A couple of weeks ago I arrived home pretty tipsy and I decided that even though it’s a little too late for it, I’ll finally watch a movie in my new flat. Don’t imagine a cinema setup though, just a shitty laptop screen and headphones in bed kinda situation. My pick was one that I’ve been trying to hunt down quite a while and I recently succeeded: Time and Tide by Tsui Hark, one of the most insane action movies I had the luck to see in my whole life.
It doesn’t go too hard on the plot: a greenhorn guy working at a shady bodyguard company and a mercenary who tries to leave his past behind, both have a pregnant woman to protect and both have exceptional fighting skills. What really mesmerised me about the movie though is the pacing: it’s incredibly fast, so fast that I came to the conclusion that it doesn’t really care if the viewer can’t catch up with the storyline. When I realized this, I felt very drunkfunny and I just kinda let it flow through me. Obviously at the end I figured out most of the things. I had the same experience with Hark’s fantasy epic Green Snake, but also with other directors from Hong Kong, namely Johnnie To and even Fruit Chan got me puzzled. I wonder if this feeling is coming from the cultural differences, or if they’re in a cinematic “wave” together (like e.g. the Taiwanese New Wave), I should look that up.
In the last 2 or so years I noticably had a big shift in what movies get me excited. Of course I still watch a handful of artsy stuff, mainly picking from the Criterion Channel instagram (lol), but I think during Covid, me and my past flatmates managed to watch some batshit crazy movies. I started to really appreciate plotholes, badly written and therefore iconic lines, old-school gruesomeness, well-aged visual effects (btw Time and Tide has really cool ones) and the mystery in general. I just love it when every minute is epic in some way, maybe the looks, the scenery, a silly line, maybe someone gets beheaded randomly and I’m left with a lot of 🤷🤷🤷 when the end credits come up.
So I thought this month’s newsletter will be lengthy one, not only because a lot of great and inspiring stuff got released recently, but also because I’d include a couple of movies which had a big impact on me and I suspect are a little bit lesser known. My movie taste is way more accessible than my music taste though.
LEGACY - LEGACY (Promesses, 2023)
Very few album can navigate through trap, r&b, cloud rap, deconstructed club and ambient so well as this one, creating gloomy, somehow mystical and catchy tunes. It’s absolutely on repeat for weeks now, I play it all the time. All of the tracks are produced at least partially by HAJJ and I have to say these foggy vocals really elevate his sound to a next level. I think most of the singing/rapping is coming from 2NDSKY, who has a pleasant vocal range and a great flow in general, which I value the most in hip hop genres, much more than good lyrics (maybe that’s why I have this strange attraction to hip hop coming from different countries: when I don’t understand the lyrics I can fully dedicate my attention to the rapper’s flow). The only track I don’t like much here is Merle featuring Ronce, mainly because I kinda hate ASMR whispering in songs now. On the other hand I really appreciate the slowed & reverbed Gigi’d Agostino sample in Fall, it feels like you’re listening to the score of a nearly forgotten summer memory.
Very cool drone video for Malaga:
x or size - Aether Ore (Good Morning Tapes, 2023)
These gorgeously dubbed-out long tracks will sip you in instantly for a literal brain, ear & soul massage. I was already a big fan of his debut (Covert ID, also on GMT), but oh my, this second album takes it even further with the numbingly expanded samples & loops and hyper slow track development. Some bits are more on the melancholic side, others are blissful but all of these songs make you dive into a deeper state of mind.
This month I’ve been reading A Drowned World by Ballard - apparently the first ever climate fiction book - about a not too distant future, where everything is flooded by the sea, new islands form with massive Triassic rainforests and huge reptiles are the new apex predators of the planet (again). Our protagonists are constantly dizzy because of the levels of heat and humidity. At some point they all begin to have strange hallucinatory dreams about reptiles and one of them, a scientist in his 60s has a theory that they’re actually experiencing the awakening of their ancient Triassic instincts, a mindset developed thousands of years ago.
I just felt there’s a connection between this album and the atmosphere of that book, it’s great that I met them around the same time. Tacky humid sounds, a whirl of ancient thoughts that are strangely familiar but impossible to decode.
Loopsel - Öga för Öga (Mammas Mysteriska Jukebox, 2023)
I wrote about how much I admire Mammas Mysteriska Jukebox in a previous newsletter, it’s always a delight to hear their new releases and this one is no exception. I think Loopsel’s sound universe really ripened & expanded on this new album to its fullest. Charming, psychedelic folk songs, sometimes pinned with some nature sounds and great backing vocals, true forest fairy music. Cooper Bowman’s passionate liner notes and the somehow dark cover painting makes me believe that I’m hugely missing out on some deeply political lyrics here. Nonetheless, it’s a beautiful album with complex song structures that somehow still manage to stay in the ‘pop’ alley. My personal favourite is the titler Öga för Öga with it’s groovy, sinister bassline, shy spoken word and nice vocal buildup throughout the song.
ugne&maria - HEALING (Futura Resistenza, 2023)
Almost everytime we gather tracks together for our next LCR mix, there are some which we find at the exact moment and fits in perfectly. This happened in this mix too, where Edit put the first song better from this magical album and I ended up listening the whole thing before she did. Brussels-based, Lithuania-raised duo ugne&maria is making very playful music that is impossible to track down genre-wise. I hear minimalistic synths with a lot of samples teasing a twisted out violin, I imagine this could be a very fun live experience. Something probably me and my five friends would dance the hell out to, while the rest of the audience would just stand there with stiff limbs and question marks above their heads.
Alexander Grawoig - Chants (Sun Ark Records, 2023)
Sun Araw’s long-standing label Sun Ark is famous for its very off-grid experimental release batches, of course somewhat in the realm of what he’s been doing musically for a decade now. I’ve seen both JC Leisure’s and Anders Lauge Meldgaard’s new album there getting praised in various forums, but no one is really talking about the third one in that batch by Alexander Grawoig, fka D/P/I. Yes, he ditched this long-standing moniker, which I’ve been a fan of around 2015, I would even say he was pretty influental on me. I remember in that era I consumed a lot of weird collagey tapes that I mostly hunted down from Tinymixtapes 😢 big RIP. His Ad Hocc album was my utmost favourite, but also I listened his Duppy Gun material as Genesis Hull, the first time I realized I’m really into dancehall was when I heard Who feels it, knows it (hands down best mixtape name). Well, around 8 years passed, he completely abandoned all that and - to my pleasant surprise - started to make folk music. Really lush, gorgeous stuff that is clearly influenced by the likes of John Fahey and Robbie Basho. It fills me with joy to see him being capable of wandering from genre to genre effortlessly throughout his life. I strongly recommend to play this one on a sunny Sunday morning, a truly elevating experience.
Lyra Valenza - Low Gear No Pressure (Petrola 80, 2023)
I’ve been following this Danish duo since their EP Scan, Deliver came out and their unique sound never goes out of date for me. Somehow they managed to perfect this mixture of trance and bass that is super entertaining and fun to listen to. Their first LP Low Gear No Pressure goes a little further and has some surprising wandering-off moments to ambient / downtempo territories. “Away from music industry stress and burnout; inspired by friendship”, as the liner notes say, the early versions of these songs got toghether in a summer house during lockdown and reflect the strange calmness of those times. However there are some real dancefloor burners on this too (at least in my terms), like Joy Divided, Life on the Line, or the epic vocal trance anthem Strech Your Arms, which has a half-tempo dancehall-type beat going on…really well-crafted stuff that also manage to sound effortless.
Not Waving - The Place I’ve Been Missing (Ecstatic, 2023)
Sometimes I wonder if TV was still so prominent in our lives as in my childhood, especially MTV, some of the tracks and albums which are now lucky to have a spot on the Boomkat main page or like a 5 sentence Pitchfork review, would totally go worldwide / mainstream. Multiple tunes qualify for this idea on the new Not Waving output, I imagine Again and Again having a contemplating desert car music video that I see 5 times every day and not getting bored of it (have to confess that I’m not so imaginative here, because Spivak already has a contemplating desert car music video). Fool could have a Craig David-style conceptual vid with a main character walking backwards and doing regretable things. Running Back To You even sounds like something straight from the 2000s glitch pop era, could be paired with a video where more and more people appear on the streets and walk towards the end of the road where - plot twist - the Earth itself ends: we zoom out to the galaxy and we realize we’re just tiny little specks of dust. All in all I think Not Waving is at his peak of pop music writing, but still keeping it a little weird & original. Shout out to all of the great collaborators on this too, those songs are absolutely the highlights.
And now, the movies…
Martin (George A. Romero, 1977)
I have a little ‘movie club’ with 2 fellow movie nerd friends, where we had a serious vampire movie binge last year and this one was by far the most unique title of the bunch. Romero, who you most likely know for his Night of the Living Dead series, plays with the idea of what defines a vampire, what it means to be one. Martin is a deeply droubled teenager who believes he needs to drink human (women’s 🙄) blood to stay alive, but he has no supernatural abilities, nor long eyeteeth to do the job. However his older cousin, the very catholic Tateh Cuda is unwaweringly sure that he’s carrying a family curse and is in fact the reborn Nosferatu. Cuda tries to hold Martin in with any tools he has in hand. From this tension and the movie’s amateurish nature we get enourmous fun, very random cuts and some of the most frightening and disturbing killing scenes I’ve seen. Martin was kinda fucking up his bloodthursty murders in a way that they seemed very real to me. This movie leaves you with a lot of questions unanswered, but I love it for that.
God Told Me To (Larry Cohen, 1976)
I had the luck to begin to explore Cohen’s filmography with this brilliant crime / horror / sci-fi piece, he’s a B-movie king for a reason. We follow a cop trying to piece together and stop a series of mass murders followed by the killers’ instant suicide, who have no connections each other, only that they state “God told them to do it” at the last second of their life. As we move further in the story, the more puzzled and mysterious it gets and our main guy is getting more and more unsure about his own faith. Where the hell does this go to sci-fi territories? I won’t spoil that, but it’s definitely the most cathartic part of the movie. Grab this if you like insane plot twists.
Bullet Ballet (Shinya Tsukamoto, 1998)
Every arthouse movie fan stumbles upon Tetsuo: The Iron Man sooner or later, I most likely saw some outtakes of the metal/man imagery and of course, the drill penis 😏 on tumblr, before watching it on a triple bill movie night with a dear previous flatmate (alongside Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Jan Svankmajer’s Lunacy…a memorable day). It’s an extremely fast-paced movie with lot of hand camera action, stop motion, fleshy gore, high-level anxiety and an amazing industrial soundtrack by Chu Ishikawa, which I still think is one of the best movie soundtracks ever. Not much after that I watched Tokyo Fist as well (the most epic opening scene burnt into my brain forever), but almost 10 years past until I returned to this crazy director again and downloaded Bullet Ballet. Staring Tsukamoto as Goda, an ordinary Japanese man whose girlfriend just killed herself, he’s shocked and confused and as a result, he desperately tries to get a gun. In the meantime he crosses paths with some young punks, eventually forms a strange companionship with them and gets himself into a real downward spiral of events. Tsukamoto’s main imagery about ‘the industrial society eating up the man’ is very much present here and all of the characters under the spell of death in some ways: there’s not much sense to live in this world, but it’s too hard to kill, yourself or someone else equally. I really loved this one for being a bit more stripped down than the previous two I’ve seen, but still channeling the directors typical ideas, visual madness and most importantly him as the frustrated everyman lost in societal roles.
I think I’ll finish it up here. This took me a month to write, partly because of a lot of crazy life stuff (moving, got fired, a lot of gigs, summer, etc…), on the other hand I just kept delaying because I felt it’s an enourmous task I made for myself lol. I probably won’t make a long post like this anytime soon, but I hope you enjoyed it. Thanks for scrolling thru, new post at the end of the month (hopefully)!