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 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.".

The contemporary European-centric jazz scene that is characteristic of what has become known as the "ECM Sound" is embodied by such players and ensembles as 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. The significance of the ECM label to the extended international jazz community and its embracing of 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 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", at the Earshot Jazz Festival date at the 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, SAM’s plan 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.

Brighter Death Now and Mortiis "The Dungeons are Calling" US Tour: Sept 4 - 28 | "Cold Meat Industry: Burning the Self to Seed the Soul Anew" | Bardo Methodology

A confluence of genres, aesthetics, cultural formations and schisms intersected in the late-1980s to mid-1990s to produce a musical movement and moment in experimental sounds coming out of Scandinavia. Much has been written about the countries’ black and death metal cultures, Michael Moynihan and Didrik Søderlind's "Lords of Chaos: The Bloody Rise of the Satanic Metal Underground", being the often-referenced document of the era, as is Daniel Ekeroth's "Swedish Death Metal" published by Bazillion Points. More obscure were the concurrent post-industrial music sounds emerging from Sweden and Norway, then described by the death ambient and black industrial, apocalyptic neo-folk, power electronics, and dungeon synth subgenres that found a locus and home through the record label created by Roger Karmanik. The earliest of these releases issued on vinyl record and cassette in the late 1980s, a component of the global experimental music tape trading culture, and were expressly within the industrial noise and power electronics spheres. These sounds were epitomized by the ritualistic and anti-christian power noise thematics of Maschinenzimmer 412, the pounding industrial percussion of In Slaughter Natives, gloaming atmospheres and harsh textures of Megaptera and Memorandum, and Roger Karmanik's own human depravity-themed Brighter Death Now project. By the early 1990s Cold Meat Industry had expanded its roster to include artists and sounds within the dark ambient and pagan neo-folk scenes. Shifting their focus to the compact disc format, and a heightened sense of graphic design focused on the atmospheric and ethereal, the label released some of the earliest music from Peter Andersson's Raison d'être, and BJ Nilsen's Morthound projects. The former would become one of the mainstays of the label, and over the course of the ensuing three decades Raison d'être would produce a strain of oppressively atmospheric ambient music that stretched the boundaries of abstract industrial into outlying cinematic realms.

In interview, Andersson has made his filmic inspirations evident, and it is elementary that Decibel Magazine would make Raison d'être's music the focus of their, "Dark Ambient: For When You Need to Concentrate…or Meditate on the Nothingness of Existence". By the middle of the decade Cold Meat Industry would come to diversify their sound further to encompass the growing global neo-folk scene, and launch the offshoot label Cruel Moon International to showcase their release. They also enlisted the noise assault of Mental Destruction, blackened ambient music from Aghast, martial industrial from Puissance, pagan ritualistic and neoclassical music from Ordo Rosarius Equilibrio and Arcana, and one of the earliest forays into what would later be termed dungeon synth, "Ånden Som Gjorde Opprør" a largely electronic album from former Emperor bassist, Mortiis. The cohesion of the label's sound, conceptual and aesthetic concerns were highlighted by three compilations released around this time in rapid succession. The first, an anthology of rarities and cassette-only releases that took the form of "In the Butcher’s Backyard", the other two, both overview assemblies, the "Karmanik Collection", and “…Even Wolves Hid their Teeth”, which remain among the most indelible of the label’s releases. In the ensuing years, after a brief label hiatus brought on by deteriorating mental and physical health, Roger Karmanik reactivated Cold Meat Industry in late 2018. Following the successful multiple-day 30th and 35th anniversary festivals, at the Södra Teatern in Stockholm, Sweden, he then engaged in a series of European-centric tours across the continent with a rotating roster of past and current labelmates. Now, on the eve of the release of the successfully crowdfunded documentary, "Soul in Flames: The Adversarial Fires of Cold Meat Industry" this fall, Brighter Death Now will be joining Mortiis and domestic artists Sombre Arcane and Malfet for "The Dungeons are Calling" an extensive United States tour, with a date at Seattle's El Corazon. In a rare interview with Niklas Göransson for Bardo Methodology's seventh issue, Roger Karmanik spoke of his artistic beginnings, improbable successes, and the long journey to reanimate the label, "Cold Meat Industry: Burning the Self to Seed the Soul Anew".

Einstürzende Neubauten's "Rampen" & European Tour: Sept 5 - Oct 30 | "Feurio!: The Strange World of Einstürzende Neubauten" | The Quietus

After two unsuccessful attempts at arranging North American tours in the span of the last decade, germinal industrial music band Einstürzende Neubauten will not be returning to the United States in the foreseeable future. The first of these two failed tours was caused by the delayed processing of their visas, and the second with a date in Seattle, by the disruption of the coronavirus pandemic. Instead this fall they will be embarking on an extensive tour of continental Europe and the United Kingdom, with major dates in Berlin, London, Paris, and multiple performances in Antwerp. Theirs is a four decade history, which began in West Berlin in 1980 amidst the wreckage of the 20th century's vision of Europe. In the dilapidated warehouses, urban ruins, and null-zone of Potsdamer Platz in proximity to the Berlin Wall, Einstürzende Neubauten were there at the very inception of industrial music. Following in the wake of punk and early new wave, industrial music culture bore many correspondences to its post-punk and gothic rock siblings, yet defined itself apart for the literal mechanics of its production and aesthetics. Globally a number of epicenters for the sound's earliest formation could be found in Berlin, Chicago, New York, London, and the major coastal cities of California. Most notably and formative for the sound and its culture, the German scene was the initial defining locus. Gathering around the Geniale Dilletanten Festival, and its burgeoning music and performance subculture through efforts largely spearheaded by Wolfgang Müller, the genre's origin immediately expanded outwards to encompass multimedia, performance art, print and literary works. In a span of half a decade, this thriving scene in the margins of the divided city, gave birth to such artists as Die Tödliche Doris, Deutsch Amerikanische Freundschaft, F.S.K., Mania D, Palais Schaumburg, Sprung Aus Den Wolken, Abwärts, Malaria!, and Einstürzende Neubauten along with their various side projects and solo iterations.

Their legendary, sometimes infamous, and often literally incendiary presence spans decades, and has been documented in numerous and expansive articles and interviews. A cross-section of these include The Wire's cover feature, "Einstürzende Neubauten: Annihilating Angels", the recounting of a 1984 London performance, "How to Destroy the ICA with Drills", Wired magazine in their "Einstürzende Neubauten has Cooked Mud, Transformed Meat", and more recently in the pages of The Guardian, “'They'd Greet Us with Fire Extinguishers!': The Wild Times of Blixa Bargeld”. For the band's 30th anniversary, Mute Records released a fourth anthology of studio improvisations, commercially released recordings, live excerpts, and previously unreleased compositions. This futurist anthology, titled "Strategies Against Architecture IV", runs the gamut of grinding industrial ruin, theatrical poetic digressions, atmospheric meanderings, and propulsive motoric groove. In his review for The Quietus, Tim Burrows states; "Approaching a world tour followed by imminent hiatus, they leave behind this varied yet cohesive record of the last eight years, a period of creativity that belies the band’s three decades. It’s a virile, nuanced alternative to a lot of the flat pop around at the moment, and suggests that there could be a lot more to come." This a-lot-more-to-come has since taken the form of the nuanced bohemian landscapes explored on 2020's "Alles in Allem", and this year's double album, "Rampen". While these new works express a kind of refined accessibility, they however remain playfully experimental in that they still adhere to the fundamental tenets of Neubauten's ethos. These were detailed in The Quietus' "Feurio!: The Strange World of Einstürzende Neubauten", as a characteristic dissonance, an abstractly poetic lyrical sense, a raw molding of sound, and a genre-adverse bastardization of styles which remains singularly their own.

Seattle Art Fair at Lumen Field Event Center: Jul 25 - 28 | Forest for the Trees at RailSpur: Jul 24 - 28

Following a two year pandemic hiatus, Seattle Art Fair returned with a new artistic director under the aegis of Art Market Productions who announced that they would continue as sole owner and producer. This was due to the passing of Paul Allen in 2018, wherein the future of Allen's founding of numerous cultural and arts institutions, and significant philanthropic contribution to the city, were made uncertain. By 2020, it was established that Allen's Vulcan corporation would no longer be investing in their cultural branch, with the explicit message sent by the shuttering of their arts and entertainment division, and the layoff of all related staff. This would of course translate as "Vulcan Closes its Arts + Entertainment Division, which Includes Cinerama and Seattle Art Fair". Producing a cascade of concerns related to arts funding and the venues under Vulcan's purview. Most significantly, the question of the  Seattle Cinerama, one of only three movie theaters in the world still capable of showing three-panel Cinerama films, project 70mm celluloid, and present digital ultra-high resolution films in Dolby Atmos Sound. The future of this almost singular venue was resolved last year with the announcement in the Seattle Times that, “SIFF Buys Cinerama, Plans Reopening", and through a deal with the Paul G. Allen estate the cinema reopened this past fall. In the case of Seattle Art Fair, it is now wholly owned and run by Art Market Productions, after the inaugural success of its four year run under Vulcan Arts + Entertainment. On the eve of the fair's 2015 launch, there was abundant speculation as to the nature of the exhibit local philanthropist Paul Allen and the organization he had assembled with Max Fishko of Art Market Productions, would be bringing to the city. At the time there was little that offered insight beyond the press release, which made it out to be half-commercial gallery, half-curated exhibition, featuring some 60 galleries representing local to international dealers with an emphasis on the Pacific Rim.

The majority of the dialog focused on the fair's relation to the art market, with Brian Boucher's "Why Are Gagosian, Pace, and Zwirner Signing On for the Seattle Art Fair?" and The Observer's "Paul Kasmin and Pace Gallery Join the Inaugural Seattle Art Fair" leading the discussion. With later pieces like Seattle Times "High Art Meets Deep Pockets at Seattle Art Fair", as well as the New York Times recap, "Seattle Art Fair Receives a Boost From Tech’s Big Spenders", and ArtNews "Why the Seattle Art Fair Is Important for the Art World", positioning the event in relationship to the moneyed local tech industry. All of which were little more than discussions of the art market and the inclusion of some of the gallery world's international power players. For insight into the curatorial direction and work to be featured, one had to rely on regional media in which there was no small supply of skepticism expressed concerning the fair being another of Paul Allen's pet cultural projects, both for the good and the bad. The extent of the fair's scope became apparent opening weekend with favorable coverage in both the New York Times and Artforum. The exhibitions and galleries drawn from Asia were among the three day event's greater successes. In addition to the participating galleries Kaikai Kiki and Koki Arts from Tokyo, along with Gana Art of Seoul and Osage Gallery from Hong Kong, the "Thinking Currents" wing curated by Leeza Ahmady, director of Asia Contemporary Art Week produced a premier exhibition of video, film and sound work exploring themes related to the cultural, political, and geographical parameters of the Pacific Rim. With Kaikia KiKi head, Takashi Murakami returning for the fair's second installment, programming his own satellite exhibition "Juxtapoz x SuperFlat", for Pivot Art + Culture. As covered by Trinie Dalton in, "Pacific Objects", for Artforum, "Seattle Art Fair and Out of Sight made a Return" on the occasion of the fair's second year. Continuing the trend of atypical and non-traditional gallery works, the fourth annual Seattle Art Fair presented Mark Pauline the founder of Survival Research Laboratories, joining influential science fiction author Bruce Sterling in conversation.

The author and the outsider artist, technologist and robotics specialist have intersected on previous occasions, notably 20 years prior in the pages of Wired, for "Is Phoenix Burning?". The cultural and economic landscape that Pauline operates in now is quite different than that of the early 1980s, presenting a new set of challenges to his performative art. So there's logic at work in that Pauline would now align himself with gallery culture, and the contextualized space of its presentation. As Wired said, "artistic respectability doesn’t so much beckon as envelop", in response to The New York Times' "Fire-Breathing Robots Bringing Anarchy to a Chelsea Art Gallery". The 2018 installment also saw artistic director, Laura Fried, succeeded by Nato Thompson. For ArtNews, Thompson went on to explain the approach in his curatorial statement, for the 2019 edition which featured works and talks by the Center for PostNatural History, largescale video artists Nadia Hironaka and Matthew Suib, architecture and installation creators, Bigert & Bergström, and choreographer Morgan Thorson. For 2023, the year's big coup was the challenge as "Seattle Art Fair Pushes the Boundaries of Artistic Expression", by hosting artist provocateur, Dinos Chapman. Who as a member of the Young British Artists movement with his brother Jake Chapman, have been characterized as, "What if Satan and Hitler Opened a MacDonald's in Hell?". With Seattle Art Fair's eighth installment this year, artistic director Nato Thompson returns, programming a series of specific works by, Michael Leavitt, João Artur da Silva, Nathalie Djurberg & Hans Berg, Julie Alpert, a mixed-media installation by Ruy Cézar Campos, Epiphany Couch, Maria Gaspar, Tori Karpenko, Sam Stubblefield, an open gallery event with Emily Counts, and installations by Michael Rakowitz and Ralph Ziman. With a voluminous body of galleries, more than 80 in total, along with on-and-off site discussions, projects and open studio events. New Artists/New Collectors also presents the work of 10 select artists, Corning Museum of Glass will host "New Glass Review 43", and Seattle Art Museum will be represented by a Pop-Up Gallery. There are also the annual panel discussions, this year including New Artists/New Collectors once again, and observations on Art Appropriation in Today’s Environment. There are also five major satellite events around the city on the weekend of Art Fair, and The Seattle Times have selected from the abundance on offer, "During Seattle Art Fair week 2024, Don’t Miss these Satellite Shows". Their numbers include the return of Forest for the Trees at the RailSpur building in Pioneer Square, the second activation of the Coliseum Theatre after the initial opening from XO Seattle by Actualize AiR, and the two new downtown gallery spaces opened by Base Camp Studios. Photo credit: The Rendon Gallery