REVIEWED BY: BRYCE TAYLOR RUDOW • (HYG) DC
When I was first assigned to review “Reach For The Dead” by Boards of Canada, I honestly had no idea what I was getting myself into. Knowing nothing about the band beforehand, I was shocked (and admittedly a bit embarrassed) to find out that the song was the first single from their fourth studio album, with their previous three all having charted in the UK and garnering nearly unanimous critical praise. Apparently, these two Scotsman, Michael Sandison and Marcus Eoin, were two people with whom I should have been better acquainted. So, I spent the following week giving myself a crash course in all things Boards of Canada. Little did I know that this was less of a crash course and more of a tumble down a rabbit hole à la “Alice in Wonderland.”
A lot of people talk about music “taking them on a journey,” but Boards of Canada are on a completely different level. On their first album, “Music Has the Right to Children,” I let the ambient voices of “Turquoise Hexagon Sun,” the Black Moth Super Rainbow influences of “Roygbiv,” and the destined-to-be-rapped-over beats of “Rue The Whirl” introduced me to a world that was both comforting and disorienting all at the same time.
But “Music Is Math,” the leadoff track from their next album, “Geogaddi” (I already checked and it doesn’t translate to anything), showed me that this new Wonderland wasn’t all sunshine and tea parties. Instead, they carved their way through dark, dense sonic landscapes. Even the fairly bright ”Julie and Candy” contorted into something more sinister midway through. Read More
REVIEWED BY: GISELLE CHILDS • (HYG) NYC
Here’s the situation: It’s Monday and I’m still thinking about Sunday’s taco and mimosa-infused brunch; New York City was having an outstanding moment. 80-something degree breezes flew down avenues and I was smiling for 77 different reasons. In fact, I was feeling that particularly rare feeling that–real talk–life truly IS good. But then again, life is all about balance. I knew that I was going to have to come down from that high at some point. Good thing I always have the perfect antidote — he goes by the name of Giraffage.
Giraffage’s trapped-out, sample-based pop will have you feeling nothing but good vibes, so long as he blares from your speakers. But just who is this happiness harbinger? Giraffage (aka Charlie Yin) is, in his own words, a “giant pixel.” (I don’t even know.) Based out of San Francisco, the dude is also one of the most talented music producers I’ve come across in a long time. At only 23 years old, he’s been making music for almost a decade; his first instrument was a drum set, followed by a guitar, and he’s since moved on to using various MIDI controllers for his most recent sounds. Read More
CRITIQUED BY: RUTHIE WILLIAMS • (HYG) LA
For a long time, one of the most important questions in art and culture was “What’s next?” Film was a magic technological innovation that could actually capture motion. The Lumiere Brothers filmed Loie Fuller’s famous and frenetic “Serpentine Dance,” a choreography that projected beyond the body into the constantly moving fluid-like fabrics that enveloped her. As the 20th century progressed, artists continued to push away from the figure. Oskar Fischinger followed in Walter Ruttmann’s footsteps and invested himself in creating Visual Music. The abstract language of his animated films, like Studie No. 5 would later inspire many of the sequences in Disney’s Fantasia.
Over 100 years later, Julien Martorell brings together these modernist influences, combining elegant footage and motion design with Polerik Rouviere’s simple piano score. Piano Works 13 marries clean graceful graphics with the music and the movement of the dancers. The graphic squiggle elements themselves are an abstracted language derived from the rhythm and flow of the music and dance in harmony. The design of the graphics draws from the disciplines of Visual Music and graphic music notation. The graphics serve to isolate and sharpen the eye’s focus on the harmonizing fissure of sound and image. Read More
REVIEWED BY: BRYCE TAYLOR RUDOW • (HYG) DC
Chancelor Barnett, known by his stage name Chance The Rapper, has already been fully ensconced by the proverbial hype machine (and with due cause). He’s seemed to peak the interest of every journalist out there, and I admit to adding my voice to the maddening crowd on multiple occasions, citing his debut mixtape #10Day as one of the best debut mixtapes I’ve heard in a long time and that his latest release, Acid Rap, was going to help shape the future of hip-hop. But throughout all the thousands of words I’ve read describing and praising the 20-year old rapper out of Chicago, the one observation that keeps coming back to me is Nathan Scott’s comparison of Chance to a top-of-his-game Lil Wayne, meaning “a rapper who seems totally taken over by the beat. A rapper who makes it seem like they aren’t even trying… like it is just happening.”
I can’t tell you how many times I played Da Drought 3 when it was released back in 2007, but an aggregated few days of my life were spent being blown away by Weezy’s lyrical venom on that album so I understand exactly what Nate means when he describes the rappers as “possessed”. Each song on Acid Rap oozes an organic self-assurance that allows Chance to pull off dropping into odd voices mid-rhyme, cacophonic outbursts, and absurd analogies that would never work if it wasn’t for the carefree nature with which they were being delivered. Read More
REVIEWED BY: GISELLE CHILDS • (HYG) NYC
Song overdose is dangerous. An introductory listen can send shivers down your spine, causing every neuron of your being to vibrate with instantaneous pleasure. Much like a sugar high, the feeling is addictive and almost impossible to resist. Repeat listens start to pile up, one after another, and pretty soon you’re dancing close to the point of no return. The track then starts to lose its luster. Each subsequent listen brings less joy and more eye rolling. This unfortunate phenomenon is the musical equivalent to the law of diminishing returns in economics. I can (almost) undoubtedly posit that every music fan, at any moment in human history, has hit this wall at some point; and some harder than most. I, for instance, can no longer listen to La Roux’s “Bulletproof” without wanting to test drive my body’s bulletproof limits with an actual gun. In the music world, these are the casualties — the spoils left by the wayside on the path to a brighter star: the album.
CRITIQUED BY: RUTHIE WILLIAMS • (HYG) LA
Nightingales in December is a animated short film by Canadian multimedia artist Theodore Ushev. It is an allusion to T.S. Eliot’s poem, “East Coker,” and a commentary on how industrialization and war distorts humanity, leaving behind nothing but a history of what took place.
It begins with a child waking up to the unnatural combination of birds singing during a snowstorm. The red glow of dawn shines on the child’s face as she jumps out of bed and sits down to look out the window. As the snowy field outside brightens, the window of the house begins to move, and the child and viewer are now both passengers on a train into the past. Black birds perch along telephone lines as we travel across empty fields that call to mind Anselm Kiefer’s post-WWII paintings. The telephone lines become barbed wire and loudspeakers blare across an industrial dystopia, or maybe even a prison camp. It is populated by figures that look like strange humanoid versions of a nightingale – men in plague doctor masks with featherless wings. Read More
REVIEWED BY: AMRO NADDY • (HYG) LA
I’m surprised to find that with a 14% on Rotten Tomatoes AGITMOCSIII was so widely panned. The only thing I didn’t enjoy about this movie was converting its title into an awkwardly long acronym.
A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III tells the story of a bad break-up from the perspective of a brassy, narcissistic graphic designer, Charles Swan. The film observes Swan, played by Charlie Sheen, as his life unravels from romance to meaningless sex, from sociability to loneliness, and above all, endless creativity to blockage. Throughout, Swan putters around mid-1970s Los Angeles complaining about his inability to let go of his ex-girlfriend to his best friend, Kirby Star. Star, portrayed by Jason Schwartzman, appears as a philosophical comedian so famous that by merely illustrating his album cover, Swan was instantly propelled into international design fame. Beyond his emotional woes, Swan is weeks behind schedule on Star’s next album cover, and has no idea how to move ahead.
A Glimpse is a film with a conceit: half of it takes place in the mind of its protagonist. Charles Swan looks at a beautiful woman, she looks back at him seductively, and suddenly her pants magically disappear. Roman Coppola takes us into the imagination of his film’s lead and depicts his dreams, nightmares, and his fantasies. We see what he wants exactly when he wants it and without the requirements of plausibility in his real life. We see his bright, pop-culture–soaked fantasies of beautiful women tormenting him: the spies to his saboteur, the Indians to his cowboy. During Kirby Star’s onstage comedy bit he describes the “S.S.B.B., the Secret Society of Ball Busters”. Whoosh: immediately we are in Swan’s imagination of the S.S.B.B., a dim war room full of 70s-era computers, radars, and women in military-themed stripper outfits detecting and taking vengeance upon the infidelity of men. In its execution, A Glimpse looks and feels like Wes Anderson’s energetically and exquisitely referential The Life Aquatic. Swan is a designer, so his imagination is a place of perfect design: the typography is perfect; the outfits are perfect; the set-pieces are perfect.
It was precisely this conceit that earned this film the scorn of critics, who called it “self-absorbed”, “too long”, and a “dreck sandwich”, despite the “seductive details”. The style isn’t just ornamental, however: it shows us the shallowness of the depths of Swan’s mind, that all he can really engage with is cool typography and beautiful colors as his life falls apart. When Swan remembers a pivotal fight with his ex-girlfriend in a car wash, the camera follows alongside the car as it is lathered with red buffers and sprayed with pink soap. We see Swan shouting, and hear nothing but music: that’s how his memory works, all style and no content, and that’s why he’s doomed to repeat his mistakes.
A Glimpse revitalizes a tradition of story-telling that, from its inception, risks lapsing into self-indulgence. In literature, this is the tradition of Hemingway, Bukowski, and Burroughs, artistic men whose flaws keep them from perfecting their art. In film, it probably begins with Bob Fosse. 1979′s All That Jazz is distinguished by the scenes set in the amphetamine-soaked brain of Bob Fosse’s alter-ego, Joe Gideon, and we watch Gideon wrestle with himself about fidelity and mortality using the language of musicals and dance. This is an unfair thing for me to recommend, but go back and watch the Director’s Cut, and you can see how — had the film not been edited correctly – All That Jazz might not have, you know, won four Academy Awards and been nominated for five more. It’s a great movie, but it’s always about thirty seconds away from being way, way too much. Swan may be creatively blocked, but his character still has an immense imagination and ability to process the world around him through his fantasies. A Glimpse sets down these fantasies to show us the rich and glittery worlds Swan can imagine, as well as the limitations that Swan doesn’t even know he has. We shouldn’t confuse the limitations of the character with the limitations of the film.
CRITIQUED BY: RUTHIE WILLIAMS • (HYG) LA
Modern animation has become something that we’re consistently exposed too. We see it everywhere, everyday, and at times without even realizing it. In a world where car commercials, impossible action sequences, and children’s cartoons are all made with the same computer graphics (CG) software, we expect to see our media slick, smooth, and clean. In actuality, hyper realism is so much of a given that we don’t even blink upon seeing it. Maybe that is why stop motion animation has gained so much popularity within the last few years, with three major features in the medium released this year, and one even being nominated for an Academy Award. The texture of the fabrics and wood grains, the grit and real light that the camera captures, and the toy-like appeal of the puppets make stop motion animation feel a little more strange and magical when you watch it.
Perhaps this explains the emotional response inspired by a stop motion short depicting the strangeness that children see in the elderly and the magic that can be found in broken and cast aside things. In her short film, “My Strange Grandfather,” filmmaker, Dina Velikovskaya, embraces the materiality of stop motion with her sets, puppets, and story. Read More
