A surreal artist, a forgotten actor’s story, and an album benefiting a worthy cause
Post-Trash: Volume 2 compilation
Dan Goldin is an incredibly busy guy. Not only is he behind Exploding In Sound, an amazing record label that puts out adventurous music that skirts lines between post-hardcore, indie, and art-rock, but he also runs the blog Post-Trash, which features some of the best new music around. In December 2015, Post-Trash released a 51-song compilation featuring many of the exemplary bands covered on the blog. It has recently released Volume 2, featuring 30 songs from the likes of Mannequin Pussy, Baked, Nnamdi Ogbonnaya, Rick Rude, and dozens of others. Sweetening the deal: All proceeds go directly to Planned Parenthood. With all the money from the pay-what-you-want download benefiting a very necessary organization, it makes the compilation all the more vital. [David Anthony]
Multidisciplinary artist Jennifer Juniper Stratford
Beach House “TheTraveller” from Jennifer Juniper Stratford on Vimeo.
I first encountered Jennifer Juniper Stratford’s work last year in the video for Beach House’s “The Traveller.” Much like the band’s music, the video’s gauzy textures are mesmerizing, seemingly transmitted from a place both far-flung and familiar (Blade Runner’s Los Angeles of 2019, perhaps? Well… kind of, actually). Apparently that place is Telefantasy Studios, Stratford’s Hollywood atelier, where she has spent more than a decade reclaiming cast-off analog broadcast equipment from the ’80s and mining it for new applications. Toiling at the cutting edge of technologies long abandoned by most, Stratford has produced mind-bending video-synth abstractions, public access programs, music videos, and documentary webseries, among many other projects—much of it imbued with a geeky sci-fi surrealism à la Buckaroo Banzai (a notable influence of Stratford’s). I highly recommend subscribing to her Vimeo or YouTube channels, or even better, getting lost in the ever-expanding range of her beautiful and bizarre work at her website. [Kelsey J. Waite]
Suite For Barbara Loden by Nathalie Léger
In his novel-cum-memoir Autoportrait, Édouard Levé writes, “To describe my life precisely would take longer than to live it.” Nathalie Léger has a similar problem in Suite For Barbara Loden (Dorothy), but with another person. In the (mostly) nonfictional book, Léger struggles to write a short encyclopedic entry on Loden, the late actress most notable for directing and starring in the 1970 film Wanda: “I find myself… writing only on condition that I know nothing, or writing only on condition that I omit nothing.” The compact book that emerged from the seemingly simple assignment, and which won the 2012 Prix Du Livre Inter in its original French, alternates among passages about the author’s mother, Léger’s research into the elusive Loden—who was at turns impetuous and acquiescent, knowing and childlike—and a close viewing of Wanda. These latter sections are some of the book’s most elegant, with something very lovely being gained in translating the film into prose (it makes a wonderful companion to the movie). It’s a quiet, meditative book of one person trying to distill another person’s essence, and while that task proves impossible, here and always, Léger, at the least, succeeds in gracefully illuminating her intriguing subject. [Laura Adamczyk]