Jonathan Glazer's "The Zone of Interest" at SIFF Cinema: Jan 19 - Feb 15

After receiving a six-minute standing ovation at its premiere at Cannes, wherein the film won the Grand Prix, and garnering numerous five-star reviews, Jonathan Glazer's newest vision arrives at SIFF Cinema. Based on Martin Amis' novel of the same title, "The Zone Of Interest" is in a sense a chronicle of the family life of Rudolf Höss, the commandant at Auschwitz, and one of the engineers of Hitler's attempt to exterminate all Jews in Europe. The Höss family live in close proximity to the ongoing genocide and the workmanlike efficiency of the industrial machine which Rudolph oversees. The sounds of this machinery of mass extermination are ever-present, with only occasional intrusions of morbid clouds of smoke, and material from this industrial eradication factory washing downstream through idyllic rivers of the Polish countryside. As a product, there is a profound lack of sentimentality to the setting and the film's representation of its larger historical context. The film's two stars have spoken on the dichotomy of its experience, "‘This is a Film to Make us Unsafe in the Cinema. As We Should Be’: Sandra Hüller and Christian Friedel on The Zone of Interest". The depiction of the close correlation of domestic life and mass-murder speaks to the intimate relationship the Höss family have with the destruction of a people and European culture. They profit off of the eradication in chilling and unspeakable ways, as stated by Robert Daniels for RogerEbert.com, "It is the sanitation the film performs, which speaks to the now, in a way few Holocaust films have done before". There have been many films on this most horrifying of chapters in human history. From "The Son of Saul", to "The Painted Bird", to "Night and Fog", all asking to some extent for the viewer to bear witness to unfathomable humiliation and suffering of the National Socialist's regime of dehumanizing brutality. Where Jonathan Glazer, and to a similar extent Amis' novel differs from these, is that it does more than simply ask viewers to witness. As addressed in The Guardian's interview, "Jonathan Glazer on his Holocaust Film The Zone of Interest: ‘This is Not About the Past, it’s About Now’". This discomfiting work, expressed through an immaculate sense of visual aesthetics delivers the viewer into an antiseptic, even pastoral at times, visual environment which stands in stark contrast to the debasement and horrors happening off-screen. It is between these two points which the film's cast found the space, and frame of mind necessary to depict, "The Family Life of the Nazi Commander at Auschwitz", and specifically, in the pages of The New Yorker, the plumbing of "How Sandra Hüller Approached Playing a Nazi". Peter Bradshaw's review from Cannes places the film in a tradition of representing the horror of these events indirectly, like Claude Lanzmann and Michael Haneke before him, and in a striking coda sequence presents a vision from our present-day future, delivering the most powerful blow in, "Jonathan Glazer's Chilling Holocaust Drama".

"The Music of Twin Peaks and Angelo Badalamenti'' at Seattle Symphony: Jan 17 | "How the Twin Peaks Soundtrack Came to Haunt Music for 30 Years" | The Guardian

This month Seattle Symphony and host Kyle MacLachlan invite listeners to join them in entering into what James Poniewozik posited for the New York Times as being more than a musical experience, "The ‘Twin Peaks’ Theme Isn’t Just a Song. It’s a Portal". The music for one of the most notable television and film series of all time, is explored by The Atlantic in "Twin Peaks and the Remarkeable Influence of David Lynch". This convergence of director and composer came about during the production of one of Lynch's films, and was born of the inability to secure a licensing deal to 4AD label maven Ivo Watts-Russell's cover of Tim Buckley's "Song to the Siren". Outside of auteurs like John Carpenter, the films of Michael Mann, and the meeting of David Cronenberg and Howard Shore, the 1980s seemed to yearn for new confluence of the big screen's coalescence of moving picture and soundtrack. The meeting of David Lynch and composer and musician Angelo Badalamenti can be seen as a consequence of the director's first entry into into commercial studio distributed film with Universal and Paramount, thanks largely to the production funding of one Mel Brooks. Based on the Victorian era documents of Sir Frederick Treves and his patient Joseph Merrick, "The Elephant Man" met with both box office and critical success, including eight Academy Award nominations and multiple BAFTA awards. As a product, what followed was one of the stranger turns in the whole of the director's fortunes. The then most popular film franchise in the world, helmed by George Lucus, turned the spotlight on Lynch for him to direct the third installment in the Star Wars trilogy. He declined, citing Lucas' comprehensive vision of the fictional universe would allow for very little in the way of space to express his own. Following this, and the distribution deal with Dino De Laurentiis that came directly from Lynch's own science fiction epic. By the time of his fourth feature, the dominant facets of sound, and its influential role in the prevailing character of Lynch's film work had been established. It was with "Blue Velvet'', that the disparate components of massed strings inspired by the minor symphonies of Prokofiev, Stravinsky and Mahler, met with the, pulsing, churning drone of the underlying industrial sound design and the director's other great musical love. This third component was to be found in the dreamy, melancholic lament to be heard on the fringes of the popular radio-play of Lynch's childhood. A slow swinging rock n' roll defined by the plaintive, longing sound of Roy Orbison's crooning pop, the spacious productions of Phil Spector, and twang of Duane Eddy's guitar. These share a unifying element in their immersion of instrument and voice in echo and reverb, with its capacity to create the impression of vast horizons and spacious chambers of sound resonant with a lush, textured romanticism.

The meeting of Lynch and Badalamenti would happen overcoming the challenge of having the film's lead sing her own parts in a series of central scenes. One of the primary producers on "Blue Velvet", Fred Caruso brought in stage and theater composer Angelo Badalamenti to coach the lead actress on the performance of the film's titular song. Nearing the end of central filming, the club scene being the last of a series of shoots for the film, Rossellini's performance came together notably under the guidance of the Sicilian composer and pianist. Lynch then made efforts to secure rights to pieces of music he had in mind for the soundtrack. Foremost among them was the 4AD label in-house band, This Mortal Coil and their cover of Tim Buckly's "Song for the Siren". Badalamenti reports that while complete creative control and the important "final cut" were conditions of the contract with De Laurentiis, the film was on a strict budget, and the $50,000 rights to securing the Ivo Watts-Russell cover was unattainable. With the success had with Rossellini, Lynch approached Badalamenti about writing an original song to replace it. Supplied with a title, and a few short lines, Badalamenti recounts how their collaboration began for Film Score Monthly, "Isabella handed me a piece of yellow paper that had David's lyrics on it. On the top of it was the title "Mysteries of Love" I read it through. There was no rhyme scheme or hook to latch on to like songs were supposed to have." Approaching the director for insight into this minimalist coda, Lynch is quoted as offering; "Oh, just make it like the wind, Angelo. It should be a song that floats on the sea of time. Make it cosmic!". Julee Cruise, who had performed in a musical that Badalamenti had written in New York, was brought in to provide the vocals for the resulting track which replicated much of the atmospheric dreamscapes of the then "4AD sound". This Mortal Coil was an in-house collective of artists around Blackwing Studios, its producer John Fryer and Ivo Watts-Russell, co-founder at London-based record label. By the time of "Blue Velvet"'s production 4AD had cultivated a roster of artists who specialized in angular indie introspection, atmospheric dreamscapes, downtrodden post-punk, and gothically tinged chamber music. The collective's first release "It'll End in Tears" included Howard Devoto of Breathless, Cindytalk's spectral vocalist, Gordon Sharp, members of neoclassical ensemble, Dead Can Dance, and singing on the influential "Song to the Siren", Elizabeth Fraser from the Scottish band, Cocteau Twins. Progenitors of what would later be called dream pop, Cocteau Twins' sound was a swirling canopy of Robin Guthrie’s reverb-enveloped guitar, sharp drum machine and bass geometries, and Fraser's vocal gymnastics and interpretation-resistant lyrical glossolalia navigating the instrumental tide.

With the successes had in Rossellini's singing part and the "love at first sound" as Lynch described their first collaboration with Cruise, Badalamenti was recruited to try his hand at the score. As for Lynch’s working methods, in interview Badalamenti recalled how the director would further test working relationships of sound and sequence while shooting. “He would have me on set,” he recalled of the Blue Velvet scoring sessions. “I would actually play music live while they were filming so the actors could feel the mood". Badalamenti relates, "On the plane to Los Angeles I wrote the music and Lynch flipped; “It’s Russian, dark, a little dissonant - beautiful but strange at the same time”, the director is quoted as saying. Badalamenti's creative trajectory after graduating from the Manhattan School of Music had already taken the Brooklyn born Sicilian-American into the world of composing minor film scores and musicals for Broadway. He wrote songs for Nina Simone, and even a brief stint working alongside electronic pioneer Jean-Jacques Perry. Yet it would be this mid-career meeting with Lynch on the set of "Blue Velvet" that would be the defining junction. Even with the successes had in the production of that film, and it's global reception, could not have prepared the director and composer team for the chapter that was to come next. Their collaboration in sound and image was soon to be broadcast into nearly every home in America. In 1989, Badalamenti and Lynch assembled a band of veteran sessions and film musicians, including jazz drummer Grady Tate, and guiatrist Vinnie Bell, in small studio off of Times Square in New York to work on three simultaneous projects. These would be the avant-garde stage musical "Industrial Symphony No.1", Cruise's album "Floating into the Night'', and the Twin Peaks soundtrack, in which Cruise appears as the in-series Roadhouse band's chanteuse. From these sessions, Badalamenti's pieces born of chord suspensions and evocative of dissonance, loss and longing, singer and composer express, "‘We Felt Like We Could Do Anything’: Angelo Badalamenti and Julee Cruise on the Music of Twin Peaks". This process recounted in detail for The Guardian, "'Make it Like the Wind, Angelo': How the Twin Peaks Soundtrack Came to Haunt Music for Nearly 30 Years". Lynch would sit with the composer at the side of his Fender Rhodes piano, quietly verbalising what he envisioned. “I haven’t shot anything, but it’s like you are in a dark woods with an owl in the background and a cloud over the moon and sycamore trees are blowing very gently…” I started to press the keys for the opening chord to “Twin Peaks Love Theme,” because it was the sound of that darkness, recounts Badalamenti. Lynch said; “A beautiful troubled girl is coming out of the woods, walking towards the camera… and she comes closer and it reaches a climax and…” I continued with the music as he continued the story. “And from this, we let her go back into the dark woods”. Lynch was ecstatic with the outcome. “Don’t change a single note, Angelo. I see Twin Peaks".

:::: Films of 2023 ::::

TOP FILMS OF 2023 IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER
-----------------------------------------------------------
Jonathan Glazer  "The Zone of Interest"  (United Kingdom)
Mstyslav Chernov  "20 Days in Mariupol"  (Ukraine)
Lucien Castaing-Taylor & Véréna Paravel  "De Humani Corporis Fabrica" (France)
Victor Erice  "Close Your Eyes"  (Spain)
Cyril Schäublin  "Unrest"  (Switzerland)
Ira Sachs  "Passages"  (France)
Jafar Panahi  "No Bears"  (Iran)
Alice Rohrwacher  "La Chimera"  (Italy)
Bertrand Bonello  "The Beast"  (France)
Nuri Bilge Ceylan  "About Dry Grasses"  (Turkey)
Hirokazu Kore-eda  "Monster"  (Japan)
Pedro Costa  "Daughters of the Fire"  Short (Portugal)
Laura Citarella  "Trenque Lauquen"  (Argentina)
György Fehér  "Twilight"  Restored Rereleased (Hungary)
Budd Boetticher  "The Ranown Westerns"  Restored Rereleased (United States)
Juliet Berto & Jean-Henri Roger  "Snow"  Restored Rereleased (France)
David Lynch  "Inland Empire"  Restored Rereleased (United States)
Jean Eustache  "The Mother and the Whore"  Restored Rereleased (France)
Wim Wenders  "Anselm" & "Perfect Days"  (Germany/Japan)
Ryusuke Hamaguchi  "Evil Does Not Exist"  (Japan)
Kôji Fukada  "Love Life"  (Japan)
Yorgos Lanthimos  "Poor Things"  (Greece)
Ulrich Seidl  "Wicked Games: Rimini Sparta"  (Austria)
Lukas Moodysson  "Together 99"    (Sweden)
Wang Bing  "Youth: Spring"  (China)
Pham Thien An  "Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell"  (Vietnam)
Pablo Larraín  “El Conde”  (Chile)
Takashi Yamazaki  "Godzilla Minus One"  (Japan)
Hayao Miyazaki  "How Do You Live?"  (Japan)
Makoto Shinkai  "Suzume"  (Japan)

For decades now, this annual overview has acted as a summation of the music, film, dance, theatre, visual art exhibitions and festivals attended and covered. Both domestic and international. As we enter into the post-phase after the global pandemic one would assume that the continuance of such opportunities would be returning in an assertive manner. Yet here in the urban northwest, the effects of the pandemic on cultural and social life are still manifesting themselves in a dynamic manner. Businesses and cultural venues continue to have limited hours, close early on weekday and weekend nights, and program with a reduced scale and truncated durations over what we saw in the years preceding the pandemic. Some of which regionally even reducing hours more than when they had initially after reopening two years ago. The once essential component of urban social life in the Northwest, the espresso cafe, has been particularly hard hit. With many of them no longer offering evening hours of any variety. Regionally, arts venues and cultural institutions returned to in-person programming in the fall of 2021, cautiously opening the doors to music stages, galleries and movie houses. After a year and a half of navigating the complexities of the pandemic restrictions and closures, programming returned in August and September to the majority of these Northwest culture spaces. It is important to consider that the benefits of the Save Our Stages Act, alongside the Shuttered Venues Grant are a significant component as to the continuance of arts beyond the pandemic. The benefits of the various relief bills, alongside regional infrastructure like the 4Culture Relief Fund, awareness efforts like the Washington Nightlife Music Association, crowdfunding and philanthropy like the ArtistRelief, ArtsFund grant, and GiveBig Washington, all came in the 11th hour for many of our regional cultural institutions and art venues. Most of which would not have doors open to their cultural community now two years later, without these resources.

Unlike last year's convergence of the Venice Biennale and Document in Germany, the art seen and traveled to this year was all of a domestic nature. The Seattle Art Fair returned at the height of summer, offering works from over 80 galleries from around the globe, and the satellite event Forest for the Trees, concurrently presented a volume of regional work in Pioneer Square. In cinema, after the discontinuation of the Seattle Art Museum's film program, and the termination of its programmer, Greg Olson found a new home for his long-running film noir and italian cinema series at SIFF Cinema. The most significant filmgoing news of the year came with the unexpected convergence of cultural and civic rehabilitation funds, the legacy of Paul Allen, and the Seattle International Film Festival organization with their acquisition of the Seattle Cinerama Theater. Other notable annual events returned with the array of horror and genre film returned in the fall, significant jazz performances were seen, both within the Earshot Jazz Festival and outside its programming, and SIFF Cinema presneted a near-complete retrospective of the films of David Lynch. In music events, Seattle's recently launched Tremolo had a second successful festival of shoegaze, noise-rock and dream pop sounds at the Central Saloon, and the goliath of metal, noise and hardcore that is Northwest Terror Fest, returned to Neumos and Barboza with a sprawling and qualitative fifth iteration. Over the course of the summer, a set of legendary gothic rock and early electro-industrial bands had tours, presenting The Cure's "Songs of a Lost World", and after nearly 40 years of darkly theatrical music, the final tour from Skinny Puppy. The year also saw a series of closures and conclusions within the arts community. Two hard-hitting losses came at the end of the summer, the first of which was the newly launched visual art and community space, Museum of Museums, and the second not soon after its opening and inception for, XO Seattle in the space of the historic Coliseum Theater. Even Seattle's longstanding and prestigious literary arts mecca finds itself in uncharted water, due to a recent turn of events, "Seattle's Hugo House Faces an Uncertain Future". The year also saw the announcement of the, "Closing of both Linda Hodges and James Harris Galleries" and all the while, the gutted void-space of downtown has seen a few vacant storefronts become creative arts venues. In a lengthy discussion with NPR's Libby Denkmann and Mike Davis, Museum of Museums founder Greg Lundgren addresses the reality of, "Is Seattle's Arts Infrastructure Crumbling?"

While there are now opportunities again to engage with film, music and visual art, domestically as a culture we are still relying on online resources more than was necessary pre-pandemic. Yet these deliver only a modicum of the sensations, social engagement, and sensory thrills and satisfactions of in-person cultural happenings. The pragmatic response would be to accept the inherent losses and embrace what vestiges of a cultural life that could be salvaged online. Two major events in the year revealed the fragility and impermanence of our quality online arts platforms. The first of them came with a series of corporate buyouts of the online direct-to-artist platform and community that was Bandcamp. First by Epic Games, who quickly dispensed with the platform, "Epic Games’ Sale of Bandcamp Has Left the Artist-Friendly Music Platform in Limbo", and then by Songtradr, as artists and professionals working in music had a unified response which was shared by The Guardian, "The Music site Bandcamp is Beloved and Unique. I Shudder at its Corporate Takeover". The second came with what Wired called, "HBO Max, Netflix, Disney+, and the Day Streaming Died", after Warner Brothers Discovery gutted the leadership team of Turner Classic Movies, a group of famed directors then came together to "Fight to Save Turner Classic Movies". Which concluded in a positive outcome and a rare reversal for the network, "TCM to Include Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese and Paul Thomas Anderson Taking Active Role". So, now at year's end, for those who have not found compelling new sounds, digital retailers like Boomkat, online institutions like The Quietus, and magazines like The Wire, represent the kind of expertise you’ll not find brought together online outside the framework of their curatorial legacy. A particular advantage, The Wire offers the opportunity to Listen to The Wire Top 50 Releases of 2023. Similarly, film institutions like those below offer a worldly scope, compiling the life’s work of people who have made watching their enterprise. Year in and year out again, Sight & Sound, Film Comment, Cinema-Scope, Criterion Collection's The Current, and The Guardian's excellent film coverage have brought focus to the year of moving pictures from around the globe.

:::: Albums of 2023 ::::

TOP ALBUMS OF 2023 IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER
-------------------------------------------------------------
Violent Magic Orchestra “Supergaze / Martello Mosh Pit” EPs (Never Sleep)
Full of Hell & Nothing  “When No Birds Sang”  (Closed Casket Activities)
Bell Witch  “Future's Shadow Part 1: The Clandestine Gate”  (Profound Lore)
Boris & Merzbow  “Klatter”  Reissue (Relapse)
Pharoah Sanders  "Karma"  Reissue (Impulse!)
Natural Information Society & Ari Brown  “Since Time Is Gravity”  (Eremite)
Alabaster DePlume  “Come With Fierce Grace”  (International Anthem)
Tord Gustavsen Trio  “Opening”  (ECM)
Kjetil Mulelid Trio  “Who Do You Love The Most”  (Rune Grammofon)
Ryuichi Sakamoto  “12” & "Opus"  (Commmons)
Philip Jeck & Chris Watson  “Oxmardyke”  (Touch)
Demdike Stare & Jon Collin  “Minerals”  (DDR)
Regis & Ann Margaret Hogan  “Hospital For Beasts”  (Downwards)
Vivid Oblivion  “The Graphic Cabinet”  (Downwards)
Godflesh  “Purge”  (Avalanche)
Swans  “The Beggar”  (Young God)
Ragana  “Desolation's Flower”  (The Flenser)
Sextile  “Push”  (Sacred Bones)
Khanate  “To Be Cruel”  (Sacred Bones)
Lankum  “False Lankum”  (Rough Trade)
Kristin Michael Hayter  "Saved!"  (Perpetual Flame Ministries)
Tim Hecker  "No Highs" & "The Infinity Pool - Soundtrack"  (Kranky)  (Milan)
Teeth Of The Sea  “Hive”  (Rocket Recordings)
La Baracande  “La Baracande”  (La Nòvia)
The Inward Circles  “Before We Lie Down In Darknesse”  (Corbel Stone Press)
Sarah Davachi  “Long Gradus : Arrangements”  (Late Music)
Various Artists  “Vanity Records: Vanity Sample”  Book + CD (Remodel)
Various Artists  "Spectra Ex Machina: A Sound Anthology Of Occult Phenomena 1920 - 2017" (Sub Rosa)
Various Artists  "Ecuatoriana: El Universo Paralelo De Polibio Mayorga 1969 - 1981" (Analog Africa)
Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou  "Jerusalem"  Reissue (Mississippi Records)
György Ligeti / Quatuor Diotima  "Metamorphosis"  (PentaTone)
Various Artists  “Compositrices: New Light on French Romantic Women Composers”  Box Set (Palazzetto Bru Zane)

For decades now, this annual overview has acted as a summation of the music, film, dance, theatre, visual art exhibitions and festivals attended and covered. Both domestic and international. As we enter into the post-phase of the global pandemic one would assume that the continuance of such opportunities would be returning in an assertive manner. Yet here in the urban northwest, the effects of the pandemic on cultural and social life are still manifesting themselves in a dynamic manner. Businesses and cultural venues continue to have limited hours, close early on weekday and weekend nights, and program with a reduced scale and truncated durations over what we saw in the years preceding the pandemic. Some of which regionally even reducing hours more than when they had initially after reopening two years ago. The once essential component of urban social life in the Northwest, the espresso cafe, has been particularly hard hit. With many of them no longer offering evening hours of any variety. Regionally, arts venues and cultural institutions returned to in-person programming in the fall of 2021, cautiously opening the doors to music stages, galleries and movie houses. After a year and a half of navigating the complexities of the pandemic restrictions and closures, programming returned in August and September to the majority of these Northwest culture spaces. It is important to consider that the benefits of the Save Our Stages Act, alongside the Shuttered Venues Grant are a significant component as to the continuance of arts beyond the pandemic. The benefits of the various relief bills, alongside regional infrastructure like the 4Culture Relief Fund, awareness efforts like the Washington Nightlife Music Association, crowdfunding and philanthropy like the ArtistRelief, ArtsFund grant, and GiveBig Washington, all came in the 11th hour for many of our regional cultural institutions and art venues. Most of which would not have doors open to their cultural community now two years later, without these resources.

Unlike last year's convergence of the Venice Biennale and Document in Kassel, Germany, the art seen and traveled to this year was all of a domestic nature. The Seattle Art Fair returned at the height of summer, offering works from over 80 galleries from around the globe, and the satellite event Forest for the Trees, concurrently presented a volume of regional work in Pioneer Square. In cinema, after the discontinuation of the Seattle Art Museum's film program, and the termination of its programmer, Greg Olson found a new home for his long-running film noir and italian cinema series at SIFF Cinema. The most significant filmgoing news of the year came with the unexpected convergence of cultural and civic rehabilitation funds, the legacy of Paul Allen, and the Seattle International Film Festival organization with their acquisition of the Seattle Cinerama Theater. Other notable annual events returned with the array of horror and genre film returned in the fall, significant jazz performances were seen, both within the Earshot Jazz Festival and outside its programming, and SIFF Cinema presneted a near-complete retrospective of the films of David Lynch. In music events, Seattle's recently launched Tremolo had a second successful festival of shoegaze, noise-rock and dream pop sounds at the Central Saloon, and the goliath of metal, noise and hardcore that is Northwest Terror Fest, returned to Neumos and Barboza with a sprawling and qualitative fifth iteration. Over the course of the summer, a set of legendary gothic rock and early electro-industrial bands had tours, presenting The Cure's "Songs of a Lost World", and after nearly 40 years of darkly theatrical music, the final tour from Skinny Puppy. The year also saw a series of closures and conclusions within the arts community. Two hard-hitting losses came at the end of the summer, the first of which was the newly launched visual art and community space, Museum of Museums, and the second not soon after its opening and inception for, XO Seattle in the space of the historic Coliseum Theater. Even Seattle's longstanding and prestigious literary arts mecca finds itself in uncharted water, due to a recent turn of events, "Seattle's Hugo House Faces an Uncertain Future". The year also saw the announcement of the, "Closing of both Linda Hodges and James Harris Galleries" and all the while, the gutted void-space of downtown has seen a few vacant storefronts become creative arts venues. In a lengthy discussion with NPR's Libby Denkmann and Mike Davis, Museum of Museums founder Greg Lundgren addresses the reality of, "Is Seattle's Arts Infrastructure Crumbling?"

While there are now opportunities again to engage with film, music and visual art, domestically as a culture we are still relying on online resources more than was necessary pre-pandemic. Yet these deliver only a modicum of the sensations, social engagement, and sensory thrills and satisfactions of in-person cultural happenings. The pragmatic response would be to accept the inherent losses and embrace what vestiges of a cultural life that could be salvaged online. Two major events in the year revealed the fragility and impermanence of our quality online arts platforms. The first of them came with a series of corporate buyouts of the online direct-to-artist platform and community that was Bandcamp. First by Epic Games, who quickly dispensed with the platform, "Epic Games’ Sale of Bandcamp Has Left the Artist-Friendly Music Platform in Limbo", and then by Songtradr, as artists and professionals working in music had a unified response which was shared by The Guardian, "The Music site Bandcamp is Beloved and Unique. I Shudder at its Corporate Takeover". The second came with what Wired called, "HBO Max, Netflix, Disney+, and the Day Streaming Died", after Warner Brothers Discovery gutted the leadership team of Turner Classic Movies, a group of famed directors then came together to "Fight to Save Turner Classic Movies". Which concluded in a positive outcome and a rare reversal for the network, "TCM to Include Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese and Paul Thomas Anderson Taking Active Role". So, now at year's end, for those who have not found compelling new sounds, digital retailers like Boomkat, online institutions like The Quietus, and magazines like The Wire, represent the kind of expertise you’ll not find brought together online outside the framework of their curatorial legacy. A particular advantage, The Wire offers the opportunity to Listen to The Wire Top 50 Releases of 2023. Similarly, film institutions like those below offer a worldly scope, compiling the life’s work of people who have made watching their enterprise. Year in and year out again, Sight & Sound, Film Comment, Cinema-Scope, Criterion Collection's The Current, and The Guardian's excellent film coverage have brought focus to the year of moving pictures from around the globe.

Bell Witch “Future's Shadow Part 1: The Clandestine Gate” & North American Tour: Oct 17 - Dec 16

The lowest descent into abyssal sound within the burgeoning global post-black metal world can be found in the newest strain of what is being called funeral doom. Foremost among them, Bell Witch in their new lineup with Aerial Ruin's Erik Moggridge, have descended deeper, and for longer, than most. Born of the death of drummer Adrian Guerra, their previous sprawling work, 2017's magisterial "Mirror Reaper" encompassed an auditory journey through the Hermetic axiom "As Above, So Below", as a conceptual traversing of the dichotomy of life and death. Bridging recordings from their previous incarnation, and unused vocal tracks from that period with work of the new lineup, this "Loving Tribute to Former Drummer Adrian Guerra", acts as a looming, Brobdingnagian titan spanning the two. As a pathway of entry into this musical world, Brad Sanders' essential overview, "Untrue And International: Living in a Post-Black Metal World", compliments the curation from this sphere that can be found in the past decade of excellent selections in The Quietus' Columnus Metallicus. The above resources sound the expanse of releases dominantly sourced from labels like, Hydrahead, Neurot, Ipecac, Deathwish, 20 Buck Spin, Dark Descent, Sargent House, Profound Lore, Season of Mist, Roadburn, The Flenser, and Relapse. Since the release of Guerra's final work with the band, Bell Witch have undertaken an even more tectonic series of works for the Profound Lore label. The first of these was a collaborative album with Aerial Ruin in 2020's, "Stygian Bough Volume 1", and earlier this year issuing the first of an epic trilogy, titled, “Future's Shadow Part 1: The Clandestine Gate”. Their lengthy trajectory touring North America with the album comes to a terminus in mid-December, with the final of their west coast dates at Neumos in their Northwest hometown. The Quietus spoke with the band on the eve of Clandestine Gate's release, bridging such concepts as about the cyclical nature of existence and taking their time with process and creation, such as the first entry in their new triptych of albums, "Same as it Ever Was: Bell Witch Interviewed". It is this premise, that of the Eternal Return, which informs the themes of Future's Shadow, as stated by bassist and vocalist, Dylan Desmond; "This of course is perhaps the most horrifying aspect to the eternal return - even if you were living a happy, fulfilled and productive life that you’d be proud to experience again, would living it over and over again eternally rob it of any meaning or purpose you may have found in it? There’s a recurring theme of ghosts in Bell Witch’s work, and in this light, it’s easy to see how the eternal return fits into this theme: being stuck in an endless loop with no definitive end in sight would surely make ghosts of us all."

Codeine's lost album "Dessau" & West Coast Tour: Dec 4 - Dec 9

From the early to mid-1990s a distinct subset of bands formed a continuance of related sounds which were branded as slowcore by the independent music press. Where their approach and instrumentation differed in some cases, their unifying qualities all shared a focus on a minimalist compositional density, hushed vocals, and an anticlimactic progression of build and release through an attuned attention to dynamics. This music of subtraction that would define the genre could be most clearly identified in the earliest releases by Low, Bedhead, Codeine, Idaho, and the highest profile of these outfits, the Mark Kozelek-led band from Atlanta Georgia, Red House Painters. The latter would be signed to Ivo Watts-Russell's highly influential underground label, 4AD, and release four singularly spare albums spanning 1992 to 1995. It was these albums, alongside the eminence of Low and their signing to Chicago's then tastemaking label Kranky, which brought the sound of slowcore to a growing audience within the wildly expansive flurry of mid-1990s independent rock. The sound of this cloistered subgenre did not originate from a void, the groundwork of their inspiration can be undeniably traced back to the decade before, with stylistic threads clearly connecting to American Music Club, Galaxie 500, and Opal's follow-up band, Mazzy Star. While the genre subset itself remained a narrow set of bands, their influence could be heard in other independent and post-rock contemporaries of the 1990s which ranged as widely as Slint, Tortoise, Duster, Spain, Sofa, Arab Strap, Rex, Windsor for the Derby, Bowery Electric, Labradford, Ida, Jason Molina's Songs:Ohia, and Acetone.

Of the central body of artists that comprised the slowcore sound, there was probably no band that did so as comprehensively and precisely, as singer and bassist Stephen Immerwahr, percussionist Chris Brokaw, and guitarist John Engle. Codeine's original tone, characterized by an extreme asceticism, which would often erupt into post-rock percussion passages or ascendant noise eruptions that often were truncated, or unpredictably cut short by dynamic breakdowns was singular within the subgenre, and marked them as more experimental than their contemporaries. Immerwahr's subdued and introverted vocals, the traversing of expanses ranging from absolute silence to explosive impacts by Brokaw, and Engle's ringing Telecaster, a sound characterized by The Quietus as, "Codeine: A New Kind of Stillness", remained solidly consistent during their career. Codeine seemingly arrived fully-formed and cemented on their 1990 release, "Frigid Stars", nominally fine-tuned through 1992's "Barely Real" EP, and further refined on the culminative 1994 album, "The White Birch". This five year trajectory would describe the totality of the band's initial incarnation, with Codeine only reforming as recently as 2012 at the request of British post-rock band Mogwai, through curating that year's edition of All Tomorrow's Parties. A domestic tour followed the UK festival date of what the New York Times called, "Grunge’s Estranged, Desolate Cousins". Now a decade later, they embark on a second US tour with a night at Seattle's Barboza, in support of the comprehensive discography reissue series and box set "When I See the Sun", from Numero Group. This series of releases is most notable for its further inclusion of "Dessau", an eight song mini-LP originally recorded in 1992, which was intended to become their second album, and withheld at the time due to conflicts over its production. As NPR suggests, hearing this album now decades after the era of its intended release, "Codeine's Lost Album 'Dessau' Feels Like a Ghost".

Hania Rani "Ghosts" & North American Tour: Nov 22 - Dec 10

While sharing company with modern neo-jazz chamber ensembles like Portico Quartet and GoGo Penguin, trumpeter and bandleader, Matthew Halsall, and other Gondwana Records modern classical, jazz and electronics artists, Polish composer Hania Rani has built up a considerable audience for her solo piano miniatures. Her latest for the label, "Ghosts", moves into an adjacent, aqueous abstract pop territory, with a few select tracks exploring muted vocals and diffuse song structures. The album itself mirrors the two concurrent courses of the progression of her career; she has released an album of duets for the seminal German classical label Deutsche Grammophon, composed a spare score for a documentary about Swiss sculptor, Alberto Giacometti, and issued a series of releases exploring her own brand of hush electronic chamber music. This dynamic interplay is explored in her BBC Radio 4 Profile, and while Rani has a singular fluid sound, she considers her work very much an ongoing progression, “I think I am still looking for my own voice." She says; "I started to learn from the masters, to mix what I know from classical music, from other things I listened to, and from one of my first inspirations Nils Frahm". It is this later, current neoclassical world to which her albums belong, which is cemented by the participation on her most recent recordings of Erased Tapes staples like Ólafur Arnalds, Portico Quartet's Duncan Bellamy, and indie rock artist, Patrick Watson. For all of these associations with an inward-looking brand of neoclassical chamber music, her current North American tour alongside bassist Ziemowit Klimek will be hosted in rock clubs and venues. "Just because of my classical background, I am fascinated with these a little bit more rock venues." Rani continues; "Also, there is something about a standing show that I admire. Sometimes I feel a little bit of embarrassment if people are just sitting and watching me from this very relaxed position. I know that some listeners would rather sit comfortably, but as a performer, it gives me so much energy and gives me more focus.” And while the instrumental soundscapes and tangential ballads on "Ghosts" are delicate, Rani says that's not true of her live sets; “The show is quite loud,” she notes. “We start with these extremely intense synthesizer sounds. And then I can go play the piano solo, really quietly. I need these kinds of extremes.”. Indeed, as posited by The Washington Post for her east coast dates, "Polish Musician Hania Rani’s Album is Delicate. Her Live Show Won’t Be", and the following Chicago show, "The Atmosphere was Just Right for Hania Rani’s Mesmerizing, Sold-Out Concert", we can expect more of the same from Seattle's performance next week at The Neptune Theatre.

Yorgos Lanthimos' "Poor Things" and Ira Sachs' "Passages" Streaming on Mubi and at SIFF Cinema: Dec 14 - Jan 4 | "The Pleasure Principle" | Sight & Sound

As a follow-up to Catherine Shoard's 2019 editorial for The Guardian, "Cut! Is This the Death of Sex in Cinema?", Christina Newland's "The Pleasure Principle", for Sight & Sound tackles the newest Ira Sachs film, "Passages", which received an NC-17 rating in the United States due to its honest and frank depictions of sex. Such is the cultural moment that a prohibitive MPAA rating, trigger warning supplied by the exhibitor, or outright retraction and editing of material in response to poor audience reception of on-screen sex is not unheard of. Shoard's piece for The Guardian illustrates over numerous observations and citations, the reasons for this being concurrently made complicated and narrow-minded by the two sides of a polarized political landscape. Wherein sex has become that much more weaponized in its entanglement with identity and representation, and the discomfort experienced by audiences who feel their identity politics not complimentarily represented defines no small part of their enjoyment, or even acceptance, of thematic and psychological content in fiction. In the eyes of a currently influential constituency, for whom artistic merit must be allied to a certain branch of moral and political virtue, there are vast realms of the erotic, suggestive, and sexual material on screen that will not pass such demands. Regardless of said material's truth or honesty in representing the complexity of these matters in relation to life. In the case of the Ira Sachs film, what followed was an outcry in response from the domestic distributor, Mubi, and the film's director, "Director Slams MPAA Decision as ‘Cultural Censorship that’s Quite Dangerous’". Sachs speaks with Newland for the British Film Institute on the rating and the cultural and political moment that his film has navigated; "It’s really about a form of cultural censorship that is quite dangerous, particularly in a culture which is already battling, in such extreme ways, the possibility of LGBT imagery to exist”. NC-17 movies have gotten lots of attention in recent months thanks to the release of Andrew Dominik's "Blonde" a Marilyn Monroe biopic that scored Ana de Armas an Oscar nomination for best actress, and "Infinity Pool" which director Branden Cronenberg re-cut so that it could be released with an R rating. Sachs did no such thing with "Passages"."

Newland continues in the pages of Sight & Sound; "It’s possible that a combination of factors, both culture-wide and industry-specific, have contributed to this odd moment of both the avoidance of and a fixation on sex acts on screen. Initial hesitation around on-set safety post-MeToo, and a sense of discomfort around sensitive topics, has perhaps been fueled by social media pearl-clutching and a Gen Z backlash against the idea of ‘sex-positive’ feminism." The latter is supported by recent statistics, like those highlighted in NPR's coverage "Gen Z Wants Less Sex in Their TV and Movies" of the UCLA study, which featured such descriptors as the content being found, "Icky, Pointless, and Invasive", wherein half of those polled were, "Turned Off by Onscreen Sex". Nonetheless, two high profile sex-positive arthouse films are endeavoring to contradict these trends. They arrived this year in the form of the previously mentioned "Ira Sachs Thorny Love Triangle Drama", and "Emma Stone's Sexual Adventure in Yorgos Lanthimos’s Virtuoso Comic Epic". Winning major awards at Venice and Sundance, and garnered notable praise in the cinephile press, the artists involved have made their stance in relation to on-screen sex very clear, with "Adèle Exarchopoulos: ‘Film Shoots are Like Little Summer Love Stories’, and "Lanthimos’s Poor Things Fuels Speculation of Sex Scene’s Return to Cinema". At the press conference in Venice before the film's premiere, Yorgos Lanthimos posed the question; “Why is there no sex in movies? It was a very intrinsic part of the Alasdair Gray novel itself, her freedom in everything, including sexuality”, Lanthimos said of the film’s sex scenes. He added: “It was very important for me to not make a film that was going to be prudish because that would be completely betraying the main character. We had to be confident Emma had to have no shame about her body, nudity, engaging in those scenes, and she understood that right away". In this tale of Emma Stone's recently reawakened Bella Baxter, Lanthimos draws on traditions from classic European cinema like Georges Franju’s "Eyes Without a Face", obvious references from gothic literature in Mary Shelley's legendary monster, David Lynch's depiction of Joseph Merrick, and Werner Herzog’s gloriously naive explorations of life via Kaspar Hauser, and along the way, "Interrogating Gender Dynamics and Sexuality from Nearly Every Angle". Our chance will come next month at SIFF Cinema, when "'Poor Things' Brings Hot Sex and Stone-cold Brilliance to the Screen" After an awkward MeToo hiatus, films are showing intimacy in messy, complicated ways again and in a late addition, The Guardian's Adrian Horton argues, "Why it Was a Good Year for Sex On Screen". As well as the question posed, "Provocative Sex is Back at the Movies. But are We Ready for It?", by Alexandra Kleeman, Guggenheim Fellow and author in the pages of The New York Times.