JJJJJerome Ellis speaks with a stutter. He asked that his stutters be included in the transcription of this interview as a gesture towards others who speak dysfluently, so that they might see...
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Vee Hua 華婷婷By the time I enter the spacious warehouse in Red Hook, Brooklyn, Danish-Kenyan movement artist Phyllis Akinyi has already begun her performance. I hear her before I see her. A repeating loop plays overhead, with an off-kilter rhythm and the...
Rana SanA heavy cut of fresh meat hangs suspended over the abdomen, the artist’s own body bare against the blue cold of a wall. Her abrupt movements cause ripples in the flesh of the meat. From where the viewer sits, the female body, nearly...
A series of informal Zoom conversations about how artists and arts administrators are learning to grapple with public art, social practice, and performance in the context of digital space and real-life limitations. This second installment features a...
Photography by Naomi Ishisaka “But those are the most narrow parameters!” balks my well-meaning white friend. We are on our way to On The Boards to see dancer and choreographer Dani Tirrell’s latest ensemble piece, Black Bois, and...
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...
According to Death Play writer and performer Lisa Dring, grief, in its most violent throes, can be so consuming that one who is experiencing it can hardly feel anything at all. Dring would know. Having lost her estranged father, beloved mother, and...
Self-referential yet self-governing in the best of ways, the music video for Pantha Du Prince’s “The Winter Hymn”, directed by the musician Hendrik Weber himself, culls together years of video footage to offer a look into his...
![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=0SEQKJHlilMAX_1KUVG&_nc_ht=scontent-atl3-2.cdninstagram.com&edm=AL-3X8kEAAAA&oh=00_AT9AU4F1Jqfc54R-mB44EquoGr6RC3wXv24T29YFn8QnKA&oe=6295ED76)
![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_AT9ExpCF6yekwPaRPW4NkDpg9krOBRvfkqdu4rV-lEhs5Q&oe=6295D1FA)