Stitching together “sparkles of ideas,” musician Nandi Rose aka Half Waif and director Kenna Hynes turned one-off creative visions into a four-part video series full of ambitious...
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Vee Hua 華婷婷We’ve finally made it to the bitter end of 2020, and believe it or not, human beings are still making amazing art in the midst of crisis and a pandemic. After a five-year hiatus, our Album Covers of the Year feature is back with a deep dive of...
Backwoods folk music plays quietly as visitors enter The Mistake Room, and they find themselves in the midst of a manufactured landscape. Pathways demarcated by rubber tires lead towards a simple architectural structure, and TV sets are strewn about...
Claire GordonIt’s tempting to think of SXSW Eco as the weird hippie brother of the massive music-film-interactive-free-vodka-was-that-Bill-Murray-and-RZA? festival. In reality, SXSW Eco is South By Southwest’s chic sister, just back from Les Ateliers and looking...
Generally brightly-colored and psychedelic in nature, Polish film, theatre, and circus posters from the mid-1940s through the 1980s have played a major role on inspiring modern poster art and graphic design. Supported at the time by the Polish...
We’ve raved before about the visual work of San Francisco graphic designer and ambient electronic musician Tycho, aka Scott Hansen — but how exciting that similarly-styled graphic designer and director Charles Bergquist has now been...
This book just came out this month, and it features the work of Canadian graphic artist Marian Bantjes. I just wanted to draw some attention to it, as it is a beautiful book with some pieces that seem inspired by textiles and patterns of all kinds...
Interior Designer Irene Lovett matches images of interior design with music albums to create a sonic-visual mash-up of a non-projected, non-synthesized sort. Check these out for some ideas of what you might be able to do at your house! — THE...
![Sweetheart Deal @SweetheartDealMovie, a cinéma vérité-style documentary from local filmmaker Elisa Levine @ElisaLevine99, follows the trajectories of four sex workers on Aurora, and eschews feverish commentary in favor of unvarnished truths...
Sweetheart Deal‘s four subjects — Krista (formerly Amy), Kristine, Sara, and Tammy — brim with wry humor and startling honesty about “being dopesick” and “turning tricks.” In the decade or so of filming between 2011 and 2021, they splinter off then reconnect, make amends and give apologies, all while being pulled relentlessly back into Aurora’s undertow. Each cycles in and out of Elliott’s RV, gradually shifting from casual acquaintances to close friends.
“Everybody who’s out there on Aurora: you don’t know what their background is,” says Levine, who felt it was important to highlight the disparate backgrounds of these women, but also their solidarity and similarity. “They could come from a family of millionaires or they could come from a life of poverty. Once you get out there, [with] the intensity of what you have to deal with every day, just trying to survive there — everybody’s on an equal playing field. Nobody cares where anybody else came from. So that was something that was surprising and interesting and sad. Even people who came from a better-off background and had more opportunities to go into rehab more times and things like that over the years — they still very often fall back into the addiction.”
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READ THE INTERVIEW
w/ Director Elisa Levine
by Alison J. Smith @alison.j.smith:
https://bit.ly/redefinesweetheart
Initially viewed at @SIFFnews
#SeattleFilm #REDEFINEmagazine #REDEFINEmag #FilmReview #FilmReviews #SeattleFilms #SeattleFilmmaker #SeattleFilmmakers #FilmJournalism #DirectorInterview #ElisaLevine #SweetheartDeal #AuroraAve #AuroraAvenue #Streetwise #DocumentaryFilm #DocumentaryFilms #GabrielMiller #CinemaVerite #Highway99](https://scontent-atl3-2.cdninstagram.com/v/t51.29350-15/280151906_381199520608193_6699221920708279913_n.webp?stp=dst-jpg&_nc_cat=104&ccb=1-7&_nc_sid=8ae9d6&_nc_ohc=YRvMPdvwabEAX9nNnfN&_nc_ht=scontent-atl3-2.cdninstagram.com&edm=AL-3X8kEAAAA&oh=00_AT9Phzd_KjhkwEQLEBtwNrtyiG3emYQ4iWbSlX1csJEGyg&oe=629532DF)
![Ghanian-Australian musician @GenesisOwusu is finishing his first-ever U.S. tour this month! Check out our review of the blistering, high-concept show in Philly, written by Vee Hua @hellomynameisvee -- READ: https://bit.ly/redefinegenesislive
By the end of the night, multi-faceted Australian musician Genesis Owusu and his three back-up “goons” will have brought the entire audience at Philadelphia’s @UndergroundArts venue through an emotional journey of darkness and lightness, exploring themes found throughout his 2021 concept-heavy record, Smiling With No Teeth. The album’s main narrative centers around two symbolic characters known as the “black dogs,” which are referenced in almost every track. The internal black dog represents depression; the external black dog represents racism.
“[Smiling with No Teeth] is a very personal project for me… it’s a relaying of rage, sorrow, happiness, joy, hopefulness… For the longest time, Black people, especially, have been wronged and then expected to be the bigger person, and then expected to be the educators for the people who just wronged them. [Your] feelings of rage are then invalidated. You’re made to feel hysterical or paranoid… so this is moreso an intention and a statement of those raw feelings, whether logical or not.” - Genesis Owusu
READ THE REVIEW:
http://bit.ly/redefinegenesislive
RED OUR INTERVIEW W/ OWUSU:
http://bit.ly/redefinegenesis
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REMAINING TOUR DATES
(don't miss this rare opportunity)
4/10 - Terminal West - Atlanta, GA
4/12 - Basement East - Nashville, TN
4/14 - Antone's - Austin, TX
#REDEFINEmagazine #MusicJournalism #MusicWriting #MusicReview #LiveShowReview #LiveShowReviews #MusicVideos #AustralianMusician #AustralianMusicians #SmilingWithNoTeeth #BlackDogs #Colonialism #Racism #PopMusic #Soul #RNB #R&B #DanceMusic #GenesisOwusu #Goons @Ourness @HouseAnxiety](https://scontent-atl3-2.cdninstagram.com/v/t51.2885-15/277973179_354611006721297_4579906513960108085_n.jpg?_nc_cat=105&ccb=1-7&_nc_sid=8ae9d6&_nc_ohc=FgBi0YCFj_MAX9PXysh&_nc_ht=scontent-atl3-2.cdninstagram.com&edm=AL-3X8kEAAAA&oh=00_AT89xhSQgLyQWm_E2JYLAHFt5yZB2mcUgC54S4ogDRZLVA&oe=6293F336)
![The Growth Eternal's PARASAiL-18, is out now! Read the new interview by Vee Hua @hellomynameisvee -- https://bit.ly/redefinegrowth
On its surface, PARASAiL-18, the 2022 full-length from experimental solo musician @TheGrowthEternal, comes across as a smooth, harmonious, and vocoder-laden electronic offering. Beneath its surface, however, one finds a challenging, highly-personal record that came from years of introspection and escape from challenging life circumstances — though the journey ultimately has a positive ending. It resolves in the type of self-aware expansiveness that the project’s name might suggest.
Originally from Tulsa, Byron Crenshaw relocated to Los Angeles in 2019 and immediately connected with the community-oriented record label @LeavingRecords, who would go on to release PARASAiL-18. Yet life hasn’t always felt so smooth or aligned. He first began working on the record in 2018, when he was studying jazz at a Texas college and feeling massively conflicted that the institution’s approach to jazz varied significantly from his own.
“My initial exposure to jazz before that was very much organic and vocalized and a lot of time mentorship-focused, which is basically the dynamic of jazz traditionally and how it was,” notes Crenshaw. “It was really conflicting when I knew I was passionate about this enough to put my life into it, and then I get to a space where… [due to the] the academic culture behind [the college] and how they viewed and positioned jazz in the curriculum, I felt marginal…”
This marginalization, however, had a bright side; it allowed Crenshaw to connect to the historically Black artform in a deep way that he had never experienced before, as well as find his personal connection to it.
“It felt like one of those things where I didn’t really conceptualize it a lot of the time, but… it felt like a natural falling into,” he says.
READ THE FULL INTERVIEW:
https://bit.ly/redefinegrowth
#TheGrowthEternal #LeavingRecords #ExperimentalMusic #ElectronicMusic #REDEFINEmag #REDEFINEMagazine #MusicJournalism #MusicWriting #MusicReview #MusicReviews #MusicInterviews #BlackMusic #MusicWriter #ExperimentalElectronic #Jazz #Electronic](https://scontent-atl3-2.cdninstagram.com/v/t51.29350-15/278093628_353901813341512_8927193726196441923_n.webp?stp=dst-jpg&_nc_cat=101&ccb=1-7&_nc_sid=8ae9d6&_nc_ohc=XdBK3Wse4sIAX_nzvhb&_nc_ht=scontent-atl3-2.cdninstagram.com&edm=AL-3X8kEAAAA&oh=00_AT-jsVGzhv_gP27iTo5RCd7L8fhv4YF8UCV8huQknpAYng&oe=6293D7BA)