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Comic Con
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splayers from other fandoms held a candle as well, including a Nixon from “Futurama” (head in the jar and everything), Sans from “Undertale,” two fancily dressed Blues Brothers and a Ghostbuster. Along with the cosplayers came the merchandise adorning the halls of the comic-con, which included a variety of clothing, prints and jewelry related not only to popular fandoms but also belonging to an array of artists and writers both new and returning. One such writer marked her fourth year at the Albuquerque Comic Con. Author of the “Dream Walker Chronicles” Gail Wagner
promoted her series, which she describes as paranormal with a historical twist. Wagner said she enjoys seeing the cosplayers that attended the convention and has cosplayed herself. “I feel like Albuquerque has a really great sense of community with the comic-con here,” Wagner said. “Everybody’s friendly. It feels like family, so that’s why I keep on coming back.” Wagner was not alone when it came to the feeling of community, as another vendor Megan Craig, a Albuquerque-based illustrator, said what she loves about Albuquerque is that the community is close.
“I’ve attended a lot of other cons where it’s been a little bit edgy,” she said. “You can feel some animosity between some groups of nerds, but every time I come to a Albuquerque or Santa Fe or Duke City that just started last year, the volunteers are great. And everybody here is just super excited to be here. This is the con that I love the most.” Nichole Harwood is the culture cditor at the Daily Lobo. She primarily covers alumni and art features. She can be contacted at culture@dailylobo.com or on Twitter @Nolidoli1.
Top 3 albums of 2017 By Audrin Baghaie, Kyle Land, James Li, Colton Newman, Eric Ng @DailyLoboMusic A Crow Looked at Me Mount Eerie Songwriting: Phil Elverum Highlights: (None) In the summer of 2016 Phil Elverum’s wife, Genèvieve Castrée, died of cancer, leaving him the sole parent of their young daughter. Revered in songwriting and indie circles for his work with The Microphones and Mount Eerie, Elverum has a reputation for creating sonically lush and complex treatises on nature and existence itself. But in “A Crow Looked at Me,” Elverum relieves himself of his familiar tools and instead goes for a bare and literal approach, combining the opaque high-context lyricism of Sun Kil Moon with brazenly sparse instrumentals. He charts the unending journey of grief with relentless honesty, chronicling death’s immediate aftermath, tainted domestic routines and unwanted tribulations. He also sings of the love he and Genèvieve shared, of its beginnings and the plans they made together as a family. The result is not just an remarkably moving and blunt documentary of grief, but also a monument to a deep and unbreakable love. — James Li “A Crow” is painful and cathartic to experience, providing the most genuine perspective on death and love — perhaps ever. Elverum’s voice cracks and breaks and tears in trying to put into words the gravity of loss; the instrumentation barely supporting his hollow exhales. Yet, despite the hopelessness and futility of these recordings, the album is undeniably beautiful, perhaps because of the
honesty. Something of this nature, as truly as genuine and open as this record, hasn’t really been attempted before. There are no lies, no comfort, no hooks or bridges or choruses. In turn, hardly any replayability. But there doesn’t need to be. “A Crow” is too rich of an album to be played often. It’s tremendous dreary weight, seemingly infinite in futility, is also a reminder of how vivid life can be. On the flipside of Elverum’s darkened moon there resides an equal, albeit obfuscated, amount of love and life to be cherished. Somewhere. — Audrin Baghaie
Sacred Horror in Design Sote Songwriting: Ata Ebtekar Highlights: Bogzhe Esfahan, Holy Error Dariush Dolat-Shahi’s 1985 album, “Electronic Music, Tar and Sehtar,” was the exhibition of a graceful dance between traditional Iranian folk music and newer, synthetic technologies, acting not so much as partners than as extensions filling each other out into a new, unprecedented whole. Though the latest from the evershifting Tehran-based composer and electronic musician Ata “Sote” Ebtekar, “Sacred Horror in Design,” builds toward more discordant ends, though that sense of fulfilled convergence remains — perhaps even more so given the more refined electronic tools with which he’s able to synthesize. “Flux of Sorrow” drones a grounded but undefined center around which Arash Bolouri’s santoor and Behrouz Pashaei’s sehtar weave and carve a sense of ungraspable history; this dynamic
morphs on the next track into a conflicting mountain of buildup that falls into emptiness, as if to say the chaos doesn’t need to be there to be felt. The relationship continues to change, with the sehtar and electronic whirr pushing each other over the santoor’s gallop on “Plural,” steady pumps of low end fuzz emphasizing the grandeur of the strings around it on “Plebeian,” a virtuosic dance between instruments becoming even more vertiginous with the underlining rush of sound on “Segaah.” One might see this as being an upgrade of an older lineage of music, but they coexist, as on closer “Holy Error,” the most techno-oriented track here, the way traditional instruments (on which Ebtekar told Pashaei and Bolouri to also play on the wooden edges) fall at various angles into the electronic movement is as thrilling a vision for electronic music as it is for its older companion. The title of “Sacred Horror in Design” reflects both its discovery of latent qualities in preexisting designs and its existence as a blueprint of sorts, but there’s no mistaking it for anything but a monolithic work in its own right. — Eric Ng Saturation Brockhampton Songwriting: Ian Simpson, Russell Boring, Dom McLennon, Ameer Vann, Merlyn Wood, Matt Champion, Ciaran McDonald, Robert Ontenient Highlights: HEAT, STAR, BOYS, FAKE, BUMP Brockhampton is the biggest gamble in hip-hop's history. 15 20-somethings, most of whom met through a Kanye West fan forum, moving in together under the sentiment that something
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Tuesday, January 16, 2018 / Page 9
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