Max Richter's "In A Landscape" & North American Tour with ACME: Apr 26 - May 10

Over the course of some 50 recordings, spanning soundtracks for dance, theater, installation and film, beginning with 2002's "Memoryhouse", Max Richter has marked out a body of work in a field shared with such 21st Century contemporaries as Jóhann Jóhannsson and Ólafur Arnalds. Backed by the American Contemporary Music Ensemble, he returns to North America this spring with dates in prestigious venues as varied as Chicago Symphony, BAM, Kennedy Center, and Seattle Symphony, to present selections from "In A Landscape", and his wider body of work. Many of the entries in Richter's prolific discography are commissioned works, such is the case with "Infra", a score for the modern dance choreographer, Wayne McGregor. Not limited to dance work with Company Wayne McGregor, their collaborations have also embraced cutting edge transmedia installations like those of Random International. Their "Future Self" was one of the first in a series of successful collaborations with a score supplied by Richter. Following in rapid succession, the trio's "Rain Room" made its premier at The Barbican London the following year, to then becoming a sensation stateside at MoMA's PS1, and eventually concluding its run at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

An unexpected turn by the composer who recently exclaimed "I'm a Low-key Raver! I Love all Kinds of Music", to the Baroque era produced another of Richter's major hits in his neoclassical reworking of Antonio Vivaldi's "The Four Seasons" for the Deutsche Grammophon Recomposed series. The project presented abundant opportunities to express these shared juxtapositions of angular mathic patterns and gradual, flowing, tectonic undertows. After "Max Richter gave The Four Seasons a Modern Update", with the original volume "The Four Seasons: Recomposed" in 2012, he then returned to the work a decade later, and convinced Deutsche Grammophon of the necessity of a new performance and recording. This "The New Four Seasons: Recomposed", may seem an exercise in indulgence and paradox, as Richter utilizes both classic period instruments alongside analog synthesizers, yet the composer convincingly rationalizes this reworking for The Guardian, "Max Richter on Rewriting The Four Seasons - for the Second Time".

Among his major works, in 2015 the composer realized his long developing 8 hour piece for the facilitation of "Sleep". The full night-long composition is available as a recording for home consumption both digitally, as a ultra high fidelity Blu-Ray audio release, as well as a separate edition of excerpt highlights conceived to represent the more engaged listening aspects, titled "From Sleep". But it is in performance that "Sleep" most explicitly realizes its intent. Premiering in atypical venues across Europe, such as the Welcome Collection Reading Room, wherein the attendees nestled their campbeds between the reading room’s bookshelves for the performance of Richter's "Eight-hour Lullaby for a Frenetic World". This bold venture was met with anticipation for its experiment in duration and setting, in both Rolling Stone's "Composer Max Richter to Perform Overnight L.A. Concerts with 560 Beds", and the Los Angeles Times' "Composer Max Richter Wants Fans to Spend the Night in Grand Park". There has been no shortage of coverage in the pages of The Los Angeles Times, Time and NPR connecting the ritualized durational performance of "Sleep", and its benefits in relation to the media abundant and time-scarce times in which we live.

Long Play Festival at Public Records, BRIC, Issue Project Room and Brooklyn Academy of Music: May 2 - 4 | Christian Marclay's "The Clock" at MoMA: Feb 17 - May 11

This year, once again rather than attending the Seattle International Film Festival, I will be in the city of cities partaking in the abundance New York has to offer. This begins with Japan Society, and their shared screenings with The Metrograph, presenting the incomparable cinema of Mikio Naruse. Through the two-part, 30 film series, screened entirely on rare prints imported from collections in Japan, the two cinemas host this most explicit of examples of, "The Auteur as Salaryman", in their combined, "Mikio Naruse: The World Betrays Us". Across the way at Film Society at Lincoln Center, Jia Zhang-ke's masterful generational journey, "Caught by the Tides" begins it's US theatrical run with the director in attendance, alongside Roberto Minervini's "The Damned", and a retrospective of the films of the rarely screened Odersan filmmaker, Kira Muratova. To properly take in the city is to immerse oneself in music, film, dance and cinema premieres. Among these this year, are performances as diverse of the  Metropolitan Opera's presentation of the opera most lauded by Alex Ross in his books and writing for the New Yorker, on Richard Strauss' "Salome", and the same night, across Manhattan the avant-ambient leanings of Cosey Fanni Tutti's "Industrial Art" are on exhibit at Maxwell Graham. In which the Throbbing Gristle founder explores feminism, freedom and the politics of the personal, with "Time to Tell". Truly, no time spent in New York would be fully realized, without at least a night of theatre. The re-envisioned classic Cabaret, made famous by the 1972 film starring Liza Minnelli, now presented as Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club, in a new staging by Rebecca Frecknall will be such a night.

Similarly, the New York week wouldn’t be complete without a day revisiting the Museum of Modern Art's permanent collection on view on the fourth and fifth floors. While there, also witnessing Rosa Barba's celluloid experiments, and Christian Marclay's staggering audio-visual installation, "The Clock". The run of Christian Marclay's installation at MoMA marks the work’s return to the United States for the first time since 2016, and for the first time to New York in nearly a dozen years. Of which the artist himself says of this superhuman work of assembly and editing, "‘It Became a Nightmare’: Christian Marclay on Creating Global Smash 'The Clock'". Similarly, an afternoon will be occupied at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the unmissable array of 14th to 19th century paintings on display, as well as the 19th and early 20th century wings on offer in the Robert Lehman Collection. In addition to the work in The Met's permanent wings, there is also an assembly of romantic paintings presented in, "Caspar David Friedrich: The Soul of Nature", and an exhibition of John Singer Sargent's work from his time in Paris. Following a day at the museums, Tim Hecker's engaged noise sculpting is on display at Public Records. Whatever you do, don't refer to Hecker's dissonant washes of sound as auditory products for wellness culture, the composer has established, "Tim Hecker Helped Popularize Ambient Music. He’s (Sort of) Sorry". After days on end of museum hopping, the opera, gallery openings and cinema screenings, most every night will be coming to a close during Ron Carter's 88th Birthday Celebration at the Blue Note, and in the AM hours to the tune of late-night sets at Midtown's Tomi Jazz.

The weekend commences with the highest density of performances to be found annually in Brooklyn, encapsulated in the three day, fifty performance, fifteen venue, Long Play Festival. Programmed and conceived by one of the central the East Coast mainstays of New Music and modern classical composition. In just a few short years, Bang On A Can have assembled a festival of a caliber which, "Long Play has Risen to the Top of New York Classical Music Festivals". From this formidable roster, this year's highlights include, Kim Gordon with Kassie Krut and I.U.D. at Pioneer Works, American Opera Projects plays Arvo Pärt at South Oxford Space, Idris Ackamoor and The Pyramids at BRIC Ballroom, Body / Head, Foodman, and Emptyset at Public Records, Carl Stone and Akaihirume at Issue Project Room, Moritz von Oswald Presents: Silencio at Roulette Intermedium, Salamanda at Public Records, Max Richter and the American Contemporary Music Ensemble at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, David Lang's "Darker", performed by Ensemble Signal at BRIC Ballroom, Tashi Wada with Julia Holter at Public Records, Sophia Jani "Six Pieces for Solo Violin", performed by Maiani da Silva at Issue Project Room, Ensemble Offspring plays Iannis Xenakis, Tujiko Noriko, Niecy Blues, and the Ben LaMar Gay Quartet all in rapid succession over the course of one day at Public Records. With the festival coming to a close around the American minimalist composer Terry Riley's 90th Birthday Tribute performed by Bang on a Can All-Stars, Pete Townshend, Gyan Riley, Krishna Bhatt, Valentina Magaletti, Nicole Mitchell and Suphala, at Pioneer Works.

Northwest Terror Fest at Neumos & Barboza: May 8 - 10

The regional venues hosting regular national and international tours spiraling out of the global metal, doom, hardcore, and noiserock have both in tumult and a thriving state of expansiveness in recent years. Regular nights, showcases, and festivals for this burgeoning and heavy end of the sonic spectrum can be seen at El Corazon, The Clock-Out Lounge, Black Lodge, and Substation, all stepping up to fill the void of what was once the locus of this culture, The Highline, after closing due to the sale of their building. In 2017, the combined venues of Neumos and Barboza became the host to this sound's most significant event of the year with the arrival of Northwest Terror Fest. For metal and its fans, it was a pivotal paradigm shift in which, "Northwest Terror Fest Flipped Seattle on its Head". An all-things-metal festival with a previous Southwest iteration, Terror Fest's three days hosted a lineup featuring no small quantity of metal issuing from the variegated low-lit landscape of black and doom metal mutations. Initially launched under the opportunity to, "Bring Warning to America: An Interview with Terrorfest founder David Rodgers", Rodger's wider curatorial vision for the festival, was detailed in Decibel's, "It's Good to Have Goals and Dreams Can Come True", and in a 2019 interview, the festival's co-organizer Joseph Schafer describing how "The Third Time (Is Still) the Charm".

Returning after three successful post-pandemic editions, Northwest Terror Fest arrives this year with some of the most potent sounds from the heavier end of the 21st century. Over the course of three nights, and six showcases, this year's lineup encompasses everything from gloaming atmospheric ambiance and doom riffs, blistering thrash and hardcore, and heavy psychedelic and stoner rock explorations. As depicted in No Clean Singing's coverage, attending Northwest Terror Fest is to witness an annual summation of the global scene's ongoing and expanding development. 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 expansiveness 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. The above resources sound the expanse of releases dominantly sourced from labels like, Hydrahead, Neurot, Ipecac, Deathwish, 20 Buck Spin, Dark Descent, Sargent House, Profound Lore, Season of Mist, Roadburn, Century Media, The Flenser, and Relapse.

David Cronenberg's "The Shrouds" at SIFF Cinema: Apr 25 - May 8 | "David Cronenberg: Master of Our Deepest Anxieties" | The Guardian

In the course of three years, and two editions of Cannes Film Festival, the Canadian master of sexualized sociopolitical cinema of the body, "David Cronenberg has Practically Become Bionic", by delivering us his "Post-Pain, Post-Sex Body Horror Sensation", that was "Crimes of the Future", and more recently the elaborate necrophiliac exploration of loss and longing, that is "The Shrouds". While the sensualist and philosophical film of 2022 explored a marginalized community and its search for a new sexuality in a changing human landscape, his newest, born of a rejected miniseries for Netflix, is a meditation on eroticised necrophiliac examination of grief and technology. Both films are attentive to the intricacies of cultural labor, and the appetites, needs and utility that would arise from a wholly different relationship to the body, and new technology which might enable them. Through "The Horror, the Horror of Crimes of the Future", and, "David Cronenberg getting Wrapped Up in Grief", the director has envisioned a shift in the human paradigm with new bureaucracies, artistic, political mores, and the interpersonal consequences of these newfound contexts. Each of these films, in their own way, have returned Cronenberg to his fundamentally Ballardian obsessions.

These concerns were at the forefront of his work of the mid-1990s to the earliest 2000s in which Cronenberg most clearly defined his brand of cerebral, carnal cinema, expanding on the initial plumbing of the future-body seen in "Videodrome" and "Dead Ringers", the decade before. Through a set of films, David Cronenberg fleshed out his preoccupations with the human body and the ways in which it would come to intersect with the social mechanisms and advanced technology of the modern world. The underground society of deviant sybarites, where machinery and injured appendages collide in “Crash”, and the mind deranging high stakes enhanced-reality gaming of “eXistenZ", both felt disturbingly prescient, and feature an unnerving, and enticing eroticism that draws you into their sexually charged intellectual premises. Mainstay of film criticism, Mark Kermode, dives into the meeting of technology, politics and the concerns of the body to be found in the filmmography of one of the greatest explorers of the modern era's concerns, "David Cronenberg, Master of Gore as a Metaphor for Our Deepest Anxieties". And in a wide-ranging conversation with The Guardian, the director and composer of the scores for 40 years of his major works explore how, "‘Something Must have Gone Wrong with Us’: David Cronenberg and Howard Shore on Four Decades of Body Horror".

Yasuaki Shimizu's "Kakashi" and "Kiren" US Tour with Spencer Doran: Mar 20 - Apr 2 | "This Japanese Sax Polymath Might Be a Postmodern Bach" | The New York Times

Some five years ago, curated by Visible Cloaks' Spencer Doran, Light in the Attic's Japan Archive imprint released a sublime assembly of Japanese interior music heard on, "Kankyo Ongaku: Japanese Ambient, Environmental & New Age Music 1980-1990". For the edition, Doran rightly cites that ambient music in Japan started, much as it did elsewhere, with Erik Satie, Marcel Duchamp, Morton Feldman, John Cage and their 20th century contemporaries being taught in university courses attended by these then-young electronic pioneers. By bridging modernist and postmodern modes of composition with the then-concurrent forays into "musical furnishings" supplied by Brian Eno, their ideas about background, modes of attention, functionality, and the abstracting of authorship came to the fore. These were to then intersect with the timing of notable advances in technology. In the hands of this generation of electronic pioneers, hardware manufactured for the consumer market was to meet culture-specific notions of environment and sound. The arrival in the west of this assembly of "Lullabies for Air Conditioners: The Corporate Bliss of Japanese Ambient", as Simon Reynolds points out, couldn't be more perfectly timed.

In recent years, labels like Palto Flats, WRWTFWW, and Doran's own Empire of Signs have unearthed rare and much sought-after gems, "Telling the Musical History of Japan's Ambient Era". A number of these recordings have garnered a scale of attention rarely seen for such works of quietly eccentric minimalism. In the second decade of the 21st century, the refined sublimity of Hiroshi Yoshimura's "Music for Nine Post Cards", and the incomparable micro-percussive soundworld of Midori Takada's "Through the Looking Glass", have finally made their way to western ears. The particularly long and circuitous course Takada's music has taken is explored by The Guardian in their, "Ambient Pioneer Midori Takada: 'Everything on this Earth Has a Sound'". The masterful saxophone-driven electroacoustic pop on Yasuaki Shimizu's "Kakashi", and previously unreleased "Kiren" from 1984, have also discovered new audiences. Riding in the wake of the New York Times feature, “This Japanese Sax Polymath Might Be a Postmodern Bach”, Shimizu and band arrive in the United States for the first tour of its kind in five decades, including a date at Seattle's Madame Lou's.

Michael Rother presents the Music of Harmonia and Neu! US Tour: Mar 22 - 30

On tour of North America this spring, Michael Rother presents a night at The Neptune focused on the trailblazing German experimental rock music of the 1970s, and the groundbreaking territories explored by his bands Neu! and Harmonia. Among the most notable figures to originate from the explosion of Krautrock's propulsive minimalism of the decade, a wave of experimentalism that birthed Can, Amon Düül II, and Ash Ra Tempel, Rother's various outfits and collaborations were at the very locus of this era. In interview, The Wire explored how the German guitarist helped develop a new vocabulary for rock in the 1970s and beyond. The decade saw a concurrent generation of German electric invention in minimal and synthesizer explorations from the likes of Popol Vuh, Asmus Tietchens, Conrad Schnitzler, Harald Grosskopf, and members of Cluster working both in and out of solo modes. Both of these facets of the burgeoning German experimental music scene are detailed by Jon Savage, in the pages of The Guardian's, "Elektronische Musik: A Guide to Krautrock". Recent overviews like Soul Jazz' "Deutsche Elektronische Musik" series, Light in the Attic's, "The Microcosm: Visionary Music of Continental Europe", and Bureau B's "Silberland: The Psychedelic Side of Kosmische Musik", and "Krautrock Eruption: An Introduction to German Electronic Music", have brought new attention to their explorations. Further timely unearthing of these Kosmische explorer's work, the early music of Asmus Tietchens saw a handsome series of reissues from Bureau B, and Harmonium received a lavish box set repress of their central albums on Grönland Records, the first official release of it's kind in decades.

Likewise, there have been official reissues of the music composed by the trio of Hans-Joachim Roedelius, Dieter Moebius, and Conrad Schnitzler as the Cluster 1971 - 1981 box set. In an interview for for Perfect Sound Forever Roedelius chronicled the intersection of this most notable outfit within the Krautrock and Kosmische scenes as an outcome of his and Schnitzler's founding of the Zodiak Free Arts Club. The venue acting as an attractor and confluence of the existing minimalist strain of psychedelic rock, performance art and theater and what Roedelius calls "free jazz meets electronics". A regular of the venue, Dieter Moebius became the third element in their improvised music theater trio, then named Kluster. It was through these intersections in the art, theater, and performance world that brought Moebius and Roedelius into the influential sphere of producer Conny Plank. This fortuitous meeting would be a catalyst in further cementing the disparate aspects of the existing Krautrock and Kosmische sounds into shared culture, producing notable cross-pollinations like that of Harmonia. Intersecting in the space between the repetitive motoric vocabulary of Michael Rother's work in Neu! with Moebius and Roedelius' freeform synthesizer explorations, Harmonia could be considered the genre's sole supergroup of a style. Documented in Alex Abramovich's "The Invention of Ambient Music" for the New Yorker, their open-ended freeform performances in gallery and theater spaces following the release of 1975's "Deluxe", attracted the attention of British producer extraordinaire Brian Eno. The shared solidarity in musical exploration and synthesis would culminate in September 1976 in an 11 day stayover in Forst Germany where Eno lived and recorded with Harmonia, producing the material that would become "Tracks and Traces".

“The Magic Lantern of Ingmar Bergman” at SIFF Cinema: Feb 25 - Apr 30

It is not without reason that Swedish director Ingmar Bergman, "The Master Filmmaker, Who Found Bleakness and Despair, as well as Comedy and Hope", in his indelible explorations of the human condition, appears on every significant critical assessment of 20th century cinema. Look no further than The British Film Institutes' Greatest Films of All Time Poll for evidence. This spring, Greg Olson productions, in collaboration with Stina Cowan, Cultural Director of the Swedish Club presents a series of ten films, restored by Svensk Filmindustri and the Ingmar Bergman Foundation, as “The Magic Lantern of Ingmar Bergman”. This retrospective follows on Olson's highly successful Italian cinema, film noir, Fellini, and Powell and Pressburger series hosted by SIFF Cinema, after Olson's departure from Seattle Art Museum and the discontinuation of their film program. In The New Yorker's "The Immortal World of Ingmar Bergman", Anthony Lane characterized the power of his first significant films from the mid-to-late 1950s as having the grip of a thriller and the elegance of a waltz. During those years Bergman was at the height of his prowess, thanks initially to a string of films spanning "Summer with Monika", "Wild Strawberries", "Smiles on a Summer Night", "The Magician", and "The Seventh Seal", all made in rapid succession in under six years. These were not born out of the ether, but instead the product of an extraordinarily long artistic development. "Summer with Monika", wasn't Bergman's first film, but his tenth. That this body of work stood apart in contrast to the Neorealist school which dominated post-War arthouse cinema at the time, was one of its defining and popular strengths.

Employing an analytic precision to the intellectual and existential disquiet that seemed fiercely at odds with the hedonistic nature of the times, Bergman's cinema centers around a grim obsession with an unflinching micro-examination of emotional confrontation. In-part made possible by his collaborations with two great cinematographers (Sven Nykvist and Gunnar Fischer), and his team of skilled performers. Bergman astonished audiences with the degree to which he was willing to interrogate cruelty, death, and above all the torment of doubt. He used cinema to strip bare these central concerns of life, few directors integrating their personal turmoil into their body of work to the extent that Bergman did. An autobiographical cinema, not simply in the details of the drama drawn from experience, but also in the sense of its spiritual and artistic response to the complexities of marriage, the relation of the sexes, duplicity, illness (both physical and mental), death and the church. His time in the theatre in Sweden as the director of the Royal Dramatic Theatre, Stockholm, brought to his film work a crucially interrelated set of technique and skill, and with it a devoted body of actors. These would form a locus around repeated roles from Harriet Andersson, Gunnar Björnstrand, Bibi Andersson, Max von Sydow, and Liv Ullmann. This body of actors was central to the successful stretch of films following on the notoriety of his initial breakthrough trio of the 1950s. His star continued to shine through the following decade with an Academy Award for "The Virgin Spring", which was echoed the following year when "Through A Glass Darkly" received the Best Foreign Film award at the Oscars. What are arguably his greatest works followed in this period spanning the mid-to-late 1960s, encompassing "Hour of the Wolf", "Winter Light", "The Silence", "Persona" and concluding with "Cries and Whispers" in 1971.

With multiple series of restorations, and repertory representations, the largest body of which thanks to the work of Criterion Collection and Janus Films, Bergman's cinema has been examined and re-examined through the lens of decades. Spanning sixty years and thirty nine films, The Cinema of Ingmar Bergman, was released by The Criterion Collection in celebration of the director's centennial as an astounding testament, housed in a lavish assembly of physical media, essays, printing and binding. Glenn Kenny's review for the New York Times, "Viewing Ingmar Bergman Through a Glass Less Darkly", plumbs the depths of this extravagant set and the riches to be found in its abundance. Criterion's assembly of essays around these central films make for essential reading, beginning with what many consider to be his first true film, "Summer with Monika: Summer Dreaming", to "Wild Strawberries: “Where Is the Friend I Seek?”, "The Seventh Seal: There Go the Clowns", and later, "The Virgin Spring: Bergman in Transition". These essays also documenting the mid-career string of masterpieces, including, "Through a Glass Darkly: Patron Saint of Angst", "Winter Light: Chamber Cinema", "The Silence", and "The Persistence of Persona". At the time of Janus Films' touring, "Ingmar Bergman's Cinema: A Centennial Retrospective", Peter Bradshaw wrote on the repertory theatrical revival of one of his fiercest, sensually brilliant, and unclassifiable pictures in the pages of The Guardian, "Persona: Bergman's Enigmatic Masterpiece Still Captivates".

Noir City Festival: Dark City Dames: The Wicked Women of Film Noir: Feb 14 - 20

This year's edition of the annual festival thematically curated as, Noir City: The Wicked Women of Film Noir finds Eddie Muller and the Film Noir Foundation returning to Seattle, at the gloriously high definition venue of the Seattle Cinerama. The 18 film iteration, 12 of which will be on celluloid, follows the savvy protagonists, streetwise antagonists, and the often calamitous enticements of cinemas femme fatales. Which have been richly chronicled in Muller's ”Dark City Dames: The Wicked Women of Film Noir”, to be published in a new expanded edition this April. This marks the fourth installment since returning from a pandemic hiatus with the Noir City: 15th Anniversary Edition, and Noir City: Dark City in 2022, the latter inspired by Muller's bestselling book "Dark City: The Lost World of Film Noir". At the time of the newly expanded publishing of the book, Muller spoke with NPR's Terry Gross, plumbing the genre's "Celebration of Cinema's Double Crosses and Doomed Characters" that populate "The Lost World of Film Noir". Previous to the hiatus, the festival presented Noir City: International Edition II, which continued the programming last seen in the first of the Noir City: International Editions, with geographically framed sets and quartets of films originating from far flung corners of the world. On other occasions, the program has been focused thematically, such as the year that featured Noir City: The Big Knockover - Heists, Holdups and Schemes Gone Awry, and just last year a new spin on the international edition was assembled with, Noir City declaring Darkness Has No Borders.

Earlier editions such as the Noir City: Film Noir in The 1950s program which tracked the beginning of the decline of the American studio system, and into a fresh cinematic landscape where the genre was to be refashioned, both subtly and radically, for a new generation. Other iterations have been formatted in a Film Noir from A to B presentation involving "A" and "B" film double bills, in both low budget and high production value features. Outside of the annual festival, in 2018 Muller took up permanent residence on TCM with the launch of his Saturday night Noir Alley showcase. Now in its ninth year, his show has become a central component of how "Turner Classic Movies Is Changing. And Trying to Stay the Same", yet the venerable platform has been under fire from its larger corporate umbrella. In 2023, Warner Brothers Discovery gutted the leadership team of Turner Classic Movies, following which, a group of famed directors then came together to "Fight to Save Turner Classic Movies". This resulted in a surprising reversal, in which, "TCM to Include Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese and Paul Thomas Anderson Taking Active Role". Muller's weekly selections and introductions on Noir Alley act as more than just a showcase for the Film Noir Foundation and their partners at The UCLA Film & Television Archive, but instead a global overview of the social concerns, look, sound, aesthetic, and feel that define the Dark Passages of film noir.

Molchat Doma's "Belaya Polosa" & North American Tour with Sextile: Jan 25 - Mar 7

Inspired by the goth and early electro-industrial sounds of the 1980s and 1990s, a new generation of darkwave and synthwave producers have found novel variations and generated a music of 21st century nuance to its particulars. The balancing act of its particular brand of starkly minimal, angular, existential electronic dance pop of alienation and heartbreak is presented by The Guardian in, “‘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, She Wants Revenge, Xeno & Oaklander, The Soft Moon, Twin Tribes, She Past Away, Drab Majesty, TR/ST, 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. An overview of these concurrent, interrelated, and offshoot genres, and their contemporary revival was mapped by Vice in their, "A Brief History of Musical Waves from New to Next". Compilations like the now-classic, “The Minimal Wave Tapes: Volume One” focused on the coldwave and minimal wave strains, while the recent “No Songs Tomorrow: Darkwave, Ethereal Rock, and Coldwave 1981-1990”, present an all-inclusive cornucopia of variables within the subgenre.

Taken together, these compilations offer an overarching map of a sound that was born of the settling dust of the tumult of post-punk's upending of the topography of rock and noise music. Expressed through a more uneasy, existential, often edgier and sexually charged sound than their more commercial compatriots, darkwave retained its post-punk values while utilizing the same technology, and dancier, more upbeat tempos of new wave. Few contemporary artists embody this intersection of new wave and harder-edged sonic aesthetics than Belarusian artists, Molchat Doma. Their sound is a concoction of the recognizable components of synth-driven new wave, staccato drum machine, angular guitar and plodding bass of post-punk, with the additional reflection of a hauntological looking back to the monumental ruins of the Soviet era. In more senses than one, "Molchat Doma: Is Caught in the Crosshairs". Social media, relocating from Belarus to the United States, and signing to Sacred Bones the domestic haven of all things neo-goth, have contributed significantly to their rise in prominence within this scene. In doing so, they have also made new compatriots of labelmates like Sextile, and their electro-industrial sound as heard on "Push". On tour beginning this month in support of last year's "Belaya Polosa", Molchat Doma and Sextile will be channeling post-Soviet melancholia and fetishistically energized Los Angeles electro when they intersect for a night at The Showbox, Seattle.

:::: Films of 2024 ::::

TOP FILMS OF 2024 IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER
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George Miller  "Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga"  (United States)
Sean Baker  "Anora"  (United States)
Julia Loktev  "My Undesirable Friends: Last Air in Moscow"  (United States)
Dimitris Athyridis  “exergue - on Documenta 14”  (Greece)
Albert Serra  "Afternoons of Solitude"  (Spain)
Jia Zhang-ke  "Caught by the Tides"  (China)
Brady Corbet  "The Brutalist"  (United States)
Miguel Gomes  "Grand Tour"  (Portugal)
Catherine Breillat  "Last Summer"  (France)
Brothers Quay  "Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass"  (United Kingdom)
Agnieszke Holland  "Green Border"  (Poland)
Mike Leigh  "Hard Truths"  (United Kingdom)
RaMell Ross  "Nickel Boys"  (United States)
Lisandro Alonso  "Eureka"  (Portugal)
Nicolás Pereda  "Lázaro at Night"  (Mexico)
Lou Ye  "An Unfinished Film"  (China)
Francis Ford Coppola  "One for the Heart: Reprise"  Restored Rereleased  (United States)
Emilio Fernandez  "Victims of Sin" Restored Rereleased (Mexico)
Hiroshi Shimizu  "Children of the Beehive"  Restored Rereleased  (Japan)
Edward Yang  "A Confucian Confusion"  Restored Rereleased  (Taiwan)
Gary Hustwit  "Eno"  (United States)
Steve McQueen  "Occupied City"  (United Kingdom)
Sergei Loznitsa  "The Invasion"  (Ukraine)
Johan Grimonprez  "Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat"  (Belgium)
Kevin Macdonald  "High & Low: John Galliano"  (United Kingdom)
Peter Zaillian & Patricia Highsmith  "Ripley"  (United States)
Peter Kosminsky & Peter Straughan  "Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light"  (United Kingdom)

Again, this annual overview will be a shorter and more terse assessment than in years past, of cities traveled to, arts seen, music heard, and festivals attended. No other event of 2024 was or will be more consequential to arts and culture in the United States as the results of this past fall's election. Of which, the data now clearly supports what the New York Times stated at the time; “Voters in liberal strongholds across the country, from city centers to suburban stretches, failed to show up to vote for Vice President Kamala Harris at the levels they had for Joseph R. Biden Jr. four years earlier, contributing significantly to her defeat by Donald J. Trump". Which poses the question, “Why Was There a Broad Drop-Off in Democratic Turnout in 2024?”. The Times continues in "How Democrats Lost Their Base and Their Message", by providing substantial evidence supporting the observation that the 2024 conservative populist pitch bumped Democrats off their traditional place in American politics. In doing so, establishing the fact that; "The overarching pattern is clear. In election after election, Democrats underperformed among traditional Democratic constituencies during the Trump era. Sometimes, it was merely a failure to capitalize on his unpopularity. Other times, it was a staggering decline in support. Together, it has shattered Democratic dreams of building a new majority with the rise of a new generation of young and nonwhite voters. It tapped into many of the issues and themes that once made these voters Democrats. This overarching pattern requires an overarching explanation: Mr. Trump’s populist conservatism corroded the foundations of the Democratic Party’s appeal."

In other news of the year, with the global pandemic now decidedly in the rearview, one would assume that the continuance of the regional venues and cultural opportunities would be returning in an assertive manner. Yet here in the urban northwest, the effects of the pandemic on cultural and social life are still manifesting themselves in a pervasive manner. Businesses and cultural venues continue to have limited hours, close early on weekday and weekend nights, and program with a reduced scale and truncated durations over what we saw as recent as four years prior. Some of which have even reduced hours more since their initial reopening in 2021. The once essential component of urban social life in the northwest, the espresso cafe, has been particularly hard hit. With many of them no longer offering evening hours of any variety. Correspondingly, and almost unheard-of before the pandemic, our independent theaters like that of SIFF Cinema, now rarely have screenings past the hour of 8pm. Yet it should be championed that SIFF’s major achievement of recent years was in acquired the historic institution of the Seattle Cinerama, where it was announced, "SIFF buys Cinerama, Plans Reopening of Shuttered Cinema Palace".

Many of the other regional arts institutions and venues are in a state of flux, transition, and relocation. Where it was Seattle Art Museum's loss when "Museum’s Longtime Film Curator of SAM Film Series Laid Off", it has been SIFF's gain. As Greg Olson has continued his programming work renting theaters from SIFF for his successful film noir, italian cinema series, and Powell & Pressburger retrospective. In the University District, the one-of-a-kind 150,000 title resource that is Scarecrow Video has begun a Save Our Scarecrow campaign, wherein the last video store and film archive of its kind in the world is at a pivotal point, "Scarecrow Video Needs to Raise $1.8M or Face Possible Closure". Their sister organization, The Grand Illusion Cinema is also in a state of flux as 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 the city on Capitol Hill, after seeing years of diminished programming, and subsequently reduced attendance, Northwest Film Forum now faces a fiscal and cultural crisis, and in response, "Northwest Film Forum Laid Off Nearly Half its Staff".

A number of other hard-hitting losses to the cultural landscape of the city came at the end of last year. The first of which was the recently launched visual art and community space, Museum of Museums, and the second not soon after its opening and inception for, XO Seattle in the space of the historic Coliseum Theater. Even Seattle's longstanding and prestigious literary arts mecca finds itself in uncharted water, due to a recent turn of events, "Seattle's Hugo House Faces an Uncertain Future". The year also saw the announcement of the, "Closing of both Linda Hodges and James Harris Galleries" and all the while, the gutted void-space of downtown has seen a few vacant storefronts become creative arts venues, including the massive retail space once occupied by Bed Bath & Beyond. In a lengthy discussion with NPR's Libby Denkmann and Mike Davis, Museum of Museums founder Greg Lundgren addresses the reality of, "Is Seattle's Arts Infrastructure Crumbling?". Yet, into that same space have manifested three major new gallery and studio developments, the week of Seattle Art Fair saw the second activation of the Coliseum Theatre by its new stewarts Actualize AiR. Over the course of the spring and summer, "Belltown Has a New Gallery, with Another on the Way", in the downtown gallery spaces opened by Base Camp Studio. These made possible by Seattle Restored, an arts and culture subsidized campaign from the Office of Economic Development.

Breaking from annual tradition, this year saw a deviation from attending the international film festival in the month of May. Insead, the middle of the month was spent in New York City for music, film, dance and cinema premieres. Foremost among these, the Metropolitan Opera's presentation of “John Adams’s ‘El Niño’ Arriving in Lush Glory”. Concurrently, the New York City Ballet assembled their yearly showcase of "Contemporary Choreography", featuring the highlight of "Glass Pieces' Drawing Us into its World". No time in New York would be complete without theatre, so I was in attendance at Chekhov's “Uncle Vanya”, in a new translation at Lincoln Center Theatre. It is also elementary that a day was dedicated to The Museum of Modern Art's permanent collection on view on the fourth and fifth floors, and while there, experiencing Joan Jonas' "Out Takes". Similarly, an afternoon was occupied at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the unmissable array of 12th to 17th century paintings on display, as well as the classic 19th and early 20th century wings on offer in the Robert Lehman Collection. The day was also complemented by the current exhibitions on, "Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion", and "Before Yesterday We Could Fly" an Afrofuturist overview. Being in the big city, galleries are a must. Chelsea delivered two notables in Delcy Morelos' "El abrazo" at Dia: Chelsea, and Lucas Arruda's "Assum Preto", at David Zwirner. Across the way in Midtown, Japan Society was in the midst of a major two-part overview of "Tomorrow There will be Fine Weather: A Hiroshi Shimizu Retrospective". And unlike Seattle, no day in New York concluded before midnight, with most nights coming to a close in the AM hours to the tune of late-night sets at Midtown's Tomi Jazz.