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".