"Yayoi Kasuma: Infinity Mirrors" at Seattle Art Museum: Jun 30 - Sept 10

Following its debut at the Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden, the retrospective of Yayoi Kusama's painting, sculptural and installation work will travel to four major museums in the United States and Canada, including the Seattle Art Museum, The Broad in Los Angeles, the Art Gallery of Ontario, and the Cleveland Museum of Art. From experiences had at the Broad and it's "Infinity Mirrored Room: The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away" of 2015, with overwhelming demand and inaccessibility by those who purchased tickets, the current touring exhibition hopes to curb such issues with a explicitly finite number of tickets offered for scheduled times and limited duration viewings of each installation. The Hirshhorn became the testing ground for this format, finding that even with the severe limitation put on time in each of the Infinity Rooms, patrons were engaging in distracted activities, leading to damage to the installation. From their example, we can hope that Seattle Art Museum has created a structure for programming the highest qualitative experience for it's patrons as "Yayoi Kasuma: Infinity Mirrors" arrives for it's two month engagement this July. Working concurrently with the then developing Gutai movement in Japan, Kusama produced her own idiosyncratic paintings in a style incorporating abstracted natural forms in watercolor, gouache and oil, primarily on paper. This work came to develop in a fashion outside of the canvas, with a growing disregard for traditional materials and setting. Her focus on repeating abstract patters and polka dots expanded to cover the surfaces of walls, floors, cloth materials, and later, household objects and human figures. Leaving Japan in 1956, a brief stint in the Northwest followed, during which her correspondence with notable American painter Georgia O'Keeffe led to connections in the New York Minimalist and Fluxus scenes of the early 1960s.

By 1961 Kusama had relocated to New York, coming to share a studio in the same building as installation artists and sculptors Donald Judd and Eva Hess. Kusama's own work developed over this period, expanding to include everyday objects such as ladders, shoes and furnishings who's surfaces where redolent with the sculptural recrudesce of phallic protrusions. Initially white and monochrome, and later in metallic and again, polka dot configurations. During this time Kusama struck up a friendship with assemblage and experimental filmmaker Joseph Cornell, which came to be a source of lasting and often daily conversations and correspondence with the senior artist and creative mentor. A span of time also marked by notable shows with figures from the Pop Art movement, a brief compatriotship with Andy Warhol and inclusion in high profile exhibitions including the 1966 Venice Biennale with her "Narcissus Garden". It was with the breakthrough of her 1965 "Infinity Mirror Room: Phalli’s Field" that came to define the larger direction of her life's body of work. Utilizing mirrored walls in a controlled and enclosed space, Kusama escalated the focused repetition of her earlier paintings and works into a seemingly endless perceptual landscape. In the decades since the advances of her first installation of it's kind, the artist has produced more than twenty distinct Infinity Mirror Rooms as a series of "Vivid Hallucinations from a Fragile Life". The Hirshhorn exhibition of this past year presented six of these works, the largest number of such pieces shown simultaneously together, making it the first retrospective of it's kind. From the Hirshhorn: "Ranging from peep-show-like chambers to multimedia installations, each of Kusama’s kaleidoscopic environments offers the chance for the viewer to have a vantage into the illusion of infinite space. By tracing the development of these iconic installations alongside a selection of her other key artworks, Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors aims to reveal the significance of the Infinity MIrror Rooms amidst today’s renewed interest in experiential practices and virtual spaces."

"Tokyo Flashback: P.S.F. Psychedelic Speed Freaks" & The Legacy of Hideo Ikeezumi | Keiji Haino's "Watashi Dake?" & Fushitsusha North American Tour: Jul 19 - 22

With the passing of Hideo Ikeezumi and the conclusion of his legendary P.S.F. label there have been many remembrances of "Psychedelic Speed Freak: The Blistering Experimentalism of Hideo Ikeezumi". In the wake of the loss of this notable cultural figure and his institution, a series of corresponding events have been seen around the globe. Most notably a memorial concert in Japan and the collaborative release between Disk Union and DIW "Tokyo Flashback: P.S.F. ~Psychedelic Speed Freaks~". Next month will also see an exceedingly rare North American tour from the stalwart and defining band of the label, Fushitsusha, with a limited set of dates in New York and Los Angeles. Before his death, Ikeezumi entrusted the legacy of P.S.F. to Peter Kolovos and Steve Lowenthal, who will be reissuing selections from the vast and influential catalog on their Los Angeles based, Black Editions label. The first of which will be Fushitsusha frontman and plumber of the depths of musical and aesthetic darkness, Keiji Haino's first solo recording, "Watashi Dake?". In a rare english interview, the guitarist spoke this year with Takeshi Goda on his formative years and first forays with the band Lost Aaraaff into early psychedelia, “Like an Antithetical Keiji Haino: A Conversation with Haino on His Early Years and 'Watashi Dake?'". Essential reading can also be found in Alan Cummings piece for Forced Exposure on the origins of Haino, and his influential role in the deep Japanese underground of the 1970s, "Pitch-Black Convulsions: Watashi Dake? in the Context of Underground Japan".

Cummings details the context from which Keiji Haino's first band of note arose, a scene born of dissolution with the 1970's Jazz Kissa, central to which was a venue called Minor in the western Tokyo suburb of Kichijoji. The venue's owner Takafumi Sato slowly transformed the space from a conventional jazz coffeehouse of the time, to a stark, bare-walled live venue where anything went. Minor situated itself in the interzone between the 1970's late-hippie underground rock scene populated by groups like Les Rallizes Denudes, Takehisa Kosugi's Taj Mahal Travellers, and Zuno Keisatsu, with the newly generated punk sound heard in the Tokyo prefectures of Shinjuku and Roppongi. A sound practiced by the fledgling body of bands that included Friction, Mirrors, and Lizard, in their numbers. It would be at Minor that Haino would hone his darker-than-dark style of guitar and vocal performances, often in extended late night sessions lasting until the AM hours. This venue, depicted as ground zero in Cummings' "The Origins of the Tokyo Underground Sound" for The Wire, would also be the cultural coalescing space from which Haino's best known and longest lasting group, Fushitsusha would first emerge. In a quickly modernizing and densely populated city like Tokyo, with few opportunities outside of the Jazz Kissa and coffeehouse scenes, rare venues of this kind provided a foothold for the deep rock underground and outsider creativity. Named after his heavy rock band at the time, "Gaseneta Wasteland" is Toshiharu Osato's memoir of Tokyo's late seventies rock underground. In which Osato describes the history of Minor as a "mad, destructive race to total ruin," a space inhabited by "troublesome howling boors... goblins, monsters and ghosts." It is no wonder then that the blackest, black-clad specter in all of modern of Japanese rock would find such a space his creative incubator.

"The Amazon Effect": How the Dot-Com Juggernaut Dominated Nearly Everything This Year | The New Republic

Essential reading for all consumers this past December in the pages of The New Republic to be found in Alex Shepard's "Amazon Dominated Nearly Everything This Year". Particularly notable when one considers the contributing effect this will have on the cultural character, retail landscape, competitive housing environment, and wealth stratification in their host city, when Amazon chooses it's second corporate headquarters. Not to mention the conditions of the workplace environment and it's corporate ethos, as detailed in the New York Times extensive expose of last year, "Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace". Further plans to expand into physical retail were also revealed in recent months, "Why Amazon Just Opened a Physical Bookstore", with upwards of 300 of their bookstores speculated to open nationwide. Or, as Gizmodo puts it, "Amazon Will Open Physical Bookstores Because Life is a Practical Joke Played on Us All". Of less levity, the documentation of the "Amazon Effect" continues on NPR this morning in their feature "Big Behemoth?: How Amazon Could Upend the U.S. Economy", with Stacy Mitchell co-director of the Institute for Self-Reliance, and author of "Amazon’s Stranglehold: How the Company’s Tightening Grip Is Stifling Competition, Eroding Jobs, and Threatening Communities". She is joined by James Marcus, editor at Harper's Magazine, and author of "Amazonia: Five Years at the Epicenter of the Dot-Com Juggernaut". As they discuss the nature of the Amazon's grip on the economy, as well as the question whether with the company's latest series of acquisitions, it has opened itself up to the grounds of an extensive anti-trust suit.

Concurrently, a limited but informed subset of book consumers are beginning to question their default to Amazon as the go-to for all things print and beyond. This was brought on by 2015's flexing of power in the publishing and distribution world, when Amazon delayed deliveries and prevented pre-orders on titles in relation against the publishers Hatchette Book Group and Bonnier. This heightened awareness would only have caused minor ripples (at best) in consumer response and awareness, if it wasn't for Hachette having an ally in Stephen Colbert and his campaign, "I Didn't Buy It On Amazon". See his dialog on the subject with social activist and writer, Sherman Alexie, for reference. Rallying awareness and solidarity among book retailers, Colbert paired with one of the nation's largest independents, Portland's Powell's Books to drive pre-orders on many titles, as "Indie Booksellers Join Hachette's Battle with Amazon". A few higher profile news and entertainment vehicles have been getting in on the game, positing that in the midst of this all, we take advantage of the existing book retail options we have in our urban centers. Editorial pieces like Stephen Marche's "How to Quit Amazon and Shop in an Actual Bookstore (and Why You Damn Well Should)" giving renewed relevance to Steve Wasserman's essential reading in the pages of The Nation, "The Amazon Effect". Among other consequences of Amazon's dominance, Wasserman discusses what many unwitting consumers are relinquishing, and may not be able to replace, in making the shift to online buying from a single marketplace holding a dominating percentage of the field. All the while many of us live in cities where the (few remaining) independent retail choices still exist. These both read as excellent companion pieces to Tony Sanfilippo on the future of place and community-oriented books retail, "Book Places in the Digital Age".

Typonexus presents Lubomyr Melnyk at Chapel Performance Space: Jul 1

Lubomyr Melnyk's appearance at the final Northwest edition of Substrata was a rapturous cascade of dynamic tonalities, timbres and performance physicality. Producing some of the most bewilderingly gorgeous emanations I've heard originate from an acoustic instrument, of any kind. His is a music similar to the long-form Indian Ragas of LaMonte Young or Terry Riley, while embracing the density of Charlemagne Palestine and wedded with a repetitive patterned dichotomy of minimalism vs maximalism heard in Steve Reich or Philip Glass. Through marathon performances bending those forms to the service of tonal, harmonious, beauty, the composer's perspective from the piano bench seen him, "Lightning-fast Pianist Lubomyr Melnyk: 'When I Play I Turn into an Eagle Flying'". Returning for his fourth occasion in Seattle, Typonexus Globalist Series presents two nights hosted at their Nuclear Recital series and Chapel Performance Space, featuring music from this "Enigmatic Ukrainian-born Pianist, Who Looks like Rasputin's Doppelgänger". Melnyk has recently come to find company with a set of contemporary, younger composers on the British Erased Tapes label. While the 70 year old Ukrainian pianist is an outlier demographically, his aggressively modern chamber music has found shared company with the neoclassical experimentation of his label mates, Nils Frahm, Peter Broderick, and Ólafur Arnalds. As presented live for the BBC, Melnyk's self-pioneered Continuous Music approach makes for a fascinating read and lends some insight into the performance and it's technique, first represented on his 1978 release "KMH: Piano Music in a Continuous Mode". From the Wayward Music Series: "Ukrainian composer and pianist Lubomyr Melnyk is the pioneer of Continuous Music - a piano technique he has developed since the 1970s that use extremely rapid notes to create a rich, pulsating tapestry of sound. The technique of mastering his complex patterns and speeds makes for the kinetic athleticism seen in Melnyk's unparalleled performances. Inspired by the minimal, phase and pattern musics of Steve Reich, Philip Glass, and Terry Riley, yet frustrated by the ecstatic detachment from reality they can encourage, Melnyk created Continuous Music. A form based in the innovations of the minimalist composers but with its roots more deeply planted in harmony; overtones blend or clash according to the dominant harmonic directives."

Northwest Terror Fest at Neumos, Barboza & The Highline: Jun 15 - 17

Some of the most potent sounds from the heavier end of the 21st Century have issued from the mutating offshoots of black metal. The sound's ongoing and burgeoning development encompassing melodicism and atmospheres lifted from shoegaze and spacerock, punctuated by blistering eruptions of heavy rock and industrial drumming, electronic atmospheres, distorted guitar and noise. What may be the epitome of this cross-genre hybridization can be heard in the dynamic solar magma of guitar riffs and rhythm-play of Deafheaven. With other compatriots in the sound to be found in Oathbreaker, as well as the turbulent rock of Nothing and their fusion of metal drumming and spacerock blur as heard on 2014's "Guilty of Everything". From the fringe of the genre, taking the sound down more melancholy paths, there's the crushing shoegaze blues of True Widow. Krallice, Agalloch, and Pallbearer represent the darker, heavier school of blackness pouring forth from the Profound Lore label. A branch of a sound and scene Brad Sanders detailed in his piece for The Quietus, "Untrue And International: Living in a Post-Black Metal World". The article acting as an excellent opening unto the dark passageways of this genre's multitude of representations, dominantly issued from Hydrahead, Ipecac, Deathwish, Sargent House, Profound Lore and Relapse. This particular low lit territory branching out from the landscape of black and doom metal has no small place in the lineup of this month's inaugural Northwest Terror Fest. A all-things-metal festival with a previous Southwest iteration, Terror Fest's three days and nights at Seattle's Neumos, Barboza and The Highline, have been assembled under the compelling opportunity to, "Bring Warning to America: An Interview with Terrorfest founder David Rodgers". Rodger's wider curatorial vision for the festival, detailed in Decibel's, "It's Good to Have Goals and Dreams Can Come True". His programming for the Northwest edition encompassing everything from the gloaming atmosphere and doom riffs of Wolves in the Throne Room, to Samothrace, Graves at Sea, Cephalic Carnage, Cult Leader, Yob, Heiress, Bell Witch, and the dark neofolk of Marissa Nadler.

"Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between" at The Metropolitan Museum of Art: May 4 - Sept 4 | "Rei Kawakubo Revealed (Sort Of)" | The New York Times

Begun as a personal artistic endeavor by Rei Kawakubo in the late 1960s and established as a company in 1973, Comme des Garçons found success in Japan in the 1970s, with a menswear line added in 1978. A decade later the company had a debut show in Paris Fashion Week, where Kawakubo's heavy use of black distressed fabrics, and unfinished seams were striking for their originality and going against the then seamless, refined grain. Throughout the 1980s, Comme des Garçons were often associated with a distressed and punk-oriented style, and an all-black aesthetic, earning its followers the term "crow tribe". An image which stood out boldly against the current zeitgeist of the 1980s, as they were seen in high contrast to daily, leisure, and business colors and dress demeanors in the urban environments of Japan. Pattermaker Junya Watanabe almost instantly began to ascend within the work of the fashion house, in the late 1980s he was promoted to chief designer of women's Tricot knitwear, and then moved on to design for the Comme Des Garçons Homme line. Now featuring his own diffusion line, Junya Watanabe Man, he is most known for his streetwear-influencing and groundbreaking "techno-couture" work of the late 1990s and earliest 2000s. This year their work, presented in "The Met’s Rei Kawakubo Show, Dressed for Defiance", is on exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.  The New York Times Sunday Magazine feature and interview, "Rei Kawakubo Revealed (Sort Of)" focuses on the four decades of Comme des Garçons' creation of subversive, gender-bending clothes for men, begun at a time when no one else, in Japan or otherwise, were endeavoring to do so.

Host and interviewer Alice Gregory attends the staff-only show of this season's work as her point of entry; "The models themselves seemed beside the point, redundant. With their tulle-stuffed skirts and plastic-wrapped heads, they looked like characters sprung from the mind of Lewis Carroll. And yet, as hard as I tried to force myself to pay attention to them, I was continually distracted by the dozens of employees sitting across from me, each dressed in head-to-toe Comme des Garçons - a band of ideologues in wait. Most had bangs and wore no jewelry. There were ruffled jackets made of washed wool, Arcimboldo-printed gowns accessorized with allergy masks. The skirts were long and layered, the ankle socks plentiful, the shoes flat, the Peter Pan collars oversize. They mixed seasons and lines (there are 18 under the Comme des Garçons label) to dizzying effect; some men wore women’s clothes, some women wore men’s clothes. It was like being in the middle of “Art of the In-Between,” the Rei Kawakubo retrospective mounted by the Metropolitan Museum of Art - but more urgent and immersive, as though the archive of her work had come to life. Even the most oddly dressed woman is seldom doing anything all that transgressive with her appearance. We assume that women care about how they look, even when they don’t want to look pretty, so when they don kooky hats or outsize suits or shave their heads or apply rouge with purposefully grotesque abandon, it’s taken to be merely an outlandish variation on expected behavior. Meanwhile, an eccentrically dressed man - not a dandy in the Beau Brummell mold but someone plainly interested in creating new and jarring shapes with his body and clothes - is a rare and electrifying sight. In refusing to telegraph the traditional goals of male fashion (power, utility, wealth), it can seem as though he has renounced capitalism itself - even if the price of doing so is equal to a series of consecutive mortgage payments."

"When I met Kawakubo, this is what I wanted to talk to her about: her approach to making clothing for men, whether or not she had thoughts about the state of masculinity in 2017, how designing men’s wear is different (or similar) to creating women’s wear. I wondered if perhaps the tighter constraints of masculine dress codes allowed, in fact, for more creativity and fun. I didn’t expect real answers. Kawakubo is notorious for her gnomic pronouncements (e.g., “The void is important”) and her anachronistic, otherworldly embodiment of what it means to be a genius. Once, in response to a journalist’s question, Kawakubo drew a circle on a piece of paper and walked away. To my surprise, I did not find the designer particularly aloof or monastic in her bearing. Flanked by her husband and translator, Adrian Joffe, who is also the company’s president, Kawakubo projected a kind of plain and quiet professionalism, though the topic of masculine versus feminine wares appeared to agitate her. “Men seem to have more courage to try new things now, not only in Japan but all over the world,” she said, wondering aloud why women have become “so quiet,” and why, these days, it’s the men who buy and wear the showpieces. Women, comparatively, have become more conservative. “It’s a bit upsetting,” she said. “If you have an insight into that, it might help with my business.” It’s true that while there are certainly women who consider themselves dedicated fans of Comme des Garçons (in the early days, they were known in Tokyo as “the crows,” since Kawakubo and her followers were so devoted to the color black), the company seems to hold an even more special place in the hearts of men."

"Though Kawakubo described Comme des Garçons’ male clientele as comprising students and men with creative jobs - “Anyone who is not free in his work probably is not wearing our clothes” - she admitted that the so-called rules of men’s wear (subdued colors, suiting materials, professional silhouettes) make designing for men more interesting, especially as someone with a self-imposed edict to always be creating new, never-before-seen garments. “The basics of clothing lie in men’s fashion,” she has said. The male ardor for Comme des Garçons is, at least in part, a kind of gratitude for a gender-fluid approach to fashion design that has gone mainstream in recent years but was practiced by Kawakubo, virtually alone, for decades. She shrank suit jackets to Chanel topper proportions, made handsome (no other word for it) skirts out of gabardine and tacked schoolgirl collars on otherwise office-ready white button-downs. She gave men a way of opting out of society while still remaining in it. For nearly a century, there had been little to no innovation in men’s wear - a steady, conservative beat of sensible, timeless clothing. Then suddenly, Kawakubo appeared like a sorceress, materializing a new and more permissive way of appearing in the world that changed not only fashion but, on a small scale, maleness itself. Now, 40 years after she began designing men’s wear, her philosophical heirs - Thom Browne, Raf Simons, Craig Green, to name a few - are everywhere. This, finally, is their time."

Seattle International Film Festival: May 18 - Jun 11

Seattle International Film Festival once again arrives bringing a spectrum of cinema from across the world. In working through the program, this year continues the decade long diversity dip seen in the per-capita of all things cutting edge foreign cinema, auteur, arthouse and experimental. These were content agendas that once had prominence within SIFF, on occasion approaching the programming on offer in Toronto and New York. Those times though, are now decades in the past. That said, it's worthy of note that this year's festival isn't as painfully omissive as 2011 or 2010 for that matter. We saw string of years that suggested relief from the lackluster programming described above which waned a bit in 2012 and a further positive trend in that direction in 2013. For the 2014 festival, their 40th Anniversary was celebrated with SIFF's strongest programming in almost a decade, suggesting a renewed vision for the festival. This year continues the trend away from the previously seen glut of middle ground contemporary romances and knowingly clever dramas for the sub-Sundance sect. One can speculate that this middle road approach to programming, which returned in 2015 and 2016 after it, has been taken to entice some imagined Northwest demographic out of their suburban hobbles and inner-city condos. With the inclusion of showcases in the outlying areas of Bellevue and Kirkland indicative of such. One can't help but consider these factors alongside the changing economic and cultural landscape of Seattle and what may be SIFF's bid at strengthening financing ties with it all.

Seattle International Film Festival in the past has existed as a focal point of visionary cinema curatorialship, with the resources, funds and legacy to be a hugely influential institution. One can can adduce that even San Francisco and Portland continue to program festivals of a caliber that SIFF has seemingly un-learned. We can observe, year in and year out, that Seattle continues to go astray of the standard of the international festival circuit embodied by New York, Cannes, Toronto, Rotterdam, Vienna, Venice, Berlin and Locarno. But there remain a handful of legitimate, original, well crafted cinema to be found in here too. Largely culled from the Contemporary World Cinema, Asian Crossroads, Archival Presentations, Midnight Adrenaline, Alternate Cinema, Documentary Films, FutureWave, and New Directors sections, this year I was able to generate an approximate 25 films of interest or gravitas. These run the spectrum from directors of note, archival restorations and new developing artists. As a consequence the majority of the titles listed below are simply films of curiosity, rather than considered essential viewing. Not the least compelling year in recent memory, but not approaching the par established with SIFF's own stellar run spanning the decades of 1987-2007. Nonetheless, I continue to be enthused about their home at the SIFF Cinema Uptown and expanded screens between the recently acquired SIFF Cinema Egyptian and Film Center. Their curation for these year-round venues has exhibited the scope of SIFF, with a visionary course forward for the institution once exemplified in the short-lived Recent Raves series. As the series has been discontinued in the past year, SIFF's venture down this path appears to have come to a conclusion.

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Friday, May 19
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7:00 PM - Emiliano Torres  "The Winter"
Majestic Bay Cinemas
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Saturday, May 20
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4:00 PM - Hirokazu Kore-eda  "After the Storm"
SIFF Cinema Egyptian
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Saturday, May 20
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9:00 PM - Bill Morrison  "Dawson City: Frozen Time"
SIFF Film Center Festival
DAWS0520

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Sunday, May 21
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11:00 AM - Jean Pierre & Luc Dardenne  "The Unknown Girl"
AMC Pacific Place 11
UNKN0521

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Monday, May 22
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9:30 PM - Hong Sang-soo  "Yourself and Yours"
Majestic Bay Cinemas
YOUR0522

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Tuesday, May 23
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9:30 PM - Norihiro Niwatsukino  "Suffering of Ninko"
SIFF Cinema Egyptian
SUFF0523

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Wednesday, May 24
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9:30 PM - Andrzej Wajda  "Afterimage"
AMC Pacific Place 11
AFTE0524

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Thursday, May 25
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9:30 PM - Xavier Dolan  "It’s Only the End of the World"
AMC Pacific Place 11
WEIR0525

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Friday, May 26
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7:30 PM - Julian Rosefeldt  "Manifesto"
SIFF Film Center
MANI0526

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Saturday, May 27
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11:00 AM - Alexander Korda  "The Marseille Trilogy: Marius"
AMC Pacific Place 11
MARS0527

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Saturday, May 27
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6:00 PM - Andrei Konchalovsky  "Paradise"
Lincoln Square Cinemas
PARA0527

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Saturday, May 27
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12:00 AM - Yoshihiro Nishimura  "Meatball Machine Kodoku"
SIFF Cinema Egyptian
MEAT0527

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Sunday, May 28
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11:00 AM - Marc Allégret  "The Marseille Trilogy: Fanny"
AMC Pacific Place 11
MARS0528

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Monday, May 29
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11:00 AM - Marcel Pagnol  "The Marseille Trilogy: Cesar"
AMC Pacific Place 11
MARS0529

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Monday, May 29
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8:00 PM - Alejandro Jodorowsky  "Endless Poetry"
SIFF Cinema Uptown Festival
ENDL0529

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Tuesday, May 30
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8:30 PM - Brett Whitcomb  "A Life in Waves"
SIFF Cinema Uptown Festival
LIFE0530

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Wednesday, May 31
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6:30 PM - Kenji Kamiyama  "Napping Princess"
SIFF Cinema Uptown Festival
NAPP0531

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Wednesday, May 31
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9:30 PM - João Pedro Rodrigues  "The Ornithologist"
SIFF Cinema Egyptian
ORNI0531

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Thursday, June 01
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9:30 PM - Anocha Suwichakornpong  "By the Time It Gets Dark"
AMC Pacific Place 11
BYTH0601

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Friday, June 02
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7:00 PM - Ken Loach  "I, Daniel Blake"
AMC Pacific Place 11
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Friday, June 02
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8:45 PM - Pacho Velez & Sierra Pettengill  "The Reagan Show"
SIFF Cinema Uptown Festival
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Saturday, June 03
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9:00 PM - Selma Doborac  "Those Shocking Shaking Days"
SIFF Film Center Festival
THOS0603

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Sunday, June 04
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5:30 PM - Zhang Yang  "Soul on a String"
SIFF Cinema Uptown Festival
SOUL0604

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Monday, June 05
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8:30 PM - Brillante Mendoza  "Ma' Rosa"
SIFF Cinema Uptown Festival
MARO0605

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Tuesday, June 06
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6:00 PM - BU Wancang  "Love and Duty"
SIFF Cinema Uptown Festival
17LOVE0606

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Thursday, June 08
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6:00 PM - Bertrand Bonello  "Nocturama"
SIFF Cinema Uptown Festival
NOCT0608

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Friday, June 09
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7:00 PM - Bertrand Tavernier  "My Journey Through French Cinema"
SIFF Film Center Festival
MYJO0609

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Saturday, June 10
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4:00 PM - Abbas Kiarostami  "Taste of Cherry"
SIFF Cinema Uptown Festival
TAST0610

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Saturday, June 10
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7:00 PM - Wang Xuebo  "Knife in the Clear Water"
AMC Pacific Place 11
KNIF0610

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Sunday, June 11
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3:00 PM - Kim Ki-duk  "The Net"
SIFF Cinema Uptown Festival
NETT0611

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Pye Corner Audio's new album "Stasis" and US Tour: May 12 - 20 | Moogfest Durham North Carolina: May 18 - 21

The Head Technician himself, Martin Jenkins, will be appearing in a brief series of domestic settings before arriving at Durham North Carolina's annual tribute to Dr. Robert Moog. The east coast meeting of all things electronic, both historic and contemporary, sees Jenkins' techno-atavistic take on analog process appearing in the lineup alongside Colleen, Suzanne Ciani, SURVIVE, Pharmakon and The Haxan Cloak. Before arriving in Durham to celebrate the legacy of musical synthesis, Jenkins embarks on limited set of domestic dates including the Masonic Lodge at Hollywood Forever Cemetery Los Angeles, programed by Mount Analog. A San Francisco show follows, with The Head Technician appearing in the unlikeliest of settings for his Seattle date. Local all-female synth, techno, wave, industrial and DJ collective, False Prophet have been enlisted as guest curators for another of Paul Allen's cultural endeavors. Their contribution to Upstream Festival sees both a Boy Harsher and Haunted Horses showcase. Which intersects thematically with Kremwerk's programmed night of music from the Diagonal label's foremost techno-brutalist, Not Waving, and Jenkins, under his Pye Corner Audio moniker. In their review for what many to consider to be masterpiece of Jenkins' prolific catalog, The Quietus review of The Black Mill Tapes touches on the nature of this explicit branch from the world of the Hauntological. The Wire offering the greatest tutorial of the form, hosted by Mark Fisher aka K-Punk, with their "Revenant Forms: The Meaning Of Hauntology". Describing the collective headspace of "Alternative Nostalgia" as Phil Harrison coined it, Pye Corner Audio are perhaps the most purist in their recreation and reclamation of our proto-electronic heritage. While their music fits in nicely with the techno-mystic cult built up by other early practitioners around the likes of J.G. Ballard, M.R. James, Nigel Kneale and the a reverie for all things BBC Radiophonic Workshop it's conceptually less abstruse and sonically more authentic, with the great majority of their output sounding like it could have been recorded pre-1984. What his work shares with Ballard, and some of his 1980s offspring like David Cronenberg and John Carpenter is the fascination for desolate spaces of leaded, weighty tension and a pre-computer era mix of future-fantasy and weary trepidation for our imminent 21st Century technoscape. The Dystopian Modernity that The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography attributes to Ballard's work as being occupied with "eros, thanatos, mass media and emergent technologies" most clearly describes the themes of his most recent endeavor, "Stasis" for Julian House's Ghost Box label. House himself being the preeminent Hauntological practitioner in the world of graphic design and aesthetics. Work that should be considered alongside his compatriot, Richard Littler's Scarfolk Council gesamtkunstwerk of paranoid, propagandistic, satiric plumbing of, "Why the 1970s was the Most Terrifying Decade".

Slowdive's new album & East Coast Tour Apr: 30 - May 11 | FYF Festival Los Angeles: Jul 21 - 23

It's been a memorable string of years for those who saw the heyday of spacerock and shoegaze as a pinnacle development following in the wake of the iconoclastic era of 1980's post-punk. We were not only witness to the third domestic tour since their reformation by My Bloody Valentine but the first new album in 22 years, "MBV" which finally manifested after years of legend and rumor. Equally unexpected, the return of LOOP after decades of it's founder Robert Hampson claiming if you weren't there to witness their staggering volume and endurance-testing live performances in the 1990's, then you'll never quite know what the band was about. 4AD label dreampop confection, Lush also joining their ranks in the course of the last year. Spring 2016 saw the band's first live shows in 20 years since the unexpected death of friend and drummer, Chris Acland, Miki Berenyi, Emma Anderson and Phil King spoke with The Quietus for their "Mad Love: An Interview With Lush". An era for the band that both initiated and concluded within the course of the single tour cycle. Marking a similar path, these ranks were also bolstered the immensely popular britpop influenced Ride, who themselves have a new set of recordings to be released this summer. All of which pursuing courses forged down precluding pathways by Scottish dream-pop progenitors Cocteau Twins, and the later British bands following in the druggy astronomical haze of Spacemen 3. This set of compatriots in shared sound fast became a who's who of the best of UK underground rock of the early 1990's. The most improbable of them all, was the announcement that Slowdive would be performing a one-off at the Primavera Sound Festival in 2014. Following in the wake of the massively received event, the band recognizing the ongoing dedication of their fanbase in interview with The Quietus, "There Seems To Be A Lot Of Love Out There: A Slowdive Interview". Finding an enthusiasm for performing and writing again, suggesting the very real possibility of a reformation as the "Slowdive Reunion Expands with More Shows, Possibility of New Music" and following in rapid succession, "Slowdive Announce North American Tour, Reunion".

For followers of the band, after the breakdown of the mid-90's, the last thing one would expect to hear is that it's their overlooked final album created in mid-rift, "Pygmalion" that stands out amidst the sonic bluster of this new incarnation. Made all that much more surprising for Neil Halstead's often-expressed sentiment that that era of his music was definitively closed and it was his 4AD released project Mojave 3 and solo work that would be his larger legacy. Halstead not the only band member with a vital and prolific post-breakup creative arch away from the path carved by Slowdive, the work of drummer and sound designer, Simon Scott is equal to the band's sonic summits. One only need hear the atmospheric, jazz-informed doomscapes of his excellent "Bunny" for the Miasmah label for it to be made clear that the adventurous pop Scott created with Halstead, Rachel Goswell, Nick Chaplin and Christian Savill decades before was a point of entry, rather than a destination. This month they reassemble for the first new recordings in 22 years on the self titled "Slowdive" for Bloomington Indiana independent label, Dead Oceans. Home to Ryley Walker's folk-concrete tapestries and the the spectral vocal transmissions of Juliana Barwick, the newfound poppier edge of the singles, “Star Roving” and “Sugar for the Pill”, share much with both the current neo-psychedelic scene as the band's own legacy. The development of this new work detailed for Stereogum by guitarist, Rachel Goswell with Halstead who was the primary architect of 1995's "Pygmalion", stating that his time out the group dynamic was all important, offering; "It's poppier than I thought it was going to be,". "When you're in a band and you do three records, there's a continuous flow and a development. For us, that flow re-started with us playing live again and that has continued into the record." The album's release ushering in a string of tour dates across the United States and continuing throughout the summer, onward from Slowdive's late July appearance in Los Angeles' FYF Festival.

Demdike Stare's album "Wonderland" & US Tour: May 5 - 12

For most, Sean Canty and Miles Whittaker were first encountered in the context of the Modern Love label's string of hailed releases surrounding Andy Stott's breakthrough "We Stay Together" of 2011. This prolific period for the electronic producer in interviews for FACT Mag, "Tearing Up the Rulebook: Making Mistakes is the Most Exciting Thing You Can Do" and "Andy Stott: Lost and Found" for Resident Advisor. Stott's previous full length, "Luxury Problems" making The Wire's 2012 Rewind and the essential British magazine hosting a significant interview with him that same year. The critical turbulence created by Stott in the wake of his string of albums for Modern Love woke audiences to  Demdike Stare's dual-pronged refashioning of dance music into a corporeal/cerebral body-impacting experience of noise and rhythm, unlike most anything heard in the genre. In rapid succession the following year saw both outfits appearances in Decibel Festival with Canty and Whittaker exhibiting their multifaceted nature in both club and theater contexts. Particularly the case in deep exploration of the duo's passion for all things Italian Giallo and French Fantastique in their live score to Jean Rollin's surrealist erotic-horror classic "La Vampire Neu". Their love of underground and cult cinema saw further expression that year in the British Film Institute's season of Gothic: The Dark Heart of Film with a live score to accompany Benjamin Christensen's 1922, "Häxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages". Returning again, some 16 months later in a second label showcase with the duo, this visit to North America showcased the totality of the brobdingnagian influences on display in their body of work.

The Wire's cover feature on the duo dug deep into the what The Quietus called, "An Unholy Matrimony: In Interview with Demdike Stare", probably best epitomized by their collected "Elemental" series of 2012. Absorbing influences equally from mid-Century Modernism, Concrete and late 1970s and 80s Industrial, alongside two decades of British underground Techno, Bass and Garage music, the following "Test Pressing" 12" series showcased some of the densest subterranean atmospheres being generated in contemporary dance music. These contrasting poles are explored more explicitly, with their dance music signifiers more boldly displayed in their collaborative Millie & Andrea project via distended takes on UK Bass music and Jungle. A circumnavigation of the pigeonholing that the duo began to find themselves in, the series successfully recalibrated their listenership for the next move in, "How Demdike Stare Traded Darkness for Dancefloor Naivety on Wonderland". Backtracking from a knowingly self aware sound steeped in 1990s UK Bass, the new work follows a different trajectory around the fringes of the dancefloor. The result was a propulsive, rhythmic album that listens as a refined and precision-honed assembly of fractured and angular concrete sounds bent and refashioned to workmanlike utility. Embracing the dualistic facets of Demdike's delectus, "Wonderland" is of two minds, a frisson-charged electronic dance music album with peripheral vantages into its inner, brooding persona. Much in the way of the shared night with Andy Stott at the Crocodile of this past summer, Canty and Whittaker will be returning on tour with a date at Kremwerk next month to deliver some of the most assured, darkly rich post-techno heard this side of the millennial cusp.