American Interior is a lot of things at the same time: a documentary, a record, a PowerPoint conference, an app, and a book. The trans-media dimension of this piece, which also rummages through the remains of a minority language and culture (the Welsh one, in this case), is what made it so worthy of grants and institutional pats in the back. It may...
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Kneecaps are free. No one goes through life without experiencing dancing. If you want to know what it’s like you should go dancing. Cumbia is the princess of the streets, a hammock for kids, Latin America’s popular music. It’s fun and it takes away the sadness. So, in the year 1955, the Wawancó were already moving everyone&...
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A documentary about one of the unfairly forgotten pioneers of Argentine rock music: Roque Narvaja, who back when the Sixties turned into the Seventies went from being the author of beat hits in the years of La Joven Guardia to become a solo artist of exquisite compositions and a socially committed stand, with one foot on Third World priests and the...
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There are lots of films that look like From Scotland with Love, but we should also say this one doesn’t look like any other. Less cerebral than Gustav Deutsch’s Welt Spiegel Kino and more surprising than Electric Edwardians –that collection of footage and primitive views of British pioneers Mitchell and Kenyon– Virginia Heat...
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Some day we will be nothing, but in the meantime, where do we really exist? Glen Campbell looks at himself in a familiar Super 8 footage. He doesn’t know who the guy on the screen is. It’s him. Neither does he know he’s a country music legend to whom Sir Paul McCartney himself says: “I just wanted to say I love you” (a...
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If a rock musician’s dream were to play with Jagger and Richards, then the equivalent for a dub band (a musical genre derived from reggae) would be to brush against Lee “Scratch” Perry and Mad Professor. And it turns out that in Argentina, a country with practically zero tradition in that genre, that band actually exists: it&rsquo...
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“In the city of Corrientes, musicians from every region in the country have 48 hours to draw a musical map of Argentina and turn it into a concert, guided by Liliana Herrero and Juan Falú,” a card explains at the beginning of The Inner Music. And that’s all the explanation there will be, because what follows doesn’t n...
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Brian Wilson heard sounds inside his head. Some of them were tanned shapes of pop music that would become the musical soul of California, even when they were new mutants or had less sexual charisma than a noodle stuck on a tile: the Beach Boys, that wisely garish mirror image of The Beatles. Love & Mercy reenacts two instants of those sounds: o...
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After directing several music videos (by El Otro Yo, Leo García, and more) director Nicky Pintos moved to a more suitable format for a band like Attaque 77: the documentary. And so, he embarked on this journey as a director. The seminal punk rock band deserved a feature-length film that would portray its almost thirty years on the stage, and...
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“It’s the record label I know to be the closest one to perfection,” says one of the many people interviewed, and that’s probably right: the history of Bristol-based Sarah Records is the one of a particular and specific way of understanding pop music. Like a secret world for initiated members, Sarah dazzlingly shone between 1...
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Come on, let’s fight the monster of History. Or if you prefer, some other one that’s even more terrible: prejudice. Because Tubular Bells is that annoying lesson we used to receive from our older brothers to the cry of “This is real music!” It’s the superb picture of young Mike Oldfield with the 27 instruments (give or...
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To depict the life and work of Beto (or if you prefer to call him by his name, Alberto Zamarbide, the V8 vocalist who taught Argentina to sing Heavy Metal, with capital letters, yes) means to draw an arch that goes from the loneliness of the very first heavies, misunderstood and resisted during the last dictatorship, to the growing epic of metal ba...
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Today it’s hard to believe, but there was a time when, in order to record an album, you had to be part of a label. And poor those who wanted to make music that didn’t fit with the industry standards of the time. Long before the arrival of the internet and of computers as portable studios, those responsible for that situation to change w...
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Seymour Bernstein started playing the piano as a little boy, and by the time he turned 15 he was teaching it to others. He enjoyed a long and illustrious career of concertizing before he gave it up to devote himself to helping others develop their own gifts. Ethan Hawke’s lovely film is a warm and lucid portrait of Bernstein –his work h...
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One can get all worked up about Spandau Ballet –as demonstrated by this excellent summary of its journey. Soul Boys of the Western World has the one thing that’s conspicuously absent from the ‘80s nostalgia programmes: context and vision. This is a film without clichés or cheap headlines. A documentary that oozes enthusiasm...
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Not everyone is up-to-date with the relations between Greenland and northern Europe: it belonged to Norway, then to Denmark and, since 1979, has been autonomous region from the kingdom of the latter. Is there rock in Greenland? Is there rock in Greenland sung in Greenlandic? Greenlanders Malik Høek and Per Berthelsen were studying in Copenha...
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This is the story of The Residents, a story that spans more than 40 years and is clouded in mystery. Many details surrounding this renegade sound and video collective from San Francisco are secret, including the identities of its members: They always perform wearing masks and costumes. Fortunately for us, The Residents have a management company, Th...
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