Monday, July 12 2021
Good morning, opulents. Drop something in the hat if you can—we need to meet our prudent reserve. If you’re new here, check out the hits.
With social spaces upended, going outside with your entire face and eyeballs is just nuts. It’s time to revisit what Cam’ron said about pink five years ago. Grappling with What Other People Have Decided To Wear is no small thing.
There is no meaningful scale in reproduction technologies. Machines just capture what they can at the time of their invention, and this is always a fraction of what our eyes and ears perceive. The resolution of the moment—whether it’s a 1080p video or a 78 rpm shellacked disc—is then dependent on whatever device is trying to reproduce that resolution: a turntable, a laptop, and so on.
In 1973, 16mm film captured a lot of information, most of it too fine for ‘70s television sets, or even early YouTube rips from ten years ago. Now that YouTube is posting clips of 4K resolution and above, we can step into 1973 with Genesis like it’s yesterday and next door. I don’t think you need to care about young Peter Gabriel or young Phil Collins to find this compelling. Wearing face paint and singing multipartite songs about nature is something you could do right now in 2021.
This SDEM mix from a few weeks ago is pure joy: lots of rap and torn up pianos and beat grout. Turn up the bidet and make yr neighbors cry!
I’m so glad Michael Snow is still with us, and this interview with the 92-year-old Canadian visionary will explain why. Snow, an actual Canadian, hung out with Albert Ayler and Marcel Duchamp and made stone classics in more than one format: Wavelength (a movie) and Cover To Cover (a book Snow calls a “sculpture”). Interviewer Michael Foye does a great job of drawing Snow out here, which probably happens because Snow is 92 and free of resentment. He is clear about himself, and what the ‘70s were like.
I love this new DBN Gogo song, “Possible.” It’s an amapiano track with the affect of a whisper, delivered a little more loudly than a whisper. The dance sequence is subdued but sick. The red hats!
This recent 2 1/2 hour mix by Andrew “Noz” Nosnitsky is fire. Any blend of music by Dean Blunt, Luke Vibert, Mica Levi, The Breeders, and Stockhausen is gonna be a good headache. The New York Times called Noz “a longtime rap music journalist and the proprietor of Park Blvd. Records,” which is accurate, though not sufficient. We hope to get Noz into the newsletter some day, but no promises.
This interview with British filmmaking genius John Akomfrah finds him making, as he always does, a half-dozen great points partly by slowing down the speed of thought to match the complexity of a situation.
Shine So Hard is a fantastic and odd 32-minute promo film made by John Smith for Echo and the Bunnymen in 1981. It was supposed to document a secret one-off gig and then sort of bloomed and turned into a fabulous time capsule/pause tape. White Man is a 21-minute a short film that Bong Joon Ho made in 1994 while at Yonsei University.
I adore the new Giant Claw album but it could also be accurately called Folder Two: Disney Rises and Stings for Freelance Film Editors.
“MSHR is the audiovisual performance collective of artists Birch Cooper and Brenna Murphy, a collaborative project focused on the building and exploration of sculptural electronic systems, cybernetic sessions that are captured as AV compositions, installation work and live performances.” (Birch Cooper also did the Body Meπa album art.) Look at “Liquid Conglomerate Presence Cycle,” the world-building gerbil maze freakout they made. It is a “prism of their live set,” which is worth keeping in mind, because they are actually in the middle of all the crimson chrome spongiform multiplication.
