Earshot Jazz presents Makaya McCraven at Madame Lou's: Oct 26

Among the numerous variables on all things jazz, this year's Earshot Jazz Festival lineup features one of the prominent voices in the new Chicago scene issuing from the International Anthem label. Featuring two sets, an early and late show at Madame Lou's, percussionist and multi-instrumentalist Makaya McCraven leads his band in their Seattle date on the current west coast tour. McCraven is among a 21st century body of musicians effectively "Rewriting the Rules of Jazz", who have produced bountiful collaborations and an array of top-notch albums. Most notably releases from the aforementioned International Anthem label, New York's Eremite, and the UK's scene represented by Gilles Peterson's Brownswood Recordings have expressed new directions and a willful genre-expansive attitude to the fundamental parameters of what can be considered jazz. McCraven has been a pivotal figure in this Chicago scene since the earliest of the releases issuing from him and a set of regular collaborators heard on his "In The Moment" from 2015. Featuring nineteen rhythmic jams that were born of improvisation, this wasn't a cacophonous free jazz, but instead a new body of groove-oriented spontaneous soul jazz that was culled from 48 hours of recordings spanning 28 shows. A multitude of live chops on display alongside dense processes, synth lines, and rhythmic programming, that album acted as a foreshadowing for the more-intensive studio construction that is his debut for the legendary Blue Note label.

This meeting of a new scene and sound, with the longest running legacy in American jazz is the locus of the New York Times "Makaya McCraven Sees the Future of Jazz Through Layers of History" feature on the musician, and their wider overview, "Chicago and Jazz at Play, Ideally.". His interview for The Guardian, "‘Evolution is Part of Tradition’: Musician Makaya McCraven on the Future of Jazz" maps the last decade in which McCraven cemented his status as one of the most individual voices in contemporary jazz, pioneering his technique with a group of local collaborators to create the albums, "Universal Beings", "Highly Rare", and his astute reconfiguration of Gil-Scott Heron, "We're New Again", straddling improvisation and influences culled from neo-soul, and hip hop's mentality and approach to sample splicing. All of which became more explicit on his deeper foray in beat sciences with the "Ingenious Hard-bop Homage" of 2021's "Deciphering the Message". The album contributes another facet to McCraven's growing discography; the ability to assimilate and reconfigure some of the legendary height's of jazz past, into a liquid, changeable new form of his own making. Which is also expressed more obliquely in its immediate follow-up, the lush homage to the 1970s elegiac orchestrations of that era, what The Guardian called "A Generous Unspooling", heard on "In These Times". Four new collaborative EPs are on the horizon featuring Jeff Parker, Josh Johnson, Ben LaMar Gay, Theon Cross, and Jeremiah Chiu to be released later this year on the vanguard Nonesuch Records.

The Grand Illusion Cinema presents All Monsters Attack: Oct 2 - 31 | The Month of Scarecrowber at SIFF Cinema: Oct 7 - 28

For the first time in nearly two decades, Seattle's annual Halloween season cinema offerings will not have a central locus at The Grand Illusion Cinema in the University District. This year, their sister organization, the one-of-a-kind 150,000 title resource in that is Scarecrow Video launched their Sustain Our Scarecrow campaign. Wherein the last video store and film archive of its kind in the world is at a pivotal intersection in which, "Scarecrow Video Needs to Raise $1.8M or Face Possible Closure". A nucleus for genre film in the Northwest, annually Scarecrow Video steps up with their curated Halloween section of domestic and international horror, sci-fi, fantasy, and psychotronic selections. Another annual tradition, their Psychotronic Challenge returns now in its tenth installment, challenging viewers to select a new theme category for every day in October from the trivia cues on offer. Similarly, The Grand Illusion Cinema is also in a state of flux as their building has been sold and is imminently to be developed into high-cost housing. "After 53 years, Seattle Theater Maintains its Grand Illusion … for Now, and as such they are in a donation drive to fund their search for a new location. Subsequently this year's edition of their seasonal programming, the incomparable All Monsters Attack, will be hosted at the partner cinemas, Northwest Film Forum, SIFF Film Center, Here-After, and Central Cinema, across the city.

Highlights this year include Henri-Georges Clouzot's arthouse psychothriller, "Diabolique", the annual tradition of the William Kennedy memorial screening of David Cronenberg's body-horror techno thriller, “Videodrome”, and James Whale's classic Universal Monsters franchise entry, "Bride of Frankenstein". There's also the extreme discomfiting physicality of Lucky McKee's cult sleeper, "May", Park Chan-wook's third film in his revenge trilogy on 35mm, a selection of Japanese video and cult horror, and The Sprocket Society's presentation of 16mm gems curated as their Secret Vault of Torment. Independent of Scarecrow and The Grand Illusion, The Beacon Cinema in Columbia City also has a selection of genre and horror on offer. SIFF Cinema's seasonal offerings focusing on disorienting frights, crepuscular surrealism, and discomfiting atmospheres are programmed by the staff at Scarecrow Video, which SIFF have appropriately dubbed the month of Scarecrowber. This year's theme, "When There Is No More Room In Hell, The Dead Will Walk The Earth", features Robert Fuest's absurdist, musical, "The Abominable Dr. Phibes", medieval horrors return in Amando de Ossorio's rarely screened "Tombs of the Blind Dead", Hajime Sato's extraterrestrial enigmas, "Goke, Body Snatcher from Hell", and the gothic, psychedelic, Czech cinema coming of age kaleidoscope of Jaromil Jires' "Valerie and Her Week of Wonders".

Autechre "twentytwentyfive" North American Tour: Oct 1 - 29 | "Anatomy of an Engima: An Interview with Autechre" | The Quietus

Returning to deliver their "Anatomy of an Enigma" that is Sean Booth and Rob Brown's sonic quest to bridge the modernist mid-century traditions of Musique Concrete and pure computer music of INA-GRM and IRCAM, with the multitudinous forms of dance and urban beat music issuing from New York, Chicago and Detroit in the 1980s. Autechre cross the Atlantic this month on the twentytwentyfive domestic tour for the first time since their extensive sojourn in 2015, which included a night in the final installment of Decibel Festival. To witness their live performance of which there will be two at Seattle's The Crocodile, is to be inside of a chimerical three-dimensional sound object suspended in a hyper-delineated stereo field. Less a performance of music broadcast to a receiving body, the listener was instead located within the framework of an exertive, dynamic, ever changing aural-kinetic sculpture. An experience The Guardian called a "A Bombardment of Singular Sounds to Combat the Dark", that The Washington Post similarly referred to as, "Autechre's Maneuvers in the Dark". Their current process has abandoned a degree of the hardware-centric focus of the previous decade's modus operandi, in favor of a complex programming of modules and patches generated within Cycling 74's MaxMSP. Booth and Brown's role is then one of actuating the engineering of the sounds to emerge from these processes into structures, as sculptors of the finely crafted, yet oblique architectural spaces that describe the music.

This hybridization detailed in the audio engineering and music production journal Sound on Sound in 2004, "In Producing their Complex, Abstract Electronic Music, Autechre have Taken the Idea of the Studio as an Instrument to New Extremes" following on the heels of their first 21st century album, "Confield", and it's divisive mid-decade siblings, "Draft 7.0" and "Untilted". This era of their sound producing what appeared to be two schools of thought on their musical output as heard on "Oversteps" and its companion EP, "Move of 10". Drew Daniel of Matmos makes this schisming of the listenership the focus of his interview, as those converted on the first decade of output struggled to adapt to the new developments and abandonment of dance music signifiers within Autechre's work. For many, 2008's "Quaristice" and the companion album of "(Versions)" not only acted as Pitchfork suggests, a return to form, but a balancing of old and new. Along with this, there was an abundance of volume on offer as well, "Quaristice" produced a sonic corpus totaling in at over 5 hours of new music. This move toward works that cycled between assimilation of past gestures and sounds, couched within explorative forays into new territory culminated in 2013's "L-event" and "Exai", which saw "Autechre Looking as Forward as They did Back". At over two hours, the album reinforced the abundant modus of the current phase, which would culminate in what FACT Mag called, "Autechre Bury the post-Club Poseurs in the Digital Dirt" with the release of the sprawling, "elseq 1-5". In rapid succession their assembly of live NTS Session was then followed by the mini-albums "Sign" and "Plus" born of the pandemic years, which the New York Times covered in their, "Autechre Worked in Isolation for Decades. Now it’s Unintentionally Timely."

SWANS "Birthing" & North American Tour with Little Annie: Sept 4 - Oct 7 | "Enduring Love: Why SWANS are More Vital Now than Ever" | The Guardian

In a statement for his Young God Records site, SWANS bandleader Michael Gira announced both their current tour with a Seattle date at The Neptune, as well as the fruition and conclusion of this era of his singular, transcendental, brand of rock music. Having led the outfit through numerous manifestations over the decades since its inception, including a brief phase as the folk ensemble The Angels of Light, change and transfiguration have been one of their great constants of Michael Gira's lifelong music endeavor. The cartography of this four decades-spanning terrain was mapped for Exclaim in Dimitri Nasrallah's "Michael Gira: from SWANS Uncompromising Sound to Ethereal Angels of Light", and in greater detail and intimacy by friends, fellow musicians and peers in Nick Soulsby's recently published oral history of the band, "SWANS: Sacrifice and Transcendence". At the end of their previous incarnation, with the grandiose heights scaled in "Soundtracks for the Blind" and "Swans are Dead", they took celestial ascension and physical bombast to literally epic durations and dynamic magnitude. The post-reform precision and (relative) brevity of 2010's "My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope in the Sky", the more variegated and nuanced "The Seer", the extended forays heard on "To Be Kind", and rapturous hypnoticism of 2016's "The Glowing Man" ascend to, and even expand upon similarly Homeric heights. Following on the hypnotic and repetitive krautock-inspired grooves of 2019's "Leaving Meaning.", in which Gira enlisted Australian avant-jazz luminaries, The Necks, organist Anna von Hausswolff, and Icelandic electronics sculptor, Ben Frost, to enhance their tapestries of sound. The tour for that album was disrupted and eventually cancelled altogether, with Gira releasing a statement about the next work in progress and the fruitful recording sessions held in Germany. The album that came from those sessions, "The Beggar" enlisted many individuals from the band's previous lineups. This arrangement extends to the current iteration found on "Birthing" and was realized by Gira alongside longtime percussionists Larry Mullins and Phil Puleo, Angels of Light bassist and keyboardist Dana Schechter, and mainstays of the band's 21st century incarnation, Kristof Hahn and Christopher Pravdica.

The albums and live performances of this past decade, spanning 2010-2018, were the fruit of an extended, ever-evolving recording process. "A Little Drop of Blood: Michael Gira of SWANS Interviewed" for The Quietus describes the often arduous writing, rehearsal, touring and recording in a dynamic creative systole and diastole. The undertaking of then translating these recorded works to a marathon live experience documented in an interview with Pitchfork of 2014, "Michael Gira Talks about How SWANS Returned without Losing Any Potency". Even more personal and confessional, The Quietus have produced a lengthy interview on the explicitly spiritual, transcendental nature of their live incarnation, "This is My Sermon: Michael Gira of SWANS Speaks". The Observer's "Michael Gira on ‘Dangling Off the Edge of a Cliff’" maps the musical trajectory's Oroborous-like path back to itself, as SWANS of the 21st Century has birthed a supreme amalgam from its own DNA. One that encapsulates the totality of their 40-plus year trajectory. From brutalist no wave minimalism, to musique concrete and extended tonal and drone compositions, to electric rock, psychedelia, blues, folk and Americana. The Guardian's John Doran postulates how it came to pass that SWANS produced the best work of their career so far. Where so many other bands of a similar vintage have retread familiar ground, revisiting the formula of past successes, Gira and company chose to instead stake everything on a fresh roll of the dice. They took a genuine gamble on creating new art rather than trying to recapture past glories and in doing so, they conjured an, "Enduring Love: Why SWANS are More Vital Now than Ever". Of the sonic topography found on this "Dark and Unsettling, Purifying and Beautiful" work on these 21st century albums, Gira has said that "My vision changes according to the unfolding of random events found in the music that we play together", and as with each release before it, "SWANS Just Keep Swimming" towards some unknown and distant horizon. And in this purportedly final iteration, "SWANS ‘Birthing’ Wants and Demands Transformation", bringing the listener through a "A Ritualistic Endurance Test That Demands Attention".

Lankum's “False Lankum” & North American Tour: Sept 26 - Oct 16

In an exceedingly rare west coast appearance, Irish dirge-folk four piece Lankum will be doing a single United States show at Seattle's The Neptune Theatre as the conclusion of a larger Canadian tour the month of October. This multi-instrumentalists outfit comprising Ian Lynch, Daragh Lynch, Cormac MacDiarmada and Radie Peat, had their beginnings in Irish traditional music sessions in Dublin's pubs, with Ian Lynch noting; "this was one of the most inspiring and influential things for Lankum, there would be no Lankum if it was not for the sessions". At these sessions the pair met singer and multi-instrumentalist Radie Peat and violinist Cormac MacDiarmada, stating further; "that’s the circumstances that brought about us in the band… Grim, but having quite a good time”. Their live incarnation during this period has been described by The Guardian as, “Lankum: More Like an Exorcism than a Gig”. From these meetings and a honing of their sound which included a doubling-down on the the drone qualities of traditional Irish folk music, they then by combining them with the edge of their early years playing self-described "crusty punk festivals", and moving beyond a sound of "Dark, Raucous Poetry from Irish Folk Miscreants", to then reconfigure their music with notes of hardcore, the weight of metal and doom, and the hypnotic, repetitive focus of trance music. In doing so, Lankum produced their own strain of "Brilliant, Raw, Detonating Folk", which was further refined into the underground folk breakout of "False Lankum" released on Rough Trade in 2023. Voted Best Album of the Year by The Guardian, Lankum’s Daragh Lynch spoke with the paper on the making of the album, "Lankum: ‘We Finally Nailed What We Wanted to Be’”. Also, in an interview about their fourth album Ian and Daragh Lynch, Radie Peat and Cormac Mac Diarmada spoke with The Quietus about Lankum's ever-intensifying extremities, transcendence through music, and their relationship to folk tradition, "The Sea, The Sea: An Interview With Lankum". In related coverage the band's side-project, ØXN are the first Irish band to be signed to esteemed national folk label Claddagh in 18 years, in "Beers, Steers & Fears", they speak about their stormy rise and announce their debut album "CYRM". Which again, like the fourth Lankum album before it, was rated five stars by The Guardian in their "Irish Folk Debut Full of Unsettling Dark Magic" review. Update: In a cryptically inspecific statement from the band, the tour has been cancelled, citing possible health or safety concerns.

Sextile's "Push" and "Yes, Please" & US Tour: Sept 11 - Oct 11

Returning after an extensive tour earlier this year, in which they opened for Sacred Bones labelmates Molchat Doma, Los Angeles duo Sextile are back on tour to headline a bill at Seattle's The Crocodile. Like much of this current electro and wave-inspired scene, theirs is a style looking back to a bandwidth of music within the goth, synthwave, electro-industrial and early EBM sounds of the 1980s and 1990s. Where Sextile distinguish themselves is in their bridge both the original electro-industrial and EBM sound of that era, along with that of modern raved-up breakcore and jungle rhythms, and the new synth and darkwave revivals that are occurring concurrently. On the two recent albums "Push", and this year's "Yes, Please", their specific amalgamation of these genres is then held together with the adhesive qualities of punk attitude, and matched with an anthemic, lyrical defiance. Yet there is a shared affinity with this new set of darkwave acts which most clearly define their genre and cultural alignment. Inspired by the original wave and post-punk bands of the 1980s, and the balancing act of their particular brand of starkly minimal, angular, existential electronic dance pop of alienation and heartbreak, a new generation of producers have come to the fore. These have been presented in an ideal introduction by The Guardian in their, “‘The Body was the Drums, the Brain was the Synthesiser’: Darkwave, the Gothic Genre Lighting up Pop”. A cross-section of artists within this subgenre, Molchat Doma, The KVB, Xeno & Oaklander, Twin Tribes, She Past Away, Lebanon Hanover, and Boy Harsher, express a spectrum of variations on an aesthetic of darkly romantic, sexually fetishistic, and imperially fatalistic thematic concerns. In describing Boy Harsher's sound as a "moving choker-collar muscle-mash" which "contains a dark power, an atavistic pull", the music press has rightly depicted the central components from which the variables pivot and deviate around. Sextile move closely within these same affinities, with variables of their own, sharing an additional razor-sharp electronic and rhythmic edge with labelmates The Soft Moon and Blanck Mass, as well as such acts as Machine Girl, Pixel Grip, and the defiant electro-industrial noise mania of fellow Los Angeles duo, Youth Code.

Wardruna's "Birna" & North American Tour with Chelsea Wolfe: Sept 4 - 28 | "'The Drum Needed a Blood Sacrifice': The Rise of Dark Nordic Folk" | The Guardian

In "An In-Depth Interview with Wardruna on their Brilliant Norwegian Roots Music" with Louder Than War, Gaal and Einar Selvik characterize their performances as acting as a musical ritual in which they conjure the primal wilderness of the Nordic Bronze Age. Blending the theatrics of elk skin-drums, choral chanting, instruments made of animal bones, Rune stones and amulets, and the resulting conjuring of the past through music is chronicled by The Guardian in their, "'The Drum Needed a Blood Sacrifice': The Rise of Dark Nordic Folk". Sharing a kinship with other pagan ritualistic music of central and northern Europe, like that of Heilung and Danheim, the music of Wardruna belongs to a new strain of dark folk music that draws from traditions in the Bronze, and Norse Age, which the New York Times portrays as, "The Sound of the Vikings, With a Heavy Metal Twist", as it moves to hybridize these traditions into a 21st century neo-gothic sound. The process of approaching the past was described to Revolver Magazine by Christopher Juul of Heilung, "Denmark's Heilung are Creating 'Amplified History' With Human Bones". "In order to connect to what was before," says Juul, "you have to disconnect from what is now.". Speaking with NME, Wardruna's co-founder, Einar Selvik maps their own musical traversing of past and present, "Wardruna Call on ‘the Wisdom of the Past’ to Soundtrack Hit TV show ‘Vikings’". At the time of the interview, having completed an album cycle over the course of seven years with, "Runaljod: Gap Var Ginnunga", "Runaljod: Yggdrasil", and 2016's "Runaljod: Ragnarok", "Norse Code: Wardruna's Runic Trilogy Transformed Norway's Musical Landscape", they remain steadfast in continuing their evolving hybridization of the sounds of an ancient Nordic past, and a new modern music of their own design.

These themes are touched on by The Quietus in their, "The Terror of Stagnation: Gaahl of Wardruna", and "Ragnarok & Roll: Einar Selvik of Wardruna Interviewed", and manifest in the following set of works in 2018's "Skald", and "Kvitravn" of 2021. The two albums resulted in the first major tours of the United States, which took them to Seattle's National Nordic Museum, The Neptune Theatre, and a rescheduled performance at The Moore in late 2021 after the delays of the coronavirus pandemic. This year, Wardruna bring their sonic rituals to Montana's Fire in the Mountains festival and domestic stages across North America with west coast dates in San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle. Their most recent album offers an expansion of the sound heard on "Kvitravn" and the Runaljod trilogy before it, "Birna" bridges their interpretation of Nordic traditional music and a sound not dissimilar to the notable 1980s gothic-inflected orchestral world music of Dead Can Dance. All of the above might lead listeners to perceive Wardruna as purveyors of old ways, from a distant past and culture, yet as plumbed "A Kind Of Magic: Wardruna Teach Us Ourselves Again" their music aspires to help us understand ourselves in the modern world today. Opening for them on this tour will be another modern voice of folk and blues traditions, made hybrid and contemporary in her neo-gothic explorations of the yearning soul, existentialist thought, and a ritualistic kinship with Wardruna's speaking with the natural world. The music of Chelsea Wolfe has acted as a hybridization of gothic rock, blues, folk, doom metal and even recently, electronic subgenres. In recent years the songwriter has "Embracing Her Inner Wisdom" and moved beyond alcohol addiction, discovered new passions, and in her taking of a singular pathless path to her "Gothic Heart", forged a musical amalgamation of all of these forms.

Blood Incantation's "Timewave Zero" & North American Tour: Jul 12 - Aug 7

In just the last two years, the varying threads heard in the sound of Blood Incantation came to be fully realized in a synergy of their affinity for synthesizer and kosmische sounds alongside the death metal and technical proficiency of their earlier work. Producing in the album "Absolute Elsewhere", a maximal music and culmination of all of their broadly heterogeneous styles and forms. This masterful feat of genre fusion found great praise in the pages of The Quietus, and in a rare moment of unrestrained ebullience, The Wire proclaimed; "It belongs on the shelf alongside Pestilence’s "Testimony of The Ancients and Spheres", The Orb’s "UFOrb", and Pink Floyd’s "Wish You Were Here". It’s a goddamn masterpiece". For many, the first awareness of Blood Incantation came with their 2019 Albums of the Year charting, "Hidden History Of The Human Race". This assembly of tracks took their sound into truly progressive, inventive death metal with intermittent passages of song structures and a haunting intergalactic bent to the lyrical themes. Technical and occasionally delirious in its precision, the performances are precise without being flashy, and occasionally ornate in their psychedelia without the encumbrances of gaudiness. Tangents are taken into doom and meditative synth workouts, which then return to death metal riffs and unexpected structural shifts, all executed with assurance. All of the above are considered in their exploration of influences and newly formed manifestations of form by The Quietus, in their "Expanding the Circle: Blood Incantation Interviewed". In recent years with the advent of their "Timewave Zero", the band have leaned harder into the realms of progressive rock and German kosmische which they had previously only hinted at, delivering a work of unadulterated cosmic synthesizer workouts with 2023's, "Luminescent Bridge". Speaking with The Guardian, they map the trajectory which brought them to this far fringe of the metal world, "‘Subtlety is the Hardest Part’: Blood Incantation Trade Extremes for Ambience". Returning on tour again, after a stopover at Montana's Fire in the Mountains, Blood Incantation arrive with a succession of nights at Tacoma's Temple Threatre. The second of the two will be a return to last year's excellent "Absolute Elsewhere", while the first is explicitly a showcase for their cosmic side, promising an ambient opening set by Krallice, and a full night of cosmic journeying to distant and desolate stars, billed simply as "Timewave Zero".

Nine Inch Nails "Peel It Back" North American Tour: Aug 6 - Sept 18 | "Trent Reznor: ‘You’re Seeing the Fall of America in Real Time’" | The Guardian

Since its inception in 1988 as the brainchild of Trent Reznor, Nine Inch Nails have taken various non-commercial elements and counter-cultural components; songs about pain, anguish, existential confusion, power, control and submission, and combined them with noise rock, electronic dance music, and industrial rhythms, and then forged on an anvil into pop culture shapes for the goth-glam-rave set. Almost forty years on, Reznor and the only other long-term collaborator in the band, British composer Atticus Ross, are in one of their most fertile periods. As with their Bush-era treatise "Year Zero", the current political climate has charged their music once more. In interview with The Guardian, the band's frontman recounts surviving infamy, drug addiction, and a foray into tech, but in the years since has transferred his self-loathing for shame at the state of the nation, "Trent Reznor: ‘You’re Seeing the Fall of America in Real Time’". There are still glimmers of Reznor's self-focused egocentrism, a clear nod to such nepotistic tendencies can be seen in How to Destroy Angels, his band with his wife. But these are overshadowed by an intensified razor-focus on social unease and the disintegration of reciprocal faith seen in society, corporations, its citizenry and its workers. There have also been recent moments of deep personal loss and reflection, like their heartfelt cover of David Bowie’s "I Can’t Give Everything Away". Bowie’s final album "Blackstar" and its use of jazz elements alongside electronics, significantly influenced Nine Inch Nails' most recent mini-album "Bad Witch", with Reznor going further by saying; “If it wasn’t for him, we wouldn’t be here,”.

Rather than a new album, Reznor, Ross, Alessandro Cortini, Ilan Rubin, and Robin Finck will be embarking on this year's Peel It Back Tour on their series of recent EPs. "Not the Actual Events", the first in this trilogy of concise releases, was followed by 2017's "Add Violence", and the aforementioned "Bad Witch". Speaking with NME, Reznor said; "When we did "Not the Actual Events", we were kind of throwing the stylistic focus of the "Hesitation Marks" album out the window and being unafraid to explore approaches we have in the past". Shortly afterward, with the cultural setbacks of the coronavirus pandemic, they also returned to the series of instrumental, richly substantial environmental landscapes, previously anthologized and released as, “Ghosts I-IV”. As a response to the moment, “Nine Inch Nails Faced the Pandemic With Hope, Despair and Noise”, making these works available as cost-free downloadable content. The series of Ghosts continued into the pandemic with both "Ghosts V: Together", and "Ghosts VI: Locusts" released in 2020. Alongside these three EPs and expanded instrumental series, in recent years Reznor and Ross have established themselves as the collaborators of choice for such directors as, Nicole Kassell, Ken Burns, David Fincher, and Luca Guadagnino, composing soundtracks for both film and television. Few would have predicted "Trent Reznor’s Upward Spiral" as this bold mid-career reinvention for the cinema. Riding on these successes, the duo are now thinking in an even wider scope, and imagining an artistic empire which includes festival curation, such as this November's Future Ruins in Los Angeles. Indeed, in recent years it seems as though, "Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross Have a Plan to Soundtrack Everything". Photo credit: Rob Sheridan.

"Ai, Rebel: The Art and Activism of Ai Weiwei" at Seattle Art Museum: Mar 12 - Sept 17 | "A Deep Dive into the Provocative and Creative World of Ai Weiwei" | The New York Times

On the eve of his previous major assembly of work at the Hirshhorn Museum, dissident artist Ai Weiwei found that he was unable to attend the event's opening, as the Chinese government had barred Ai from traveling abroad, an unofficial form of punishment for claims of tax evasion. Which he and his supporters consider a politically motivated attempt to silence one of China’s most high profile and outspoken intellectuals. The impounding of his passport by the Chinese authorities came about in 2011, when he was jailed, without charges, for three months. His effective disappearance gained international attention and protest amongst the international arts community. In his last interview before being detained, "Ai Weiwei: 'China in Many Ways is Just like the Middle Ages'" the artist described the constant state of omnipresent menace and surveillance by the authorities of him and others. In the years following, Weiwei braved periods of house arrest, a beating at the hands of local police that caused a brain hemorrhage, the following prosecution for tax evasion, the shutting down of his online presence within China, the revocation of his design firm’s license, and strikingly, "Ai Weiwei Responds to Chinese Authorities Destroying his Beijing Studio".

When his passport was returned in 2015, he left the country and has not returned since. Now residing in rural Portugal, where he maintains an art studio and farmhouse, Weiwei spoke on his new life as a artist in exile, "Ai Weiwei Finds Peace in Portugal: ‘I Could Throw Away all My Art and Not Feel Much’". Speaking further with The Guardian on everything from living in a dugout in Little Siberia, to his friendship with Allen Ginsberg in New York, Weiwei reveals a life that has driven his restless creativity, "Ai Weiwei: ‘It is So Positive to be Poor as a Child. You Understand how Vulnerable Our Humanity Can Be’". The "Challenging Work" born of this life is on display in Seattle Art Museum's "Ai, Rebel: The Art and Activism of Ai Weiwei", his largest survey to date in the United States, which traces his evolution from artist provocateur, to one of the most globally visible critics of authoritarianism. Coinciding with this month's Seattle Art Fair, the show features some 130 works in this "Deep Dive into the Provocative and Creative World of Ai Weiwei" spanning the mediums of performance, photography, sculpture, documentary video, and large scale installation. Some of which are known, like the Tate Modern’s commission of 100 million "Sunflower Seeds", while others are here in their international debut, such as "The Cover Page of the Mueller Report, Submitted to Attorney General William Barr by Robert Mueller on March 22, 2019", and others are variations on existing pieces, like the exacting recreation of the room of his extended detention at the hands of Chinese authorities, first seen in the exhibition entitled "S.A.C.R.E.D." for the Venice Biennale.