From Blue Dawn – Blue Nights, released just months ago . . .
on HighNote Records
Archives for March 2020
Gerhard Richter’s Solemn Yet Miraculous Retrospective, Painting After All
at Met Breuer, NYC (through 5 July 2020)
Reviewed by Peter Schjeldahl
The New Yorker
“Birkenau.” The dread name—of the main death facilities at Auschwitz—entitles four large abstract paintings and four full-sized digital reproductions of them in the last gallery of Painting After All, a peculiarly solemn Gerhard Richter retrospective at the Met Breuer. The works are based on four clandestine photographs that were smuggled out of the concentration camp in 1944. Two, taken from the shadowed exit of a gas chamber, show naked corpses strewn on the ground and smoke rising from bodies afire in a trench beyond them. Men in uniform stand at ease—two appear to chat—amid the shambles. Richter first saw the images in the fifties. He encountered them again in 2008 and kept the worst of them hanging in his studio in Cologne. In 2014, he projected them onto canvas and traced them. As he worked, they became illegible. The finished paintings exemplify Richter’s frequent style of densely layered, dragged pigments. They are unusually harsh in aspect, with clashing red and green, sickly whites, and grim blacks. But you’d hardly guess, by looking, their awful inspiration. [Read more…]
Cinema Disordinaire: A List Of Infectiously Strange Must-See Films For The End Times
Cinema Disordinaire, aka Riot Cinema, is a uniquely selective entry of films that showcase the singular in all of cinema, the seminal, and the utterly sublime come to screen this past half century. For these particularly disordinary times, where self-isolation is our newly mandated norm, we offer up a distilled list from Cinema Disordinaire’s five-decade accounting. These are must-see films — if you’re a lover of cutting-edge or entirely uncommon cinema — beginning with the latest (2019) and working backwards to high cult-bizarro, 1972. Soderbergh’s Contagion, the current streaming darling of this moment, is surely not amongst these greats, but an infectious strangeness runs throughout them all. They are, in other words, Riot Material’s favorites, offered up for those with a latently wicked heart. Below you’ll find links that take you to the original reviews of each film. Enjoy: [Read more…]
Nina Wu
It’s easy enough to slap the #MeToo label on Nina Wu (2019) and call it a day. Yes, its titular heroine (a remarkable Wu Ke-Xi, also a co-writer) is an actress brutalized and exploited by a misogynist film industry, and the Taiwanese director, Midi Z, never pulls his punches. Yet this startlingly evocative, complex and confrontational new film is not interested in justice or didacticism. [Read more…]
Jazz in LA: Arturo and Adam O’Farrill, Live From Culver City
The Live Show: Arturo and Adam O’Farrill, 28 March 2020
Please scroll to 8 minutes into the video above; technical setup prior
Please scroll to 8 minutes into the video above; technical setup prior
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Riot Material is proud to present, and stream live this evening, legendary Jazz pianist Arturo O’Farrill and his son, Trumpeter and NPR critic’s fave Adam O’Farrill, performing together in their living room, Saturday, 28 March beginning at 6pm Pacific Standard Time. This will be a very special evening where father and son, two exceptionally fine men and notable greats on their instruments, burn down the so-called house while also lighting fire to our hearts and imaginations, the sonic and creative landscapes of our minds, all in ways where we never have to leave our homes. Dine in with a special dish, either homemade or delivered-in from your favorite local restaurant, click onto the Riot Material homepage / riotmaterial.com, and voilà, sit back and enjoy!
On Lessons From August Wilson’s Jitney
at the Mark Taper Forum, Los Angeles
By Seren Sensei
Jitney ran for a limited revival at the Mark Taper Forum prior to the quarantines that recently swept through L.A. County. A protective measure against global pandemic COVID-19, the lockdown effectively shut down bars, restaurants, movie theaters, plays and gatherings; while leaders felt this was necessary to halt the spread of the highly contagious illness, a wave of uncertainty has settled across the landscape of the gig and freelancer economy, powered by everything from artists to food servers to Uber and Lyft drivers. [Read more…]
Bacurau
The town in the shocker Bacurau (2019) is fictional, a bit magical, at once ordinary and otherworldly. It’s filled with faces that have life etched in them, which helps deepen the realism. And while the story is set in the near future, it looks like the present: the charming landscapes, laughing children, crowing roosters, the grinning balladeer with a guitar. Then, the guns come out, history rushes in and a ghost pops by. (It smiles.) [Read more…]
Dr. Cornel West Speaks Black Prophetic Fire
An always-welcomed dose of Cornel West, who is the focus of Arturo O’Farrill’s The Cornel West Concerto, a timely recording to be released this week. O’Farrill is onstage tonight with Jacques Lesure and His Soulful Cohorts here in Los Angeles, at Los Balcones, 9pm. Meantime, below is the Professor’s speech that inspired O’Farrill’s composition, which saw its debut at the Apollo Theater with the Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra.
Dr. West and his “Black Prophetic Fire” speech, at Town Hall Seattle:
Storytime With David Lynch
In Memory of Genesis P-Orridge: “Hamburger Lady”
From Throbbing Gristle’s D.o.A: The Third and Final Report
Hamburger Lady
♠
Genesis Breyer P-Orridge
1950 – 2020
Godspeed!
The Beguiling Desolations Of Trisha Donnelly
at Matthew Marks Gallery, NYC
by Brian Block
In this era of pervasive promotional storytelling, Trisha Donnelly consistently chooses to go the other way and expunge. Her works carry no titles, her exhibitions no names, and her press releases only a few facts. This calculated act of liberalizing the viewing field works to intensify the abstracting power of the white cube toward the discrete objects and artist’s interventions on view. Indeed, what remains most compelling about Donnelly’s practice is her expert crafting of distinctive analogue mise en scène that finely reframes the show’s perceptual field. Far more gripping than any particular artwork of hers, it is this clandestine manipulation of the gallery space itself — as if it were a fabric in her medium — that she wields to captivating and occasionally frustrating effect. [Read more…]
Afro-Future Jazz From Shabaka And The Ancestors: “Orb”
from Wisdom of Elders
on Brownswood [Read more…]
Organized Anarchy in OOIOO’s Nijimusi
on Thrill Jockey
Reviewed by John Payne
What are we looking for when we listen to new music? What is most important? It’s not so much that each and every musical experience has to be formally groundbreaking and utterly unlike anything that has come before, though that rare occurrence certainly does help. Really, we’re talking about the same thing we ask of pop music or jazz or anything else, which is the element of surprise — surprise at how our assumptions about what music is and ought to be get a hefty boot in the booty; surprise at how our own pretensions toward being in whatever kind of vanguard get challenged, how we are forced to question our own orthodoxies, our own ways of breaking the rules. [Read more…]
Abandoned To The Voice In My Head: King Krule’s Man Alive!
on XL Recordings/Matador Records
Reviewed by Henry Cherry
Archy Ivan Marshall is a 25-year-old musician who performs under the nom de guerre King Krule. As Krule, he has delivered a stunning portrait of demonic exorcism across three full length releases and as many extended plays. As Archy Marshall, he’s added a book and another album, both featuring his brother, Jack.
In a universe devoid of the weary and multitudinous musical classification system, people would immediately recognize the emotional content of the Krule/Marshall output and stamp it as such. Within the varied categorization that has been embraced by those seeking to brand themselves with the musical ideologies of others as a lifestyle choice, defining King Krule as Emo is still a contextual misstep. His is the sound of an ambling internal, but revolutionary discord. [Read more…]
Inspiriting Lightness In Lone’s “Blue Moon Tree”
from Ambivert Tools Volume Four
on R&S Records
Youth Is No Excuse! But For The Mysterines’ “Hormone”
from the Take Control EP
newly released on Pretty Face Recordings
In This Moment Of Collective Anxiety, New Images of Man Ponders The Human Condition, And Further Disquiets The Sense
at Blum & Poe, Los Angeles
Reviewed by Genie Davis
Curated by Alison M. Gingeras, the expansive exhibition New Images of Man is a both a revisiting of and expansion on a 1959 exhibition of the same name at MoMA in New York City. A tribute and comment on the human condition, the original exhibition, curated by Peter Selz, focused on new figurative work following WWII. As such, it included a wide range of artists, from de Kooning to Giacometti, working in both sculptural forms and painted images. The Blum & Poe iteration offers its own view of figurative human depiction in a vast variety of genres, from pigment prints to acrylic and oil-on-canvas, fabric, paper-mache and other mixed media, as well as sculptural figures in bronze, plaster, and even created from a mixture of fabric and human hair. [Read more…]
The Throttling, Throat-Slogging Beat of “Stressy”
Hanni El Khatib
from the forthcoming Flight (out May 15)
on Innovative Leisure
McCoy Tyner, Greatest Jazz Pianist Of All Time, Is Dead at 81
McCoy Tyner’s death was announced on his Facebook page earlier today. Tyner, most famously linked to John Coltrane, was a gale force of rhythmic complexity and ingenuity on the piano. Joining with Coltrane while still a teen, his double-barreled approach to the aural intricacies of modern jazz cannot be fully appreciated. The genius of Tyner’s musicality is still being deciphered. [Read more…]
McCoy Tyner, The Greatest Jazz Pianist Of All Time, Is Dead at 81
By Ben Ratliff
The New York Times
McCoy Tyner, a cornerstone of John Coltrane’s groundbreaking 1960s quartet and one of the most influential pianists in jazz history, has died. He was 81. His death was announced on his Facebook page, which gave no further details. Along with Bill Evans, Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea and only a few others, Mr. Tyner was one of the main expressways of modern jazz piano. Nearly every jazz pianist since Mr. Tyner’s years with Coltrane has had to learn his lessons, whether they ultimately discarded them or not. [Read more…]