The Cure's "Songs of a Lost World" & Livestream from The Troxy London: Nov 1

The Cure are quite possibly the most notable entity to emerge from the whole of the UK gothic rock countercultural microcosm of the late 1970s and early 1980s. No other band from this scene ascended to the heights of both UK and American charts, while fluidly bridging the the concurrent movements of post-punk, gothic rock, and new wave to the extent achieved by (the initial trio of) Robert Smith, Michael Dempsey, Lol Tolhurst, (and later) Simon Gallup, Porl Thompson, Boris Williams and Roger O'Donnell. Working in a sound that spanned these concurrent interrelated subgenres, The Cure rose to the top of the underground British acts that defined the cultural moment and associated musical scene. Within a decade of forming, they reached audiences far above and beyond their contemporaries at the time, proceeding the tsunami of alternative and college rock of the mid-1990s with the massive genre and audience crossing hits of 1992's "Wish", and the widely-regarded masterpiece of three years before in 1989's "Disintegration". Unlike the albums before it, "Disintegration" bore a single mood, that of a kind of epic, depressive solitude and it revelled in doing so, at times with a majestic grandeur. For an album of such deep introspection, eccentric production qualities and muted dynamics, many now recognize "The Cure's 'Disintegration': An Oddly Comforting Masterpiece" as Jason Heller does for The Atlantic on the eve of the album's 30th anniversary tour. Though Smith later admitted “it was never our intention to become as big as this,” the Prayer tour which followed the album saw The Cure graduating to stadiums and playing marathon, career-spanning sets and in the process, the band found that they had transformed into one of the biggest alternative rock acts on the planet.

In recent years, these massive shows and career-spanning setlists have produced a string of memorable events, highlighted in "The Cure Capture 40th Anniversary Gigs with Concert Films", and waxing lyrical with Rolling Stone about the following set of tours, focused on the 1989 album, "The Cure’s Robert Smith Talks 30 Years of ‘Disintegration’: ‘The Whole Atmosphere was Somber’". In the interview, Smith cast light on the new material the band have constructed in its wake; "At the same time we were rehearsing for the 30th anniversary of Disintegration, we were running through songs for the new album that we’re recording this year. I think that helped the band It’s certainly helped me light the way. It helped me to see how it was constructed. So it wasn’t done in a purposeful way, but that informed the recording of the new album". Last year, with the release seeming imminent, The Cure began a world tour with the surprise return of guitarist and keyboardist Perry Bamonte, who rejoined the band for the first time in nearly two decades. Over the course of  the 2023 tour, they premiered five songs from the upcoming album such as “I Can Never Say Goodbye,” “A Fragile Thing”, “And Nothing Is Forever”, “Endsong”, and “Alone”. Speaking with the press ahead of the NME Awards, Smith said the 8-song album was nearly finished, with the aim of releasing it in that coming fall. He characterized the music on this forthcoming album "Songs of a Lost World", as "relentlessly doom and gloom", and elaborated with NME, stating that, "The Darkness of Recent Years has Inspired their 'Merciless' New Album". We had a preview of the album framed by another of their discography-spanning setlists, in a series of North American shows including Seattle, in which "The Cure Live Review: Top Goths Tease their Bleak but Beautiful New Album". A year later, after a series of reworks and refinements of the material honed through live performance, "The Cure Deliver the Power-Doom Epic We’ve Been Waiting For". The resulting album is, "As Promised, ‘Very, Very Doom and Gloom’", yet features a bruising existential yearning, and plea for a life unlived and dreams unfulfilled, it is without reservation, "Dark, Personal, and their Best Since 'Disintegration'"

This week, Robert Smith spoke with the New York Times on, "How The Cure Became Rock’s Most Dogged Activist" and with NPR in their, "‘How it Will End is How it Will End,’ but The Cure isn’t Over, Yet" on the working of the material which became the album, born of personal loss, and a sense of the times, they produced an abundance of work, which was repeatedly delayed in its release. Smith states; "I think the mistake I made was I was trying to get 30 songs all finished together, so they all somehow hung together. And I realized at the start of this year that that really wasn't going to happen. So I reduced it down to 20, and then I reduced it down 10, and then I finally emerged with 8 that I thought worked together best. But I have left behind quite a few of my favorite songs, weirdly enough". The resulting eight tracks have finally arrived as a deluxe CD and Blu-Ray Audio, and half-speed mastering double LP, with the release of "Songs of a Lost World". A brief album for the band, coming in at just under 50 minutes, its composite songs variously find Smith and the band exploring mourning, the passing of time and mortality, and reflecting on youth, life, and love lost and spent. All the while yearning for a sense of that lived past, that feels somehow out of reach, in the baleful and divisive cultural and political atmosphere of the present day. Encapsulated by Smith in one of many such lyrical turns featured on the album; “my weary dance with age and resignation moves me slow towards a dark and empty stage”. Matching the emotional impact of the lyrical themes, the instrumentation of "Songs of a Lost World", is more direct and purposeful than much of their discography, delivered in tracks that move forward with gradual and inevitable bruising impact, while also devoid of the kind of excess volume of their later albums, where quantity and quality got confused. This is Robert Smith, Simon Gallup, Jason Cooper, Reeves Gabrels, and Roger O'Donnell's weighty, spare, and concise statement on our times. Concurrent with the album's release on Friday, November 1, “The Cure Announce London Show to Launch New Album”, convening at Troxy, London, which was presented in a global livestream. This performance, in which ”Songs of Innocence and Experience Combined Spectacularly in Intimate Setting” has been archived and remains on the band's video page for all to see and be enticed into the embrace of their Lost World.

Blood Incantation's "Absolute Elsewhere" & North American Tour with Midwife: Nov 7 - Dec 5

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 last year's, "Luminescent Bridge". These sounds have now come into a fully realized synergy with the death metal and technical proficiency of their earlier work, producing in "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.".

The above making Blood Incantation a prime representative of the voracious genre-expansive developments currently flowing through experimental metal. These sounds have now come to encompass melodicism and atmospheres lifted from shoegaze and spacerock, eruptions of heavy psych rock, industrial drumming, synth exploration and electronic atmospheres, and pure experimental noise. The voluminous body of which is detailed in Brad Sanders' essential overview, "Untrue And International: Living in a Post-Black Metal World", with complimentary curation from this sphere found in the excellent selections of The Quietus' Columnus Metallicus. These articles sound the deep expanse of these movements, which are sourced from labels like, Hydrahead, Neurot, Ipecac, Deathwish, 20 Buck Spin, Dark Descent, Sargent House, Profound Lore, Season of Mist, Roadburn, Century Media, Relapse, and The Flenser. Having passed the milestone of its tenth anniversary, The Flenser's founder Jonathan Tuite, described its ethos to New Noise magazine, which could be surmised as, "The Flenser Is a One-Man Pursuit of Quality Doom". In one the aesthetic fringes of the label, resides the hushed slowcore of Madeline Johnston’s Midwife project. This shadowy corner of existence is expressed in her "ability to wrench ecstasy from devastation, to make romance out of abject pain, and to transmute specific feelings into an ineffable longing", as heard on "Luminol", and the even moreso on the inward-looking "No Depression in Heaven". Together, the two bands will be bringing audiences into their fold at Seattle's Substation, transporting venues across North America into the absolute-elsewhere-space of their tour this fall.

All Monsters Attack at The Grand Illusion Cinema: Oct 1 - 31 | The Month of Scarecrowber at SIFF Cinema: Oct 2 - 30 | Scarecrow Video's "Save Our Scarecrow" Campaign

The season of Halloween genre film and its disorienting frights, crepuscular surrealism, and discomfiting atmospheres has arrived once again. A nucleus for genre film in the Northwest, Scarecrow Video annually steps up with their curated Halloween section of domestic and international horror, sci-fi, fantasy, and psychotronic selections. The Psychotronic Challenge also returns in its ninth installment, challenging viewers to select a new theme category for every day in October from the deep trivia of the cues on offer. While we're here, let's talk the incomparable one-of-a-kind resource that is Scarecrow Video. For horror and genre aficionados, there is no other resource in North America like that offered by Scarecrow and their abundant catalog of obscure, foreign releases, out of print, and ultra-rare editions, and with 160,000 films on offer, no singular online streaming resource can compare. To state it simply; if you live in the Northwest and are an appreciator of cinema, it's your personal obligation to ensure their doors stay open for business. Now more than ever this participation ethos applies. A Save Our Scarecrow funding campaign has been launched, as the last video store and film archive of its kind in the United States is at a pivotal point, wherein "Scarecrow Video Needs to Raise $1.8M or Face Possible Closure". Their sister organization, The Grand Illusion Cinema also has a narrowing timeline, their building is up for sale and imminently to be development into high-cost housing, "After 53 years, Seattle Theater Maintains its Grand Illusion … for Now, and as such they are in search of a new location. Across town, the month of "Scarecrowber" has been designated for Scarecrow Video's programming of the SIFF Cinema calendar. The sixteen films on offer span classic black and white French thrillers like Georges Franju's "Eyes Without a Face", technicolor mid-century adaptations of H.P. Lovecraft, in Daniel Haller's "The Dunwich Horror", the high style and fetishistic theatrics of Dario Argento's "Opera", the unease of 1970s B-movie slashers like John Hancock's "Let’s Scare Jessica to Death", a set of career-defining films from John Carpenter in "Halloween" and, "Christine", as well as two of the greatest horror films ever made. George Romero's genre-birthing "Night of the Living Dead", and the unwavering, indelible terror of the "Symphony for the Devil" this is Tobe Hooper's "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre".

In addition to a set of season-specific genre films at Northwest Film Forum, and The Beacon, the longest running, and most consistently satisfying of the local Halloween series has been The Grand Illusion Cinema's All Monsters Attack showcase. This monthlong slate of horror, creature features, classic thrillers, sci-fi, and cult cinema, includes new and returning genre classics and recent releases, both in new digital restorations, 35mm and 16mm celluloid, a triple-feature pizza party, and a night exclusively presented on VHS. A highlight from previous editions returns with a memorial night for Seattle's most dedicated cinephile, music lover, and man-about-town, William Kennedy. Before his passing in 2021, Bill wished for nothing more than his friends and cultural compatriots to join together for a screening of the director's cut of David Cronenberg's classic body-horror techno thriller, “Videodrome”. Unclassifiable genre-elusive cult films are represented by the eccentric smut of Curt McDowell's "Thundercrack!", and a VHS midnight movie-era restoration of Bruce Toscano's "Charon" with the director in attendance. Two nights of obscurities on 16mm will be hosted by the Sprocket Society with Ted V. Mikels' absurdist gross-out, "The Corpse Grinders", and a triple bill of pre-Code horror classics and period shorts in their Secret Vault of Horror. Among the films on offer on 35mm, the lineup includes such memorable 1990s entries as Antonia Bird's "Ravenous", Clive Barker's first directorial effort in adapting his own "The Hellbound Heart" into the major studio production of "Hellraiser", and quality franchise films like Guillermo del Toro's "Blade II", and Ernest R. Dickerson Tales from the Crypt entry, "Demon Knight". There's also rare Asian horror on offer with Sisworo Gautama Putra's "Satan's Slave", and no Halloween season series would be complete without a selection from the explosive abundance of 1980s horror and genre films issuing from the United States. Anne Billson's feature in "The Other Side of 80s America" issue of Sight & Sound plumbs the deeper realms of the decade's more assertively subversive low-to-medium budget genre fare often “unburdened by notions of good taste". These manic explorations of class conflict, Cold War dread, ecological disaster, and suburban paranoia are represented here by the first entry in Wes Craven's quintessentially 1980s franchise, "A Nightmare on Elm Street".

Boris "Amplifier Worship Service" US Tour: Sept 25 - Oct Nov 23 | "Boris: Noise is Japanese Blues" | The Quietus

The Japanese noise-rock trio Boris continue to show no signs of a sedentary codification of their sound, or a deceleration of their recording or live schedule as they return to Seattle on the current "Amplifier Worship Service" tour. Just this last year, finding that they were not satisfied with two albums titled "Heavy Rocks", they created a third album sharing this title for Relapse Records, and this fall, for the 25th anniversary of their influential “Amplifier Worship” a new edition will be reissued through Third Man Records. Quite simply, "For Boris, Heavy is a State of Being". This is all following on the abundance born of the sessions for the 2017 album "Dear" for the Sargent House label, which generated nearly three albums of new material. Then, in rapid succession they delivered, "LφVE & EVφL" as well as a set of domestic LP reissues for Third Man Records in 2019. In the five years since, they released the stellar "NO" on their own label, a collaboration with post punk band, Uniform, and the dub-inspired release, "W" both for Sacred Bones. At the height of the coronavirus pandemic, they spoke on the subjects of the, "Making of NO, Pandemic Existence, and the Uncertain Future of Touring", and generated a new work that might be considered an exercise in, "Extreme Healing: 'W' By Boris". Prior to this period, the March 2016 issue of The Wire recaps the trio's decades-long recording and touring process, which brings them back into contact with legendary noise extremist Merzbow on the 150 minutes of music appearing on the interchangeable double LP set, "Gensho". Its depths sounded by Masami Akita in his interview for The Quietus, "Razor Blades in the Dark: An Interview with Merzbow", which acts as a preface of sorts for their second studio album collaboration "2R0I2P0", released in 2020 on Relapse. In doing so, "Boris and Merzbow Made a Joint Album. With Options.".

The most recent tour marks a decade of semiannual domestic visits to North America in which they have manifested an ever-mutating mix of doom metal, heavy psych, warped J-pop, willfully dysfunctional indie rock, and even their own thrilling take on dreampop and shoegaze. The latter we first glimpsed on their "Japanese Heavy Rock Hits" 7" series, which was then refined on "Attention Please", from which they then pivoted to the guttural psyche assault of the second "Heavy Rocks". This prolific inundation culminating in the tri-album recording release of late 2011, topped by their upbeat pop-assault of the generically titled, "New Album". Following this deluge was the more atmospheric Metal-oriented tour album "Präparat" and the mainstream riffs of 2014's "Noise", with its pronounced college-rock sensibilities. The band themselves perceive this stylistic shift as just another stage in their assimilation of influences towards an all-inclusive Boris sound, in an interview for The Quietus the feedback-worshiping trio state, "Noise is Japanese Blues': An Interview with Boris". The sonic realm which they have created for themselves was first carved out with 2005's "Pink", and the brand of lyrical guitar squall of collaborator Michio Kurihara heard on the companion album "Rainbow". Typical of the abundant recording sessions which have produced each album, the recent domestic reissue of "Pink" features a previously unreleased companion album of "Forbidden Songs". Comprising overflow from this era that ended up on the cutting room floor, their interview for Invisible Oranges delves into this phase of high production and new inspirations.

Earshot Jazz presents Shabaka Hutchings and Vijay Iyer Trio at Town Hall and Seattle Symphony: Oct 25 & 31

Among the abundance on offer in this year's Earshot Jazz Festival lineup, two representations of the newest variations in form and genre can be heard in the work of these distinctly dissimilar luminaries. With a date in his current North American tour, Shabaka Hutchings' mining of jazz's cultural memory will be on full display next month at Town Hall. Richly explored in his previous projects and quartets over the course of the last decade, Hutchings' ensembles include Sons of Kemet, its splinter trio The Comet Is Coming, Melt Yourself Down, Afro-futurist outfit The Ancestors, and as a guest player with the legendary Sun Ra Arkestra. So there is possibly no better player in contemporary jazz more equipped to lead a quartet exploring the fringes of the territory once mapped out by postbop, Afrofuturist and spiritual jazz luminaries, Charles Mingus, Pharoah Sanders, and the aforementioned Sun Ra. His albums have found a home on Impulse!, the legendary and influential American jazz label that was home to Charles Mingus, John Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders, Freddie Hubbard, and Bill Evans at the peak of their 1960's output. This adds another weighty dimension to Hutchings’ relationship with American jazz, placing him among the players whose legacy he’s endeavoring to subvert, deconstruct, and expound upon. All of which, Hutchings enthusiastically details in his interview for The Guardian, "History Needs to Be Set Alight: Shabaka Hutchings on the Radical Power of Jazz". Following these interviews, he performed a series of concerts "soaring to unfettered heights" on international stages, and in the years since has "shifted towards the meditative", after stepping away from the saxophone in 2023. This maven of "The New British Jazz Explosion" has been reassessing his art, exploring the gentler timbres of the Japanese shakuhachi on his most recent solo endeavor, "Perceive its Beauty, Acknowledge its Grace", an elegant rebirth in which, "The Saxophone Master Shabaka Hutchings is on a Fresh Journey: Flutes.".

Embodied by the Mats Eilertsen Trio, Thomas Strønen, the Christian Wallumrød Ensemble, Tord Gustavsen Trio, Keith Jarrett's work with Jan Garbarek, and the quartet led by the late Tomasz Stanko, such players and ensembles comprise a corpus of the European-centric jazz which characterizes "The ECM Sound". The significance of the ECM label to the extended international jazz community, and its five decades of encompassing broad tangents both inside and outside of jazz, classical, avant-garde improvisation, and chamber music experimentation can't be overstated. Co-founded by producer Manfred Eicher, Manfred Scheffner and Karl Egger in Munich in 1969, the label's prestige has been meticulously constructed over five decades of "The Pristine Empire of ECM" bearing their distinctly refined auditory qualities and visual aesthetic. Dana Jennings "ECM: CDs Know that Ears Have Eyes" for the New York Times mines ECM's ensuing decades, focusing specifically on the imprint's meeting of sound, material, image and its half-century of "Manfred Eicher's Search for the Sublime". The ECM sound has also come to be epitomized by a new generation of players, outside of the Scandinavian scenes that initially defined it. Such is the case of the prolific pianist and composer, Vijay Iyer, who was rewarded Downbeat's 2015 Artist of the Year, and profiled by the New York Times in their "DNA of a Polymath, Restlessly Mutating". His newest trio alongside bassist Linda May Han Oh, and drummer Tyshawn Sorey, developed its intuitive real-time exchanges in performances like those on the current tour, wherein "Vijay Iyer Wants to be Heard Loud and Clear" in Earshot Jazz Festival's night at Nordstrom Recital Hall. The reviews in the pages of The Guardian describe their synergy as a "an object lesson in music for the heart, head, and feet", which often sounds like displaced blues in its reflection of Miles Davis' postbop bands from the 1960s, or even their contemporaries in The Bad Plus, as they "push jazz into the future", through exercises as "a trio of rare intuition", in improvisations that sound simultaneously inside and outside the harmonies. Its in these two recent recordings for ECM, "Uneasy", and this year's "Compassion", they have established that, "Vijay Iyer’s New Trio Is a Natural Fit". Photo credit: Fadi Kheir

PJ Harvey's "I Inside the Old Year Dying", "Orlam" & North American Tour: Sept 11 - Oct 14 | "PJ Harvey on Doubt, Desire, and Deepest Darkest Dorset" | The Guardian

Sharing the company of some of the most influential bands of the era, such as Pixies, The Smashing Pumpkins, and Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, in which artists who were once underground found themselves ascending to the highest levels of popular culture, fueled by the cultural and economic abundance and liberalizing zeitgeist of the 1990s, the music of PJ Harvey defined that decade like few others. Her first album, born of the disassembly of her role in the band Automatic Dlamini as a vocalist, guitarist and saxophonist, playing alongside frontman, John Parish, was picked up by influential British independent label, Too Pure. Having only released a single, which instantly had play thanks to John Peel, and press in the then widely-read weeklies NME and Melody Maker, and championed as being "charged with aggressive eroticism and rock fury. It careens from blues to goth to grunge, often in the space of a single song." in the pages of Rolling Stone, by the time of 1992's debut album "Dry", Polly Jean Harvey was almost instantly established as one of the major musical voices of the era. Her vertical cultural ascension continued that year with the signing to her longterm home, Island Records in 1992. Hot on the heels of the first of their Peel Sessions, the band traveled to Cannon Falls, Minnesota to record their next album with indie legend Steve Albini, founder of such bands as Big Black and Shellac. The producer of some of the most memorable albums of that decade passed unexpectedly earlier this year, and many of those who's art was enhanced by his singular style and artistic philosophy spoke with The Guardian, “PJ Harvey, Mogwai and More on Steve Albini”. The resulting album "Rid of Me", would be the band's major label debut in May 1993, and initiate a chain of releases created alongside producers Flood and John Parish, that would find themselves in placements within Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Records of All-Time. Few albums and artists so fully expressed the rough edged, hyperkinetic songwriting energy, hybridization of underground styles, and general zeitgeist of the era as "Dry", "Rid of Me", and 1995's "To Bring You My Love". It was indisputable at this point that Harvey was an artist of-and-from her time, and as The Guardian states in their profile, "PJ Harvey: A Singular Talent, She Dances to Her Own Tune".

By the end of the 1990s, a new phase, tempered by introspective moods, more spare arrangements, and a lush, refined production arrived with her first major duo album with John Parish "Dance Hall at Louse Point", and was then further polished to perfection on the 1998 high water mark, "Is this Desire?". Harvey expanded her musical vocabulary again on the multifaceted arrangements of "Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea", the following dynamic, "Uh Huh Her". Their decades-long and fruitful collaboration and friendship, and the production of the albums that closed out the last years of the 1990s were illuminated in the pages of The Quietus, "A Woman, A Man: PJ Harvey And John Parish Interviewed". By the mid-2000's a clearly delineated shift toward a stripped down minimalist on albums like "White Chalk", and following in rapid succession, the second major collaboration with Parish, "A Woman A Man Walked By" of 2007 and 2009 respectively. This third stylistic phase of sorts initiated in the new millennium finds her songwriting more restrained and inward-looking. Yet it also expresses a newfound point of entry for her creative enterprises, “I Feel Like I’ve Just Begun”: An Interview with PJ Harvey", with expanded instrumentation outside of the rock lineup, as heard on 2011's "Let England Shake", and 2016's "The Hope Six Demolition Project". Departing from her longtime home of Island Records, with last year's "I Inside the Old Year Dying" on Partisan, Harvey has been exploring the historic and fictional lore of her home of Dorset. Set in a magical-realist outpost of the West Country, the singer-songwriter’s "Orlam" delights in Dorset dialect and folklore, and it is these themes of "Light and Dark, Ecstasy and Melancholy", that define her most recent body of work. The UK performances of this work have been described as a "Haunting Journey into a Fantastical Dorset World", expressing the album's "Disquieting Escape into the Wilds of Dorset". Yet PJ Harvey herself was motivated to further test the mettle of these materials and herself and band live, "‘Am I still any good? Have I still got it?’: PJ Harvey on Doubt, Desire and Deepest, Darkest Dorset", with the undeniable results on full exhibition this fall in North America, and a date at Seattle's Paramount Theatre. Photo credit: Richard Isaac

“Enchanted Evenings: The Boundless Cinema of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger” at SIFF Cinema: Sept 18 - Nov 20

Hailed as quintessentially British cinema, the films of Powell and Pressburger in fact were born of the creative energy when Michael Powell combined his dynamic direction and editing, with the elegant, incisive writing of Emeric Pressburger, a Jewish Hungarian emigré. Their core creative team, the production company they titled The Archers, was made up of individuals from across Europe, channeling their cross-border collective talents into a filmmography which took flight into complexly woven narratives defined by its lush colors, humanistic ethos and a dream-like romanticism. No filmmography stands on an island of its own making, but the works of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger are so elevated over the body of British cinema, that they might be considered as being in a loftier realm. Concurrently, for many decades, this realm that their films occupy was also shrouded in obscurity, neglect, and inaccessibility. This status can be charted back to the box-office failure, and Powell’s critical shunning after the rejection of the themes explored in his then-controversial "Peeping Tom" of 1960. But by that decade, many of the pair’s joint glories from "The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp" to "The Red Shoes", had been recut then spurned, left to neglect and decay. Martin Scorsese, who's singular and essential restoration work with his World Cinema Foundation, would help to restore and resurrect both "...Colonel Blimp" and "The Red Shoes", for Janus Films and The Criterion Collection. Following these essential restorations, the film press has had a major reassessment of the work, hailing "'The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp' as one of the great works of art in the history of film", the "sublime celestial romance that is, 'A Matter of Life and Death'", "Dancing for Your Life" in the case of "The Red Shoes", and celebrating "Tales of Hoffmann"'s "over-the-top 1950s neo-Romanticism tipping over into surrealism"

This past year, Martin Scorsese and longtime collaborator and editor, Thelma Schoonmaker paid tribute to Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger in the pages of Sight & Sound, as well as dedicating a personal tribute to the filmmakers’ legacy, in the form of the documentary, “Made in England: The Films of Powell & Pressburger”. Scorsese went further, proclaiming his admiration and love of their art, "Kings of the Movies: Martin Scorsese on Powell & Pressburger". But he and Schoonmaker have hardly been the sole champions of the riches the two directors gave to the world. Beginning in the 1970s, critics, scholars, and curators began reviving and reclaiming the films, and in the ensuing decades, Powell and Pressburger have influenced creatives ranging from Derek Jarman, to Matthew Bourne, Kate Bush, Darren Aronofsky, and Tilda Swinton, finding inspiration their "Cinema of Rejecting Hatred and Fear". With last year's "Cinema Unbound: The Creative Worlds of Powell and Pressburger" the BFI aimed to introduce the work of The Archers to a new generation of imaginations, filmgoers and creatives, in the largest and most wide-ranging exploration of the legendary writer-producer-director team to be theatrically presented. This same retrospective was then announced to tour US and Canada, with a date at Seattle's SIFF Cinema. For this, we can thank programmer Greg Olson, who continues his essential work after "Fate of SAM Film Series Unclear as Museum’s Longtime Film Curator Laid Off", with the elimination of his position at Seattle Art Museum. It should also be noted, that in addition to the loss of Olson specifically as the programmer of the longest running film noir series in America, the position has remained unfilled. Instead, the plan at SAM appears to be, to bring cat videos, guest chefs, and miniature golf to the museum. Subsequently, in the years since, Olson has rented SIFF Cinema as a guest programmer, bringing his film noir, Italian, and Fellini series to their screens. Now this fall, he has collaborated with the BFI to present “Enchanted Evenings: The Boundless Cinema of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger”, with a very special screening of "A Matter of Life and Death" featuring Thelma Schoonmaker in-person, as well in attendance at Scorsese's "Raging Bull", the following night.

Have a Nice Life's "Voids" & West Coast Tour with Mamaleek: Aug 29 - Sept 1

There is probably no band which better expresses the range and cloistered specificity of The Flenser label than the dynamic sonic topography of Have a Nice Life. Varying between a minimalist stasis, hardcore outbursts and the squall of shoegaze guitar immersion, the Connecticut band made their presence known on their expansive 2008 release, "Deathconsciousness". The album's qualities are clearly established in the pages of The Quietus; "The genres didn’t matter; the planet-devouring "Deathconsciousness" bled bedroom pop into amplifier worship all it liked, but came to be known as a masterpiece of depression". For a second opinion, one could also look to the consistently overblown hyperbole of Vice to substantiate this. Yet it was with 2014's "The Unnatural World" and its dive into even greater abstraction and obfuscation of the sound of physical band, that ignited many listener's imaginations. So much so, that it was a fan-assembled anthology which came to be released as their "Voids" album, which was recently given a multiple-format official edition on The Flenser. Sinuous instead of rigid, physical and textural instead of sterile, the gutturally upheaving beauty of "Having a Nice Life with Dan and Tim of Have a Nice Life", will have all the space and volume they could ever ask for next month at The Showbox, as Have a Nice Life engage on a west coast micro-tour with labelmates, Mamaleek. Outside of Have a Nice Life, The Flenser's roster varies in its nuance between the roaring solar blast of shoegaze and noiserock of bands like Deafheaven, to recently enlisted post-hardcore outfits like Chat Pile and Kayo Dot. Some of the more hushed sounds on the label recall mid-1990s slowcore, such as Madeline Johnston’s music as Midwife, and genre fusions bridging lofi folk and post-rock can be heard on Vyva Melinkolya's "Orbweaving" collaboration.

Embracing experimental black metal and hardcore, the label has released work by Agriculture and the "furious drums, squalls of guitar, and guttural vocals delivered in a language of pain", of Ragana's "Desolation's Flower", both of which were witnessed in a rip-roaring night last month on tour at The Crocodile. Specifically on the doom end of the spectrum, the label acted as one of the first homes for ever-ascending Bell Witch, as well as releasing early works by Botanist, who improbably had a feature in the pages of the Atlantic, "The Brilliant Black Metal Album about Plants Wiping Out Humankind". More recent entries by Drowse, Sprain, and Planning for Burial move between all of these points with their fluid hybrids of genre. Having passed the milestone of its tenth anniversary, the label's founder Jonathan Tuite described its ethos for New Noise; “When I started the label I was intending it to be very much focused on black metal,” Tuite explains. “There was sort of a black metal scene that was happening in the U.S. at that time. I mean it had changed forms and kind of diversified a little bit. So, Tuite expanded his label’s sonic horizons and began exploring other styles. “I have sort of gone with what intuitively feels like it relates to the label. So something like the Midwife record feels like it’s part of the Flenser catalogue. It doesn’t feel like an outsider, and so part of that is like intuition for me and just kind of different sets of judgment." In some ways, it could be surmised that, "The Flenser Is a One-Man Pursuit of Quality Doom". Rather than doom as the metal genre specifically, the label's site offers "100% Gloom", "Suffer", "No Future", and "Nope" as its conceptual and curatorial variables. Which it also represents in print, and heard on compilations like 2022's "Send the Pain Below".

"Un Bouquet de Breillat" at The Grand Illusion Cinema: Aug 9 - Sept 19 | "Catherine Breillat's Metaphysics of Film and Flesh" | Film Comment

There is no other director who has so boldly and audaciously explored female sexuality on screen than Catherine Breillat. A notable novelist and screenwriter, cowriting films with contemporary Italian and French auteurs Liliana Cavani, Maurice Pialat, and Marco Bellocchio, as well as an acting career which began with Bertolucci’s legendarily incendiary "Last Tango in Paris", hers is a singular artistic and intellectual contribution to late 20th and early 21st century cinema. Exploring her influences in interview with Senses of Cinema "Hell’s Angels: An Interview with Catherine Breillat", the director exclaiming "I Love Blood. It's in All My Films", revealing an unexpected affinity with the body-as-subject seen in the films of David Cronenberg. Breillat's art also belongs to a brand of existentialism discussed in The Telegraph's "Catherine Breillat: 'All True Artists are Hated''", Senses of Cinema's "The Way We are Looked at Transforms Us", and "'To Be an Artist is To Be Alone'” for IndieWire, as well as asserting life through eruptive physicality, a theme which she shares with novelist Virginie Despentes and her contemporaries, Claire Denis, Marina de Van, Bruno Dumont, Diane Bertrand, Philippe Grandrieux, Leos Carax and François Ozon in the cinéma du corps movement. All of the above are considered offshoots from the larger New French Extremity of the late 1990s and millennial cusp, a term coined by James Quandt in his zeitgeist-channeling feature for Artforum, "Flesh & Blood: Sex and Violence in Recent French Cinema". Though they mixed and accentuated these through varied ways and perspectives, the work of the directors in this movement share the narrative commonality of psychological struggles with profound inner urges, that were bracketed by the implications, or lack of, behind sexual encounters. Taking the form of the destruction and subsequent construction of new identities through violent catharsis, which would often reveal a relationship to gender, political, or class roles, or constraints therein being unbound.

In both the New York Times, "Sex and Power: The Provocative Explorations of Catherine Breillat", and Film Comment's "A Matter of Skin: Catherine Breillat's Metaphysics of Film and Flesh", the director's uncommonly attuned pursuit of exploring questions of intimacy and desire are detailed, in which she remains one of the great provocateurs of modern cinema. On initial release her films were met with great controversy, and have found both new audiences and new opposition to her art in recent years. So it is a perspective that offers a bold vision of modern programming that would put together a retrospective like Lincoln Center's "Carnal Knowledge: The Films of Catherine Breillat" of earlier this summer. Following on the heels of the new restorations by Janus Films, Seattle's own The Grand Illusion Cinema has taken up the baton from Lincoln Center and assembled its own, "Un Bouquet de Breillat". The retrospective offers an ideal "bouquet" of selections spanning the 50 year career of an artist who's hypnotic and constantly surprising storytelling pushes cinema into the realm of sensorial philosophy. These works have unflinchingly, and unapologetically depicted, dissected and condemned the plight of their female subjects as they pull against the forces of societal and patriarchal control, on a trajectory towards liberty and profound self-actualization. Spanning decades of criticism and writing in Breillat's contribution to French cinema, Film Comment has also hosted some of her more significant interviews. Both from the last decade, "Power, Seduction, and Lies": Breillat speaks about Color, Love, and Working with Kool Shen in Abuse of Weakness", and more recently, "Love in the Afternoon": The French Filmmaker Discusses her Return to Cinema, the Productive Tension Between Realism and Expressionism, and the Art of the Sex Scene", as part of this year's retrospective and the US premiere of her newest film, "Last Summer". Which The New Yorker's Richard Brody called a "Ferocious Vision of Sexual Frenzy", and the director's long delayed return to work and artistic self-renewal.