe speaks in beautiful scrambles, so does Cosmic Logic.

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music art film review - REDEFINE magazine

Peaking Lights Band Interview: Deciphering Cosmic Logic

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music art film review - REDEFINE magazine

Top Albums of the Year 2014: Staff Picks

Vivian Hua - dance, indie, pop, psychedelic, electronic
Troy Micheau - metal, electronic, experimental, ambient
Jason Simpson - pop, soul, electronic, ambient
Ian King - electronic, ambient, instrumental, pop
Peter Woodburn - ambient, metal, garage, indie
Judy Nelson - dance, electronic, indie, pop, hip-hop

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music art film review - REDEFINE magazine

Top Albums of the Year 2014: Staff Picks

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music art film review - REDEFINE magazine

Album Covers of the Year 2014 Interviews

music art film review - REDEFINE magazine

Album Covers of the Year 2014 Interviews

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music art film review - REDEFINE magazine

Best Live Shows of the Year 2014: Holocene Staff Top Picks

2014 was an amazing time for music, and this year, rather than asking the Gina Altamura and Van Pham of the interdisciplinary Portland venue and nightclub Holocene to list their favorite up-and-coming Portland musicians, we decided to give them the opportunity to highlight their favorite shows of 2014, both local and international. The dynamic result is not exclusively Holocene-centric, and definitely gives ample nods to Portland's experimental music scene.

PHOTO: SZA @ Holocene, Courtesy of Red Bull Sound Select
SEE ALL POSTS RELATED TO: PORTLAND MUSICIANS + HOLOCENE PORTLAND

Pop + Puppetry + Beady Little Eyes Present: PWRHAUS, Sara Jackson Holman, Mojave Bird @ Holocene (August 7th, 2014)

This year I became aware of a very robust and vibrant artistic community of puppet artists in Portland and was immediately fascinated by their creations. I found their whimsical creative energy so inspiring that I asked the wonderful Katie McClenahan of Beady Little Eyes to help me curate a show pairing live music with puppetry. Artists PWRHAUS, Sara Jackson Holman and Mojave Bird were paired up with puppet artists of various mediums for a dazzling audiovisual experience, with original puppet shows specifically tailored to each act's set. Tiny puppet shows using overhead projectors, handheld puppet figures with elaborate costumes and shadow puppetry utilizing live dancers were all incorporated in the show. It was an enchanting evening for audience, puppeteers and musicians alike, and it really did feel as though the combination of the two artistic disciplines helped both to achieve a new and deeper resonance. - Gina Altamura

How To Dress Well @ Holocene (August 25th, 2014)

We've hosted avant-garde R&B auteur Tom Krell several times, and it's always a great pleasure. His performance this time around was part of his tour for his exquisite new album What is this Heart?, and proved to be my favorite incarnation of his live show yet. The set was highly orchestrated with a backing band, with live strings and percussion. Wall-to-wall projections made for an immersive visual experience as well. His video artist had essentially crafted a built-in light show, with strobes, spotlights and other effects built right into the projections, which were pointed right on to Krell and flooded the stage around him. At the center of it all, as ever, were Krell's heartrending vocals. he stood as usual in front of two mics: one mic distorted, one mic crisp and clean (used for both story and song, as his onstage banter is a thing of beauty), and bounced between the two with passion and grace. - Gina Altamura

Tim Hecker @ Lincoln Performance Hall for TBA Festival (September 14th, 2014)

Hats off to the folks at PICA for a week of what might have been my favorite musical stacking they've pulled off for the performance festival: OneohtrixPointNever, Arca, Liz Harris, and THEESatisfaction (among an array of other performances and installations). This was Tim Hecker's first time in Portland and the anticipation was grand; I can't remember the last time I've waited in a proper line to go see a show, much less one this experimental in nature. Alongside the music, I was pleased that the show was situated in the black box of Lincoln Performance Hall, the audience all but disembodied, with just the faintest light outlining Hecker at the helm of din and drone. The darkness in the room was its own silent performer for the evening - suspending a view of our surroundings left more energy for the crowd to feel their way around what was happening sonically, and to chase trails of audio in the same way we might've experienced imagined shapes in the low lighting. It was not unlike the fleeting nature of all the thoughts that swim in your field of perception during a group meditation, and Hecker was a fantastic guide. - Van Pham

SZA @ Holocene (October 7th, 2014)

The young R&B songstress Solana Rowe, aka SZA, is tremendously talented. Our entire staff had been buzzing about her debut LP, Z, for some months, and it was absolutely a dream come true to host her at Holocene, in partnership with Red Bull Sound Select. The first woman to be signed to Kendrick Lamar's Top Dawg Entertainment label, she not only holds her own within the boys club, she outshines just about everybody. Her radiant smile, down-to-earth nature and genuine warmth were infectious qualities that night, as a packed house fell in love with this up-and-coming star. Prior to soundcheck, I had gone to show her to her private green room, and Solana responded with a humble little giggle, “oh, I'm not much of a green room person.” Sure enough, much of her time not on stage was spent chatting and taking pictures with fans. If you ever have a chance to see SZA perform live (with her extremely talented 5-piece band behind her, no less), don't sleep on it. - Gina Altamura

PHOTO: SZA @ Holocene, Courtesy of Red Bull Sound Select

Slowdive, Low @ Crystal Ballroom (November 5th, 2014)

SO GOOD. Maybe this is something of a check-one-off-the-list concert, but it's satisfying nonetheless to get enveloped in the deliciously '90s shoe-gaze sounds of Slowdive (complete with seizure-inducing projections that fit the kind of dated vibe). Of the recent reboots of Creation Records acts, this was the most exciting for me - Souvlaki has gotten me through a lot of long drives and heartaches, so the sentiment factor was high for this concert, and it didn't disappoint! - Van Pham

(Various regrets/aka shows in Portland I had in my calendar that I wanted to see but didn't for various reasons: Fear of Men, Madalyn Merkey, Kevin Drumm, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. I'm sorry, self.) - Van Pham

music art film review - REDEFINE magazine

Best Live Shows of the Year 2014: Holocene Staff Top Picks

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music art film review - REDEFINE magazine

Psychoactive Soundscapes: The Trippiest Psychedelic Albums of 2014

(Editor's Note: The focus of this article represents only one writer's opinion on the multi-varied world of psychedelic music, with a focus on his tastes in metal and hip-hop. We dare not otherwise quantify what complements psychedelic states in a more over-arching absolute way! Enjoy, and you can also see past installments of Psychoactive Soundscapes here!)

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15. Helms Alee - Sleepwalking Sailors (Sargent House) __ Recreational

Despite being one of the best live bands in Seattle, I must confess that Helms Alee's previous two outings were only really great in small doses, which I tend to geek out on 3 or 4 songs before getting bored and moving on. Granted, those 3 or 4 songs are genius – but this is their first album that slays all the way through, and weirdly, it works not necessarily because of the monumental amount of fuzz cascading through Ben Verellen's self-made amplifiers, but more because of the increased focus on songwriting. And that'd be the thing; you've just got to give points for originality. I honestly don't know what other band sounds even sort of like Helms Alee. It's like sludged out stoner surf rocky indie metal/pop with 3 sets of alternating male and female vocals who all growl and croon in equal measure. There are even some melodic Pollardian micro-songs tying the more brutal cuts together. Nothing like it out there, and it gets a few bonus points for: a. having the hottest/most talented drummer in the known universe (who also sings and plays guitar in the band Lozen) and b. because Verellen is also a drummer who put out another fantastically debauched album in 2014 with Constant Lovers, on the predictably solid Good to Die label. Also worth checking out.

14. Ex Astra - Ex Astra (Self-Released) __ Ritualistic

I know very little about New York's Ex Astra, other than that I had a conversation with one of the guys in the band early in 2014, and he forwarded me a link to a bunch of Dr. Strange comics from the '70s. That always wins points, but lots of people forward me their music and I only write about the shit that's both excellent and trippy, which Ex Astra certainly is in equal measures. Great music to wig out to, and not the sort of strain that compels the listener to ignore their dark side, but rather the sort that inspires growth-inducing shadow work. While not brutal, metally, or confrontational in any way, there's a dark beauty coursing through this disc's Middle Eastern scale work, ethereal female vocals, echoing guitars, and table-heavy drum meditations. It approximates the aura of a star-filled winter night sky rather than a sunny summer day at the beach. Certain minor key, Eastern-influenced sounds effectively invoke a sensation of spiritual awe or what King Missile appropriately referred to as "Mystical Shit" back in the day. This is an entire album of that feeling – like you're continually on the verge of piercing through the veil of higher understanding. If I was going to take bong rips and meditate while sitting in the lotus position, I'd just throw these jams on and lose myself to the feeling. Come to think of it, I'm not sure why I'm not doing that right now.

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12. Run the Jewels - Run the Jewels 2 (Mass Appeal) __ Recreational

I've said it once, and I'll say it a million times; El-P basically ruined hip-hop for me back in 2002 when he dropped Fantastic Damage. It sounded roughly a decade ahead of its time both lyrically and production-wise and made all the bling rap bullshit surrounding it in the mainstream seem beyond embarrassing. As El rightfully declares on RTJ2, "Every bar of that bitch shit you spit is your fucking prison." Word. 2014 was the year that the mainstream finally caught up to Jaime Meline, and thank fucking god. It's incredibly appropriate that Rage Against the Machine's Zach De La Rocha guests here because this album often gives off the exact same vibes that made RATM so great back in the '90s: preaching about the inherent corruption of our economic system while simultaneously making your head nod uncontrollably. Just try and listen to RTJ2 (or "The Battle of Los Angeles", for that matter) without involuntarily popping your neck back and forth and raising your hand in a Black Panther gesture of solidarity. It's impossible. The saddest thing about Rage is that they broke up right before W. weaseled his way into office (i.e. at the exact moment we needed them most). The good news is the RTJ made the perfect protest album at the perfect time, which seemed almost prescient. The fact that they ended up in on tour in St. Louis on the very night the bullshit grand jury verdict for Darren Wilson was delivered is beyond synchronous.

Now the bad news: As high as this album soars at times (with say, "Oh My Darling Don't Cry", which is one of the best tracks ever made period), I personally didn't find it to have the replay value of previously produced El-P LP's. It sort of pumps you up with the first four tracks and then fails to maintain the same energy throughout, but this probably also has to do with the frequency with which I listened to Cancer 4 Cure, R.A.P. Music, and RTJ1 in the last 2 years. I suppose that's my way of telling you to go pick up all of those albums stat. And does it lose a few points for that "dick in her mouth all day" song? Yeah, it absolutely does. Sorry.

11. Earth - Primitive and Deadly (Southern Lord Records) __ Ritualistic

To tell you the truth, Earth's last few mellow albums were both an incredible execution of vision while simultaneously not being something I found myself wanting to spin very often. For longtime heroin addicts, I had to respect the effect they created, which was very much in tune with the psychoactive properties of that particular drug in that they gave you the auditory sensation of nodding off blissfully without any of the painful withdrawals. But therein lies the problem. After about the third time I put on The Bees Made Honey in the Lion's Skull and found myself falling asleep within 15 minutes, I had to resolve to not listen to it in any circumstances where I had to get anything done. It just isn't actually very often when I want to willfully fall asleep while listening to music.

Which is why this album's return to heavier, more distorted territory works so well as it keeps the glacial pacing of their tracks from unintentionally sending me off to dreamsville. Oh, and vocals, by people like the legendary Mark Lanegan and the crazy talented Rabia Shaheen Qazi from Rose Windows, who threw down on the album's finest track, "From the Zodiacal Light". It's amazing what a little bit of songwriting chops can bring to the table, and it wasn't until I bought this that I realized, wow, I now have like 7 Earth albums in my collection. I can resoundingly say that this is the best of those albums, which is quite a statement from a band that's been around over 20 years and done enough drugs to kill a small planet. I'm sure Randall Dunn's production (he always seems to have his hand in at least something on this list) has a great deal to do with how excellent this all turned out.

10. Mastodon - Once More 'Round the Sun (Reprise Records) __ Recreational

2014 will also go down as the year metal gods Mastodon released their finest album to date while simultaneously alienating half their fanbase. You know what I think Mastodon's second best album is? The Hunter. Me and the 'Don clearly have similar tastes, which I think could probably be best demonstrated by the unbelievably awesome album art they chose for this beast (Editor's Note: Created by the amazing Skinner; see our interview with him here), as well as the fact that their music has been continually progressing towards more melodic/trippy territory for years. The problem with that, of course, is that a ton of their fans would love to see them get bleaker and more growly. I've even seen people on Facebook straight-up bash their new direction and boldly point out that they peaked with 2004's Leviathan. Funny story on that. Because I was grooving on this album so much, I threw on Leviathan at some point in 2014 and found myself pretty "meh" about the whole endeavor. Lord, the whole "80's thrash metal is awesome" thing that was going on in the early 2000s. No, that shit always sort of sucked. Sorry. It's white trashier than most country and nu metal being terrible wasn't really a reason to resurrect it, but Mastodon got their start riding that train and thankfully decided to move onward to bigger and better things.

I don't blame them at all. Having played in an angry metal band for 4 years and spending a ton of my time focusing my psychic energy on all the things that pissed me off about society, I can decidedly say that the whole exercise was demonstrably terrible for my mental health. Maybe Mastodon started sensing that as well. Your art is an extension of your persona and from a magickal perspective, songs with a chorus of, "This time, This time, Things will turn out just fine" could actually be used as a banishing ritual for a clever mage. It'd work particularly well for the person who wrote it. Anywho, I do find it more than odd that the metal police have turned on these guys for gasp, writing better songs. It's not like Once More' Round the Sun isn't heavy. It's pulverizingly freaking heavy. It's just that they also thrash out in some major keys and you can sing along to it too. How terrible. Death to knuckle-dragging meatheads who say dumb shit like, "Death to false metal".

9. Saiga - Steppenlord (Self Released) __ Recreational

I can't believe I'm actually saying this, but the stoner and doom metal genres have gotten so saturated in the last decade that even I'm sort of getting to the point where I'm a bit bored with it all. Don't get me wrong; I'll gladly listen to even a run-of-the-mill doom or stoner metal band over pretty much anything considered "indie rock" in this day and age, but simultaneously, there's certainly a bit of undeniable stagnation going on in those scenes. Which is why Saiga is a breath of fresh air, as according to their Bandcamp page, their music "contains lots of genres, all of them stoned" -- which I have to admit is a pretty fair assessment. It's not like these dudes are reinventing the wheel with their weeded out instrumetal, but they do it with an undeniable verve lacking in most of what could be considered stoner rock these days.

The fact of the matter is, this shit destroys from the jump. Choppier than a sailboat ride in a hurricane, and you know what, it's also just fucking fun. The prototypical rehashed Sleep riffs are all there, but contorted in clever new configurations that never would have occurred to your average Sabbath-worshipping basement dweller. The guitar tone is sick. The rhythm section air tight. Everything fits together exactly as it should, and you know what, I'm glad there's no dude yelping about dragons and wizards and bunch of other D&D bullshit on top of it. The guitars continually bending spaceward are more than enough to compensate for the lack of vocals. This is one of the more promising debuts I've heard in a while, and only time will tell whether their unique brand of psychedelic Prague rock can be kept in Czech… or if they'll find a wider audience outside their home country. I apologize heartily to anyone that just read that last sentence.

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Guided By Voices - Cool Planet / Motivational Jumpsuit Guided By Voices Inc. __ Recreational

Yeah, yeah. I know, Guided By Voices aren't a psychedelic band by most forms of conventional measurement. True -- but at the same time Robert Pollard is weirder than probably everyone else on this list combined. Let's review. Since reforming the "classic lineup" of GBV in 2012, they managed to put out 6 full-length albums and an EP before breaking up again a mere two years later. And the thing is, excluding the inaugural inconsistency of Let's Go Eat the Factory, they're all pretty solid. The common knock is that these guys peaked 20 years ago, but I don't really see it. I dig the new shit just as much and fuck, what else do you want from a band you're a fan of? 6 goddamn new albums. Watching Bob talk shit about this astounding feat on stage in Seattle last summer was priceless.

An absolute master of the cut-up approach to making art, Pollard's hyper-productivity has spawned a whole new level of meta-strangeness in that nearly all his hardcore fans make cut-up mixes of their favorite tracks, which I had never actually done before 2012. 2014 marked the year I made my second 23 song album of GBV hits solely from their output from 2013-2014 alone, called English Motivational Planet. Of course, this is the second greatest hits album of their stuff I've made now, so in just what these guys did from 2012-2014, I've now assembled 2 separate 23 song greatest hits collages just to make sense of it all. And it's not like these dudes are programming beats; they're writing Surrealist pop songs. Unbelievable, and 2014 also marked the year Pollard released EAT 10, the tenth and best edition of his collage art in graphic novel format. Listen to Motivational Jumpsuit and Cool Planet (Cool Planet is slightly better in my mind) back-to-back while thumbing through that slowly, and you'll be wandering into a foreign dimension of exquisite inner weirdness, I promise.

Seven That Spells - The Death and Resurrection of Krautrock: IO (Sulatron Records) __ Ritualistic

Seven That Spells is a band that I don't honestly know that much about other than that they're simultaneously amazing, from Croatia, and describe themselves by saying shit like:

"Beyond. We are the dogs of the western Jazz society looking for dope."

Despite the fact that this album is touting itself as krautrock, what makes it so exceptional is that they're not just trying to rehash Can or Neu! albums like a lot of their retro-minded contemporaries. While not really metal in any discernable way, they do seem to be a bit metal-ish just in terms of the chops necessary to pull this shit off. The first tune starts with a Middle Eastern-hued wormhole riff pattern that repeats itself a thousand or so times while the rhythm section does calculated acrobatics behind it. A lot of psychedelic rock and culture in general gets pegged as being lazy (which it often is), and what makes this great is its extreme level of focus and precision. Even when they're veering into ambient chanting passages, nothing lingers too long or seems out of place. It's just a manner of guiding the listener's trip through various roller coaster dives into the blissful enchantment that lives where prog and trance collide.

This album is so good I actually bought another one of theirs, which almost reminds me of a Boredoms drum circle noise extravaganza. One circular track feeding on itself like a serpent eating its tale for nearly an hour. Ahh, you've got to love the information age. These guys have roughly 5 other full lengths I'm now going to have to procure at some point, and they seem like the type of act that's just going to continue to flood the market. Krautrock is over; Croat rock's the new thing. I thought you people knew.

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4. Hail Mary Mallon - Bestiary (Rhymesayers) __ Recreational

Also coming from a dimension comprised entirely from batshit lyricism and tripped out sci-fi effects come Hail Mary Mallon, the pairing of Aesop Rock, Rob Sonic, and DJ Wiz. Shit is so far beyond mind blowing its essentially indescribable. The funny thing is, I never would have known this bastion of divine madness even existed if not for following Aes on Twitter (@Thad_McKraken; follow me) and seeing some posts. Never even heard of Rob Sonic before, but wow, do the 2 make a formidable duo who finish each other's absurdist non-sequiturs with a preternatural ease. There are so many arcane references and inside jokes running through this beast you'll take away new mesmerizing trinkets on every run through, and that'd be the thing. I went from liking this to having it suck me in and consume my entire unconscious process for a period of about 3 weeks straight. Powerful hypnotic linguistics afoot in the HMM camp, to say the least. The scratching clinic put on by DJ Wiz puts the whole package well over the edge of incredible.

In my mind, this is the best thing Aesop Rock has ever done, and I went out and bought a Rob Sonic disc because of it as well. While cool, what separates this project is the level of hilarity and self-deprecation, which works well for both of MC's. Most rappers throw down about money and women; these guys talk smack about how they can out weird you any day of the week, or as Sonic puts it at one point: "protocol overall is lederhosen." Even the skit that ties the disc together, which I normally hate in rap albums, is brief and funny enough that it adds to the flow rather than dragging it down. Also, just look at that album cover. I've seen that exact shit on mushrooms. Same color scheme and everything. Just sayin'.

Earthling Society - England Have My Bones (Riot Season) __ Ritualistic

Any band that starts off an album with an 11-minute track named after a channeled discarnate entity (Aiwass) is going to win points with me. A band that starts off an album with a track named after a freaky discarnate entity that actually sounds like something you'd play to summon a freaky discarnate entity is going to end up being one of my faves of the year, no problem. England's Earthling Society: yet another band who have apparently put out a ton of records and been around for over a decade that I'm just now catching on to. I can't speak for their entire discography, but this album is all kinds of awesome. It's not really much more than prototypical neo psych jam band stuff, but thankfully, they don't skimp on things like Sonic Youth-style noise guitar blasts and overly affected vocals. The thing that's really odd about this album actually is that while being mainly in the background and indecipherable, the vocals really do add an atmospheric layer of import to the package that elevates it to the higher stratospheres of pleasantly disorienting. A lot of variety, too. No two tracks truly sound that much alike, but they all go on forever and give off the exact vibes of ritualistic higher dimensional spirit summoning. If you were to say, set aside a day to take massive amounts of hallucinogens in an attempt to make contact with your holy guardian alien, this album will get you about as close as it gets.

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The Future Sound of London - Environment five (FSOLdigital) __ Ritualistic

Remember when people were getting all excited about that new Daft Punk album and I was like, what, that mediocre group from the '90s? Then people were freaking out about the new Aphex Twin, and don't get me wrong, I love the Richard D. James album and the Selective Ambient Works stuff as much as the next guy, but I also have a few other albums by him that are passable at best. Haven't even picked up Syro yet because of that. On the other hand, the one electronic act from the '90s that I hold in almost godlike regard is The Future Sound of London. Seriously, if you like psychedelic music of any variety and don't own the "holy trinity" of FSOL albums that is Lifeforms, ISDN, and Dead Cities, just go download those now. No really. Absolute freaking classics. Untouchable stuff.

As a matter of fact, 2014 marked the 20th anniversary of the aforementioned Lifeforms, and me randomly stumbling on an article about that lead me to the ontologically jarring news that they were releasing an entire album of new material a month later, their first since Dead Cities. What I eventually found out however, is that this being their first album of new material is a bit of misnomer, as it's called Environment 5, after all. Yeah, it's the 5th in a series but the others all included at least some radical reconfigurations of previously released material or something to that effect. I don't entirely get it either, but what I do get is that 2014 was essentially the year I realized that one of my all-time favorite artists had 5 albums I'd never heard.

But wait, there's more. Yeah, I also found out that what I thought was their final disc, The Isness, was actually only released as an FSOL album in the US for marketing purposes and was supposed to come out under their alter ego Amorphous Androgynous, which explains a lot. as it didn't sound much like their prior stuff. And oh hey, they released 2 albums under the AA name in 2013 as well, so yeah, essentially 7 new albums by these guys since 2007 after a 5-year hiatus. There are reasons bands have record labels, and me not knowing about any of this until a few months ago is that reason.

Is Environment five good? Yeah, it's freaking amazing, but so are all the Environments discs. So are the other 2 Amorphous Androgynous albums I didn't know existed, but the reason this is the number 1 album of the year actually has to do with how it caps the series. One day, I was working on some writing and made a nearly 5-hour playlist of Environments 1-5 in order. What's fascinating is how 5 not only fits in, but simultaneously sort of pulls all its predecessors together like the rug that tied Lebowski's room together. I wasn't actually expecting that at all, but when it finally came on, I was mesmerized.

Man, listening to the Environments series from start to finish in 1 or 2 sittings is a surefire way to transport yourself to surreal realms of inner contemplative astonishment. Highly recommended and what I mean by that is: get high and try it when you have 5 free hours to zone out. 20 years after dropping the ambient masterpiece that is Lifeforms, FSOL still sound a few decades ahead of their contemporaries thus living up to their cocky moniker by continuing to make raw shit for the heads for all the right reasons. The more things change, the more they stay the same, I suppose. The main difference is that now these guys are far more productive then they ever were in their supposed '90s heyay. Who knew?

www.fsoldigital.com

music art film review - REDEFINE magazine

Psychoactive Soundscapes: The Trippiest Psychedelic Albums of 2014

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