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COVER CRATE ART: MAE PATRIDGE DOOMSDAY DIY AND YOUR DUTY TO DISINVEST FROM DOMINANT INDUSTRIES AT THE WORLD’S DEMISE: TAFARI ROBERTSON . . . . . . 4-6 A NOTE FROM JORDAN DEAL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 “SIEVE” WITH URSULA RUCKER: MASON MCAVOY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 BEST OF 2025: OCM CONTRIBUTORS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9-11 I’M NOT MEANT TO LIVE ALONE: QIAIRA RILEY. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 HEAR HERE: YURI SEUNG. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 MAVIS PUSEY AND HER WORLD: TAKIA MICHAEL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 IMDB REVISITED: THE SEVENTH SEAL: JOSEPH ROGERS . . . . . . . . 16-17 NALA SINEPHRO AND THE SMASHING MACHINE: LOGAN CRYER . . . . 18 EGO DEATH AT A BACHERLORETTE PARTY: AKILI Z DAVIS . . . . . . . . . 19
After you’ve read the mag, and if you decide that you like it after all, please come back here and make a donation to help keep it going. No amount is too small, everything helps.
Well it’s official, it has been one year of Orange Crate Magazine. Four issues in 2025 and four more planned for 2026. And there’s maybe a few more surprises that can be expected for next year as well. But back to the present and to the past: many thanks need to be given to everyone who has believed in this project. The story of this publication is that of steadfast trust — it propelled these pages into your hands. To the contributors, please know that I think the world of you and I am genuinely not upset when your submissions are running a little behind schedule or get delayed, scratched or mutated. I hope that you don’t mind my idiosyncracies and the fact I don’t like Oxford commas. To the advertisers, thank you for suporting art writing. Thank you so much for believing in our words. To the readers: boy are you in for a treat this issue. Truly Truly, Logan Cryer Future advertiser? Future contributor? Future friend? orangecratemag@pm.me
DOOMSDAY DIY AND YOUR DUTY TO DISINVEST FROM DOMINANT INDUSTRIES AT THE WORLD’S DEMISE
TAFARI ROBERTSON
4 In the crushing world of overproduction, generative ai and cookie cutter pop trash, there remains an urgent call to support localized efforts of cultural production. While some have already been mobilized to grassroots action or political organization in regard to material conditions such as food, health and collective safety from encroaching fascism, the bastions of organic communal space and experiences are often left to a nostalgic tint. Every few years, our memories rebound to compact vinyl shops, affordable outdoor festivals, mix cds and tapes made by friends, MC tags interlaced on pirated albums, intimate house parties with bands and DJs attuned to lesser known releases but we lament on how impossible it seems to recover these experiences. Alas, it is not impossible, but the recovery of a local scene rests on similar waves of grassroots organizing effort. The return of DIY is a demand to prop up creative friends as local heroes deserving of material support, care and encouragement sometimes only reserved for artists after they’ve been deemed “good enough.” If your idea of a good concert starts at competitive $90 tickets (on the low end) with email alerts and seating charts, I’d implore you to imagine a world where your favorite artist is an arm’s reach away, sharing your space, responding to your energy directly. Whether in the loft of a local bar or dingy unfinished basement,
there’s room for you here to lean against a raging amplifier or clutch a Cutwater to your chest as a fanbase emerges, devoted to someone you may also run into at the park. It’s important to clarify that DIY, meaning “Do-ItYourself,” is a process indicator (a lifestyle even), not a genre. Similar to indie but smaller, it describes an artist that produces their work with minimal external institutional support and can be applied to any genre or form of art making. This independent streak in music is most recognizably celebrated amongst white singer-songwriters and garage bands. However, in proper historic context, it can be traced to the traditional practices of Black country, blues and jazz artists dispersed across the country during the great migration in the 1920s and 30s. Rent parties started as a mutual aid effort of young Black working class creatives in new and often hostile urban centers, turning small apartments into musical lounges where they could dance and express themselves freely. Similarly throughout the segregated south, discreet shacks became bars and theaters for secular experimentation in music, storytelling, and art. After all, what is a basement show if not a segregated speakeasy made to escape from a world that otherwise does not offer you space to thrive culturally. Ennis Davis of The Jaxson Mag writes, “Said to
originate on plantations as rooms for socialization, juke joints may represent the first ‘private spaces’ in the country for African Americans. Derived from the Gullah Geechee word ‘joog,’ they sprouted up across the south following Emancipation as a final bastion for those who wanted to get away from Jim Crow and the pressures of the era.”
Mabel Dwight. Harlem Rent Party. 1929. Courtesy of Whitney Museum of American Art
during the frenzy of unofficial SXSW showcases. The merch was affordable and it was easy to meet someone whose creativity seemed familiar to your own. The benefits of DIY art communities, meant for exciting and passionate displays of productive experimentation and raw emotional experiences of unsupervised talent. Ultimately, it was an ecosystem of support that made it possible to be an artist at every level. Dwindling economic and social support for the small to medium sized labels that underlined opportunities to reach wider audiences has left a cavity for independent artists expected to be filled by their personal vigor for internet virality and allegiance to industry standards — or an uncanny ability to endure financial instability. What’s left is a tradition of creative communities routinely under supported while laying the groundwork for those with generational wealth to experiment their way to cult acclaim. The Black experimental artists who pioneer these sonic waves tend to vanish into everyday life until sparse collective nostalgia comes choosing. Similarly for independent Black audiences, consistent gathering is marred by instability due to lack of access to venues, passive and active violence in spaces that control who’s welcomed, and literal policing by landlords and cops alike that lead to scrambled scenes that are forced to
5 In a pre-integration U.S., Black artists toured through small theaters, dive bars, church basements and school gymnasiums creating the famed chitlin’ circuit. While some acts rose to prominence, as labels such as Chess Records recirculated race records to broader audiences, many of these artists continued to rely on intracommunal support to sustain their practice. In the modern day, marginalized artists continue to self produce and circulate their work to limited audiences. When I think of DIY, I reminisce on deep dives to find artists through Soundcloud, Tumblr, Bandcamp and the early days of Youtube. The deeper the effort meant deeper rewards as you could find your way into a local scene of artists that shared cultural, aesthetic or (sometimes) political values. Growing up in central Texas, artists such as Egaux Sells (FKA Blumoon), Christelle Bofale, Happy Hell and Pnthn charmed my immediate scene with regular shows making use of living rooms, art galleries, and backyards. We went to shows together and booked each other in rotation, interpreting our own catalogues of inspiration. I think fondly of tumblr-core artists and soundcloud rappers just regionally out of reach. It was a special achievement to find your favorite underground artists during the frenzy of unofficial SXSW showcases. The merch was affordable and it was easy to meet
Slauson Malone 1 at Ukie Club in Philadelphia, Oct 19, 2023
possible is a contemporary political issue parallel to movements for stable housing, gay and trans rights, Black liberation, and anti fascism. Whether you are already embedded into DIY culture or not, it is ever-pressing to reevaluate the ways we can better support the communities around us. For those that are curious about how to engage, here are some approaches you can take: CONTINUED ON NEXT PAGE
TOP DOWN You are aware of a few artist friends but don’t know how to find more and you mostly like the major stars you’re already familiar with, prefer the guaranteed production level and comfort that you’re used to: (1) Start from artists you already like and support (2) Look up the members of the touring band, often times they have side projects with cheaper live shows but familiar genres and similar quality (3) Go to a live show early enough to see the openers, actually listen and move a lil. Openers for a touring show of an early/mid career artist tend to be selected regionally (4) Follow on social media, buy merch, take a picture, something to establish a tangible connection so you can remember the artist and/or the venues (5) Go to the opener’s local shows and the other acts will be other local groups. Venues that book local acts tend to book consistently in similar genres and price ranges (6) Repeat 4 and 5 until you’ve built your own memorable map of artists and spaces that you have access to and are actively supporting
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HORIZONTAL You are already comfortable going to support your personal friends’ shows and art but want to branch out independently.
Though this may seem oversimplified to the experienced DIY-ers who are likely reading this independent art magazine, It’s nonetheless important to consider these as cycles of mutual support. Even when you can’t always afford shows or buy merch, we should break away from the idea that artists should be judged based on their ability to entertain up to popular standards without room or resources for growth and instead find ways to support the overall development of hyper local cultural environments.
A NOTE FROM JORDAN DEAL
My most recent album Seas of Triple Consciousness was released with Londonbased Horn of Plenty Records in September 2024 and was followed by an invitation to perform at CTM Festival in Berlin in January 2025. I was to open for Ganavya, whom I consider an angelic counterpart to my devilish desire to tease out and heighten wounds present. That moment initiated—without my knowing it then—a ten-month performance tour across Europe. I began in Berlin, then continued to France, Belgium, Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain, and the UK, performing the work seventeen times in site-specific, continually mutating iterations. Each performance plunged into the particular subterranean world of the city that held it. One in particular has remained lodged in my body: a performance at the Hermann Nitsch Museum in Napoli, Italy, co-presented by AKHET in April. The site became an unexpected collaborator with its late 19th-century industrial architecture folding alongside its own ghosts–its blunt force conspiring with the work. Arriving in Napoli was its own wanderfuck. I had performed in Rome the night before, after three weeks roaming Morocco. The museum I was to perform in sat on a cliff overlooking the city as its active volcano watched opposite from 9,000 meters away. I understood its feedbacking intensity as I crossed the threshold that connected the both. I began the performance suspended twenty feet above the audience in silence, letting the tension thicken before any sound appeared. Once the crowd gathered, the first sonic gesture was an invitation for us to applaud together until the noise thinned back into silence—at which point I dropped to the ground. The air shifted immediately, stripped of individual awareness and in its place rose a collective accusation, tinged with fear and eroticism. The ritual had opened; the room widened; something heavy from faraway was stirred.
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As I moved toward the grand piano and microphones, the audience followed, as if pulled by the dictation of each word that drifted through the space and sank toward the floorboards. Later, after a sonic peak, I invited several audience members to lift a table so I could balance on it. When I inevitably fell, the crowd instinctively carried me, passing my body forward and lifting me toward the intersecting beams overhead. The performance ended with a manipulated recording of an excerpt from a recent U.S. Department of Education open letter made public. What lingered afterward was a tension that didn’t resolve, but shaped itself into a faint, choreographic pulse—an elemental body still tracing its threat around us, unsure whether the ritual was resolved or merely changed form. After moments of this departure, I laid there with my cheek pressed against the floor. I felt its presence weave itself thereon into the fabric of the songs, and follow, lightly insisting, as I traveled to the next city along the Mediterranean’s plasticity. When I originally recorded Seas of Triple Consciousness in December of 2023, I intended it to become a vessel—one that could transmit the miraculous, the unseeable, and the dead. The performance in Napoli felt like that vessel answering back. Something autonomous and ancestral pressed through the room and into the seams of the work, whispering without mercy. As always, my practice offered itself to possession, my body becoming its conduit; but this time the sulfur of the volcano threaded the air and the earth under my cheek folded my own autofictions into the fabric of its older stories. In that moment the performance’s final shape sealed itself—its small orifices tapped open— preparing the work for the deeper dives it demanded in the months to follow.
Bio: Jordan Deal (they/them) works in the intersections of performance, sound, installation, film, and writing where the body becomes both instrument and interruption. Channeling what they call chaos force—a method of embodied subversion—Deal unravels the mythologies and socio-political systems that choreograph daily life. Their work has been presented internationally at prominent venues such as Cafe OTO (London), Radialsystem (Berlin, CTM Festival), Judson Memorial Church (NYC), and the Center for Performance Research (NYC). As a 2024 MAP Fund grantee, 2023–24 Artistic Fellow at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, and a 2022 research fellow at the Amant Foundation, Deal continues to experiment with black queer futurity, worldbuilding, and the unruly poetics of love & slickness.
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“SIEVE” WITH URSULA RUCKER MASON MCAVOY I met with revered poet and Philadelphia legend Ursula Rucker to play a writing game I like to call “Sieve”. The game goes as follows: each person takes 5 minutes to free-write to their heart’s content. After the 5 minutes are up, players swap papers, read, think and then respond. The goal is to write a new, condensed piece based on the contents of what the other person provides. The players swap back and forth like this until each thread has been sifted down to a single word. Here are the results of our game :)
Mason
Ursula
A terrible wind blows this way. Mercury finding solace amongst the waves. Oh child, my first & only— why is love tossed like coins into boiling fountains of melting? I lived on a star for exactly one day. Not a minute more. Not a minute less. It was marvelous. I didn’t expect there to be so many roses. Bushes & buses for miles. I didn’t expect there to be miles. I would take many walks (also to be considered one grand walk with many breaks to stop and smell the… well…) barefooted as a blue booby. The sole skin soaked in all the moisture of that wet star soil. Star soil. Star soil. Soil of the star. What a blessing. Minutes later, rain Hour before Tired waiting
I stand, surprisingly + gratefully, Checked + corrected. The view I held and had at day’s Start has now shifted… completely And that GOOD shift happened… In AN INSTANT Right in front of my eyes ALL OF THEM Mind’s EYE heart’s EYES ETC…. Like… I’m actually still a little Probably A LOT shell-shocked… In a way That is not at all usual Like…. The way I ask… The way I wish… The way I dream…. The way I pray… For a GOOD DAY A truly GOOD DAY With truly good/GOOD In it… The kind that lasts
I would take many walks To live on a star…. But not simply, exactly For just ONE DAY For a starshine LIFETIME! Barefoot, boiling… no matter A Blessing of Many Roses! NO THORNS!
The thing that lasts is A good day Surprisingly Right in front of my Eyes etc. my Actually etc. my Probably etc. ALL OF THEM The way I wish The day starts With truth Checked & corrected A dream prayer in instance Completely
I would! I would! I would! For star shine and Barefoot life No matter the thorns For just one lifetime Simple roses
Did this Day start with Truth? Or did It start with me Lying to myself again … that things wouldn’t/ Couldn’t work out? Either way…. + probably A dream prayer Came along + Worked the Good Day Ways Out.
Simple matters Would shine Like STARS Thorn-bare
Did this Dream prayer Come to play? Overworked With self Again
Bare matter Like Simple stars
Come play!
STAR-MATTER
Joy!
“Sieve” with Ursula Rucker. Nov. 10, 2025. 1:27pm. Ultimo. Germantown, Philadelphia.
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JOHNNY BRENDA’S UNION TRANSFER
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THAT MADE 2025 WHAT IT WAS
BEST OF 2025
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ORANGE CRATE MAGAZINE CONTRIBUTORS ON THE
PEOPLE PLACES AND THINGS AND MUSIC
STEPH DAVIES
YURI SEUNG
BEST PERFORMANCE YOU SAW IN 2025 “Alex G at the Fillmore (missed Nilufer Yanya :(( ) and Agriculture and Boris at UT!” - Dessie
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“Wet Leg at The Electric Factory” - Tom “Henry IV directed by Eric Tucker at Theatre for a New Audience” - Joseph “Mabe Fratti at World Cafe Live...” - Mason “Brandee Younger at Arden Gild Hall” - Tafari “Henry IV directed by Eric Tucker at Theatre for a New Audience” - Steph
LOGAN CRYER
“shamanism by kim jung jae” - yuri “Metro Boomin Presents: A Futuristic Summa (Hosted by DJ Spinz)” - Tafari “THAT’S SHOWBIZ BABY! by JADE” - Joseph “Fred Hersch - The Surrounding Green” - Steph “In The Earth Again Chat Pile and Hayden Pedigo” - Dessie “Getting Killed by Geese” - Tom “HAGEN by Titanic” - Logan
2025 ALBUM REC
TOM BAUMSER
AN UNSUNG HERO OF YOUR MUSIC/ART SCENE “Josh Spelman-Hall is quietly producing some visionary dance music” - Steph “Julia Finnegan singer/songwriter, guitarist, harpist, choir director, Germantown native. All around incredible artist and person.” - Mason “Steph Jacqlin” - Joesph “Flyers Fan 215” - Logan “Shugsline, Muthi Reed, Mr. Dancing, Tin Rodriguez” - Tafari
DESSIE NYENUH
TAFARI ROBERTSON
JOSEPH ROGERS
MASON MCAVOY
““They are an artist” -- I’m not sure what they were talking about but I overheard this the other night from an unexpected group of people. It made a profound impact on me in the way of public recognition of the artist as a way of being.” - Mason “Your landlord is an impediment to progress.” - Steph “rest in peace susan alcorn.” - yuri “The Discerning Eye and the Will to Do it! - Khalil on Black Historians’” - Tafari
“Like a cabbage… like a kebab” - Joseph
SOMETHING YOU OVERHEARD A STRANGER SAY THIS YEAR THAT STUCK WITH YOU
DID YOU EXPERIENCE ANYTHING SURREAL, KISMET, COSMIC, COINCIDENTAL, MAGICAL THIS YEAR? “In May I got a fortune from a cookie that said “Love is on the way!” and it was right!” - Logan “Fast Car blasting, alcohol flowing, a breakup occurring, all at once ” - Tom “yes. everything” - Dessie “I keep moving at exactly the right speed to run into the perfect person.” - Mason
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I’M NOT MEANT TO LIVE ALONE QIAIRA RILEY
Kerry James Marshall Better Homes, Better Gardens 1994. Acrylic and collage on unstretched canvas Denver Art Museum, Denver
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This piece is actually based on a deeply personal emotional realization: maybe I’m not meant to live alone. This could stem from my being born into a multigenerational home, which meant I would bounce from hearing my auntie blasting 106 and Park’s top ten countdown to tuning into the quiet storm coming from my grandmother’s stereo. Someone could say my grandmother is Luther Vandross superfan, but she’s too cool for that so instead I’ll establish that I know many of his songs because of her. At some point I became old enough to actually pay attention to his lyrics, but not necessarily quite understand them yet. At that time the words “and a house is not a home, when there’s no one there to hold you tight” never quite made sense to me. In those days it felt home was inevitably associated with the warmth of another’s love. But at this moment, I write a bit brokenhearted, sitting alone in my apartment, like I do most evenings. I usually have a nice dinner that I’ve made only for myself, while the only conversation I have is with my cat who kindly offers me company as I eat. Around this time is where I begin to daydream about a time where my nights at home might one day be a little less lonely. You could come close to understanding my nightly emotional undercurrent in hearing Luther’s refrains in his 1981 cover of Dionne Warwick’s “A House Is Not a Home”. Somewhere in my mid-twenties, I found myself taking the lyrics of Webbie’s “Independent” maybe too seriously as I was in the throes of a strange individualism and self-reliance. I had moved across the country all on my own, no longer living in close quarters with my family or anyone for that matter. I eventually found myself living in extreme isolation, in a world unlike the world I grew up in, birthing both a yearning and a realization. Suddenly, I was annoyed by my own hyper-independence and the loneliness it brought on, while I hoped to somehow again feel the familiar warmth of a home filled with love. Before my epiphany, in hopes of finding a title that would capture my desire to engage with the visual history of Black gendered bodies and domestic spaces, this piece was almost titled “Love is a House”. Thinking of the 1980’s R&B hit from the group Force M.D., I began contemplating if love is what is often waiting at home for those of us who are both Black and gendered or if our relationship to intimacy and domestic spaces is much more complicated. Like Dionne or Luther, I believe that love, platonic or romantic, could somehow shift the material reality of my domestic interior, transforming an architectural structure into a space of affection. I think of the two ultra-black figures strolling in Kerry James Marshall’s Better Homes, Better Gardens. They hold one another in a sweet embrace that adds complexity to the kinds of scenes the American imaginary might assume from visuals of a public housing project. The blooming flowers, flying bluebirds, and sunbeams that fill the scene remind the viewer that this bureaucratic building undergoes an intimate metamorphosis when humans bring their hopes, dreams, and fears into these spaces. This piece is an ode to Luther’s bellows and my hopes, because again I believe I’m not meant to live alone and I pray to my kindest ancestors that I won’t always have to. This is a prayer not only for myself, but for all those who suspect that the allegedly complicated intersection of being Black and gendered might hinder our platonic and romantic endeavors. Until the day love stumbles at our collective doorsteps, I’ll just look for a bit of solace in echoes of Luther Vandross.
hear here: mini-interviews yuri seung
i’m endlessly fascinated by the ways we engage with our sonic environment—the feedback loop of how sound shapes us, how we shape it, and the ephemeral sound memories that linger without intent or structure. these mini-interviews explore the ambient pockets within the sonic worlds of friends and artists, focusing on sounds that haven’t gone unnoticed. –yuri seung..
scan this and tell me where the sound seems to travel from and toward: hear.here.yuri@proton.me
what’s your favorite onomatopoeia and why?
tell me: hear.here.yuri@proton.me
when does a material stop being structure and start becoming sound? I think that it is all one in the same, structures are sounds and sounds are structures. For myself, I look to make music with images rather than with sound, one gives emphasis to each other. what we see and what we hear are both frequencies of energy and so they’re no different.
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what’s a noise that has followed you from one home to the next? Footsteps. Literally. It’s the first thing you hear when you enter an empty home and the last thing you hear when you leave. It’s a constant reminder of the movement that we carry as well as it carries us. when performing, what do you listen for to know the space is responding?
what’s your favorite (onomatopoeia)? and why? I like which maybe counts maybe doesn’t.. to me it counts because it’s the sound of your breath as you comprehend something unexpected. Anyways it’s a family favorite as well as my own because my baby cousin (who is an adult now..) used it so much and so iconically growing up. is there a sound that captures the feeling of being between cultures? I think almost every sound coming from Queens where I live feels in between cultures--perhaps why I feel connected to this place. what does translation sound like when it happens through the body?
The space is always responding, so it is truly about being and existing. Melding into the environment and the air that pervades it
It sounds like unison played by multiple different instruments when you feel profound understanding happening. Working to get to that point sounds more complicated.
what did four years of recording teach you about how sound changes over time?
what memories or emotions surface when you hear your own processed voice back?
You learn that what you make will rot as a document of time. The very mediums themselves decay too, so then you’re then just left to organize and arrange a set of memories. Some you remember, some you forget.
Nostalgia both lived and imagined... various ways of living that I and we don’t have access to anymore whether that’s 2005 Shanghai or 1500s Andong. I would say I intentionally try to induce that emotional space.
Holden Linton, Musician
Leo Chang, composer, improviser, performer
Sounds that are wet, in the pedestrian sense — they startle a bit, pull me into the real. A sound of physical transformation, minor. I’m thinking of bubbling. Some examples: a good glug, a sick squelch. A slosh is heavy, a blurp irrepressible. how do you recognize when an old sound is asking to be heard again? I have been thinking of the uses of nostalgia, because nostalgia can be a force that gets me to the kitchen, or to the page, but then what. Beyond the comfort and a sense of relation to temporal and geographic distance, what is alive about it, and how does it keep us living and connected, even if what we’re living and connected to is atrocious, overwhelming, unstable? I recognize an old sound, this is to say, by the way it tugs — if it makes me want to sit down for a long time. if FORTUNE could be heard instead of read, what would it sound like? I love this question, and it’s the easiest to answer. Voices across the table, some private; many conversations at once; cooking in the background. House slippers shuffling, bowl clanking as it’s passed, gasps of gossip and groans of assent. what’s the softest noise that feels communal? I think easy silence. An extra few seconds before the noise of noise. Connie Yu, writer, fan of print, FORTUNE Co-Founder & Editor
MAVIS PUSEY AND HER WORLD TAKIA MICHAEL Mobile Images is a telling of Mavis Pusey’s evolving relationship with herself and the environment she experiences. Currently exhibiting at the Institute of Contemporary Art, her visual journey is separated into three different chapters titled “Tailored Abstraction”, “Rhythmic Tension”, and “Endless Renewal”. Showing Mavis Pusey’s gradual growth as an artist, this exhibit is a great display of her diverse approach in interpreting everything around her and informing viewers on who she was as a person throughout her experiences. The exhibition begins with “Tailored Abstraction”, from her time in fashion design. Her oil paintings are informed by her experiences designing and pattern-making. The paintings are flat and geometric shapes that abstract the human form. They are a direct correlation to Pusey’s viewpoint of the human body; just like how a designer creates a garment from shapes and patterns to inform the figure wearing it. Pusey approaches the figure as an abstracted shape and pattern that informs the space. “Recumbancy” is an reclining figure with browns, greens, and earth tones. Parts of the figure become indistinguishable from the background and a green shape follows around the perimeter of the canvas, framing the composition. Parts of the body—like a leg, chest, or head—are vaguely depicted, shifting in and out of the foreground and background. The paintings in “Tailored Abstraction” start the journey of Pusey’s visual abstraction and evolves more when leaving the United States. “Rhythmic Tension” is Pusey seeking music amongst the chaos. While in Europe, she was a witness during the height of the student uprisings against the French government in 1968. Affected by her environment, her work became an emotional
reflection. Pusey explores screenprinting during this time and the compositions gain more speed with more zig-zags, gestured drawings of guitars, and repeated lines that represent noise. “Paris, Mai-Juin” has silver lines of a guitar backed by a bold red shape. The screenprints are stark, black and white with an insertion of a bold blue or red. A departure from precision, Pusey orchestrates her soundscape as a tool to make her printworks become white noise. Returning to New York in 1969, Pusey saw the city going through drastic transformations. “Endless Renewal” is the last chapter of this exhibit. Now taking notes from the Futurists, Pusey is fascinated with the reconstruction and demolition of the New York City buildings. “Within Manhattan”, from her “Broken Construction” series, is a large oil painting with rectangular shapes of wood and falling debris—acting as a snapshot of moving construction. She is not abstracting the environment and sound around her, but documenting the environment itself. The world itself is now beyond its original form. Pusey’s relationship and emotional connection with her surroundings are changing as rapidly as the city. A list of Pusey’s desires are in the gallery, with the last one saying, “I want my mental powers, my mind, body, and spirit, to be at one with nature.” Pusey desired to have a connection with the ever-changing environment around her. Mobile Images shows Pusey’s dynamic use of diverse mediums, and takes you through a fluid timeline of important moments of the artist’s life. The compelling works in Mobile Images are a diaristic telling of the emotional relationship between Pusey and her world.
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IMDB REVISITED: THE SEVENTH SEAL PRESENTED BY JOSEPH ROGERS
NALA SINEPHRO AND THE SMASHING MACHINE LOGAN CRYER
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Has to start with Nala Sinephro, mythical composer who mastered the album alongside producer Heba Kadry. Sheila Maurice-Grey on Flugelhorn. Isabel Gracefield, Jay Sylvian, Tom Coath recorded and engineered the 25 minute record. Morgan Simpson and Natcyet Wakili feature on drums, playing only the MMA scenes for a movie that seemingly is about hitting but is really about fighting. The Smashing Machine. Orchestrate, led by Jessica Dannheisser, Alex Ferguson, Jedidah Rimell and Ben Foster, provided cinematic strings. They reunited with the musicians who perform with Sinephro across the world in her cosmic jazz ensemble. James Mollison, Nubya Garcia, Dwayne ‘Wonky Logic’ Kilvington and Lyle Barton. Last year they all worked on the acclaimed record, Endlessness, and it got the attenion of Benny Safdie. He reached out to Sinephro about scoring his solo directorial debut. In the past, Safdie and his brother, Josh Safdie, worked with Oneohtrix Point Never (Daniel Lopatin) to create ethereal and pounding electronic scores for their high intensity thrillers. Sinephro is a sensible successor, a musician who also brings genre to the brink of oblivion through exquisite synthesizers. Warp Records released both OPN’s latest record, Tranquilizer, this November and the original motion picture soundtrack for The Smashing Machine this past fall. Sinephro’s score is more mercurial than what is typically found in a Safdie film. That’s saying a lot. The spaciousness of her sound design matches the conspicuous distance between the events and emotions that the characters experience within the movie. Afterall, this is a film that is based on a documentary of the same name. Safdie allows the audience to see the truth of his characters but, the characters themselves can’t articulate the depth of their own experiences to each other, to themselves or to the sports journalists who ask, what it would mean to be defeated? Athletes waiting for a penultimate judge to make the final call and say what it all means. In moments of understanding, the film uses a pop-masculine soundtrack. Mark Kerr completes his training montage to the Elvis’s rendition of “My Way.” When the story comes to an end, “Corridor of Dreams” by The Cleaners from Venus begins to play. The score, by contrast, is the perfume of uncertainty enfolding each character as they begin to embody the non-dualistic state of being a winner and being a loser. There is room for pleasure in that place. Mark loves his girlfriend, Dawn, and their relationship is exemplified by “The High”, a fluttering dance between piano and sax — Debussy dueting with Mulatu Astatke. Dawn’s theme (“Dawn I” and “Dawn II”) comprises of a similar, iconic modular arpeggio that Sinephro employed throughout Endlessness. A holding pattern for a character who naively cannot separate love from duty. Tittering hi-hats indicate nervousness during a match. The synth bass rumbles when a character’s unconscious thoughts become conscious realities. The magic of film lies in it’s disinterest in linear storytelling. The scenes appear sequentially, but the climaxes do not. Two hour movie: Mark Kerr wins his big fight halfway through the film, and it has nothing to do with what he does with his fists. First, he had to dissolve into nothing. That transformation can be heard on the devasting titular track. It appears a half hour into the movie. Three quarters into the film, the movie itself begins to dream. Opening Round of the Pride 2000 Grand Prix. They all seem happy. Triumph is inevitable. The narrative conflict is not clear anymore so the story disappears. Time absconds. And suddenly she is in the ring, playing the National Anthem on her harp. Nala Sinephro on the screen. This part is not in the soundtrack. Or the documentary. Her voice, doused in reverb and delay, washes away grounded reality. In this movie, based off a documentary about a real man, authentic storytelling emerges. It is memory, fantasy and embodiment, together.
REVIEW: EGO DEATH AT A BACHERLORETTE PARTY AKILI Z. DAVIS The record begins with a cry of freedom: “I’ve got ice in my OJ, I’m a cold hard bitch/Lotta dumb motherfuckers that I made rich.” In Hayley Williams’ first independent release through her new label, Post Atlantic (you know, post-expiration of her teenage Atlantic Records 360 deal…), the Paramore frontwoman makes it known that she’s not one to mess with. In Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party, Williams explores the grief and disappointment surrounding the sunset of a recent relationship and all the other buried trauma that pops up from it. Producer Daniel James, whose previous credits largely favor Disney popstar hits, racks up major writing and composing credits on the album. With his expertise in perfecting poppy melodies, Williams is free to float between every subgenre she can grab hold of. Overall, Ego Death sits in the alternative pop category, but that classification is easily complicated in the work’s seamless shifts from alt rock to shoegaze to SZA-coded R&B. In the indie pop track “Whim,” she lulls the listener (and her former lover) into a false sense of security —“Baby take it easy”— just to hauntingly add in the second verse, “I’ll still be singing to you long after we’re dead.” The album only ramps up after that, flying from punchy drum lines to sub-80 BPM lullabies carrying lyrics both direct and devastating. “Disappearing Man” openly probes a former partner’s reluctance to open up, pointedly asking “Why’d you let go?” in a manner that implies this is not the first time she’s asking the question. Sandwiched between those two songs is “Mirtazapine”, an ode to antidepressants carried by grinding hardcore punk guitars. Considering Williams’ intentionality with the track listing, one could argue that mirtazapine itself was a connector between the content of the surrounding songs. No one ever wants to think about the potential fallout after a partnership ends, but this song makes a point to highlight that reality. In a year flush with music about relationships new and old, Ego Death stands out as something more. While most of its songs are born of her relational fissure, the best songs come from deeper introspective material exposing the more political aspects of William’s worldview. “True Believer” meditates on the contemporary hypocrisy of Nashville and the “New South,” which is being marketed to the world as a new frontier for the liberals of America escaping their tax-burdened Northern enclaves. By acknowledging both the visible destruction of culture and the invisibilized weight of the racism that allows cities like Nashville to expand —“Strange fruit, Hard Bargain / Till the roots, Southern Gotham”— she turns the camera on the people around her and asks of them, and us as the listeners, do you still stand on the side of progress if it’s built on the backs of others? Ego Death presents unfiltered vulnerability as a starting point for listeners to grow from. By acknowledging her own pain and complicated thoughts about romance, her place in family structures, and the world at large, Hayley Williams invites her fans to ask those same questions about themselves, and that directive comes first from a place of healing. Compared to her previous solo projects, Ego Death carries a palpable freedom. With this work, she fills a void that her earlier albums, including Paramore’s, struggle to close in on. It’s a grown up album about grown up stuff, where past wrongs are dealt with and difficult thoughts are parsed out in plain view.
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