#he admires soundtrack composers so very much and if anything those are the people he idolizes - they're his goal posts

[exsqueezememacaroni]

"You never get a creepy vibe from Mike - and he's an old man saying very inappropriate things while wearing S&M gear, if you think about it. But still, zero creepiness - he's not a leering lothario."

I agree 100% with this anon, he says bizarre things, he presents himself in a bizarre way, but I still get 0 creepiness from him. I don't understand this dynamic, it just happens... sometimes I also think that it's all just an act, because there are several interviews with him where he seems like a 100% normal guy, very polite and calm, and there are times when he seems completely crazy, but brilliant... one day I'll understand Mike, and I'll tell you, I promise

the Mike intrigue -gugh, it's so strong.

For the interviews thing - his general uncomfort with the media, prying or stupid questions and his very strong empathy really does play into how he is during an interview. If he gets to talk about a thing he is interested in, or he senses that the interviewer is not trying to take advantage of him, he can relax and be more "himself" otherwise, forget it....all your getting is an act. He also seemed to calm down a lot after the specter of FNM and Mr. Bungle breakup (for the time being) was behind him and he was more in charge of his own music and who he talked to about it.

I always do feel a little bad....like...here I am fully objectifying him on tunglr dot con...but the saving grace is that at least he'll never know it.

[letterboxd]

Heart Beat.

Minari’s film composer Emile Mosseri (also responsible for the Kajillionaire and The Last Black Man in San Francisco scores) tells Ella Kemp about his A24 favorites, Nicholas Britell’s friendship and the boldest Paul McCartney needle drop in movie history.

What do you think a broken heart sounds like? How about a warm, beating one? It’s something that Emile Mosseri has been thinking about for a while now. The past two years have seen him complete a hat-trick of beguiling, transporting scores for Plan B movies: Joe Talbot and Jimmie Fails’ The Last Black Man in San Francisco, Miranda July’s Kajillionaire and now, the film voted the best of 2020 by our community, Lee Isaac Chung’s Minari.

What binds these scores together is a delicacy that knows when to break free and turn into something altogether spectacular. But on Minari in particular, Mosseri is in full bloom, working for the first time in a way he’d always dreamed about. While The Last Black Man in San Francisco saw him compose to a loose edit, and on Kajillionaire he worked to a locked cut, Chung gave him the freedom to write music directly to Minari’s script. “It was a dream to work this way on Minari,” Mosseri says. “It was so beautifully written and so visceral.”

‘Minari’ composer Emile Mosseri.

Minari is an intimate portrait of a Korean family making their way in rural America, and the composer was interested in “trying to figure out musically how you can feel connected to your deepest childhood memories”. These memories belong, in the film, to David—a tiny king played by eight-year-old Alan Kim—as he comes to terms with his new life on a small farm in Arkansas, as his family strives for their own version of the American Dream.

The Yi family is made up of David and his sister Anne (Noel Kate Cho), their parents Monica (Han Ye-ri) and Jacob (Steven Yeun) and their grandmother, Soon-ja (Youn Yuh-jung). It’s a personal story for Chung, one that Mosseri felt honored to be a part of. “It’s a very intimate story with these five characters, which takes place mostly in this small mobile home—but emotionally, it’s very epic.”

There was something about Chung that had caught Mosseri’s attention early on. “I had met him at the LA premiere of Last Black Man,” Mosseri says, “and I sent him the Kajillionaire score.” Mosseri was already familiar with the filmmaker’s work: “His first film, Munyurangabo, is incredible.” He calls Chung “very open, but also sly” in terms of hitting the right notes and “gently steering the ship”. The partnership between composer and director was about working on “a more emotional level,” Mosseri says. “There was never any talk about what we wanted stylistically.”

The ‘Minari’ ensemble cast.

The result is a film graced with music at once lush and raw, grandiose and vulnerable. Mosseri is keenly aware of these nuances, and always made sure to walk the tonal tightrope in the writing process. “There aren’t sad cues and hopeful cues,” he explains. “Every cue has both feelings. Each musical moment dips in and out of the hopefulness and joy of a family, and then the pain and frustration and dissonance that they hold.”

The way Mosseri’s music swells and flows often feels intangible, magical, even—which comes more from knowing what to avoid, rather than acting with too much forced intention. On his first film, Mosseri brought brass and strings to the streets of San Francisco, and with Miranda July, he worked old Hollywood glamor into the concrete blocks of Los Angeles. Here, we twirl through the tall grass as gentle acoustic guitars and elegant string sections sigh and sway, while the Yi family work through their growing pains.

“We didn’t want to hear Korean music when you see Korean characters, and we didn’t want twangy music when you see an American farm,” Mosseri explains. “We wanted to come at it from the side somehow, in some way that’s unexpected.” ‘Rain’, his collaboration with Minari star Han Ye-ri, which features on the official soundtrack, encapsulates this juxtaposition. It’s an epic lullaby of sorts; Han sings in Korean to a gentle guitar; a pleasing swell of synths climbs alongside her voice. The effect on the listener is as if liquid love is trickling from every vein. “I wanted this score to feel like it had a warm, beating heart.”

Two of your three feature films to date have been released by A24, and so we must ask: what are your favorite A24 film scores? Emile Mosseri: Three come to mind. First of all, Anna Meredith’s score for Eighth Grade. It’s so adventurous and unexpected and fresh and just brilliant. It’s so pure and out-there. It also does this impossible thing of being hip and exciting and deep, but also hilarious. The pool-party scene fucking kills me.

Then there’s Under the Skin by Mica Levi. I remember seeing that at the Nighthawk theater in Brooklyn and feeling like it was the best score I’d heard in as long as I could remember.

And then of course, Moonlight. That film got under my skin in a way I didn’t see coming. I saw it by myself in a theater, after hearing all the hype for months and months. When a movie has that much hype you can get a bit cynical and it can distract you, so I went in a bit guarded, but I left the film destroyed. For weeks and weeks it resonated with me in a way that was so profound, and a large part of that is due to Nick [Britell]’s music. And the film is just perfection.

Scarlett Johansson in ‘Under the Skin’ (2013), scored by Mica Levi.

You’ve been described as Nicholas Britell’s protégé more than once… It’s funny, I think that came from me being a fan of his and saying nice things about his music. I met him at Sundance two years ago when Last Black Man was premiering. I went with my wife and my brother and I was so excited, I’d been waiting for this moment for so long. We walked in and Nick and Barry [Jenkins] were walking in behind [us]. And there was also Boots Riley, Kamasi Washington… all these people I looked up to. I hadn’t considered that I would see this film in the room with them, and it was the first time I was hearing the final mix and just agonizing.

Nick was incredibly generous and said great things about the score and was super encouraging, and he became a friend and mentor. But I’ve never studied with him or worked with him. Although, if you’re a fan of somebody’s work, you’re a student of any of these composers that you admire. Anything you watch and listen to, you absorb.

What was the first film that made you want to be a composer? It was Edward Scissorhands. Danny Elfman’s score was the first one that made me realize that this was a job. I’m always attracted to big, romantic melodies, and over-the-top sweeping stuff—but done tastefully. In that score, he sets the high-water mark for me. It’s so unapologetically romantic.

And then there are other obvious ones like The Godfather. It’s maybe a dorky choice because it’s the most famous movie ever, but it really is the best. And that got me into Nino Rota, and from there I found [Federico] Fellini and all these movies through Nino, the composer. And then I got really into the score for La Dolce Vita and more movies that he’d written for, which are so beautiful.

The ‘Edward Scissorhands’ (1990) score was an early inspiration for Mosseri.

Which films, new to you, blew you away in 2020? Take Shelter by Jeff Nichols blew me away. It unfolded in a way that was intoxicating and really exciting, and it just really stuck with me.

What’s been your favorite needle drop on screen this year? Aside from Devonté Hynes’ score being stunning, there’s an amazing piece of music placed in an episode of Luca Guadagnino’s We Are Who We Are. They use a Paul McCartney song called ‘Let Em In’, and they dropped it in this incredibly tasteful but unexpected way, in a really dark, emotionally loaded scene. It worked in such a beautiful and graceful way. It’s because it’s the most cheery McCartney, it’s full-blown upbeat and poppy McCartney. And this is the darkest-of-the-dark human pain, and it lands in this way that is such a bold choice, such a powerful move.

What should people listen to after watching Minari? One record I’ve been listening to a lot recently is Jeff Tweedy’s Love is the King. It could be a good companion to Minari. I’m a huge fan of his and it’s a gorgeous record. It’s very stripped-down and emotionally raw, and it’s both hopeful and heartbreaking.

Which filmmakers would you love to work with next? I’m always afraid to answer this question because there are so many filmmakers I admire. There are filmmakers I grew up with loving their films—working with Miranda was that for me. Spike Jonze or Yorgos Lanthimos are directors in her world that I also love and would love to work with. But there’s so many others. Derek Cianfrance is amazing and he works with different composers. I love his choice of collaborators musically. I love that he used the late great Harold Budd to do his shows [including I Know This Much is True], and then Mike Patton, and Grizzly Bear… the music is always incredible in his projects, but he doesn’t have a go-to person. His films are so heartbreaking and powerful and really, really raw. He’s fearless.

I feel very lucky that I’ve worked on these three films which are all very much like somebody’s ripping their heart out and putting it on the screen. I feel like Derek Cianfrance does that in his films too, in this unapologetic, super-vulnerable way of just ripping his soul out and putting it out for everyone to see. It’s incredibly appealing to find those projects, because they’re really rare.

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Follow Ella on Letterboxd

‘Minari’ is available everywhere in the US that movies can be rented, and screening in select theaters in the US and other regions. Listen to the official soundtrack and more of Mosseri’s film compositions in the official Spotify playlist via Milan Records. ‘Kajillionaire’ is available on VOD now.

[scottymcgeesterwrites]

Final Fantasy X Review

Year: 2001

Original Platform: PlayStation 2

Also available on: PS3 and PS4 (HD Remaster)

Version I Played: PlayStation 2

Synopsis:

Tidus is a renown blitzball player in the city of Zanarkand. One day, his mysterious buddy Auron whisks him away to the land of Spira after a massive entity known as Sin attacks Zanarkand. Tidus ventures into Spira, a strange world lacking in advanced technology. There, he finds many uncomfortable truths after joining a pilgrimage with the summoner Yuna.

Gameplay:

I will preface this by saying that this was my very first Final Fantasy game way back when I was like 13. I wasn’t keen on handling RPGs yet so it took me ages to finish. The result was me falling in love with everything about it. Final Fantasy X is the last main Final Fantasy game to feature turn-based combat. One of the coolest features of the battle system in this game is being able to switch characters in the middle of a battle. I missed that afterwards. When I played more Final Fantasy games after this, I kept thinking instinctively that you could switch characters in the middle of battle.

Leveling up is conventional but also introduces a Sphere Grid. You gain Ability Points to progress through a grid where each sphere unlocks a special ability or a higher stat. You can pick different paths along the grids and, typically, by the end of the game you are crossing over other character's grids.

The only truly annoying aspect of playing the game was the sphere puzzles in the temples. Every so often you have to enter a temple and solve a puzzle by placing spheres in the right places. It was so mind-numbing and the irritating music really didn't help either.

Because of how the story is told, the game is much more linear than its predecessors. The bulk of the game is spent journeying on foot across Spira. But don’t worry – there are plenty of secrets and extras to unfold – PLENTY. You eventually get an airship, but instead of flying around a world map you simply pick a destination on a map and you’re there. It sounds lame but the world is already so massive and detailed that Square probably couldn’t fit the graphics of flying around a world map.

Graphics:

The cinematics blew everyone away – because for the first time we have VOICE ACTING! JUST LIKE WATCHING A MOVIE! The voice acting worked really well in this game. It was only ever awkward when Tidus was being, uh, really annoying.

Exhibit A:

The in-game cutscenes can also be a bit stiff.

Story:

Final Fantasy X was my very first Final Fantasy game – as such, I could be biased in how I feel about it. Or maybe not. I’ve grown to be enough of a dick to crush my own dreams.

The story is completely different than the rest of the series. Completely different. While the rest of the series likes to make references to Western mythology and atmosphere (medieval and industrial settings), Final Fantasy X actually has an East Asian setting. There are no knights in armor or empires fighting rebels or even technological powers like Shinra. There are no witches or wizards. The story and references are quite esoteric, more mysterious and conceptual.

The narrative is radically different from the entire series. For the first and only time (so far), the main character narrates the unfolding events to the audience. After getting sucked out of his homeworld of Zanarkand, Tidus gets caught up in a pilgrimage to defeat Sin. Sin is a massive creature that returns every so often to punish the world for its dependence on technology. (So Sin is basically a kaiju.) A summoner with his or her friends go on a quest to defeat Sin, and the Calm returns for some time until Sin returns.

Spira is probably my favorite Final Fantasy world. It’s beautiful and haunting at the same, sad and bright. You can tell that there was once a great cataclysm but the long years have overridden the past. The rules of the world are so unique. Monsters are explained as the ghosts of people who have not passed on. A summoner this time not only summons great beings (called aeons) but also “sends” the dead away so they can find the Farplane, essentially Heaven. Like I said before, the concepts of Spira are very esoteric and East Asian. While Final Fantasy X does derive influences from Christian concepts (i.e. pilgrimage, priests, doctrines), it just as much references many Japanese and Buddhist concepts (rebirth, wandering souls, sacred temples). Overall, Final Fantasy X’s story is the most religious and spiritual in the entire series.

It’s relatively rare for a JRPG to take on an entire fictional world with a visual design referencing Asian settings. Usually, Final Fantasy and other JRPGs are more obsessed with Western settings (i.e. medieval towns). Spira is ripe with influences from island nations and places like Thailand and Bali.

The major plot twist require you to wrap your head around a bit, but surprisingly nothing is truly complicated. For the most part, you follow the story through the pilgrimage, learn some backstory stuff, and then face the end.

There are several “main” villains. For argument’s sake, and for the sake of not ruining any spoilers, let’s go with Seymour. Seymour is a recurring villain who again ups the ante on the bishonen trend. He’s also the biggest pain in the ass out of any Final Fantasy game. Ask anyone who has played this game and they will get Vietnam flashbacks of fighting Seymour. The bastard keeps popping up every so often to hinder the party’s progress. Seymour may look strange, but don’t let that fool you. He is also seriously one of the most fucked up villains in the entire series.

Tidus is unique in that he is an outsider viewing the story. He tags along and has his own story arc to deal with. Tidus’s story is one of the most personal and relatable. It’s so unique to play as a character who is not a conventional fantasy hero like a thief or a mage or a knight, but a sports celebrity with daddy issues.It’s also unique in that Tidus isn’t even the central character – Yuna is. Yuna is the summoner on a pilgrimage to defeat Sin. Even so, Tidus still plays an important role by falling in love with Yuna, influencing her goals on the pilgrimage.

In retrospect, Final Fantasy IX appears to be a prototype to Final Fantasy X. Tidus is a version of Zidane, except, unfortunately, a bit more annoying when he tries to woo Yuna. Zidane and Garnet’s relationship mirrors Tidus and Yuna’s; both involve an upbeat male trying to woo a reserved, quiet female. Tidus is the temptation to Yuna’s repressed Catholic schoolgirl personality, advising her to loosen up. The existential crisis that Tidus faces is also similar to Zidane’s.

All that being said, Final Fantasy X is my personal favorite in the entire series. It has its flaws, and yes, it’s a sappy romance. But I love it. I fucking love it. I LOVE IT ALL. I love the world. I love the plot. I love the music. I love all the characters. Auron is so fucking cool. Just look at how cool this guy is.

And that ending. Oh man. I really don’t want to spoil anything but at the same time. UNGH. This game. It is poetry. Everybody is a real gangsta until they watch what happens at the end.

Final Fantasy X is probably the most unique out of all the Final Fantasy games. Different didn’t pan out well for Final Fantasy VIII. But for Final Fantasy X – different was good, really good.

Music:

Final Fantasy X does a few things radically different from its predecessors. For one, the series’ main theme isn’t featured. That may sound like blasphemy to some. In retrospect, it might have been a good move because frankly I can’t see the main theme being played anywhere in a story like this. The “Prelude” theme is only briefly featured in an opening menu, but this time it’s given a sick beat that makes you want to dance a little jig.

Alas, Nobuo Uematsu begins to detach himself from full reign of the soundtrack. Two other composers, Masashi Hamauzu and Junya Nakano, also co-wrote a bulk of the soundtrack. While Uematsu composed the main themes of the game, Hamauzu and Nakano composed many of the other tracks. While not everything they did was so different from Uematsu, there are a couple tracks, namely “Assault”, which is distinctly unlike something Uematsu would ever compose. I don’t say this in a bad way at all. The score is still golden. But after Final Fantasy X we see Uematsu depart, and Final Fantasy music starts diving fresh into the unknown.

The pop song for this score is “Suteki da ne”. It’s pretty good although I prefer “Eyes on Me” and “Melodies of Life”.

The HD Remaster soundtrack seems to skewer the original sound of the music. I’ve listened to it and was very displeased by what they did to “Assault”, which was one of my favorite pieces. The original soundtrack has more umph, more pomp and circumstance.

Meanwhile, “Otheworld” is a metal song – a first for the series. It plays in the opening when Tidus plays blitzball, and in one of the final battles. “Otherworld” is frequently misattributed to Rammstein, especially back in the days of Limewire. They had nothing to do with it. Uematsu composed “Otherworld”, and Bill Muir, a lead singer from the metal band xtillidiex, sang it.

Uematsu’s fully orchestrated work on the ending scene is masterful. The emotion behind it brings tears to my eye. It wrecks you, man. It pulls those heartstrings and doesn’t let go. It hurts so good to listen to it and remember how the story ends. It is the most emotional track for the most emotional Final Fantasy ending. It is here where you realize that Nobuo Uematsu could really be a movie soundtrack composer. His craft came full circle here.

Notable Theme:

“To Zanarkand” – the main theme of Final Fantasy X. Beautiful, gentle, and solemn.

Verdict:

Final Fantasy X is my personal favorite. Final Fantasy VI can objectively be called the best, but I have a soft spot for Final Fantasy X. I admire its unique story and its world. It can be campy and corny at times but I love it overall. Objectively, it’s still of a higher caliber in the series.

Direct Sequel?

Yes. Final Fantasy X-2, or also known as Final Fantasy X-2: For Fangirls Who Couldn’t Handle the Ending to X.

 I kid. That was harsh.

 But I mean. . .

 They gave this Charlie’s Angels vibe with Yuna, Rikku and this new girl Payne.

And like I guess it’s cool but like the tone is soooo campy.

And then they sing and it’s like J-Pop and . . .

 Yeah.

This was the sequel.

This was the first Final Fantasy sequel ever made.

And it was. Uh. It was something.

At the time, I could only play about a quarter of the way through before feeling wrong about it. Many critics would agree that it robs the dignity of the original game. I do want to actually try playing it again. I might come into it with a new mind. But. Still. I prefer they leave the original ending untouched.

[leoninapelliolovesconchitawurst]

ENGLISH TRANSLATION ( Jeannette Nobbe)

VOLSKRANT.NL 31/01/20

by Mennon Pot

https://www.volkskrant.nl/cultuur-media/conchita-wurst-sorry-dat-ik-zo-n-wandelend-cliche-ben~b0477817/

(Conchita) Wurst: 'I'm sorry I'm a walking cliché'.

Above all we know Conchita Wurst as the bearded 'female 'singer who won the ESC in 2014. But we've moved on and are a bit wiser. It´s just Wurst now, but the beard is still there.

With light feathered steps, Thomas Neuwirth (31) enters the conference room of the hotel in Groningen where he is staying: black combat boots, black leather pants, tight black T-shirt, the black beard and the perfect short trimmed jet black hair..

He introduces himself as Tom. It's not difficult to recognise the bearded drag queen Conchita in him. (Kopenhagen, 2014, remember?) but the dress and wig are stowed away for a while. Conchita has a sort of sabbatical, so to speak.

Neuwirth is on tour as a man. Stage name: Wurst. Yesterday evening he performed in Groningen; the next concert will be 7 february at the Melkweg in Amsterdam. His new album 'Truth over Magnitude' also carries the artist´s name Wurst.

Let's get this straight: when the subject is Conchita Wurst, the word 'transgender' sometimes comes a long. Wrongly. Neuwirth is a man, ('but incredibly gay, of course'), who has a choice from now on: being on tour as a drag queen (Conchita) or as a man (Wurst) .

´a lot of fun, being a masculine stage persona', he says. Conchita will turn up again somewhere else.

Holland appreciated Conchita's 'Rise like a Phoenix' with the highest score, almost 6 years ago.

Neuwirth didn't forget: twelve points, douze points from Holland for the bearded diva from Austria.

Then hectic years followed. 'After the Song Contest I thought, I have to make the most of it now, build my fame and cash it in. So I surrounded myself with all kinds of experts, managers, stylists, make/up artists, the whole circus. After 3 years I was exhausted. I couldn´t do it anymore. I told my audience every nigh, be yourself, believe in yourself. But along the way, I forgot myself.´

He got rid of the experts’ circus and is having a relaxed tour now, with a small entourage. He feels good again, although in 2018 he had to announce he is infected with the HIV virus. His manager politely asks, almost in an humble manner, not to talk about that.

Tom doesn´t appear to be very worried about that. There has seldom been a star who starts an interview so cheerfully. ´A great photo shoot and after that talk about things I find beautiful and fun.

Terrific, I was already looking forward to it when I came out of bed.´

´Curriculum Vitae'

1988 – Born as Thomas Neuwirth in Gmunden, Austria

2007 – Candidate at the talentshow Starmania, and boyband Jetzt anders!

2011 – Debut as female persona Conchita Wurst, the debut single `I´ll be there´

2012 - Second place at the Austrian Songfestival

2014 – ESC winner with ´Rise like a Phoenix

2015 – First album ´Conchita´, co-presenter ESC

2018 – Second album ´From Vienna with Love´

2019 – Debut as male stage persona ´Wurst´, third album ´Truth over Magnitude´

2020 – Wurst ´Trust over Magnitude´ Sony Music

Wurst will be performing in the Melkweg in Amsterdam on February 7

SOUNDTRACK

Music from the Motion Picture Titanic ...1997

´My first CD. I was 9 years old when I bought it. `My heart will go on´’changed my life´. As it were, Céline Dion gave me permission to be utterly dramatic and to be over the top. When I came out of the closet, I heard that song in my head.

It was also a liberation for me as a singer. My mom always sang with a thin, high falsetto voice. I thought that was how it should be. Dion taught me, you may yell as hard as you can, with all the power you have in you. When you sing so loud, you can’t fake it. The sound you push out of your body, is the sound of your body, unique and by definition authentic. Céline Dion taught me that singing is something really physical.´

SERIES

The Crown ..Netflix..., 2016 until 2019

´For me it´s getting difficult to watch a movie to the end. I guess that´s because of all the series on Netflix and HBO. My favorite is `The Crown´.. ´the intro alone is so beautiful, that liquid gold that forms a crown, such art. I used to watch it twice. Ít says something about the fact that I can´t choose between the two women who play Elizabeth and the two men who play prince Philip. All the actors are great. The costumes, the stories, the palaces, it´s so delightful. The history also intrigues me, after every episode I checked on Wikipedia if it was really what had happened.

PARTIES

´At Christmas I always come back to Vienna. I love the lights, glitters and decorations, my inner Mariah Carey is looking forward to it every year. Christmas 2019 was extra special because it had been a long time since the whole family came together at my grandmother´s house.´

I would love it to be like that every year... A couple of days being together in one home. Talking, getting to really know my family. Maybe now you think, days on and on with uncles and aunts, such horror! It is easy to say that I don´t really have much in common with these people. But I do, Really. They all have a story and similarities with your stories. Ask them about your life and tell them about yours.´

That´s what Christmas is all about to me. To me, the birth of Jesus has not that much to do with it.´

ISLAND..

I have an agreement with my best friends to go on vacation at least once every two years. We have been to Mykonos a couple of times, THE especially gay island. I´m sorry I sound like a walking cliché.´

The sun, the sea, the beaches, the small streets, so cosy. We rent a house with a pool and for a week or two we live in our own little paradise, actually being a bit tipsy the whole time. Go shopping and cook.´

`What´s also very important, on Mykomos, the wind is always blowing the right way. I love to watch the women, because their dresses and their hair flutter so beautifully.´

STYLE ICON

Victoria Beckham

I was and still am a big Spice Girls fan and I especially admire Victoria Beckham, because she lives her life the way she wants. She appears in tabloids every day, but has survived a crisis in her relationship and has stayed happy with the love of her life and her family. I think that it´s really strong.´

In regard to her style, she can go from very classy to very trashy, I like that. One day she´s wearing a designer dress, the next she and David Beckham are walking in identical jogging suits. She couldn’t care less. I think that it´s inspiring.´

´I think she is utterly authentic, raging through the glamour. Although I have never met her, I´m sure that I could have a lot of fun with her. I´d love to drink some tequila with her for an afternoon or so.´

AGE

30

´I thought becoming 30 was really special, I lost my wild behaviour, came to be more restful. Some way or another I think a lot about some things my mother said: in my twenties, I ignored those lessons, but now I´m 30, I suddenly realised she was right for example how important family and friends are.

I´m 31 now, I have inner peace and my life in order, but I still feel young. I´m convinced that this the best period of my life´. My advise to everybody... be 30.´

ALBUM

Recomposed by Max Richter / The Four Seasons ..2012

I don´t play any instruments and until not too long ago, I didn´t really know much about music. I really found that a pity sometimes. Fortunately, my good friend Martin studies at the School of Musical Arts... !! He´s studying the history of music intensely and tells me about a lot of great composers. I learn a lot from that.´´I never understood classical music and didn´t really know anything about it, but thanks to the listening sessions with Martin I fell in love with Vivaldi..

The pop artist of the classical artists.

´Max Richter interpreted Vivaldi´s Four Seasons and composed it in a modern fashion. It´s a modern, post minimalistic piece, completely different from the original one, but you still recognise it. Greatly done, at the moment it´s my favorite album.´

BOOK

Friedrich Schiller « Ueber die aesthetische Erziehung des Menschen ». About the aesthetic upbringing of the people..´

´A good friend advised me to read the philosophical letters from Friedrich Schiller ..Letters, 1794-1795)

That´s a hard job to do. Because of the old fashioned German I had to read some sentences 5 times. You always have to wrestle yourself through a thick layer of 18th century sexism.

´But further on you´ll find something beautiful. Schiller writes a lot about finding your inner beauty and your own truth. Dare to be yourself. Embrace your darker sides. Those are important as well.´

´At the same time he preaches self-perspective.. don´t take yourself too seriously, you´re not the center of the universe. That is very worthy to me. Namely because I DO think I´m the center of the universe, haha.

`Still it´s very wise of him, to send a message from 1795 to a 21st century queen with a Mariah Carey complex.´

CLUB

Circus in Vienna

´The Arena is a huge complex in Vienna, a concert building with a mega discotheque. A couple of times a year they organize Circus, my favorite gay club night. I always go there with my group of closest friends, but it´s actually a bit of a rule that we lose each other and disappear into the crowd.´

´I roam around all night- Every room, every floor has its own musical theme and decoration. I love the types of people I meet there, their clothes, their fetishisms, everything.´

….Arena Vienna, Baumgasse 80, Vienna

CITY

Amsterdam

´I live in Vienna, I love Vienna and I will always come back there, but the greatest city I´ve been to is Amsterdam – since then I traveled all over the world so I know what I´m talking about.

´Of all the cities I visited, Amsterdam is the only one where I would want to live a period of time. So that´s what I´m gonna do, this summer, for a few months to begin with.´

´I can see that Amsterdam also has the flagship stores from all known store chains. And a lot of tourists, like every special city. But I see all these small jewelry shops where they sell their self-made jewelry. Little bakeries. Cosy streets. And a lot of water. I love water. I love cities with lots of water.´

[meadweos]

Hello! I’m Ellie, this is Dorcas and I hope you enjoy this trainwreck of a soft as all hell introduction to my babe. I’m super excited to be writing here okay byeeeeeeeee.

is that LILY JAMES wearing that HUFFLEPUFF scarf ? no, it appears to be DORCAS MEADOWES who happens to be a SEVENTH year and a MUGGLEBORN !! SHE is CISFEMALE, and i heard they’re COMPASSIONATE and BENEVOLENT but might also seem NAIVE and DAMAGED. they appear to be leaning towards the side of the ORDER, but this is a conversation we should be having somewhere else. ( ellie / nineteen / gmt / she/her )

TRIGGER WARNINGS : death, injury, hospital mention, dogs.

PART ONE. BASICS / MAGICAL FULL NAME & MEANINGS  : Dorcas ( GAZELLE ) Andromache ( MAN / BATTLE ) Meadowes ( LIVED IN OR NEAR A MEADOW. ) DATE OF BIRTH : November 16th. AGE : 17. ZODIAC SIGN : Scorpio. HEIGHT : 5 ft 7 in. EYE COLOR : Dark brown. LEFT OR RIGHT HANDED : Ambidextrous.  FAVORITE COLOR : Light blue / black. SCHOOL : Hogwarts. BLOOD STATUS : Muggleborn. WHAT ARE THEIR PARENTS JOBS? : Her mother was a stay-at-home tutor, and her father was a doctor. ( Her aunt is a therapist. Her uncle is a lawyer. ) DO THEY HAVE ANY MAGICAL BLOOD? : Not in her immediate family. Her fifth, twice removed, much, much older cousin is a wizard (of Emeric Switch fame! Imagine that!) HOW DID THEIR MAGIC FIRST MANIFEST ITSELF? : She wanted to talk to the dogs at the local pet store, and accidentally ‘phased’ through the door. She was found half an hour later just stroking a pitbull puppy which had latched itself onto her. YEAR : Seventh year. HOUSE : Hufflepuff. PATRONUS : Panda. ( THE PANDA IS A RESOURCEFUL ANIMAL, AND THOSE WITH IT AS A PATRONUS ARE THE SAME. THEY ARE GOOD AT USING WHATEVER IS AROUND THEM, AND INCREDIBLY CREATIVE AND BRIGHT. THEY ARE FRIENDLY AND WARM, AND MANY MAY GO TO THEM FOR ADVICE OR HELP, WHICH THE PANDA WILL WILLINGLY GIVE. THEY ARE A BIT OF A HEALER BY NATURE, ENJOYING COMPANY AROUND THEM AND USING IT TO ENHANCE THEMSELVES. THEY LOVE TO EXPLORE MANY AREAS OF KNOWLEDGE AND THE WORLD, TRYING TO BROADEN THEIR HORIZONS AND KEEP THEIR MINDS OPEN. ) BOGGART : Her father, sat in the same armchair he’d always loved. His head turned towards her as he tells her it was all her fault, and the room shrinks. UPDATED: Earlier, and for very good reason, I wrote a drabble centered around what her Boggart would be for a different roleplay. It’s different than what it is now, but I’m nevertheless extremely proud of it. You can read it here. AMORTENTIA : What is it about true love, dearest? What makes everyone go wild? Is it the prospect that someone, someone whole, and unflinching, is out there - waiting for you? Waiting for your embrace, your touch? Or is it just that they are tired - tired of making homes in people and receiving nothing back? You, though. You make homes in all manner of things. And, anyway, who decided homes can’t be humans? Who decided home is a stationary concept? That your heart can’t be held in the hands of many people, that it cannot be crushed and sewn back together in a matter of minutes? Who decided that love, that great big messy concept, has to be romantic? You are as messy in love as you are in life - that is to say, you build pieces of yourself from the people around you, from the pieces of themselves they give you. The skin beneath your ear? Composed of the whispers of secrets from your first boyfriend. Your nose? Your mother’s love. The inside of your wrist? The balm of Emmeline’s arms around your body, shielding you the only way she can.  No. It isn’t so impossible that love is greater than the romance. That love is so many more things. The Greeks of old always said there were many kinds of love. Eros. Agape. Philia. Storge. Ludos. Pragma. Philautia. It is these things that you, alone, recite in that dungeon. The cold seems to envelop you as you take in a breath, the tendrils of your senses magnifying. It can be overwhelming, you know, but you are not as surprised as you expect to be. Warmth, sinking between your fingertips, laps at your cheek, at your lips as you breathe out. It sticks to you, to your tongue. Like caramel and peanut butter, the batter of the cookies your aunt always makes, the s’mores that you made around the campfire just last week. Her hair, or is it her perfume (?) wafting in your direction - regardless, you stay rooted to your place. Daisies, growing wild, the way they had at home, in your back garden. The smell of old brick and something crumbling - that weird Dragonleather smell that stays in the air whenever Hagrid passes, the smell of bursting fireworks (that time that the Marauders hadn’t realized there was anyone still down the corridor) and butterbeer, warming. Your dogs breath, laughter bubbling up as you remark on the smell of toothpaste, on peppermint and mossy treebark.  You’re not surprised to smell all the things that make this place home - you’re not surprised to smell that it’s not made up of just one person - just one thing, fixable - but many. Moving parts that flare up and slide away into the background of your senses. WAND : Phoenix tail feather core. 9 inches. Black Walnut. PETS : Owl, named Athena. Also owns a pitbull, the light of her life, Agape ( LOVE AND AFFECTION ) or Aggie, for short. CHARACTER INSPIRATION : Cinderella, Sonya Rostova, Izzie Stevens, Craig Middlebrooks, Ann Perkins, Ella Lopez, Jess Day, Riley Matthews, Penelope Garcia, Kara Danvers, Capheus Onyango, and Jane Villanueva. ( CHARACTER TAG HERE. )

PART TWO. ARE YOU GOOD AT… DANCING? : I certainly try.  SINGING? : Yes! COOKING? : Somewhat. DUELING? : Never been better. STUDYING? : If my grades are anything to go by, yes. MAGIC? : Uh, I’d hope so.

PART THREE. HAVE YOU EVER… DRIVEN A CAR? : Yes. Not well, though. FALLEN IN LOVE? : … Yes. HAD SEX? : Yes. LAUGHED SO HARD YOU CRIED? : I don’t know anyone who enjoys their life who hasn’t. SMOKED? : ... No. DONE DRUGS? : Nope. BROKEN THE LAW? : Accidentally. KILLED SOMEONE? : No.

PART FOUR. LITTLE SECRETS BIGGEST FEAR : Losing everyone. And everything. SOMEONE YOU ADMIRE : Emme, McGonagall. SOMEONE YOU FEAR : I don’t really know. Dumbledore, when he’s mad. Whatever that ponce of a miserable Muggle hater is called. SOMEONE YOU MISS : Grandpa. Terry. My brother. Mum. Dad. SOMEONE YOU COULDN’T LIVE WITHOUT : Emme. Myself, too. SOMEONE YOU COULD KILL : Anyone who hates muggles. DO YOU WANT KIDS? : Maybe someday. DO YOU WANT TO GET MARRIED? : To the right person? Yeah. BIGGEST REGRET : Not sleeping in the same room as my brother that night. ( I could have saved him. I should have saved him. ) CAN YOU SEE THESTRALS? : Yes.

PART FIVE. FINISH THIS SENTENCE I AM… : Sleepy. Wishing Emmeline was here. I WISH… : Ice-cream could become a person. MAYBE ONE DAY… : I won’t feel this guilt anymore. SOMETIMES I… : Fall in love in the morning, and out of it by lunch. MY FAVOURITE SUBJECTS ARE… : Herbology. MY LEAST FAVOURITE SUBJECTS ARE… : History of Magic, Divination. IF I COULD DO IT AGAIN, I WOULD… : Save my brother. IF I COULD GO TO A DIFFERENT SCHOOL, I WOULD CHOOSE… : Beauxbatons, not Ilvermorny. IF I COULD CHOOSE A DEATHLY HALLOW, I WOULD CHOOSE… : The Stone. ( Say it like it isn’t a mantra, Dorcas. As though it isn’t something that’s poisoned your dreams since discovering those stories may be based in reality. )

PART SIX. MISCELLANEOUS

DESCRIBE THEIR AESTHETIC IN THREE WORDS : Sea, daisies, laughter. THEME SONG : Lavender’s Blue ( CINDERELLA SOUNDTRACK - 2015. ) / Sonya Alone ( BRITTAIN ASHFORD - NATASHA, PIERRE & THE GREAT COMET OF 1812 - ORIGINAL BROADWAY CAST RECORDING. ) / Times are Hard for Dreamers (Pop Version) ( PIPPA SOO - AMELIE - ORIGINAL BROADWAY CAST RECORDING. ) TOP FIVE SONGS IN THEIR ( MODERN ) PLAYLIST : You Are Enough - Sleeping at Last, Yellow - Coldplay, When I Kissed the Teacher - ABBA, Breathe - In The Heights, & Paradise - George Ezra. VINE THAT FITS THEM : ( x ) RANDOM HEADCANONS : 1. Dorcas loves deeply. Deeply, deeply, deeply. It’s intrinsic to who she is. She’s protective, maddeningly so, and unable to sit still. She wears her heart on her sleeve, and is a nightmare when it comes to pacing herself. She knows not of patience, or of taking time to breathe. She consists solely of love - a palace built between her ribs of the people that she loves. In this, she is a typical Taurus Hufflepuff. ( x ) 2. Dorcas lost her parents at a very young age. She doesn’t often speak of it - speak about them, about the parents that she lost and the brother that she was unable to save. They were killed in a home burglary turned murder spree when she was six. They’d been meant to go on holiday, but Dorcas had come down with the stomach flu, so they’d foregone the vacation when it spread to Dorcas’s younger sister, Calliope. The only reason that Dorcas survived was that she managed to climb beneath her bed with her younger sister Calliope facing the wall, only her back visible from the opening created by the duvet. She gets stabbed three times, one of those stab wounds narrowly avoiding piercing her spleen and the major abdominal arteries. She still has the scars on her lower back. Callie was uninjured, and she was the one who managed to get to the neighbors house (by climbing out of the window from the second floor and dropping at least eleven feet). Dorcas remembers, mostly, finding out her parents and brother were murdered. The rest of it often feels incredibly foggy. She went through therapy for a number of years before she was discharged from the North West Surrey Mental Health Trust. The nightmares, today, are infrequent, but some nights are worse than others. She often takes a calming draught before she goes to sleep - provided by Madame Pomfrey at the Hospital Wing.  3. Dorcas’s best friend in the universe is Emmeline Vance. They aren’t in the same house, but that doesn’t matter. They met at eleven, on the train to Hogwarts. Dorcas, with brown hair down to her hip, and Emmeline’s hair newly cut into a bob ( her parents had gone wild at her for that one, ) and that was it. The rest, as they say, is History. If you can’t find Dorcas, she’s usually with Emmeline. 60% of her spare time is spent wherever Emmeline is. They’re one another’s great loves. She doesn’t know what she’d be without Emme.  4. Dorcas wants to be a Herbologist or a Healer when she graduates. She’s not sure how likely that plan is to succeed with everything going on - how far she’ll get before she abandons it all to help the people that she wants to help, desperately. As it stands, 40% of her spare time is spent either in the Potions classroom or the Herbology classroom - Potions is a required course for becoming a Healer.  5. If this were a modern AU, Dorcas’d totally be a theater kid. She’d also be that kid that is always making scrapbooks - always half finishing projects, the one that has too many cacti and exotic plants in the corner of her room. She’d keep her phone on her, always, lockscreen always changing. She’d love bands like Little Mix and butcher the Spanish when she tried to sing songs like Despacito.  6. FUTURE: Dorcas manages to live through the Wizarding War ( well, mostly ) without casting the Killing Curse. She’s fast, she’s quick, and she doesn’t stand still. She’s often the one coming careening past the others, ducking beneath their outstretched arms as light - green, red, blue, yellow - is cast against the ground. She Apparates in and out, as though her being there is a mirage. People, injured, bystanders, disappear from where they’d been only seconds before, as soon as her hand secures around anywhere she can grip on. She works with trembling hands, to heal those that she can. Four separate times she manages to Apparate away from under Voldemort’s nose.  The first time is with her arm hooked under Fabian Prewett, his unconscious body bruised and the cut on his arm infected with what she suspects is a modified strain of the venom of the Venomous Tentacula. The second time is with a handful of wands - all belonging to fellow Order members. The third time is with Dedalus Diggle. He’s a handful, that time, splaying limbs, cracking as they twist around. They have a spell maker in their midst but Dorcas is the only one that can sooth the pain, to make it all more bearable while they try and fix it. The fourth time is with Emmeline. Emme’s far too headstrong for her own good, and knows how rare it is that Voldemort himself makes an appearance. Dorcas is the one that breaks Bellatrix’s focus - the Cruciatus curse trained on her best friend, on her Emmeline, flickers when Dorcas passes, a blur of black leather and hair tied up in a bun, bangs hanging low and the light long since dimmed in her eyes. When Emmeline comes to, the pain still ricochets through her bones, and Dorcas is powerless to help. It takes days for the aftershocks to fade. The faintest roar of rage is still heard in Dorcas’s brain. She’s just too slow, in the end, to save herself, although she doesn’t try. She’s not ready, but she is. She’s not happy, but she is. She knew there was only one way this could end. The one incapable of love striking down the one composed entirely of it is the only end that makes sense in a world at war - in a world in which war stories are not one of morals. War stories are made of absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil. It just takes her years to realize. Years to reconcile. Being soft does not make her immune to this. Being alive doesn’t. She is happy, but it is not a happy ending. No - it’s a very sad beginning.

[reikitai]

V E R Y unpopular opinion time.

If you’re easily offended by people with different thoughts this won’t be for you.

--- Basically, I’m really getting back into Tim Burton’s works. I’m feeling the groove from this creative genius. As such because of that I’m also turning goth again and god does it feel good.

No, like this is a really big deal for me. I was such a H U G E  TB geek growing up when I was 10-12. I wanted to die when I couldn’t go to the MOMA exhibit all the way in NY. Then I suddenly stopped admiring without any real reason.  

I’m 20 now. I’m going through all his films again, I have all time favorites that never seemed to change for me,*Beetlejuice/Scissorhands/Big fish* and then I’ve also seen some.... Not so good stuff. *Cue live action junk- Alice in Wonderland/Dumbo, etc. I’m looking at YOU.*  and then I saw it again. There in the somehow mediocre at best pile... There’s the famous Nightmare Before Christmas. Why is this a big deal? I haven’t watched it in forever and now I can look at it through adult lenses, critically. 

**This is NOT to say that adults who feel TNBC is Tim’s best work is wrong per say but it just didn’t do it for me like it used to personally.** Back in the day, I would have mauled anyone who didn’t praise this film as cinematic genius. It was my favorite movie and I would watch it whenever because I loved it so damn much. Here’s the thing. It’s good at best, but I personally can’t say it’s his magnum opus in my opinion.  I will break down each reason step by step.

The story: The story as we know it is actually based off a much shorter poem Tim came up with previously and then the movie took creative liberties with it. I can applaud these creative abilities to go forward with something like this, the poem itself was also simplistic so I can’t really hate on the movie’s story being simplistic afterwards.  A simple story can be cute, charming and straight to the point which is exactly what TNBC is. People love that kind of thing! Unless you want a complex story this won’t exactly do it for you. 

Plot: Simple and easy to follow yet also cliche to a fault. It can be argued that the film is aimed at children to begin with but really it just turned into a classic that everyone loves anyway. In short: Someone strives to be something they’re not and there’s the liar revealed, hero tries to fix their mistakes and makes everything right again. We’ve seen this kind of story over and over again before and that’s part of why I was disappointed. There’s this magical setting where anything could happen but it had to follow the poem so strictly, it didn’t leave much growth for story innovation at all. 

I felt as if the movie didn’t really have any lesson at all as much as I had hoped for a lesson on culture sharing or something similar. No such luck. The closest thing I got was “Stick to what you know instead of venturing out and you’ll never mess up again!” Not really a good message for anyone at all really.

Characters: The whole movie is set up to get to point A to B. We don’t really get enough time to explore characters besides their main goals and wants/needs, it would have been great to see more besides the curious Jack or cautious Sally. I live for dimensions in characters and it felt like this was pretty lacking. 

The cinematic/Style: The year is 1993- TNBC’s birth that would inspire generations to come. Scene kids, goths, emos.. Maybe even people beyond that spectrum. All uniting for one hella edgy movie that would go down in history. Technology was very limited. CGI wasn’t used hardly as much as it is now and Tim is out there being an innovator as per usual. Part of the stop motion charm is the technique itself and how it takes so much time to perfect a scene. That being said a few hiccups here and there are visible and it’s kind of hard not to notice a few seconds skipping upon occasion. A part of me almost likes how I can see the mistakes being “fixed” in a noticeable way. It feels modest in that way, the artists were really trying their best to perfect this thing when it was hard to find alternative ways to fix problems. 

It’s not fair to compare it to other stop motions that would happen years later, because that’s such a huge time gap. Techniques always change.

Music/score: Oh, I love Danny Elfman. I listen to Oingo Boingo on the regular and his music is an absolute banger. Nobody else could be a better composer for Tim’s movies. His scores are brilliant but unfortunately it doesn’t really hit anything here. The soundtrack was mostly very soft and forgettable besides He’s the Oogie boogie man and of course, This Is Halloween but that’s because it’s distinct. It stands out compared to the rest of the soundtrack. I can’t forget this is Halloween because it’s catchy. Catchy however.. Doesn’t always mean good. 

Danny is known for his outlandish tunes and the interesting instruments he chooses to make songs pop and stand out. Here it was just a lull, something ultimately just not very alluring. He missed the chance to flex his broad talent on this one and it shows.

Overall: 7.5/10. It deserves all the attention it gets, but I feel as if it overshadows Tim’s other works that could need this attention more. 

For those wondering, I identify this film as BOTH a Christmas and Halloween movie. Because... Why the hell not.

Happy haunting! 

[blschaos3000-blog]

Its 2:37 am dark

  Welcome to another “8 Questions with…….”

I’m have been waiting for this chance to sit and talk with film director Lisa Ovies once again. It has been over two years since we last chatted and it has taken that long for her new film “Puppet Killer” to finally hit the festival arena where it has racked up several wins. Lisa is currently working on a distributing deal that see Simon meet his adoring fans at long last.   Lisa is one of my favorite people,she is one of the kindest and most generous persons I have met and her desire to help young actors through her teaching studio Rogue Studios to be respected and admired,several of her young students have started landing parts in various movies and TV shows,she is such a positive force in so many people’s lives.   Her sense of adventure and fun also stand out as she tackled one of the difficult challenges any performer can face,much less a film director and that was doing a stand-up comedy set. For someone who has never tried going onstage before,it still wasn’t surprising to hear that she did a bang up job. She is a lady of many talents.   The cheetah (who says Lisa is his spirit animal) and I are excited to be able to watch and review “Puppet Killer” and am so relieved for Lisa and her team that the journey is just about over,I can see why directors treat their film projects so passionately….but for now,while we a chance……let’s go ask one of my favorite directors,the amazing Lisa Ovies,another 8 Questions……..

    Its pretty awesome to chat with you again,Lisa. Last time we chatted you were taking your new film “Puppet Killer” to post. What is the current status of Simon today?

 Thank you! It is always great to chat with you.

We are done and released into the world and we could not be happier! We started our festival run mid September where we took home Runner Up Best Feature at Mid West Monster Fest and it has been a surreal ride ever since. By the end of this month (October)  we will have played on 5 continents and we have already won 16 awards and are nominated for another 10. My mind is truly blown as you know how hard I worked to finish this film properly and honestly some people pushed me to finish quicker and with less quality. All this recognition helps me remember the fight and patience was more than worth it and my post team DESTROYED. I am so in love with the finished product and have loved sharing it with audiences and horror fans alike. I would not have this film without my amazing team and they have my heart for life. 

Can you walk us through what a “pre-production” and a “post-production” is?

 Pre production is a lot of paperwork and laying the ground work. Location and tech scouting,our practical FX builds and designs, finalizing the script, casting, working out the budget, building sets and props, sorting wardrobe.. all the pieces that go into creating what we end up filming. Our pre production also including puppet training and camera tests with the puppet to try to make our on screen kills as practical as possible. 

Post is more paperwork (AHH!) and then our editing, our VFX, color correction, our sound design and music (Sound designer Robert Phaneuf and composer Stephen Gallagher did an AMAZING job) clearances, title builds ect. In our case, because we had unexpected costs that ate up our post budget, so we took the time to raise enough money to finish properly. We used a fantastic finishing House ‘Finale Post’ and although it was painful to take so long to get it out, it was more than worth the wait. 

How is Rogue Studios doing? Have any of your acting school students landed any major roles or awards yet? What do you like about teaching the most?

 Rogues Studios is doing fantastic and I love coming home and working with my students. I love watching them grow and their hard work paying off! They are leads in movies now or reoccurring on tv shows that would have only been a dream to them a few years ago. A few to mention are Childs Play, Riverdale, Nancy Drew. But really, they are almost constantly booking so it is hard to keep our website updated and I could not be more proud.

What I like most about teaching is the personal connection. I love each and every one of my students and have close relationships with my parents. Many of my students call me their second mom (Momma Shark) and being a part of their growth, their passion, and being a human they trust and can come to when they need an ear, that means more than I could ever put into words. 

 I saw that you recently did some stand-up comedy? You are a naturally funny person,did stand-up come easy for you? Did you enjoy your experience before a live audience?

 Well, thank you for calling me funny! I think I am more sarcastic than funny and I can say it did not come easy for me. I have been a professional improv performer and instructor for 8 years and I would say the disciplines were very different for me. I have always wanted to try stand up but was terrified of it. I don’t think people give stand ups enough credit, the skill to entertain strangers with non stop dialogue all alone on stage, a true gift. 

One of my students Ragini actually signed me up for class because she knew I would never go on my own. My goal was to get through class and do the one stand up show at the end of the program. I was terrified, and I don’t often get scared, so I knew it was something I should lean into for my won growth but damn, truly nervous. At the student show, I was approached to do a show at Yuk Yuk’s, Canada’s most prominent comedy club and I guess it has been following me ever since. Just last week I was offered another paid gig to do a set. I keep saying it is my last show but evidently I have no idea what I am talking about lol

In your opinion,why do comedians adjust to doing drama so much better then dramatic actors doing comedy?

That is a hard answer for me as every actor is different and I think some have done both successfully but my instinct would be that comedic timing is intuitive, it is hard to teach. Some people just have the gift and that is a skill that can then be transitioned into drama, a form of acting that is most times, more available with the proper training. 

One of your students is at an audition and another actor,who is also trying for the same role,asks for your student for help……what are you telling your student and why?

 That is actually a great question and a scenario I have not brought up specifically with them so I think I will. I do however, teach them to hold each other up and to celebrate each others wins. They often go up against each other and truly celebrate when any of them book. I think in this circumstance they would lean into the opportunity to help the other actor and leave proud of themselves for doing so. 

  (Lisa telling Pennywise she already has a spirit animal)

  Outside of acting,teaching and directing….what makes you happy?

  First and foremost that will always be my dogs, my family and my friends. They are all amazing in their own way and bring me so much love and joy. I have had a hard few years and I was humbled by the support I received from them all. 

Beyond the human connection, I love hot yoga, snowboarding and travel. I have been lucky to do a fair amount of all of those the last few years and plan to continue.

8You recently went on a crazy international trip with “Puppet Killer”. How did this come about and where did you go during your trip?

   Yes! And it has only just begun!. Last Christmas I went away with friends to Australia, Indonesia, Thailand and Hong Kong and that was the start of this amazing journey. One of the gf’s I went with is now a member of the Puppet Killer team and in Hong Kong we secured our final investment to finish the film. Those investors flew me out to Seoul Korea the end of September for our Asian premier, I was home two days and then left to LA for the Anaheim film festival where we took home two trophies, one for best ensemble cast and a special award for the amazing Jett Kylne for best young actor. The following week the team packed up and went to HEX in Calgary, a fantastic three day horror convention and film festival. We won best horror film, best soundtrack and when we returned home, found out we had won fan favorite which means the world to us all. As I write this I am preparing to head to Nightmares Film Festival in Ohio while my team mans our Vancouver premiere. Believe it or not we play 9 film festival next weekend! 

After that I have LA, Toronto and NY on the schedule. Not sure yet what 2020 has in store for the Puppet Killer team but I can’t wait to find out!

What is next for you filmwise? Do you have anything in the works you can share with us?

 I am still working with the team and my agent to get ‘Beverly Hills Lizard People’ off the ground. We are nearly funded but have the last chunk to go. This is a dream project with an amazing script, it’s a creature feature with practical effects slated to be designed by ADI if we can finalize our funding. I have also been approached to direct three other features that I hope we get to work on once we slow down the festival run with PK. 

What have been the five biggest life events for you in the past two years?

 What a great question!

1: I started to travel with friends. I did a trip to Thailand in March 2018 with my producing partner and best friend Katie Stuart for almost a month, and then solo traveled to Bangkok and had a surprise run in with another dear friend Heather Dorff when I landed to do a solo trip of Tokyo. 

Then I did the above mentioned trip Dec 2018- Jan 2019 with a few different groups of friends, and did Christmas in a villa in Bali with Heather Dorff and Jaala Wanless.

Experiencing the world with my friends has been inspiring to say the least.

2: I lost my dog Tinkerbell, who was my fur baby for 15 years. That broke my heart. I adopted Gizmo three months after losing Tinkerbell and he has truly filled in my family again.

3. I tried stand up and didn’t die! That was a huge bucket list moment I was too scared to even say out loud let alone pursue. I will always be grateful to Ragini for believing in me and also for pushing me when I needed it most. 

4. I learned to ask for help. I had one of the hardest years this year (although social media probably fails to project that so remember that when you judge yourself and your struggles in relation to others) My family, my friends, my team on Puppet Killer, they really rallied to keep me strong and to keep me going. That truly changed my life

5. WE FINISHED PUPPET KILLER! I have been working on this film for 4 years, and to finally share it in theaters with audiences brings tears to my eyes. It is a goal I have worked towards nearly my whole life. 

The cheetah and I are BACK in Vancouver to see you doing something great but we are once AGAIN a day early and you’re stuck playing tour guide,what are we doing?

Hmmm, well right now it is pissing rain and I am hiding in a cafe doing work. If it was now, we would probably do indoor things like underground bowling, a comedy show, Maybe drive to Whistler and hope it is snowing there instead of raining!

I like to thank Lisa for her time and also congratulate her and her team for all the accolades that “Puppet Killer” has been racking up.  I do believe Simon is going to really become a big hit.

You can follow Lisa’s career by going to her IMDb page.

You can read our first interview with Lisa by going here.

You can also see whom we have chatted with by going here.

Thank you all for your support and please feel free to leave a comment or two below.

8 More Questions with…………film director/Rogue Studios owner Lisa Ovies Its 2:37 am dark Welcome to another "8 Questions with......." I'm have been waiting for this chance to sit and talk with film director Lisa Ovies once again.

[recentanimenews]

Western Movies and Ainu Instruments Were Kenichiro Suehiro's Inspirations for Golden Kamuy's Soundtrack!

Golden Kamuy's official website is releasing a series of interviews with cast and staff over the course of the Spring season, which we're translating and brining directly to you! They started things off with the character designer, Ken'Ichi Onuki, followed by animal designer, Ryo Sumiyoshi, the art director, Atsushi Morikawa, firearm designer Koji Watanabe, prop designer Shinya Asanuma, and this week we bring you composer Kenichiro Suehiro, pulling double duty this season also composing for Comic Girls and whose accolades include the isekai sensation Re:ZERO!

    Tell us how you felt when you read the manga.

  There were so many different things to enjoy, like the cool battles, the funny jokes, the daily lives of the Ainu, and the historically accurate setting of Hokkaido. It was a ton of fun to read. The story has a very strong core, based around history that everyone thinks they know, but very few people really know in depth. That’s why all these different elements and all these characters with strong, unique personalities can all exist together in one story.

What was your vision for the music in this anime?

My first thought was that I wondered what Ainu music was like. I wanted to use a lot of it, if I could, so before the first meetings I went to Hokkaido on my own. I was able to go to an Ainu museum and talk with someone who gives lectures on the Ainu language, and since I only knew what I’d learned during my formal education, I made a lot of new discoveries. What I remember particularly is that the Ainu are a race who value peace very highly. Even their language has very few words relating to conflict. So what they do when there’s a dispute is this: a representative of the village would do what’s called a caranke, where they use their speaking skills to try and persuade the other side. It’s similar to what we’d now call a rap battle, I think. I remember being told that “sometimes this could go on for three days and three nights,” and that “whoever used the more beautiful language would be the winner,” things like that. I thought it was a wonderful culture because of the way it had a method of resolving things without resorting to bloodshed. That same mentality also appears in their music. All Ainu music is very peaceful and relaxing. So the answer I came up with after that trip was that there was no need to try and force Ainu elements into the music for the anime.

What sort of things did you discuss in the meetings after that?

Director (Hitoshi) Nanba and Sound Director (Jin) Aketagawa both said that they wanted something that reflected the local culture, but that there was no need to fixate on Ainu music itself. So my first job, I thought, was to come up with cool music that would go along with the entertainment aspects of the show, like the tense battles and the modern gags. That was my first priority, and then on top of that I tried to come up with my own mental image of the historical background of the show, and incorporate that into the music. Golden Kamuy does an amazing job of mixing in historical facts, like the existence of the Shinsengumi or the Ainu way of life, and it’s almost enough to make you feel like these events might have really happened. My goal, not just with Golden Kamuy but with every show that I work on, was to use the music to help express the show’s depth and make it feel more real. That’s something I always try to do.

Were you given any specific instructions about what direction to take with the music?

The producer requested that the main theme reflect the huge scale of the battle for the gold, and so he wanted a sort of Western theme. This was pretty difficult, and it took me three different tries before I got final approval. The first one was a little staid, an attempt to stay true to the concept I had in my mind of a historical drama set in Hokkaido. But I was told they wanted something a little more playful, so I used the first version as a base but tried to bring the Western elements more to the forefront. I took inspiration from Enrico Morricone’s music in the Dollars Trilogy (A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, all staring Clint Eastwood) and added in things like whistling at the start. Then, since a pure Western song wouldn’t fit the theme, I made the rest of it much more of a rock song. You could call it “ethnic music rock,” I think.

Morricone is one of the composers you admire, isn’t he?

I’ve always loved his stuff, and I still listen to it a lot. Since this time I had explicit instructions to make the music sound Western, I took advantage of that and took inspiration from his most famous works.

Are there a lot of songs with a rock feel beyond the main theme?

No, not really. Since I was told that the opening theme was going to be rock, I tried to distinguish it from the rest of the music by keeping the rock influence to a minimum. It’s much more ethnic and orchestral.

You said that you weren’t going to be too focused on Ainu music. Are there no Ainu elements at all in the music for this show?

There are several tracks that use Ainu instruments. Just like you’d think, they go well with the scenes that focus on Ainu culture. I used Ainu instruments called the tonkori and mukkuri, but both of them can only produce a limited number of notes, and if you listen to them on their own they produce a very comical and primitive sound. There happened to be a request for a comedy-style song to go along with the osoma, so I used them for that. Also, Ainu music is usually sung in a round, as a combination of instruments and a vocal chorus, so I put in some vocals that kind of matched that feeling in a few songs. If I used a real round, it would sound like the villagers in the anime were actually singing, so I limited it to something that “sounded like” it.

If there’s any distinctive ways you used instruments, please tell us.

The music they requested was split into different groups, like battle music and emotional music, but I used a lot of flutes in all of them. I used a lot of different ethnic instruments, like the tin whistle and the quena. Because of that, I wasn’t able to get the flute recordings done in time and we had a big problem (laughs). Also, I used a lot of percussion to give it that indigenous feel. Also, this isn’t an instrument, but I the vocals I used sounded similar to the Bulgarian Women’s Choir, so I suppose you could say that’s distinctive.

Was there anything that you particularly challenged yourself with?

I did three variations of the main theme, and for the second one I tried a type of song that I’d never really made before, a song that gave a sense that a huge story was about to unfold. At the start of the orchestration, I tried to give it the same kind of atmosphere that you’d see in a Hollywood movie set in the Middle East. I hoped that by doing so I could give it a kind of expansive feeling, that wasn’t tied to Japan or any particular place in the world. This song was used for the second preview video.

If there was anything else interesting you did with the music, please tell us.

In addition to the three variations of the main theme, I also made the theme for Asirpa, where I decided to go in sort of a Celtic direction. Asirpa spends a lot of her scenes cooking and hunting, and Celtic music fits those kind of daily life scenes perfectly. I also put in a harp to allow me to express her feminine side, as well as cover the sentimental emotions she feels when she’s remembering her deceased father.

Are there other characters besides Asirpa who have a theme song?

The only other ones who had individually requested themes were Shiraishi and Ushiyama, I think. But in Shiraishi’s case, it wasn’t a request for a theme song for him, it was a comedy song named “Shiraishi” (laughs). The song itself has a fun feeling, with a lot of wood instruments and flutes. Ushiyama’s theme is also more of a song for a fight scene instead of a character theme, so I made it a kind of powerful, brute force-style song. Also, I made three themes for the Shinsengumi, which you could say are theme songs for Toshizou.

Are the themes for the Shinsengumi similar to something you might hear in a typical samurai movie?

No, the order specified that they didn’t really want a typical Japanese samurai movie style for them. They’re closer to a yakuza movie, if anything. I thought that would bring out more of the skin-crawling intensity of Toshizou’s chararacter. To distinguish them from the other music, these tracks don’t use flutes. Instead they use string instruments symbolically.

One of the other major powers in the show is Lt. Tsurumi’s 7th Division.

Of course, they also have their own song. I read the part in the manga where Tsurumi plays a piano and got the sense that he’s fairly familiar with Western culture, so I gave them a bit of a classical flair. Also, I gave them a very strict tempo, like a military march, as well as a string instrument melody to make it seem like they’re plotting something.

There are a lot of characters in this anime who are perverts. Were there songs for that, too?

Yes, there was a song order for a “pervert” (laughs). There are a lot of characters, like Henmi, who climax during the show, and it’s a song that tries to express the moment of ecstasy through music. But this one didn’t get approval on its first time either, so I made two patterns. During the first meeting, it was suggested that I make the song something like a hymn, so I tried to play it straight by putting in a female vocal, like the Virgin Mary leading someone to Heaven, but I guess that was going a little too far. So I made another version where I had a male vocalist who wasn’t an opera singer try to sing in opera style, which ended up sounding a little weird.

Just from what you’ve said, I can tell that there is a huge variety of music in here. How many tracks did you make?

The original order was for 49 tracks, but there were additional orders that brought the total up to 53. That’s quite a lot for a single cour anime.

We’re getting very close to the airing of the first episode. Lastly, please give us a message for the fans.

I’m looking forward to the first episode so that I can see what the director’s accomplished with the video, and how (Jin) Aketagawa is going to incorporate the music into the show. You can envision a lot of historical background with this anime, but my primary goal with the music was to make it entertaining. I’m hoping that what I did worked, and that you all enjoy the anime.

---

Peter Fobian is an Associate Features Editor for Crunchyroll, author of Monthly Mangaka Spotlight, writer for Anime Academy, and contributor at Anime Feminist. You can follow him on Twitter @PeterFobian.

By: news+feed@crunchyroll.com

[theseventhhex]

Kaada Interview

John Erik Kaada

Photo by Observatoriet

Kaada is a diverse and prolific Norwegian composer and multi-instrumentalist whose career spans a string of critically acclaimed solo albums, major motion picture soundtracks, high-profile collaborations with key players such as Mike Patton, as well as numerous live appearances at home and abroad. Kaada's new album ‘Closing Statements’ is a visceral fifty minutes of new music composed and recorded over a twelve-month period, and centered around the subject of death. The spiralling arrangements feature Kaada's deft layering of piano, keyboards, cinematic guitars, electronics, although the distinction between the organic and electronic are intentionally blurred. Kaada's confidence in theme and style on ‘Closing Statements’ comes after years of style evolution and collaboration – the skilled virtuoso continues to form outstanding music… We talk to Kaada about reconnecting with the piano, an Oslo forest and future aims…

TSH: What was the main spark that led to you forming your album ‘Closing Statements’?

Kaada: Well, the main creative spark was me playing piano again a few years ago during some concerts. Those concerts are what triggered the ideas for ‘Closing Statements’. When I was a kid I wanted to become a pianist, but I fell into this film music business, and before I knew it I wasn’t playing piano anymore. I ended up getting hooked on other musical features.

TSH: How did it feel to reconnect with the piano?

Kaada: It was a mixture of a total disaster and a pure blessing! On one hand, I just felt so comfortable playing piano again, but on the other hand 15 years had passed by since I had really practised and played the piano properly. My technique was rusty and just listening to my own playing wasn’t much fun. However, even though my fingers weren’t as developed as before, my ears were still working just fine, so I knew what direction I needed to go in. I had to really dig deep into my piano playing, and soon enough it felt natural and fun again.

TSH: How did you settle on this album’s themes being about farewells and memorable last words?

Kaada: Well, I had this personal experience many years ago where somebody I knew was on their deathbed. Just going through this process and being there felt so intense - this chapter in my life really stayed with me. Everybody around at the time was paying such close attention and opening their ears just to hear what this person was saying. To me, it just felt like such a sacred and beautiful moment. Every little breath this person took really counted, and just listening intensely to somebody in that state felt so overwhelming and personal in a good way.

TSH: You’re also very much of the view that we should listen to each other despite our differences...

Kaada: Absolutely. I feel that everybody just goes into their own bubbles these days, as opposed to really communicating properly and working things out.

TSH: Did you decide early on to sequence ‘It Must Have Been the Coffee’ as the album opener?

Kaada: Well, I’m so old that I’m still thinking about albums as a whole, haha! Anyhow, I felt like this piece really sets the tone for the album since it’s just a warm and welcoming ballad. I didn’t want to start with a bang so to speak and this song was just so pleasing to me so I chose it as the opener.

TSH: What does a track like ‘Farewell’ signify to you?

Kaada: This song feels like a travel song to me. I feel it’s perfect for when you’re going through different landscapes. I was imagining going from one city to another as I was making it.

TSH: For yourself, making an album on your own is more difficult because there are little to no limitations. Do you need to overcome feelings of being uninspired?

Kaada: Yes, definitely. You know, I try to always mix it up whenever I’m faced with feeling uninspired - I look to discover different ways of making music to help myself. If I’m stuck I might just try different software or a different plug-in. Other times, I just play around on piano or guitar and try new methods to find something that works.

TSH: What have you taken away from having completed this body of work?

Kaada: At this moment in time, I’m just happy that I’ve got it done, ha! Just knowing I’ve finished this album is a relief for me because at times it was so difficult to know when to draw the line. I’m mostly pleased that’s it’s finally over, ha!

TSH: Do your surroundings seep into your music making?

Kaada: My surroundings play a big part in my music. I don’t think I’d be making the type of music that I make if I lived in New York. I live very close to a huge forest in Oslo, it’s right outside my door. I have become totally dependent on needing to take a walk in the forest often. You cannot compare it to anything else, it’s so beautiful. I have my own set path that I take each time I go into the forest. I simply go in and let it all sink in.

TSH: You also recently spent 4 days unplugged in the winter snow, surrounded by trees and mountains. You’ve stated it felt like ‘magic’...

Kaada: Yes! It always is. I love getting away from modern day technology. I try not to spend too much time in front of computers, though it can be very difficult. I mostly like to just feel fascinated by the contrasts in life. Knowing I can be in a quiet place and then suddenly find myself surrounded by people and noise really is so unique to me.

TSH: How valuable has it been to work alongside such great artist and friend in Mike Patton?

Kaada: Mike is so gifted and I have learnt so much from him. Just to see how detail orientated Mike is - it’s truly fantastic. There are no shortcuts in getting to the point where he is at now; he is a very hard worker. It’s an honour for me to be so close to someone who has made so much amazing music, and he’s never compromised his vision. Nothing comes for free with Mike and it doesn’t get easier for him too. I admire how he always digs into those small nitty gritty details to create something new. He really is so dedicated.

TSH: What matters most with your musical ambitions as you look ahead?

Kaada: You know, I think I would probably get a lot further if I stuck with one type of genre and music, but I’m not wired this way. I get bored of repetition; therefore I’ll just keep on seeking and searching for new ways to define myself with my music.

Kaada - “Unknown Destination”

Closing Statements

[jordan-garland]

An Interview with HEXA

In April 2015, composer and director of the Room40 imprint Lawrence English and frontman Jamie Stewart of experimental group Xiu Xiu performed an auditory response to director David Lynch’s photographs of deteriorating industrial sites and factories as part of the Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art’s David Lynch: Between Two Worlds exhibition. As HEXA, the two released their soundtrack to Lynch’s photographs, titled Factory Photographs, in November 2016. The album is a dark and harrowing piece of music that evokes the same feelings of decay and coarseness that Lynch’s photographs of the skeletal factories expressed. On the 16th of February, just before HEXA would present their soundtrack live in Bristol’s Lantern in Colston Hall, I had the opportunity to sit with Lawrence and Jamie to discuss their collaboration, their influences, where music stands as an art form, how sound affects and occupies the body, their new solo albums (Cruel Optimism and FORGET), and their future projects.

I wanted to get some background on how the project came together as HEXA and how you were approached to do the performance at the Gallery of Modern Art.

Lawrence English: Actually we were kind of doing things before that and there is actually a still-unreleased 10-inch that exists that [Jamie] may or may not even remember now after the years it’s been waiting to come out.

Jamie Stewart: I remember, I remember.

LE: It’s actually a project with Basic House, so we did a split 10-inch with this group in Berlin. There was an artist that made the cover and it was a collaborative process and then we didn’t actually get around to it. We sort of developed some other things, but it was just floating, probably because we were both busy. Then this opportunity with the Factory Photographs commission came up and I think it just lended the focus that it needed, just to really apply ourselves to something, and also having a deadline is a wonderful thing. It’s a brutally wonderful thing. It just came together around that and it was really helpful.

Did David Lynch have any sort of involvement with it or have you heard from him afterwards what he thinks of how you’ve interpreted his photographs?

JS: [Lawrence] had more interaction on that than I did.

LE: You did meet him in LA, right?

JS: I was too shy. Shayna and Angela [of Xiu Xiu] met him, but I didn’t meet him. I did stand next to him.

LE: He came out to Brisbane before the exhibition opened. There was the exhibition opening, then a few weeks later, Jamie and Xiu Xiu came down to do the Music from Twin Peaks then we did HEXA the following day. He didn’t actually see the performance, but he was sent the documentation from the performance. He’s been incredibly supportive to us and certainly very generous to me when I did meet him, because I had a sort of rambling confession about how important the Eraserhead sound design was to me when I was 15-years-old.

Factory Photographs is very similar to the sound of Eraserhead, I found.

LE: Yeah, I think it’s probably because a lot of those photos originated around the same time. Obviously, they were part of an ongoing series, but those early ones from New Jersey and some of the other US locations were very much around that same time. He’s been super generous to us and very supportive and he gave us the carte blanche to continue the project beyond that initial commission.

JS: And allowed us to use the reproduction of the photograph for the cover, which was a surprise and generous delight.

Have you two influenced each other? Obviously, you’ve been working together for a while now, so I was wondering if Lawrence’s work has influenced Xiu Xiu and vice versa.

JS: Oh, tremendously.

LE: It’s a mutual fan club, come on.

JS: It is one of the purest and rarest delights to get to play with somebody who you’re also a fan of. You play and you listen to them and go, “He is really good. Oh wait, I’m playing with him too, yes!” Several of Lawrence’s records are amongst my favourite. Completely outside of our friendship, I listen to him way more frequently than I admit to him.

LE: It’s likewise. Because we both have new solo records out now, I think we’ve probably been on a similar timeline so there have been a lot of interactions. Jamie was one of the first people to listen to Cruel Optimism.

JS: Lawrence was, I think, the first person I sent our new record, FORGET, to.

LE: So he came back to me and said, “Look, it’s shit, you’ve just got to completely redo it.” So I did.

JS: I didn’t say that. It is a supremely great record.

LE: It’s important. I think that actually critical feedback is really useful. Obviously there’s a friendship component to it, but it’s actually important to have people that can listen critically and probably understand the context of where it’s coming from and can kind of situate it in a way where it’s not just ‘there’s an aesthetical component, there’s a technical component’, where you can bring that together.

JS: Particularly someone you not only trust, but also respect. If some fuckhead from the aforementioned New Jersey writes a shitty review, you can choose to or not to take it to heart. But if there’s a musician who’s not only your friend, but someone whose work you admire, you believe what they say to you and it can be extraordinarly helpful.

I can imagine since you’re both prolific and experimental in your music, that plays a part in it as well.

JS: I think in the Venn diagram of what we’re doing, there’s a lot of crossover. We have a lot of other similar interests outside of music too, so it’s easy to come up with, this is a preposterous thing to say, a language of critique and advice that the other person can understand, because there’s a lot of things outside of music that we can reference that we both have a connection to and an interest in.

LE: It’s actually really important, generally, the idea of being critical. I think this very much goes for music journalism. Music isn’t necessarily addressed in the same way that the other art forms are and I think that’s actually a huge problem. A lot of that comes out the way that music was situated in the mid-20th century-

JS: And continues to be.

LE: Yes. The idea of the single is this kind of twisting point where suddenly music is extracted out of the idea of it being a non-representational art form into it being entertainment. And I don’t think there’s anything wrong with music being entertaining, but I think there’s a problem if it doesn’t exist beyond it’s entertainment value. Quite often, I’m really impressed when I read something from somewhere and I actually have to say that quite recently I’ve read a couple of pieces where people are engaging with the material in a way that’s actually quite sophisticated and it’s really refreshing.

JS: “Refreshing,” is the exact word to describe when you read a thoughtful review. It’s sad that it’s refreshing, it shouldn’t be refreshing!

LE: No, it should be the status quo!

JS: But it is incredibly refreshing to read something like, “Oh, this person cares about music and they’re thinking about it! They’re not just trying to be a snarky internet fiend.”

LE: I think in the visual arts, there’s a much more heavy interest.

JS: Interestingly, in the visual arts, sometimes it goes too far in the other direction!

LE: Yes, absolutely, there can be a concept for the sake of itself. But, I think there is a real value in that critical discorse. I think that music is an opportunity to have a conversation, like Factory Photographs for me. I know David Lynch is very much taken with the aesthetic intent of what those images are, but for me when I look at them there’s so much political overlay in what they represent, particularly because of the times he captured the photographs.

JS: And region. There was the same economic failure happening in two diametrically opposed economic systems at relatively the same point. You blew it, both sides!

I find that your music, both together and your solo works, has a raw emotion to it, but it’s also a vulnerable sound, especially Factory Photographs. The images themselves are decay and, like you said, with what was going on politically. Is that something that you aim to get across in your music or a sort of byproduct as well?

JS: For me, it’s the primary point of making music. In everything that I’ve ever worked on, the goal for me is to have there be some intense and, hopefully, meaningful attachment to the emotion. And that’s what I want to get out of music as a music fan as well.

LE: When I was younger, I had a strange position I suppose you could say which was I tried to behave in an apolitical way and at the time, I didn’t have the sophistication to recognise that, obviously, being apolitical is a political gesture. I kind of do that the same way approaching the work. I was interested in how the receiver interpreted the work entirely. I tried to make it, particularly with the experimental stuff, in a way that was about this kind of flat horizon, a desert to walk through. It can be beautiful, but it can also be confronting. I think increasingly I’ve stepped away from that in the last ten years and I’m much more interested in the idea of affect and the complexity of the internal relationship you have with work. There’s these things that we feel and experience and listen to, those kind of relationships are so unable to be understood, really. Like, why do we feel a certain way when tones are played? Why does temper affect the way we can approach or not approach work? I think increasingly I’m really conscious of what that means and how profound it can be, actually, as a listener to music myself and for other people engaging. I think about, in concert particularly, the bodily effect and Factory Photographs is very much about this idea of bodily effect.

JS: Music, although ephemeral, is a physical force. Something is moving through the room that you can feel, and therefore you’re essentially touching it. A lot of it is relating to that. A factory produces something and it can destroy a body or it can allow us to go on with our life, i.e. feed their children or put a roof over their head. It is very, very much a nod to the factory producing something and it ending up having a direct and physical result on somebody’s life. It could just completely obliterate their fingers, or it can put their kids through school.

LE: Or both!

JS: Or both. In a completely different way, music does that. Both of the things affect people’s bodies, this set more than anything I’ve ever done; I’m feeling much more blanketed by the sound which is, as a physical sensation, quite wonderful. It is a lot like being high. When you get high, you feel a vibration from the beginning to the end of the extremities of your body. Standing next to two incredibly huge speakers playing, seeing that Lawrence has cut all of the high-end off and jacked up all of the bass, my body feels squished in the nicest way.

LE: Cheap highs from Lawrence English.

JS: Great mixtape!

I touched on how you’ve influenced each other, but have you got any other musical influences or would you say that it’s more life experiences?

JS: It’s just Lawrence for me.

LE: I love a lot of music, don’t get me wrong, I love a great deal of music. But also art. Today, for example, we went to see Incoming, the new Richard Mosse exhibition that my friend Ben [Frost] did the sound design for, and that was actually incredibly effective as a work.

JS: It was really, really, really well done.

LE: And I think that kind of thing for me resonates hugely in the kind of work I wanna do, and it’s not exactly like a transcription of the same feeling. I can give you a good example that I haven’t really spoken about much with Cruel Optimism, but a large part of the initial investigation into this idea of obsession that was part of the way I approached Cruel Optimism came out of this one book called Karasu by Japanese photographer Masahisa Fukase. It’s basically a book of photographs of crows and it’s an incredible book that he made after his wife left him. He basically spent ten years photographing these particular parts of Japan as a way of kind of, I guess, trying to forget his wife, because before that he’d spend most of his time photographing her so suddenly she was gone and there was this huge gap there and it was like ‘how can I fill this gap?’ The photos are incredible and he lived this incredible life, twenty years of which was in a coma from 1992 to 2012 when he died. Twenty years he was in a coma and his wife came to see him every day, every week, whatever. There are incredible kinds of things which, for me, resonate just as strongly as some of the experiences I’ve had listening to a band. I had this period, about ten days, where I saw Swans and My Bloody Valentine, both of which I had wanted to see for about fifteen or twenty years or longer in some cases. To have that experience, actually, for me it resolved a bunch of questions I had had about performance, because I had essentially stopped performing. Those groups made me recognise what that relation is between the audience and the performer, and a sound system in a room and a body. Those things are really meaningful and I think there’s stuff to be extracted from everything. Touring is wonderfully inspirational, because you suddenly get a different perspective on how other people live, do what they do, and it helps you contextualise who it is you are, what you want to do, how you want to engage, and what’s your way of being in the world.

JS: When you have the incredibly privileged opportunity to go to as many cities as people who tour frequently do, you are able to ingest the fragile diversity of what it happens to be and I think part of the obligation of being in a privileged position is to pay as much attention to it as you can and turn it into the best thing that you can from being given the gift of being exposed to a hundred times more than most people, unfortunately, have the opportunity to be exposed to.

LE: It’s very true. It is a privilege, there’s no doubt. We have incredibly privileged lives, most of us do generally, but there are degrees of privilege in this sort of ridiculous life.

JS: I think in terms of the wide range of stimulus that touring musicians who make the effort to travel the world get a chance to see, it is an extraordinary privilege.

Did your work with HEXA affect the way you approached your new solo albums, Cruel Optimism and FORGET?

JS: It’s affecting the way that I’m working on the follow-up to FORGET tremendously.

LE: I would say definitely, I developed a bunch of new techniques that I’ve never done before making the HEXA record.

JS: I did too. Technically, there was a lot of new tricks. Aesthetically, it’s affecting the next record.

LE: All these things come through each other in various ways, and sometimes it’s really acute the way it’s pronounced and other times it’s just completely incidental, like a kind of setting on a compressor.

JS: It really is stuff like that. For two people who at the exact same moment, as soon as you turned the recorder on, snapped their fingers, that’s really one of the main things we’re looking for.

LE: How can we snap our fingers more efficiently or slightly more nuanced, a bit higher maybe.

Do you have any plans to collaborate again?

JS: HEXA’s an ongoing concern.

LE: We’ve actually started work on the next one. I think in the next few months. Maybe this year, late in the year. There’s some work to be done. It will be interesting to see another collaborative project.

Check out the singles “Wondering”, “Jenny GoGo”, and “Get Up” from Xiu Xiu’s forthcoming album FORGET. Stream the album courtesy of Noisey and buy the album from Polyvinyl Records or bandcamp.

Stream and buy Lawrence English’s new album Cruel Optimism from Room40 or bandcamp.

Photo credits: HEXA, David Lynch, and Masahisa Fukase.

[scottymcgeesterwrites]

Final Fantasy Review

Year: 1987 Original Platform: Famicom Also available on: Nintendo (NES), GameBoy Advance (Final Fantasy I & II: Dawn of Souls), PlayStation One (Final Fantasy Origins), PSP (Anniversary Edition) Version I played: PSP

Synopsis:

The world is in danger. Four monstrous fiends, each corresponding to an element of nature, have wreaked havoc on the world, causing each of the four elemental orbs (in later remakes, crystals) to turn dark. Four Heroes of Light, each holding their own orb, meet and band together to take on these fiends and restore nature to its proper balance.

Gameplay: The original game introduced the Job System. The six jobs are Warrior, Thief, Monk, Black Mage, White Mage, and Red Mage. Each have their own stats. You are free to name each of your heroes. Later on the game, each job can be upgraded.

We are introduced to a classic setup of turn-based combat. Final Fantasy was notable for being the first video game RPG to show your characters on the right and the enemies on the left; all previous video game RPGs had a first-person view with the enemy directly in front of you.You choose your action between Fight, Magic, Drink, Item or Run. Then the enemy takes their turn.

It’s a simple system that at the time was already well-known. It was really the Job System that intrigued players. Black Mages perform destructive magic, White Mages heal and restore, Warriors are the powerhouses, Monks deal damage without weapons, and Thieves can run from battles successfully (they cannot steal, as later games would introduce that). The game can be quite difficult on the original Famicom and NES. It was made at a time when technology was limited, so developers had to make the game harder so that people spent more time playing it. There’s a gaming term that I’ll be using in many of these Final Fantasy reviews called “grinding”. Grinding is when you end up having to run around and fight monsters for the sake of leveling up your characters. There is a lot of that in this game, as well as the early Final Fantasy games in general. Unlike games today, the direction isn’t fully laid out. You are thrown into the world and wander about from town to town to figure out where to go next. Instead of games like today where other non-playable characters (NPCs for short) tell you what to do in cutscenes and whatever, you actually have to approach the NPCs and find out the information. The overall effect is more open-world. You walk across fields and oceans and deserts. There are caves and other secret places to find more items. From a modern gamer’s perspective, the exploring can be quite bare and – for lack of better word – boring. The remakes, like the PSP version that I played, brightened it up with updated graphics. They also added a couple extra dungeons. I actually spent time in those extra dungeons believing they were part of the story, appalled by how difficult they were, when I later found out they were extras put in for the PSP version. That has happened a lot to me with remakes of old RPGs (Chrono Trigger for the DS, another example). A little more obvious sign would have helped to make me realize that I didn’t need to finish those extra dungeons. The pace is definitely slower than the other Final Fantasy games. Most of your time is spent grinding. Grinding can sometimes be a wary word when talking about video game RPGs. If an RPG is too boring or tedious, grinding is the last thing you want to hear. But even when an RPG is fun, grinding means that you need to spend time battling enemies, and that means hopefully you don’t have a huge backlog of other video games. It's probably why I never got around to finishing the original NES version on an emulator. Once and a while I'd be pumped up about going through with it but then as I played I just. . .got distracted by other video games that I wanted to finish.

You definitely need time and patience. The most aggravating thing about the original version (Famicom/NES) is that if your character is set to attack an enemy but another one of your characters defeats it first, that character attacks nothing but air when it's their turn. It was a very annoying issue that they fixed in all subsequent remakes. When comparing the original to any other version, the original always is the best way to experience the game. It can also be the hardest and most time-consuming. You would need to pay attention to this game entirely and not be distracted by anything else.

The PSP version is watered down. I found it infinitely easier than the NES version. I actually played them side-by-side to figure out at what point the difficulty branched off. Right away when you venture to save Princess Sara, I realized that the PSP version gives more XP per battle than the NES version. Hence, you have to grind more in the original version.

Graphics:

Everybody loves some 8-bits, but let’s be honest here – there’s a whole lot of black empty space going on when you battle.

But hey, that was due to the limitations at the time. Battles may seem more boring to you due to the lack of detail to catch your eye.

The later remakes added a floor or ground where appropriate. The PSP remake did a good job of giving a facelift to the original, as shown below. It has this cute, rounded feel to the characters.

(My favorite battle background was in the final battle.)

The opening FMV sequence is ripped straight from the Playstation One remake. That didn’t age well. It’s awkward as hell. Want to see how awkward it looks? It looks mad awkward. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. Just look it up. I don’t want to sully this post by posting a screenshot. In my opinion, they should have created a brand new opening FMV sequence for the PSP version.

Story: The first several minutes of the game acts as a prologue. The Four Heroes of Light save a princess - Sara - from the clutches of Garland, and then the King of Coneria allows a bridge to be built for them to enter the world and save it. It’s not until that bridge is built that the game truly starts and the title screen actually displays – much like a late opening title in a movie. In retrospect, saving a princess probably seemed like the most common trope in video games throughout the '80's. Gamers would have been used to it by then. That short prologue acts like a trope-breaker. The average gamer would have probably expected the game to be like Mario or Zelda. Oh yeah, save the princess from some evil fiend, okay, got it. They would have then maybe been perked with interest when they "defeated" Garland so quickly, and then when the King of Coneria lets them pass into the world and the title screen opens up with the theme song, they maybe were like, "Ooooh. NOW it starts." Final Fantasy then plunged them into a wide open world.

The bulk of the story is mostly comprised of self-contained incidents. You run into someone who needs help with a thing so you do that thing and then you’re on your merry way again. You know what would be a great adaptation of this game? A Netflix series. It’s very episodic. First you deal with these pirates led by Bikke, then get a ship to sail across the land and go on a sort of delivery quest for a crown, a crystal eye, an herb, a magic key, until the main story picks up with defeating the Four Fiends and bringing light to the darkened orbs. There's no real huge spoiler other than the time travel paradox at the end, which had me wracking my head a bit. It's quite admirable that a game this early in video game console history produced a higher concept plot involving time travel. Music:

Composer Nobuo Uematsu created a legendary score that immediately became on par with the Mario and Zelda theme songs.  The Prelude/Crystal theme – the harp-like scale that we are all familiar with – was actually composed last. Uematsu had complete the score when Sakaguchi approached him at the last minute realizing they needed music for the game’s introduction. None of them had any idea that the theme would become a staple for Final Fantasy.

Due to the technical limitations at the time, you can imagine that the soundtrack is limited, but even so it was still quite expansive for its time. There are several individual tunes for dungeons, for sailing your ship and for flying your airship. The map theme will have you humming it without realizing it.

Uematsu drew his inspiration from two sources – classic rock and living in Shikoku, an island off Japan. The melodic world map theme in Final Fantasy (and the rest of the series) derives from the picturesque memories he has of the island. The town theme is reminiscent of the sleepy villages – as he was never a city person. Meanwhile, the battle theme has undertones of rock music.

There’s only one battle theme, even when fighting bosses and the final boss, but the amazing thing is that it never gets old.

Final Fantasy games are known for their great battle songs. The opening bassline always gets you in the groove to fight. You’re fighting but want to sing at the same time. Maybe that’s the brilliance of Uematsu; because of the fact that you need to grind many times in these old Final Fantasy games, he created a tune that you wouldn’t get tired of because it’s not so serious or mundane.

Not to crap on other great developers, but other video game RPGs at the time of Final Fantasy didn’t quite have memorable battle music. Just look up the battle theme to the first Dragon Quest game (released before Final Fantasy). You can imagine how that simple tune could get old really quick. I could be pulling this out of my ass, but after Final Fantasy, it seemed that battle music in video game RPGs suddenly got better. If you listen to the Dragon Quest IV battle theme, there is a portion that sounds similar to the battle theme of Final Fantasy.

The PSP version adds more tracks, specifically to the boss battles, and I like how they incorporate the original battle motif thrown into the new battle songs. The original battle theme has a guitar and drums added, which is the style that Final Fantasy battle music was known for by then.

There is one last thing to note about the score that I found very interesting for its day and age. You see, in a movie score, you have themes and motifs, just like a video game score. But in a movie score, other tracks reference those themes and motifs. For example, you have The Raider’s March in the Indiana Jones films; that’s the theme for the character Indiana Jones. Then in the movie, whenever Indy does something badass, you hear his theme blare in that instance. Obviously the entire theme doesn’t play, but it is incorporated in snippets throughout.

Uematsu actually does this with the Town Theme. He incorporates it at the ending music in the epilogue. It took me a while to try to understand why. Then it hit me. The epilogue mentions the heroes becoming legends as people talk about them. Legends are told and spread in towns.

It’s a very small detail. It’s such a small detail that it could be nothing but if it is what I think it is, then it’s cool that he was already in the mindset of passing on themes and motifs throughout the game, treating it like a movie.

Notable Theme:

I already posted the main themes in the introduction, but here’s the original battle theme:

Verdict:

A strong debut to the Final Fantasy series. To a modern gamer though, you may be spoiled by the fast-paced, eye-catching video games of today. When console games first hit the market, developers had to create games that took longer than the average arcade game to finish, or else kids would get bored with their games in minutes and gee, wouldn’t that be a waste since they paid way more than a quarter? Thus, that’s another reason why old games are harder. Given the technical limitations at the time, developers couldn’t expand much on the game, so there’s a lot of leveling up and grinding because what else could you do? You know? Ultimately, playing a video game back then was all about honing your skill with that game.

Ideally, you could play through every Final Fantasy game in order of their release, and that would give you a greater sense of the evolution of the gameplay and the series as a whole. However, most people reading this (and me) are probably more modern gamers – and as such, our perspective is biased on what feels “exciting” and “remarkable”. The first Final Fantasy game could feel boring and tedious to you now, but if you put it in the context of when it was made, this was entertainment for hours on end. This is basically like watching one of those silent adventure films starring Douglas Fairbanks. Yeah, you’ve been spoiled with more amazing stuff like The Matrix and Star Wars, but golly – this stuff blew people’s minds back in the day.

Direct Sequel? No. However, there have been multiple remakes, which I have already listed above.

[theseventhhex]

Trevor de Brauw Interview

Trevor de Brauw

Chicago-based guitarist Trevor Shelley de Brauw (Pelican, RLYR) has announced the release of his first solo album – a collection of power-ambient compositions – entitled ‘Uptown’. Trevor Shelley de Brauw’s 20 year musical career has manifested as an exploration of the vast sonic possibilities of the guitar. ‘Uptown’ marks a departure from the riff-oriented song writing of Pelican, taking a plaintive approach that unravels the meditative depth of washed-out riffs, deconstructed drones, and carefully controlled feedback. The record is a stream of consciousness sustained for too long, an aural pendulum swinging between poles of murky distress and cathartic resolve that takes shape somewhere in the hazy valleys between rock, ambient and experimental music… We talk to Trevor about improvisation parenthood and being vegan…

TSH: Like previous works, was your approach to a lot of the material on your solo record very intuitive and not thinking in terms of intent?

Trevor: Definitely. Most of the songs would start by recording either kernels of ideas or improvisations and then I would go back and listen to what I had and think about how best to flesh the ideas out. Ultimately most of the performances on the record are improvised - just laying stuff down and then adding layers until things took on their own shape. When I started this album it was intended as a continuation of my Histoire project, in which improvised performance was something of an ideological guideline because the finished pieces were intended to act as a sonic journal; a specific moment in time captured in sound. This particular album deviated from that, particularly with regards to editing and even some moments where things are a little more thought out and composed, but I would say the earlier Histoire experiences informed the creation of this album.

TSH: Knowing you spent years refining compositions for ‘Uptown’, which factors would you say were most challenging?

Trevor: The biggest obstacle was carving out the free time to work on it; I am typically in three or four bands at a time and for the last 8 years I’ve been balancing those with a full time career/desk job, so most nooks and crannies in my schedule are full. There was also a certain lack of inertia that set in after the first couple of years - there were a couple of times that I thought the record was done and then I’d listen to all the material and realise that I didn’t have a set of pieces that would flow as an album, which got a bit demoralising.

TSH: Also, given the songs were birthed at vastly different times and places, do you feel this had some sort of varied effect on the end result?

Trevor: In some ways I suppose it must have. Insofar as one goes through tremendous personal changes over a long period of time, there are pieces on the album that were recorded by very different versions of myself. But one of the things that took so long was trying to amass a body of work that would flow as a cohesive album, so while the mentality and the approaches might vary from track-to-track, my hope is that those differences are not too obvious. I went through quite a few drafts of the album where the flow felt interrupted or stilted because there were too many jarring transitions or pieces that felt like they drifted off the path. I think these six pieces work together, perhaps, because the thread that ties them together is some sort of distillation of the constants in my persona.

TSH: With this body of work you, do you feel you were able to soundtrack certain sensations?

Trevor: It’s hard to say when you view them in retrospect. Because of the nature of their composition, the recordings evoke very specific moments and feelings, but I’m not sure if my memories of those emotions and sensations is through a veil of interpretation. They each act as a manifestation of the time in which they were created, but the specific sensations of those moments may be lost in the sands of time.

TSH: How would you assess the way you decided to incorporate the guitar throughout?

Trevor: Each piece was different. Some of them started on guitar, others started on electric piano or organ. With each of the recordings it was a matter of trying to figure out what sonic space needed to be filled, like grasping for puzzle pieces without having a guide to what the finished image was supposed to look like. Guitar ended up on most of the tracks because it’s the instrument I feel most comfortable playing, but in cases where it was not the primary instrument I made a point of trying to figure out whether it was even needed before going for it.

TSH: What’s the basic foundation for a track like ‘Turn Up For What’?

Trevor: That one started with the electric piano part. I love the sound of an electric piano drenched in reverb, so really it was just a matter of setting up that sound first and then seeing what ideas jumped out of my head. Once I had that initial piano track done I listened back and could hear saturated guitars in my head, so I dialled in a sound and improvised the two guitar tracks on top. The second one was intended to simply double the first, so I had to try and remember exactly what I played on the first pass - I came pretty close but the deviations from the original worked so I kept whatever “mistakes” ended up in there.

TSH: What aims did you outline whilst fleshing out ‘Distinct Frequency’?

Trevor: That one was a little more sonically adventurous. It was recorded around 10 years ago at this point, so the details of the recording are a little fuzzy in my memory. I think first I recorded the radio noise with a mic that was set up two rooms away. Then I started layering from there with electric piano and trombone (which I remember looping and then manipulating). I think the darkness and anxiety of the piece helps balance out some of the euphoria of some of the other pieces. It was recorded during the year that my wife and I lived in a farmhouse in rural North Carolina. We were never really accepted by the locals while we lived there and our time there felt a bit fraught and anxious. I think ‘Distinct Frequency’ is a pretty accurate sonic summary of some of the feelings of that time.

TSH: Was it gratifying to operate in your own lane with this record?

Trevor: Recording solo material tends to be less gratifying than playing with other musicians. There’s hurdles of communication when it comes to playing with others that can be challenging, but the rewards are far more immediate and palpable. Crafting these solo pieces is a pretty long process of trial and error, second guessing, labouring over details. And because of the experimental nature of the compositional process it often happens that all the time spent poring over stuff is in vain because the finished work is a failure. That said, there are elements of the process that are very gratifying - times when I was able to conceive of an idea and then execute it properly, the moment I was able to hold the finished record in my hand, and definitely most every time I play live as a solo act since the act of standing alone in front of people making this stuff is pretty daunting, so when it lands properly it feels extremely cathartic.

TSH: Is your former cat walking through the room in the background of one of the songs the only feature on this record?

Trevor: Yes, dearly departed Kitty Shelley de Brauw was my only guest. Uninvited, at that, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.

TSH: Have you heard any compelling movie soundtracks in recent times?

Trevor: Several. I really, really dug the Room 237 soundtrack; it was a very cool reimagining of established tropes. It seemed really fitting that the soundtrack was an homage to a certain style when the film itself is about taking a deep dive into critical analysis, like they were both different ends to a similar goal. I also love the Beyond the Black Rainbow soundtrack. It definitely stands on its own, but it also just completely made the movie what it is.

TSH: What makes you feel not very nostalgic as a person?

Trevor: I think that’s probably something I said before I was a parent. I think it would be really difficult not to be nostalgic as a parent. You live with someone you love more than anything in the world and they change so rapidly that they’re practically a different person every few weeks. It makes you feel really precious about every single moment because it becomes crystal clear how fleeting everything in this life is. And once that epiphany takes hold it puts every experience in life into perspective… Before I was a parent I was always looking forward and didn’t really pause to reflect too much. I don’t think either approach is right or wrong, but I am very happy for everything parenthood has brought me, including the sense of nostalgia and reflection.

TSH: What do you admire mostly about Jaki Liebezeit’s drumming?

Trevor: What’s so riveting about Liebezeit is how he crafts these virtuosic intricate drum patterns but then renders them hypnotic by repeating them endlessly. I love just getting lost inside his seemingly effortless loops.

TSH: Also, your verdict on the latest Mount Eerie album…

Trevor: I love Mount Eerie. It is a very difficult album to listen to; it is a raw expression of unfathomable emotional pain, without any pretence about trying to romanticise or poeticise it. There’s not really anything like it.

TSH: Talk us through what lead to the following tweet ‘Daylight savings aka a plot to drive parents of young children insane.’…

Trevor: I think it was in reference to the most recent time change and the challenge of getting a four year old to wake up on time for school on time the next day. Adults tend to be a bit more resilient when it comes to sleep deprivation.

TSH: How long have you been a vegan?

Trevor: I’ve been vegan for 23 of my 39 years. At this point I’m so different from the person I was before I became vegan that it’s hard to conceive what role my diet could have played in that.

TSH: Finally, what are your intentions with your solo career as you look ahead?

Trevor: I’m most of the way through another album. Or that’s what I think now and eight years from now I’ll feel dumb for having said that. But with any luck I’ll wrap that up sooner than later and get it out at some point in the not too distant future. I definitely want to keep playing solo shows, including shows outside of Chicago if I can find a way of doing that.

Trevor de Brauw - “They Keep Bowing”

Uptown