To an impresario like Japanese musician Masayoshi Fujita, switching from vibraphone to marimba is a move that doesn’t come lightly. His latest album, Bird Ambience, contains the spirit of intrepid...
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Allen HuangThe recent attention paid to Africa’s contemporary electronic culture has long been overdue. And while there are many reasons for the heightened interest, none may be more responsible than Nyege Nyege, both the collective and the festival. In...
I was a huge fan of Cadence Weapon’s first two records. Hanging out on Pitchfork-adjacent web forums in my teens, I quickly learned about the inequalities inherent to the music blog meatgrinder that ran the early 2000’s all too well...
Out of all the inventions to have contributed to the increasingly relevant history of electronic music, the TR-808 from Roland likely has the strongest legacy. From Brian Eno to Marvin Gaye to Kanye West, the unique sounds of the TR-808 have...
K-Pop pundits love to predict who’s going to be the one star to stick in America, and with the impending debut of 2NE1’s CL, these predictions have reached a fever pitch. These lists never seem to change much: Girls Generation, 2NE1, G...
There is an inherent danger with really diving full-force into a film festival that has a scope as large as the Seattle International Film Festival. Often, the movies are top notch, well-selected and well-curated, and fit perfectly within the...
Michael Noer is a gritty realist, concerned with the unstoppable inertia of the city. Crossing back and forth between documentary and fiction, Noer sees no line between the constructed plots of his films and the real-life social fissures in Danish...
An abysmal effort in attempting to bring meaning to style, Computer Chess goes no further than a tedious exercise in stretching (bad) ideas until they tear. The film’s major selling point is that it was filmed using ancient video cameras...
Due the unfortunate fact that we are merely human and Seattle International Film Festival (SIFF) is just beginning its three-week film rampage, we’ve sifted through the Festival’s gigantic catalog to come up with the best films of the...
Based on the real life story of survivor-activist Chong Kim, Eden pulls no punches while following through with its dramatic premise of a young woman abducted and forced into prostitution. Jamie Chung plays Hyun-Jae, a first-generation Korean...
Directed by Evan Glodell United States Artists unavoidably inject themselves into their work. Their personality, their characteristics, their likes, their prejudices, their fetishes, all these things are skin deep in any sort of artistic endeavor...
Here’s a smattering of reviews that are up way too late for you to take advantage of, but nonetheless you should know about (for better or for worse). All these films were screened at the most excellent so far 2011 Seattle International Film...