Valerie and Her Week if Wonders - Soundtrack

Closely inspired in the nightmarish novel of czech poet and writer Vitezlav Nezval, which in its turn is inspired in Gothic imaginary and fairy tales, this surreal symbolic vampire fable directed with fine irony by Jaromil Jires ( " The joke ", adaptation to the big screen of Kundera's novel ) narrates the bizarre adventures of a innocent bourgeois teenage girl during the week she begins to puberty, surrounded in a succesion of sexual fantasies ruled by a vampire named Tchor from whom obscure influence gets to flee with the help of her magic earrings in an oniric journey in which Lewis Carroll and the Marquis de Sade could perfectly be her travelling partners. The movie is filmed in a subtle narrative way that reminds Fellini's films from the 60's ( for instance: " Giulietta degli spiriti ", " Fellini- Satyricon " ) where the frontier between dreams and " reality " vanishes. The way that the director chooses to conduct the film and its context allows to read the bizarre world and erotic symbolism that surrounds to the protagonist as a subjectivetion of a familiar and represive setting that suddenly becomes strange to her innocent and anxious eyes by the effect of her sexual awakening. Shot after the russian invasion to Prague the film contains also a melancholy political allegory about the unfair situation in which lived most of the czech citizens during the years of the dictatorship.

Lubos Fiser provides what is perhaps the greatest musical score of all the maligned Czech New Wave feature-films with a gossamer-fragile blend of pastoral-orchestral folk songs and clockwork harpsichords. From the very first delicate chord to the final crescendo this joyous sound is as addictive as the bizarre imagery seen in this seldom celebrated cinematic gem (which was screened in front of 300 mesmerized patrons of this years Green Man festival). Naturally the list of musical pioneers who freely confess there allegiance to the score verifies it's elevated place in contemporary pop. Birmingham's dedicated concrete-pop-psych combo Broadcast recently paid homage to the soundtrack on there 'Ha-Ha Sound' LP while groups such as Espers, Fursaxa and Marissa Nadler recently contributed to a live performance of the soundtrack as a homage to its unwaning influence on their music.

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Swan Lake - Enemy Mine

Swan Lake is the musical group featuring celebrated songwriter-mystics Daniel Bejar (of Destroyer and New Pornographers), Spencer Krug (of Sunset Rubdown and Wolf Parade) and Carey Mercer (of Frog Eyes and Blackout Beach).
Together they recorded Enemy Mine, their nine-song second album, in Victoria, British Columbia, in early 2008, a little more than a year after the release of their well-received debut collaboration, Beast Moans, also on Jagjaguwar.
While their debut album was a beautifully-weaved mash-up of their disparate song-writing styles, often with layer upon layer of various melodies and stylistics thrown into a collaborative cauldron to magical, and at times discordant effect, their second album Enemy Mine reflects a more stripped-down, more deliberate approach to collaboration. It’s as if they really tried to just make nice songs together. To quote Krug, “There’s architecture here.” Not that the lyric is about collaboration–it fits nicely though.
It is the band’s contention that this is the first known use of a “court painting” as a record cover used in popular music. As a result of this enthusiasm, the band had planned on calling the album Before the Law, a beloved Kafka parable and a reference to this court painting. However, the band is tired of being tagged as “literary”, so they dubbed the record Enemy Mine, a beloved movie from Bejar’s youth, and a good metaphor for collaboration.

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Jimi Tenor and Kabu Kabu

Brilliant work from Jimi Tenor and his Kabu Kabu group — an incredibly righteous set that’s easily the best we’ve heard so far from the soulful ensemble! In addition to the spiritual jazz vibe of before, the group’s also picked up some influences from African soul and jazz too — not just standard Afro Funk, but also some Ethiopian and Egyptian elements too — folded into Tenor’s music like some mad meeting between Sun Ra, Fela Kuti, and Mulatu! Jimi’s at the lead, handling tenor, flute, and a host of weird instruments — and the ensemble is heavy on percussion and horns, including some great trumpet work from Jukka Eskola of the Five Corners Quintet. Despite the monochromatic cover image, the album’s got a really rich sound — a deeply soulful, deeply spiritual vibe that’s totally wonderful — served up on titles that include “Grind”, “Mogadishu Ave”, “Mega Roots”, “Aligned Planets”, “Mystery Spot”, “Floating Orange”, “Fast Legs”, “Higher Styx”, and “Magical World”.


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Dissertation: Why kids embrace Facebook and MySpace

After 30 months ethnographic fieldwork on Facebook, MySpace and other social networking sites, danah boyd has finally completed her PhD-thesis and put it online. Although she is no anthropologist, she seems to have worked like an anthropologist. Her thesis is relevant reading for anybody who is interested in the anthropology of childhood - especially in children’s relations to adults.

For children spend so much time on Facebook or MySpace ("networked publics") partly because they are marginalized in their society by adults, she explains in the concluding chapter:

One of the most notable shifts I observed in the structural conditions of today’s teens, compared to those of earlier decades, involves their limited opportunities for unregulated, unstructured social interaction.
(…)
When asked, teens consistently reported that they would prefer to socialize in physical spaces without constant parental oversight. Given that this is not an option for many of them and that many have more access to networked publics than to unmediated public spaces, social network sites are often an accepted alternative.
(…)
Their desire to connect with others is too frequently ignored or disregarded, creating a context in which many must become creative in making space for maintaining connections outside the control of adults. (…) Through the use of technology, teens are able to socialize with others from inside the boundaries of their homes. This presents new freedoms for teens, but it also provokes new fears among adults.

The teen years are marked by an interest in building new connections and socializing broadly. Online-activites are extensions of offline-activites. Teens’ engagement with social network sites reveals a continuation of earlier practices inflected in new ways, she writes.

My findings show that teens are drawn to social media collectively and that individuals choose to participate because their friends do. The appeal is not the technology itself—nor any particular technology— but the presence of friends and peers.

boyd draws many interesting parallels and comparisons:

Baudelaire’s Parisian flâneur enters the public to see and be seen. Teenagers approach publics in a similar vain. Like the flâneur, teens use fashion to convey information about their identities.
(…)
Teens have long struggled to find a place for themselves; they have consistently formed counterpublics within broader structures. Yet when they do, adults typically demonize them, the identity markers they use, and the publics they co-opt. The demonization of MySpace is akin to the demonization of malls and parking lots that took place when I was growing up.

The inability to access publics is an explicit reminder of teens’ marginalized position within society according to danah boyd:

When well-intentioned parents limit access to publics out of fear of potential dangers, they fail to provide their children with the tools to transition into adult society. This may have other unexpected consequences, including isolating teens from political life and curbing their civic engagement. I believe that the practice of maximum control and restrictions infantilizes teenagers, making them more dependent on or resentful of adults and adult society.
(…)
In learning how to make sense of publics that are different from those with which their parents are comfortable, teenagers reveal valuable techniques for interpreting and reworking publics. Their experiences provide valuable insight for understanding how publics are transformed by structural forces.
(…)
The key is for adults, and society more broadly, to engage with these issues and help guide teens in making healthy decisions that allow them to leverage social media in positive ways as part of their everyday lives.

download the thesis via danah boyd’s blog

Lotus Plaza - The Floodlight Collective

Naturally Lotus Plaza is going to draw comparisons to Lockett Pundt’s day job in Deerhunter. In fact listening to The Floodlight Collective is proof that his contributions helped give their last album a delightful shove in the right direction. However this album is so much more than just a Deerhunter offshoot. Without the overhanging presence of Bradford Cox’s distinctive but occasionally overbearing persona, Pundt is able to unfold his songwriting skills on a more level surface. Awash in a foam of reverb and angelic vocal tones, lonesome guitars and the patter of hushed drums poke out as the only solid foothold to grab onto, but most times even they can’t hold strong amongst the shimmering waves of reflected tones. Pundt’s vocal delivery is much softer (if you can believe) than his co-worker Cox and as a result the record achieves a much dreamier quality than any of Pundt’s previous tunes. Pundt delves much further into ennui and longing in contrast Deerhunter’s anxious alienation. The album is warm and inviting while at the same time remaining somewhat beautifully sad. It serves as a pretty superb compliment to the desolate clouds of breath that hang in these winter months, dissipating slowly in the reflection of sunsets on ice.


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Building Castles Out Of Matchsticks

Anne Sulikowski is the driving force behind Building Castles Out Of Matchsticks, a project that fuses abstract songwriting with highly unconventional electronics, resulting in a magical blend of electroacoustic ambience, and disembodied vocal loveliness. If you could imagine AGF minus the html poetry hang-ups, you might arrive at something akin to these beguiling soundscapes. ‘All You Leave Behind is a particularly exceptional example of Sulikowski’s talents, combining sustained digital bitstreams with submerged vocals and microtonally detuned melodies. Elsewhere, drumkits get reshuffled into new shapes on the BCOOM hard drive, and the song structure varies between liquefied drones, as on ‘This Is Our Goodbye’, and more beat-driven outings like ‘Voices’. Highly unusual and creative rethinks of songwriting throughout.


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Alina Orlova

Music in another language tends to sound better than it probably is, and Lithuanian Alina Orlova's album is no exception. The handful of songs in English show Orlova to be an artist in possession of a fearlessness born more from naivete than audacity. Who would dare recast "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star" as a dark (and shockingly effective) ballad other than someone who doesn't know better? Proving Polonius right, the brief running time of her album also works in her favor. A record this concise and inviting makes repeat listens an easy decision.


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MySpace

Agf-Delay - Symptoms

Domestic bliss and artistic bliss. It's hard to pull off, but Antye Greie and Sasu Ripatti have seemingly figured it out, as their second full-length under the AGF/Delay moniker will be released later this year.

Greie had a busy 2008, putting out two solo full-lengths as AGF as well as co-producing Ellen Allien's Sool, and she's looking to carry that on into this year with the release of Symptoms. Produced with her long-term partner Sasu Ripatti (who you may be more familiar with under the name Luomo, Uusitalo or Vladislav Delay), their AGF/Delay collaboration combines the duo's experimental and pop tendencies to create restrained vocal tracks that overflow with sexual tension.

As with their previous album Explode, Symptoms is full of dubby textures and micro-samples, whilst Greie adds her quirky vocals that drift between singing and spoken word. Greie's friendship and co-production work with Ellen Allien has meant that Symptoms will see the light of day on Allien's BPitch Control label, which should see AGF/Delay's sound brought to a wider audience this time around.


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Junior Boys - Begone Dull Care

Canadian duo Junior Boys are set to release their third collaboration, Begone Dull Care, in the U.S. on April 7. The record will first be released in Canada on March 24 through the pair’s label, Domino.
Junior Boys spent 2008 recording the album, mostly from two different continents. Jeremy Greenspan still resides in Canada, while Matthew Didemus relocated to Germany. “Hazel” will be the first single off Begone and it will be released on both 12″ vinyl and as a download.
Begone Dull Care’s title is a reference to a short film by the pioneering Oscar-winning Scottish-Canadian animator and electronic composer, Norman McLaren, who was a big influence on the conception and creation of this album.
Junior Boys will tour Europe for a few dates during early March before heading West to the U.S. and Canada for a six-week tour, starting March 28 in Toronto.

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Headless Heroes / The Silence Of Love [2008]

Folk/Indie

Headless Heroes’ album of covers attempts to knit disjointed past influences and lost gems together into one singular voice echoing from the past. Though this collection was dreamed up by Eddie Bezale; it’s definitely his wisely chosen vocalist, RSTB fave Alela Diane, that steals the show here. Bezale’s choices are no less varied or inspired than that of his counterpart in crate digging, Andy Cabic. The collection careens from such disparate sources as The Jesus and Mary Chain and Nick Cave to more obvious kindred spirits Linda Perhacs and Vashti Bunyan. The most surprising factor in this project is that Bezale had the idea long before he’d ever even heard Alela sing a note. Reportedly putting together the band and stumbling on her through Myspace. Well the lucky stumble proved to be well in his favor, and though the tone of these songs doesn’t always come close to her arresting originals, it’s definitely her voice that takes The Silence of Love from mixtape to a more refined vision.

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MySpace

My Day at the PS1

It was snowing, it was cold, it was the perfect day to go to P.S.1