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.