Mini Reviews for July 22-28, 2019

Well, you jokers got one last Adam Sandler movie in before the summer's end. This week's reader pick is The Wedding Singer. I have to go back to school tomorrow, so this marks the end of the summer suggestions project. I'll keep a list of all the other movies submitted to the poll and try to work through them in the next few months, but I probably won't be doing one a week like I have this summer.

Thank you to everyone who submitted picks! It's been a wild, Sandler-heavy summer, movie-viewing-wise.

Movies

The Wedding Singer (1998) Reader Suggestion!
Being a mostly traditional rom-com in the '90s/2000s model, The Wedding Singer lacks a lot of the usual abrasiveness of Adam Sandler's tendencies. Both a blessing and a curse, actually, since it means we do escape some of the uglier habits of his vehicles (though the movie does make time for a Boy George riff that's both unfunny and more than a little transphobic), but in the process of excising that material, the movie becomes somewhat forgettable and generic, save for the '80s nostalgia (pretty irritating and obvious nostalgia from my perch, but I guess in 1998, the tropes of '80s revivalism hadn't quite become as ubiquitous as they are in 2019) and Sandler's performance himself in the titular role. This actually brings up something I really didn't think about until this movie, which is that it's a little strange that so few of his movies trade on Sandler's musical talents, given that music is a cornerstone of his stage legacy ("The Thanksgiving Song," "The Chanuka Song," etc.). It's legitimately enjoyable to see Sandler ham up some '80s ballads here, and I have no idea why his movies don't go to this well more often. Grade: B-

Ash Is Purest White (江湖儿女) (2018)
I haven't seen a ton of Jia Zhangke's movies, but I have seen enough to have a sort of nagging feeling that Ash Is Purest White is double-dipping on some of his previous work, most notably Mountains May Depart. The triptych structure, the isolating push of a plot that omits years in a single edit, a somewhat out-of-nowhere sci-fi flourish connecting the second and third parts of the movie—that's all there (and better) in Mountains May Depart. Actually, I like the sci-fi flourish better in this movie, and that particular moment is truly lovely. And it's not as if this movie's familiarity ruins it; far from it in fact, and it's honestly a nicely done character study of a woman whose life is thrown into complete turmoil and must rebuild on the other side and how her particular vulnerabilities on either side of that turmoil lend her to be exploited. It's just not all that surprising, and surprise was, though hardly the only thing Mountains May Depart had going for it, certain a big thing it had going for it, something this movie feels just a bit poorer for missing. Grade: B

Contagion (2011)
My standard line with Soderbergh movies is that they are super easy to like but usually kind of hard to love, but, uhhh.... I love this? It kind of feels like a Tom Clancy novel in fast-forward, but somehow without ever feeling rushed: a world-spanning epic about a global threat told via a large handful of POV characters that flesh out the unfolding catastrophe from a variety of angles, including the political, the scientific, the journalistic, and the personal. It's a deliriously big film that somehow manages to convincingly evoke global politics and scenes of expository medical charts and then make time for a purely personal moment like one girl's private prom with her boyfriend and miraculously have that micro-personal moment hit with a ton of bricks' worth of emotional heft that rivals the geo-thriller stuff—and Contagion does all this while coming in easily under two hours in runtime, breaking nary a droplet of sweat. It's incredible. Also, it's a pretty wicked meta-joke to have a movie depicpt Gwyneth Paltrow contracting a fatal disease while also that same movie prominently features a quack profiting off the pandemic by peddling homeopathic treatments. Grade: A

Logan's Run (1976)
Pretty much peak pre-Star Wars '70s American sci-fi in the sense that it has some very neat (if charmingly chintzy) production design that slightly buoys an interesting premise that otherwise doesn't quite give the movie enough gas in its tank to make it to the end. Here, we're shown a world in which people live in perfect pleasure but only until they turn 30, at which point they have to undergo a "rebirth" process in this big stadium known as the Carrousel. It doesn't take a genius to guess that this rebirth process is really just a ruse for mass-killing, which raises some questions regarding just how good a purely hedonist lifestyle is for one's intellect; it also means that the movie's biggest shock moment (the first "rebirth" sequence—very trippy, very cool sequence) hits relatively early in the film and leaves the rest of the movie somewhat adrift as to what to do with a story that's already hit its climax within its first thirty minutes. But like I said, the design of everything is baller, and that offsets the back half considerably. We need more real-life holograms used in movies. Grade: B-

Late Spring (晩春) (1949)
It's Ozu, so it's a wonderfully observed portrait of domestic Japan with a deeply melancholy strain. Late Spring in particular, more so than other Ozu movies I've seen, seems to regard societal expectations of that domesticity as not just an obligation but also a kind of cage—the issue in this movie revolving around the "necessary" marriage of a daughter, the pursuit of which neither the father nor his daughter want but they move toward regardless. It's so heartbreaking, and as affecting a portrayal as I've ever seen of the self-fulfilling prophecies that are societal norms. Grade: A-

P.S. I (and a bunch of other people) talk about this movie in a lot more depth in Episode 257 of the Cinematary podcast, which you can listen to here.

Music

U.K. Subs - Brand New Age (1981)
U.K. Subs often play second-fiddle to the bigger bands of the first wave of British punk, like the Sex Pistols and The Clash, but their sophomore album, Brand New Age, can absolutely go toe-to-toe with Give 'Em Enough Rope. And the Sex Pistols couldn't even cobble together a second album, so I guess we know who won the battle there. Brand New Age is also an early step forward toward hardcore punk—as in their debut, the songwriting is still a little inelegant, but in moving toward a more muscular, aggressive sound, the band makes their material work through sheer brute force. Grade: A-

Prog Progress 1980: Tangerine Dream - Tangram

Hi, everyone! Welcome to Prog Progress, a blog series in which I journey through the history of progressive rock by reviewing one album from every year of the genre's existence. You can read more about the project here. You can learn about what I think are some of the roots of progressive rock here. You can see links for the whole series here.

1980 is about on par with 1979 in terms of progressive rock's "progress," meaning that there isn't much progress at all. You get a few decent-but-inessential releases from prog A-listers like Yes (Drama) and Jethro Tull (A) that skew toward pop; Rush's Permanent Waves (which is essential, by the way) is practically radio pop compared to their '70s output. You also get a handful of solo records from some former members of prog A-lister bands, such as Peter Gabriel (Peter Gabriel, aka Melt, aka the melty-face album), Steve Hackett (Defector), and Jon Anderson (Song of Seven)—and the ones of those worth listening to are the ones that aren't prog, most notably Gabriel's forward-thinking record. We also get a few classic bands biting the dust, most notably Gentle Giant (probably the best British prog band I wasn't able to cover in this series during the '70s)—R.I.P., fellas. Progressive rock is still very much in that awkward limbo stage it was in 1979, and it probably will be about the same until the release of Marillion's Script for a Jester's Tear in 1983. So we've got a few limbo years left yet.

In light of that, I'm using these down years as an opportunity to catch up with a few bands I didn't have a chance to hit during the pretty stacked run of the early-to-mid '70s. Up today: Tangerine Dream and their 1980 release Tangram.

If I had covered Tangerine Dream back during their mid-'70s artistic peak, I would have likely discussed them in the context of "krautrock," a slightly demeaning term created by the British press[1] for the loose confederation of bands in Germany who fused experimental music with rock instrumentation in a sort of parallel evolution with the mostly British progressive rock movement. I'm talking groups like Kraftwerk and Faust and Can and Popol Vuh, who are responsible for some of the most interesting records of the era. Krautrock isn't usually labeled progressive rock, partially because of the British implications of the "prog" label but mostly because krautrock was always viewed by the press as much cooler than the fey, flamboyant progressive rock of the UK. Albums like Tago Mago and In Den Gärten Pharaos are brooding and alien experiences filled with bizarre sounds and unconventional structures—not really all that different from the best of British prog's output, but largely free from the foot-in-mouth syndrome that accompanied the sometimes-goofy lyrics and concepts of LPs like Close to the Edge and Tarkus, or at least obscured by the language barrier. And there certainly were no capes.[2]

Anyway, Tangerine Dream, a group out of Berlin, is part and parcel of Krautrock in the mid-'70s; their early albums like Zeit (1972) and Atem (1973) have all spaced-out improvisation and the uncompromising weirdness of the albums by Can or Neu! Then two pretty major things happened. The first of these is that Tangerine Dream signed to Virgin Records, a British label that gave the band exponentially more exposure in the UK. The second is that they got a Moog sequencer. Their next album, 1974's Phaedra, isn't a huge change compared to their previous records (it's still comprised of lengthy instrumental improvisations, it still has a kind of spacey sound, etc.), but what's new is evident: a pulsing bass sound driving these compositions forward—the sound of the sequencer. I don't know if the band came by the sequencer because of their new Virgin connections, but it seems a pretty nifty coincidence that the band's first album recorded in the UK and financed by a UK label is also their first using a piece of equipment made by the company perhaps most responsible (alongside Mellotronics) for the British progressive rock sound. Anyway, the long and short of this is that in the procession of albums Tangerine Dream released on Virgin over the next half decade, the band sounds decreasingly like krautrock and increasingly like an instrumental version of British prog, right up up to their 1978 album Cyclone, which even has vocals and is pretty much just British prog by a handful of expatriated Germans [3].

So it's no surprise that by the time Tangram rolls around two years later, the sound is still pretty much the same, only this time having returned to solely instrumental compositions. Taken from one perspective, Tangram's two sides—each a single, roughly 20-minute composition—are instrumental progressive rock in the same sense that some modern DJ music is considered "instrumental hip-hop," the excision of vocals taking away many of the hooks and verse-chorus structures and leaving instead compositions that feel like the genre boiled down to its most basic vibe. In progressive rock's case, that vibe consists of heavily processed keyboards, guitars, and electronic percussion forming dramatic crescendos over long, atmospheric passages full of little melodic twists from the guitar and keyboard.

You would be forgiven for identifying the first few minutes of Tangram as the opening to a long composition by Yes or Emerson, Lake & Palmer, because that's precisely the feel here; famously, compositions like "Close to the Edge" open with long instrumental passages before their lyrics kick in, and Tangram's opening eight minutes have this strange quality of seeming exactly like one of those long instrumental passages, only instead of climaxing and then moving on to a vocal part, it then skips to a little melodic bridge that another prog band may have used as a transition between vocal sections. This is then followed by an atmospheric, keyboard-heavy passage that builds again in a way that would traditionally signal a move toward an explosive vocal passage, this passage peaks and then fades off into a synth-y outro that repeats some of the melodic motifs from the previous 19 minutes. I think you get the picture, and Side Two is a lot of the same (though a little spacier). It's a curious case of progressive rock Jenga, cutting out all the vocal sections and instead constructing a suite out of all the connective tissues remaining. And the results are... a little generic? I enjoy Tangram for what it is, and it's a pleasant-enough way to spend 41 minutes, but I suppose the risk of boiling down a genre to its most basic vibe is that the bits you boil off may actually be what gives the music personality. Taken from the perspective of someone interested in the intersection of progressive rock and krautrock that a lot of Tangerine Dream's '70s output represents, Tangram builds for itself a frustrating centrism between the two: free of the go-for-broke otherworldliness that makes a lot of krautrock so compelling, and lacking the conceptual spark that can give prog its hair-brained charm. I know a lot of people (including myself) like to read progressive rock's lyrics with an eye for mockery, but Tangram is pretty strong evidence for those lyrics being essential to progressive rock's structure, because without them here, Tangram is kind of a boneless chicken breast of an album, flabby and shapeless, and without the stronger krautrock flourishes of an album like Phaedra, there isn't a whole lot to hang that shapelessness on. Again, it's not that Tangram is "bad"; it is just noticeably missing something.

There's another perspective you can view Tangram from, and that's a futurist one. Because for as much as the album recycles the pieces of the previous decade, it also inescapably has the sound of an album from the 1980s, which is sort of impressive, given that it just barely exists at the birth of that decade. The key is the exact same piece of equipment that gave Tangerine Dream their doorway into British prog: the sequencer. I didn't mention it earlier, but in addition to being part of the progressive rock and krautrock conversations, Tangerine Dream are often considered early pioneers in the commercial expansion of electronic music, and the sequencer is a cornerstone of what would eventually become a whole host of electronic music genres, most notably the explosions of house and techno in the '80s. So there's an extent to which Tangerine Dream has been a band of futurists since Phaedra. But the production on Tangram feels like a dedicated step toward a purely '80s sound in a way that none of their album since Phaedra has, and this is probably due to a lot of little factors: the keyboards become just a little more twinkly, the guitars become just a little less grounded in low-end frequencies, the percussion just a little bit more sampled. Sure, it has the structural pieces of '70s prog, but it sounds like the '80s.

Taking the long view, this development isn't particularly surprising. In general, the krautrock bands that survived the '70s (Kraftwerk, most notably) tended to push closer and closer toward the electronic music that would define a lot of that '80s sound, and Tangerine Dream in particular was a band that not only embraced but often defined the '80s aural aesthetic, most famously with their film score work—their 1981 soundtrack for Thief, the debut film from director Michael Mann (possibly the preeminent architect for the neon-soaked '80s cinematic aesthetic), is my pick for the most '80s film soundtrack of all time. But you don't get Thief without first taking those early steps in that direction with Tangram a year prior. With the benefit of hindsight, these new sounds are all a little cheesy in the same way that the rocket-ship dreams of the 1950s or the steampunk fantasies of the late 19th century are; there's always something a little kitsch about the abandoned future visions of bygone eras. But on the other hand, there's something magnetic about those visions as well, all the more so because they never truly came to pass, and the same goes for the neon, synthy '80s futurism that Tangram begins to embody. It's no accident that the 2010s have seen a mass reclaiming of this discarded '80s flotsam—it's cheesy, sure, but it's also cool.

Tangram isn't all the way there yet, so it lacks the purer embodiment of that vision that the Thief soundtrack would eventually provide. But standing with one foot in the previous decade and the other in the new decade gives Tangram an evolutionary significance that its sort of generic music belies. More so than a lot of music I've covered in this series, Tangram is positioned at the nexus point of a lot of the threads of the past and the future. Even if I'm just sticking with the prog conversation, Tangram is in a fascinating location in history; progressive rock's mainstream in the late '70s and early '80s is a dedicated move toward pop-rock, a genre that itself in the late '70s and early '80s is increasingly moving toward the electronic sounds and sparkling production that late-period krautrock helped to usher into the mainstream, which means that with Tangram, there's a whole lot of genetic material colliding. In a way, it's the moment that the parallel evolution of krautrock and British prog became convergent evolution, toward a singular, hybrid '80s sound.

That's a lot of history for one album to hold, especially one as slight as Tangram. Maybe I'm grasping for straws here because there's not a ton to talk about with progressive rock in 1980. Let me know if that's true.

Otherwise, see you next time in 1981!


1] The Germans themselves called it "kosmische musik," which gets at the movement's ambitions a lot better and also doesn't reek of jingoism like "krautrock" does, but since pretty much nobody in the English-speaking world calls it that, I'm kind of bound by convention to stick with the obviously worse "krautrock" label.

2] I've alluded a few times to the anti-prog sentiments of the rock press, but probably the best showcase of it is this sort of genre distinction that peels away parallel movements from the label on the basis of whether or not they contain the most hated elements of progressive rock. Krautrock is music born out of European psychedelia, has rock instrumentation that experiments with extended song lengths and additional unconventional instruments, incorporates jazz and avant-garde textures, and focuses on the album rather than the song—that sounds a lot like prog to me, and if the only difference is the degree of experimentation (krautrock is undeniably weirder), then it doesn't really seem like there's a meaningful difference between the two besides country of origin.

3] In fact, the vocals on Cyclone are sung by Steve Jolliffe, an Englishman. He had also played keyboard and some wind instruments on a very early iteration of Tangerine Dream (before even their first album), but Cyclone was the first time playing in the band since then, as well as his last time playing in the band before going solo again.

Mini Reviews for July 15-21, 2019

HELLO! The randomly selected reader suggestion for this week is Fireproof. Honestly not sure if I would have preferred another Adam Sandler movie. This next week is the last week of summer break for me, so it's the last week I'll be taking suggestions! I'll keep the rest of the suggestions in the pool, and if you want to put in a suggestion for next week (or put in another one), here's the link:

Just click here to submit a suggestion for next week's review post! Last week to do this!

Movies

Fireproof (2008) Reader Suggestion!
In the context of a world in which God's Not Dead and its combative ilk exist, it's tempting to look at a relatively more genteel Evangelical Christian movie like this or the megachurch-leaders-turned-film-auteurs Stephen and Alex Kendrick's previous movie, Facing the Giants, with gratitude. It's also a Christian movie that knows what a metaphor is and how to create one visually, which is a miracle that definitely should have been included in that final montage of Facing the Giants. But no! I refuse to fall under any kind of Stockholm Syndrome over the rare Evangelical movie that shows me the barest-minimum cinematic kindnesses. This movie is bad on such a fundamental level: the aforementioned visual metaphors are merely side-effects of a director whose only skill is knowing in which of the four cardinal directions to point the camera, and the movie is put together with such a ham-fisted and bone-headed ethos that the whole thing practically quivered to pieces the moment the first of its many K-Love-core music montages hits the screen. And then the story—when I was little, I remember being told quite a bit that God isn't a vending machine or Santa Claus, but this is precisely the paper-thin view of reality that this film is locked into. Like Facing the Giants before it, Fireproof cannot conceive of a world in which being a devout Evangelical Christian does not result in God's rewarding that fervor in the most direct way possible, and accordingly, it cannot conceive of a man who will not be rewarded with a woman provided he treats her nicely for forty days—which is ridiculous on a lot of levels, but especially considering how the husband in this movie is such a swinging dick with deeply toxic impulses (the sheer number of times he beats something to pieces with that baseball bat) and yet manages to "win back" his wife with only the most basic acts of decency like doing the dishes and fixing dinner and, like, not yelling at her. The pieces of the "Love Dare" we're shown in this movie do nothing to address the fundamental dysfunction of the marriage we see in the movie's rather harrowing opening scene, but Fireproof is so committed to the idea of the husband "earning" his wife's love that it never stops to consider that love isn't an exchange of kindnesses or a machine in which certain inputs automatically yield certain outputs, but rather a profound and messy entangling of two human beings. The movie makes a few gestures toward the unconditional love of Christ, which is both theologically problematic (I'm sure it doesn't mean to imply this, but the movie very much positions salvation as merely a step toward a happier marriage instead of anything spiritually significant—an egregious diminishing of the works of Jesus, to say the least) as well as just grossly patriarchal, since it by implication casts the husband as Jesus being battered for iniquity and the wife as the wayward sinner resisting his unconditional love. I realize this is a pretty common framing of marriage within Evangelicalism ("husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church," etc.), but 1. that interpretation misuses that verse when it becomes a roundabout justification for why wives should be obligated to love their husbands (definitely what this movie is going for), and 2. this movie is too stupid even to know how to make dynamic human drama within that framework anyway. It's all so dumb and boring and shallow, and I hate it. Grade: D

Lu Over the Wall (夜明け告げるルーのうた) (2017)
The story elements are pretty much garbage across the board—thin characters, lumpily structured screenplay, etc., although I think there are some interesting ideas here regarding grief and commercialization that get kind of buried in all the narrative flotsam. But oh man, the animation style—it's no secret by now that Masaaki Yuasa is one of the best, most forward-thinking animation directors out there, and while this is hardly his most formally dazzling movie, it does accomplish one of his most impressive technical feats in that it takes Flash animation and makes it legitimately gorgeous. The color, blobby, overly smooth textures of that style are uniquely suited to the extremely watery story, and it's a wonder to behold. Also, for a movie about a band, it's a welcome grace note that the music slaps. Grade: B

We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011)
The character of Kevin being so one-dimensionally EVIL keeps this movie from anything close to a compelling thesis on parenting or child psychology or mass-shooter psychology or any of the number of interesting issues the film brushes past. There's always the implication that Tilda Swinton's character gives us an unreliable POV through the film's flashbacks, which might make a provocative point about how we retroactively rationalize tragedies by creating cartoon villains out of their perpetrators if the movie had decided to commit to the unreliability just a tad more—as it is, there isn't a ton about the present-day scenes that flags the memories as distorted, particularly the final scene with Kevin in the prison. Which means that this movie is, despite its fancy arthouse trappings, pretty much in the territory of The Omen: a horror movie by way of a miserable walk alongside an unspeakable evil manifested in the form of a child and reflected in the abusive actions of the parent. Oh, but it is exquisitely miserable, though; Lynne Ramsay fills the film (esp. in the early goings) with a litany of disorienting camerawork that focuses on obscure textural details like distorted reflections twisting the characters into their psychologically true forms or mundane objects cropping shots into diabolically sideways glances at violence. The device of cutting to red paint at the precise moment we would expect to see blood is a consistently rattling one, too, and Tilda Swinton + Ezra Miller is the hellish screen duo I never knew I wanted. Oh, and per usual, Lynne Ramsay brings an absolutely choice soundtrack to make this all slide down. Exceptional craft on all fronts in service of a frustratingly unserious engagement with its topic. Grade: B

American Gangster (2007)
Those who say that this movie doesn't add much to the "revisionist gangster picture" genre that the likes of The Godfather and Goodfellas didn't already cover are both right and also kind of missing the point. Yes, it is a rehashing of how the sociopolitical thrust of the 20th century in America has created a system in which a lot of the boundaries between law enforcement, organized crime, and corporate capitalism are merely ceremonial distinctions that annoint prejudice and capital as arbiters of morality. But I'd say the framing of this story within an explicitly African-American perspective (or at least halfway framing it that way—there is still the Russell Crowe half of the film, which is largely boring, I think)—and not just an African-American perspective but an African-American perspective explicitly in opposition to an Italian-American perspective—is a fundamentally new way to approach these themes, and even if the movie does kind of feel stylistically on autopilot for large pieces of it, it's still pretty interesting to see the tropes of the genre play out differently, even on a relatively small scale, e.g. the use of soul, funk, and disco on the soundtrack to mark the passing years instead of Sinatra and the Rolling Stones. It's also one of the first major films of this style to be made after the memeified popularity of De Palma's Scarface, as well as in the wake of HBO's The Wire, which gives the movie an interestingly elegiac stance toward its crime-lord subject. The story of, for example, The Godfather is the story of ethnicity clawing its way into whiteness and then embodying its worst attributes, while the fact of Denzel's character's blackness makes that sort of narrative into a Greek tragedy rather than the Shakespearean one that Pacino's Michael Corleone embodies; Denzel is not a victim of his own worst impulses but rather a system that capriciously punishes only some of its adherent's worst impulses, which makes the movie present the guy with a measure of sympathy that a lot of previous mob epics lack—a less nuanced narrative, for sure, but it also is a much more politically direct one re: the limitations of the American Dream for people unable/unwilling to assimilate into the default-respectable majority. I've spilled a lot of ink over a movie that, on the whole, is pretty solidly middle-of-the-road, so don't take this as a complete ringing endorsement or anything, but there's a spark here that won't die. Grade: B

Television

Angel, Season 3 (2001-2002)
Angel's third season is a considerable step forward for the series. The show's episodic structure melds the case-of-the-week elements with its serialized, mythological flourishes in a much more organic way than in previous seasons, and after the game-changing Pylea arc at the end of the last season, the mythology of the show has become both a lot more fun and whimsical while also becoming a lot deeper. Really kooky stuff happens here involving demon babies and curses and magic sex, and the third season is able to spin this into some powerfully tragic arcs involving Wesley and Angel. It's still a little uneven from episode to episode, and the "LA noir" aesthetic is still pretty bland. But this is the first time in this series where I've felt like the long-term plotting was anything close to as engaging as what Buffy was doing around the same time, and that's pretty exciting. Plus, there's a real corker of a cliffhanger at the end of the season, too. Grade: B+

Music

Lil Nas X - 7 (2019)
Haters may hate, but for this writer, the saga of "Old Town Road" and its ability to riiiiiiide the charts 'til it can't no more is the feel-good story of the year. It doesn't hurt that the song itself is a bop. The rest of the songs on this EP are respectable but not amazing, but it only works in this EP's favor that 25 percent of its songs are versions of "Old Town Road." Grade: B

Matmos - Plastic Anniversary (2019)
Like their previous album, Ultimate Care II, which was created entirely from sounds sampled from the washing machine of the same name, Plastic Anniversary is an album that shocks by how thoroughly it justifies its gimmicky concept. This time, the album is constructed entirely from sampled sounds made with plastic objects—plastic wrap, plastic tubes, plastic silicone gel implants for breast augmentation... it's all here. There's an ecological bent to some of this (e.g. the apocalyptic "Collapse of the Fourth Kingdom" and its visions of the earth's death by microplastics) and a more humanly political bent to other parts ("Thermoplastic Riot Shield"), but mostly, it's just an engaging experimental-electronic album. I caught this duo live a few weeks ago, and they were delightful and surprisingly hilarious; that extends to the album itself, which has this great sense of play beyond the other thematic aims I've already mentioned. It's a ludicrous concept for an album, and Matmos are having a ball. Grade: B+

Mini Reviews for July 8-14, 2019

HELLO! The randomly selected reader suggestion for this week is.... *long, beleaguered sigh* another Adam Sandler movie: The Longest Yard. Just because I'm dedicated, I also watched the original 1974 version of The Longest Yard. I'll keep the rest of the suggestions in the pool, and if you want to put in a suggestion for next week (or put in another one), here's the link:

Just click here to submit a suggestion for next week's review post!

Movies

The Longest Yard (1974)
For what is nominally a comedy, The Longest Yard is impressively mean—the blood and broken necks aren't jokes as much as a really grimy middle finger toward the criminal justice establishment by way of depicting its most viceral excesses. This is textbook "1970s Hollywood filmmaking," vivacious and shaggy and raw, and there's a real "blood on the turf" feel to this movie that I really wasn't expecting. It was a nice surprise. Not nice and not surprising: I didn't like Burt Reynolds here, and his character never worked for me, especially not his longer arc from roughing up his girlfriend in the first scene to becoming a hero of the common man by the film's end. The movie is also more shambling and hang-out-y than I'd like it to be, and the first half of the movie in particular is kind of a drag in stretches. Again, textbook "1970s Hollywood filmmaking," but you know, the bad parts this time. Grade: B-

The Longest Yard (2005) Reader Suggestion!
It lacks the grit or the subversive spirit of the 1974 original while also maintaining one of the original's chief downsides: the casting Burt Reynolds. Mostly gone are the critiques of the criminal justice system, replaced by a kind of egregious "southern gents on the plantation" version of the snobs vs. slobs film that emerges from the bones of the older film, and then you have to deal with the whole litany of unfunny scatological humor, homophobia, transphobia, and light misogyny that's apparently de rigueur of a Sandler vehicle, to say nothing of the completely broken, rambling structure of the movie—somehow even flabbier than that of the original film. Billy Madison being so eccentric and watchable made me think I might have a few secret Sandler affinities rattling around inside of me, but I think by now I can pretty safely call my reaction there a one-time fluke. Grade: C- 

The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part (2019)
I was honestly bored for stretches of this movie, which is not something I thought I'd say about the sequel to The Lego Movie. It has all the ingenious worldbuilding and low-key philosophy with barely half of the sense of humor that made that all fun in the first movie. Like, this movie doesn't even try to be funny for long sequences, which is fine I guess, except "action-adventure" isn't nearly this style's forte compared to "comedy-adventure," so it's all just a little flatter than the original. That's not to say this is bad, necessarily, and there are good parts—the animation is still stellar, the character designs are inventive, and the ultimate message of "The world sucks, but that doesn't mean that happiness has no place" is a good one. It just pales in comparison to the original, which I think we all knew was going to be the case, though I was holding out hope that it would be just a tad better than this. Grade: B-

Isn't It Romantic (2019)
The movie's subversion of old rom-com tropes is really just a way for the film to back its way into being a rom com itself, which is fine. Parody that doesn't come from a place of love can be overly bitter, and Isn't It Romantic's vibes are winsome and fun, particularly on the strength of Rebel Wilson's sweetly sardonic performance. That's all well and good. But as a subversion of the rom com, I wish this movie were doing more than just lampshading unrealistic tropes, and as a rom com itself, I wish the movie were, you know, more romantic and more comedic. Grade: B-

This Is the End (2013)
I wish this were funnier and had more than two jokes (1. "This star is playing himself and referencing his own career!" 2. "Masturbation!"). Because there's something fitting about one of the last true Apatow-stable comedies being the literal apotheosis of the form: a who's who of the previous decade of comedy judged by none other than God Almighty. As the Bible says, "Many will come and say, 'Lord, Lord, have we not improvised in thy name and in thy name crafted dick jokes?' Then the Lord will profess unto them, 'I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity.'" Grade: C

Saved! (2004)
Like a lot of 2000s teen comedies (including some of the greats, like Mean Girls), the structure is kind of lumpy, and some of the beats haven't aged super well—that bit where they find the old fat pictures of Mandy Moore and plaster them everywhere? Yikes (though possibly a snide reference to A Walk to Remember?). The movie is also not particularly funny, which places it behind its 2004 sister, Mean Girls (despite the presence of a few delectable quotables: e.g. "I'm saving myself for marriage, and I'll use force if necessary"). But as someone who grew up in the Evangelical Christian world myself, I enjoyed seeing that world skewered. Parts of it felt a little foreign to me, maybe accounting for the differences between Evangelicalism in Baltimore, MD, compared to Memphis, TN—e.g. the significance attached to the religious jewelry, the lack of scriptural proof-texting in their discussions of morality, the lack of modesty culture and shaming in the sex "education" (sex was deadly serious in my church growing up, and there's no way they wouldn't have spent days hammering in how sinful extramarital activity is/how important "biblical" marriage is) etc. And I'm not sure about transplanting the "mean girl/queen bee" archetype into an Evangelical setting; there was plenty of leveraging morality and spiritual practice for gaming social power dynamics where I grew up, but that particular trope feels like an ungainly carryover from teen movie conventions rather than an authentic expression of how church kids leverage morality and theology to their own ends. But there's a lot that's spot-on, too, from the picture of George W. Bush framed at the front of the classroom to the kind of ecstatic response to worship music (hands in the air, e.g.) to the hokey co-opting of secular culture for theological purposes. Jena Malone is a fantastic lead, too, and the moment where she realizes that Jesus isn't listening to her (after she finds out she's pregnant) is probably the realest moment in this movie. Like I said, it's not a very funny movie for a comedy, but it has a beating heart not typical of the teen comedy genre—probably a more appropriate tenor at which to engage religion anyway. Grade: B

Books

Trust Exercise by Susan Choi (2019)
Susan Choi's previous novel, My Education (a novel I wasn't a huge fan of), chronicles in uncomfortable personal detail a toxic sexual affair. In some ways, Trust Exercise is entirely different, focusing on teens at a performing arts school rather than a grad student at a university. In another way, though, there are a lot of similarities between the two novels, with Trust Exercise leveraging intense psychological imprints and unflinching descriptions of emotionally and sensorily searing experiences in a way reminiscent of My Education (though, I'd wager, much more interestingly). But just what affair lies at the novel's center is something that's hard to grasp. Each successive section of the novel's three parts calls into question the reliability and the point-of-view of the prior section, pulling further and further out from the novel's original pages toward something that approximates the "truth," though in a novel whose reality folds in on itself accordion-style to such an extent, the idea of "truth" somewhat collapses. To a degree, this is a mystery to be solved (though the parameters of the mystery don't reveal themselves until the second section begins), parsing clues in the later sections to cut through the fictions of the earlier ones, but to another degree, the mystery is an end to itself irrespective of whatever answers you find. Trust Exercise is a novel about the process of fictionalizing—the way that the telling of a story warps reality around the storyteller's psyche. It's all very meta and clever, which I suppose will be a turn-off for some, but I found it thrilling. Grade: A-

Music

Bruce Springsteen - Western Stars (2019)
The output of Bruce Springsteen in the 21st century has been, to one degree or another, corny. This isn't to say that it hasn't been good, but even his best albums this century—The Rising, Wrecking Ball—have had a loud, modern-rock production and occasionally broad songwriting that, admittedly, warrant an eye roll or two. Western Stars isn't exactly corn-free, but its introspective lyrics and subdued production choices bring it closer to the po-faced rock troubadourism of Springsteen's '80s than anything this side of Y2K has. Songs like "Hello Sunshine" and the title track are somber, ruminative compositions built on subtle instrumental flourishes and a low Springsteen croon—you could fairly complain that his albums over the past twenty years have been short on the personal storytelling that the man built his career upon, but Western Stars leans heavily into that mode, engaging the Boss's depression more directly than ever before. And even the moments that do scan as corny here ("There Goes My Miracle," "Sleepy Joe's Café") are corny in new ways. Springsteen is trying new song structures and modes here, and even if that's not always 100% successful, it's still exciting to see an artist more than 40 years into his career still pushing himself to create a sincere piece of craft. Grade: B+

Interview: Andrew Swafford

Andrew Swafford, looking very ambient himself

Last month, I started a new feature where I interview my friends who are artists. My first interview was with my friend Jake Ward; I had fun with that, so I thought I'd try it again, this time with my buddy Andrew Swafford.

I met Andrew two years ago when he accepted a job as an English teacher at the same high school where I taught—he's since moved on to a different school, but since we're both still living in Knoxville, it was easy to sit down and chat with him.

A few things to know about Andrew: he and I both attended UT at the same time, though we somehow never met. I've been told he is my doppelgänger. He is an avid movie buff, more so than even I am, given that co-leads the film podcast Cinematary and has written extensively for the companion site, as well as created a handful of video essays; you may have seen me link to the site here a few times here when I've had a piece published there, and you can thank Andrew for that—he was my connection to Cinematary. Most importantly for this interview, though, Andrew is a composer of ambient music.

Currently, Andrew has released two albums of ambient music: Synth Tests and Welcome and Unwelcome Spirits, and in the interview, we talk extensively about his work and his connection to the ambient genre. I am a pretty novice listener of ambient music, but Andrew has a deep reservoir of knowledge of the genre and has a lot of interesting things to say about this music. He's also helpfully provided links to the music he mentions in the interview, so you can listen along to what he's talking about. I hope you enjoy the conversation!


Interview

Michael: What got you started with music?

Andrew: I think that my earliest music memory is about wanting to make music, even before wanting to listen to music. There were definitely teenybopper bands that everyone was listening to when I was a little kid, like Aaron Carter and NSYNC and stuff like that. But the first time that music made a really big impression on me was when an older cousin of mine came to visit the house and brought his acoustic guitar and played songs for my dad, who also played acoustic guitar. So I remember seeing this dude who was much older than me and thinking he was really cool and wanting to do that. And then a couple years later, I got an acoustic guitar of my own and started to learn—I think I was getting into listening to music around the same time. What was really popular then was the mall-goth and pop-punk stuff: Green Day, blink-182, My Chemical Romance, and all those bands. I was in middle school and listening to all that and covering music by those bands. I didn’t have a lot of great equipment. But what that music is made of is so rudimentary—you just had to know how to make power chords with like three fingers and just move around to make different progressions.

M: So mall-goth to ambient—where’s that bridge?

A: Well, for most of my “career” as a musician, I’ve been inside the singer-songwriter genre, writing music on acoustic and electric guitars and playing and singing stuff that I wrote through high school and college, going to open mics and playing at what were called “Acoustic Nights” that UT would put on now and then. I put together a handful of original songs—probably a grand total of about eight or nine—but I just hit a wall after a little while. There were a few reasons, one being that in terms of guitar playing, there’s a certain emphasis on technicality and honing your technical skills that I was only going to go so far with; for a lot of folks who get into playing electric guitar, one of their main interests is, “I want to learn how to play fast solos; I want to play ‘Sweet Child of Mine.’”

M: Or “Eruption.”

A: [laughs] Or “Eruption.” So I think that there are physical limitations that I have as a guitar player, but I also don’t have a lot of interest in being able to pick or move my fingers really fast. I can only do so much with the guitar, and mostly what I was interested in when I was playing the guitar primarily were pedals and making my guitar sound like other things and making different atmospheres and textures with the sound of my guitar. There was a really influential interview that I read with Omar Rodríguez-López of The Mars Volta, where he was talking about the last days of At the Drive-In, the band he was in before The Mars Volta. He said that at that time, he was most interested in making his guitar sound like not a guitar, and I remember taking that as an ethos of mine and trying to go with it. In high school I was making a lot of recordings just with a little pedal I had, one of those all-in-one kits that had like a dozen different sounds, and just making weird collage music with the electric guitar. But I hit a wall there on a technical level and became a little bored with guitar music.

But what I was playing when I was playing out in front of an audience was the singer-songwriter, four-chord stuff. And another reason I gave up on that was that I hate, hate, hate writing lyrics. When I was really in that juvenile phase in high school where you feel like all your thoughts and emotions really matter and people need to hear about my personal struggle, it was easier for me then, but with a certain amount of self-consciousness and also studying literature and poetry and stuff like that, I raised the standards for myself in terms of what would I want my lyrics to be like. I don’t know if I’m capable of stuff like that; I’m just not a great creative writer. And also, it’s just a frustrating process for me, so at a certain point, I decided that if I’m going to continue to make music, I want it to be instrumental music. And because there are so many limitations when it comes to the guitar, I wanted to branch out and find a way to create a broader palette of sounds. Another big chapter of this story involves me being an accompanist to other people. So, for example, I played lead guitar in a praise and worship band for my church, I ended up playing guitar for a touring praise and worship band that played in a youth conference in Gatlinburg one summer, and I ended up playing lead guitar for a friend of mine, Christina Daugherty; she makes folksy music on the classical guitar, and I joined up with her specifically to make atmospheric sounds around her. I was doing that thing where I was playing electric guitar but trying to make it sound not like an electric guitar. Doing that for her made me realize a) in a rock or folk context, I am much more of a helping hand than a lead, and b) I was more interested in making atmospheres and textures than I was making structured songs. (I use the word “song” a lot, but that’s really more of a fallback. I don’t really make songs; I make “tracks” or “compositions” or whatever you want to call them.) So that was a huge stepping stone, where I thought, “What if I made music that was just primarily ambient as opposed to providing a backing track for someone who was doing something more conventional?”

M: So that’s all, of course, collaborative. Most music that has some sort of live component is collaborative to an extent, with multiple instrumentalists and stuff like that. And there are some examples of collaboration in ambient music; there’s the Fripp and Eno collaborations. Have you ever thought about musical collaborations with your ambient music?

A: I would love to do some collaborations on the ambient side. I don’t know many people who make instrumentally focused music. I have friends who play guitar and friends who play banjo and drums and stuff like that, but mostly in a folk or indie-rock context. One thing I am very interested in doing is maybe making some music with my friend Dylan, who’s been a big source of feedback for me. He plays the viola, and every day, he will get his viola out and practice around with some scales or sheet music or drones that he makes up. I think that we could be a really good pairing if we were ever able to have an extended jam/recording session making music that had electronics on the one hand and this very organic, classical sound on the other hand. I think that’s been done by various people, like Maya Beiser—she makes experimental music on the cello. There’s a Icelandic musician, Hildur Guðnadóttir, with an album called Without Sinking, who makes ambient music with the cello along the lines of Sigur Rós. That could be interesting new sonic territory for me to branch out into.

M: So you’ve given us the big picture of the journey, but when was it that you definitively started making ambient music?

A: So just like two and a half years ago, I used my tax return to buy a synthesizer with a pretty comprehensive bank of sounds specifically well-suited for atmospheric, instrumental stuff, and I just made it a project of mine to play around with it and record the things that I was making—basically, my guesswork. I didn’t have any training on the piano or keyboard, so I was figuring it out as I went along and documenting the process, and that became an album.

M: Synth Tests.

A: Yeah, that was my first album.

M: So stuff that we hear on Synth Tests, I assume that’s curated? Like, “Synth Test 1” isn’t the first time you hit record, right?

A: There was a lot of playing around and improvisation before I decided to hit record on anything, but eventually I was like, “I know what a lot of the sounds on this machine do; what could I make if I stacked them—if I went into Garage Band and recorded multiple tracks and made something that more resembled a song or an ambient track? The first track on Synth Tests literally is that first recording that I did. There were other things that I did after that; I tried to start other recordings and abandoned them. But for the most part, those ten tracks on Synth Tests are the ten compositional experiments that I did when I was teaching myself how to play and record the synthesizer.

M: Had you been listening to ambient music already at this point?

A: I definitely got into listening to ambient music way before I was interested in making ambient music. I think it was something I discovered in college. I don’t have a vivid memory of what the first ambient album I got was, but I know that one of the reasons for my interest was that I was looking for music to help me go to sleep. I think a common criticism of ambient music is, “Oh, this is so boring, it’s putting me to sleep,” but that is kind of the point. I want music that really relaxes me. There are a lot of ambient albums that I’ve listened to the end of very few times because I am so often asleep before I get to the end. So I would say that I explored the genre and listened to a lot of the big figures and albums in the genre for close to ten years before I decided to start making ambient music of my own. By then, I had a pretty broad pool of influences to pull from. When I first started recording ambient music and I was putting my synth tests on Soundcloud with no intention of making an album, in the description of every track I would put what the influences where for that track, like, “For this track, I’m trying to do a Steve Roach thing,” or “I’m trying to do a GAS thing,” or whatever. I don’t do that so much anymore, but I always have a lot of different personal inspirations bouncing around in my head. I am often trying to imitate the sounds of various artists and put them together in interesting ways.

M: I’ve listened to ambient music, but not nearly as much as you have, and one of the things that I find is that—well, it’s not that the music is same-y, but if I listen to, like, Music for Airports or if you listen to some of Aphex Twin’s ambient music, I would hear that music and not understand what different permutations can be made of this. Which is different from, like, rock music, which can have a lot of the same instrumental backing, but the lyrics can change. Since rock or R&B or music that’s more concretely grounded in live performances, etc., has more of a tangible structure, for me personally as a listener, I can better understand how people can interchange different parts to create something new. Whereas with ambient music, I can understand that ambient tracks are different from one another, but I couldn’t come up with something new, if that makes sense. As a creator, is it hard to figure out new variations?

A: That’s a good question, because I do feel like the variations are so much more infinite in ambient music. I’ve probably listened to rock music longer than any other genre, and I feel like there are not a lot of surprises in store for me in what rock music can be. But I have yet to exhaust the scope of what ambient music can sound like. It can be noise music—some people would describe Sunn O)))’s music as ambient, or the first Earth album, both of which are these metal experiments. And then on the other end of the spectrum you can have someone like William Basinski, who’s just putting these soft, warm loops on for like an hour-plus. Or Steve Roden, who did Forms of Paper—he has created these weird musical experiments by putting really high-powered condenser mics on pieces of paper and getting different sounds from crumpling and rolling paper. It’s such a broad spectrum that it’s hard to know where the borders of this genre lie. And so because there are so many different takes on it, I feel like, as a creator, it’s easy for me to look at what has been done and go like, “Okay, let’s do this style mixed with this style and try to find an interesting middle ground here.” For me, I think that one thing that sets my ambient music apart from others is that because I’m coming from a background of listening to rock music and playing to singer-songwriter-type music, I often approach ambient music instinctually with more of a structure than other folks do. Rather than having these broad expanses of sound that could go on for five minutes or fifty minutes, a lot of my stuff ends up having a premeditated arc to it. That is something I’ve tried to break out of. If you listen to Synth Tests from beginning to end, you’ll notice that one of the big changes from Track 1 to Track 10 is that the tracks get longer, and they get a little bit more meandering and exploratory. I can’t tell if the fact that I tend to put a structure into my music is a positive thing or a negative thing. I want to be able to flex my drone muscles a little bit more, but part of my programming as a rock/singer-songwriter musician precludes me from doing that.

M: Related to that, in the notes for your most recent album [Welcome and Unwelcome Spirits], you have a little treatise where you talk about how it’s “an ambient album haunted by pop music.” On a literal level, there are two pop song covers on the album, but more generally, tell me about the interplay between ambient and pop on the record.

A: It was an evolution of what I was doing on Synth Tests. On Synth Tests, it has two bookending tracks that use elements from poetry; there are lyrics on “Synth Test 1” and “Synth Test 10,” and they both come from famous poets. “Synth Test 1” has a line from William Blake’s “To Nobodaddy” that’s repeated multiple times, and then “Synth Test 10” has a couplet from Pablo Neruda’s “So That You Will Hear Me” that I sing on that track. So on Welcome and Unwelcome Spirits, it’s partly an evolution of that idea: what if I bookended this with pop music rather than poetry? But it also came about sort of accidentally, because after I was done with Synth Tests, I made a challenge to myself: could I take these tools that I’ve used to make ambient music and make pop music with it? I spent like a month constructing this really elaborate cover of Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide,” and I was really happy with the way it turned out; I think it’s one of the most perfect parts of that album. But it wasn’t originally planned to be part of an album. It was just going to be a standalone little experiment. And then as I continued recording ambient and electronic stuff, I ended up accumulating enough stuff to make a record out of it. So I thought, “How can I make some sort of counterpoint to that Fleetwood Mac cover?” So I decided to make a dual-sided album, kind of like an LP, where the first half would be fairly pleasant and uplifting songs, and the second half would be more haunting and dark-toned tracks. So the pop counterpoint that felt right for that was the BonIver song “666 ʇ,” which is in a major key and is kind of inspiring-sounding, but it has a lot of lyrical and aesthetic signifiers that have occult associations. So in that record, I do a lot of referencing and playing with the idea of ghosts and hauntings, and that song felt like an appropriate capper. I’m also very inspired by people like Bon Iver and Thom Yorke, who have broken out of the confines of indie rock music to create a more multi-faceted, electronic sound, which I think is part of what I have done as a musician, so I wanted to pay homage to [Justin Vernon] in that way.

M: Yeah, it’s almost an inverse of the rock trope of the “pivot-to-electronic” album, like Kid A or whatever. Still talking about Welcome and Unwelcome Spirits, in your liner notes, you also talk about the relationship between the old and the new; you mentioned sonically the duality of the album, but it seems like you had an almost philosophical bent to that duality, too. You have the two songs with lyrics on that album because they’re from Bon Iver and Fleetwood Mac, but to what extent do you think ambient music can bear that meaning? Because when we think of other forms of music, we look at the lyrics to tell us what it means, and that’s not there in ambient music.

A: Yeah, it’s kind of like you’re making abstract art. Abstract painting can have socio-political undertones to it, but it can be very hard to pinpoint what exactly those are.

M: I think Andy Warhol said at one point that what was more important about art was what was written about art [ed. note: cannot confirm that Warhol actually said this], and I can definitely understand that with artists like the guy who does the paintings of different colored squares [Piet Mondrian]. And you read what kind of philosophical aims those guys had, and you nod your head and go, “Yeah, that’s interesting.”

A: But would I have gotten there on my own?

M: Right. And maybe that’s not important? The fact that you have an aesthetic experience can be enough, maybe. I think a lot of artists would say that. But you have the written piece on your album that seems to indicate that you did have something in mind beyond just an aesthetic experience.

A: With music, you have the benefit of liner notes. An album I think about a lot is The Caretaker’s An Empty Bliss Beyond ThisWorld. Have you listened to that album?

M: I haven’t.

A: Really, really good album. The Caretaker is an electronic musician who makes sample-based music, and all the samples come from 1920s-era 78 rpm jazz records that are so old that when you play them, there’s so much crackle and pop that you’re hearing more crackle and pop than music at some points. He makes these extended electronic-ambient tracks out of them, and as you go from the beginning to the end of the album, you hear less signal and more noise. His liner notes talk about how this album is meant to be an approximation of what it’s like to live with Alzheimer’s, how your memories fade and become blurred into one another. The same thing is true for William Basinski’s Disintegration Loops; he talks about those in relation to the fact that the first one was made on 9/11. He claims he was actually listening to the first one as he saw the towers coming down in New York City. When you have that extra-textual stuff, it can add meaning to music that maybe a listener wouldn’t inherently find meaning in. Aside from those extra-textuals, you just have the tone or associations with the melodies. Like, for example, in Synth Tests, I have a song that quotes the score from Twin Peaks, and I’m kind of drawing a comparison there. But you also have song titles that can add some sort of a meaning to music that might not be there initially. One of the songs that gave me the idea to frame Welcome and Unwelcome Spirits in the way that I did is the song “Smarm,” which is the second-to-last track on the album (I ended up sequencing that album differently than Synth Tests; it’s not just put in the order that I made them, but it’s meant to have a structural integrity to it). I made that song after watching a random YouTube video from an alt-light asshole gamer-boy, and I was just so mad at his tone of voice in making that video that I was like, “I want to express the way I’m feeling right now musically and make something that has a nasally whine to it.” So I ended up making “Smarm.” Then later on in the process of making that album, I made a counterpoint to it called, “Snark.” So just through the tone and titles of those two tracks, I was trying to express something about the discourse of the moment.

M: Did you go about making “Snark” as an intentional counterpoint, or is that something that you arrived at later, realizing it as the counterpoint?

A: I made it as a counterpoint. Before I started recording, I had a point in mind that I wanted it to sound like and play off of the other song, which was just symptomatic of how that album is different from Synth Tests: a lot of it was premeditated and written, as opposed to me playing around and half-improvising.

M: Who would you say you’re making music for? I think you said earlier [before we started recording] that you feel like you are the person who listens to your music the most—are you just making stuff to entertain yourself?

A: I mean, I think I make music that could potentially appeal to a lot of folks who listen to the kind of electronic, ambient music that I listen to. Now, whether or not they’re going to hear it, because of the no-budget marketing scale that I’m working on, is another question altogether.

M: There’s a lot of ambient music out there.

A: There’s so much. So unless you’re spelunking through Bandcamp and listening to everything you possibly can, you’re probably not going to come across my music. So, I haven’t gotten a lot of feedback from people who have heard it, so I don’t necessarily know what people who like my music are looking for. So I’m mostly making it for myself (what is something that I want to do or make?), and aside from that, the only feedback I’ve gotten is feedback from friends whom I’ve intentionally shown my music to, some of which have enjoyed it. Some of them you know: my movie friends Lydia, Cam, Nathan, and Dylan—Dylan is my biggest listener. Anytime I make something, I send it to him, and he usually gives me some kind of feedback, and I make future alterations or tweaks catering to what seems to be working. It’s a very small circle of people who are my de-facto audience as it exists right now.

M: Do you enjoy that smallness? I remember listening to an interview with Pink Floyd’s guitarist, David Gilmour, about after that band released the song “Money” and they blew up commercially, and he talked about how after that, the band missed the days when their concerts were quieter and more intimate, rather than having a large crowd clamoring for something they’d already heard on the radio. Do you like the size audience that you have?

A: No matter how big my audience got, there would still be an isolated, bedroom quality to making and releasing this music, just because the max audience for any ambient artist is so small. We kind of live the exception because we live in Knoxville, Tennessee, where Big Ears [Music Festival] happens, and somehow an ambient musician can draw huge crowds, but anywhere else in the world, I don’t think that many ambient artists can generate much more than just a small cult following. Maybe the biggest name in ambient music might be someone like Tim Hecker, and I don’t see Tim Hecker as a rock star.

M: There’s Brian Eno, I guess, although I guess he’s more popular as a producer now than for his work as an ambient artist. Aphex Twin had some MTV stuff—wasn’t “Windowlicker” on MTV?

A: That’s true, and he’s a guy who straddles the line of ambient and electronic, which is something that I think I do, too, but he’s so good at the electronic side of things that I think the stuff of his that has the widest appeal is almost dance music.

M: Do you have any interest in making dance music?

A: I would love to, but there are certain technical, material limitations on that for me right now. In order to make dance music, you need to have a big MIDI controller with a bunch of samples you can trigger all at once. You also need to have access to a program like Ableton Live, which allows you to store up this library of samples. These are all things that are fairly expensive. I am coasting off a tax return from three years ago; I have one synthesizer and some guitar equipment that I use in my ambient music from time to time, and I’m just trying to see how many different things I can make from those raw materials.

M: You mentioned your “movie friends” earlier—you’ve made music for a film, right?

A: I have made music for two short films that are out, and I’m currently in the process of making music for another short film that will be coming out, hopefully next month, fingers crossed. The first one I made was for a short film called “The Cabin” by my friend Dylan. I don’t think it’s available anywhere, but I’m really proud of that score I made, which is like one continuous 11-minute track. That was my first foray into making electronic, ambient music.

M: So pre-Synth Tests?

A: Pre-Synth Tests, pre-me having a synthesizer. That was just me using the “musical typing” feature on Garage Band, and I was able to make some stuff that I was pretty happy with. The second short that I did a score for—well, I really just contributed to the score; I wasn’t the exclusive composer for that. It was a short film called “Deja in Wonderland.” It was originally three very small shorts that were eventually stitched together into one longer short film. I have a track that plays in the first chapter and a track that plays in the third chapter. The story of that is my friend Deja getting out of college and not knowing what to do with her life, and so she puts her life into an Alice in Wonderland narrative. The beginning is her falling down the rabbit hole, and the end is her in a much darker place, and so I was making tracks that matched those two moods. Those tracks ended up being on Welcome and Unwelcome Spirits and giving me the idea to split the album down the middle and have the light tracks on the front half and the darker tracks in the back end. That is where the split happens; track 5 is called “Deja’s Balloon,” which is the track I did for the first chapter of the film, and track 6 is called “Deja’s Spider,” which is an extended version of the track I did for the third chapter. I’m making another thing for her now that I’m really excited about. I don’t think it’s quite as ambitious musically as what I did on my first two records, but it is tailor-made for this short film, which is so much more ambitious for her. It is kind of a neon-soaked slow-cinema thriller set in a rideshare context in downtown Nashville, so what I’m doing is a lot more drone-y and a lot more laced with stingers, because it’s a horror short. So, very different from music I’m used to making, but I’m very excited for people to see that short; it’s going to be awesome, and I’ll be putting out my score as an EP that should be less than 15 minutes, and that should be out next month [ed. note: since this interview was conducted in June, that would be July].

M: So for this most recent film, you mentioned making music that interacted with the film elements. For the other pieces you made, were you mostly working independent of the filmmaking process?

A: Sort of. With Dylan’s short, “The Cabin,” I had the whole film before I started making the music, so I was breaking it up into chapters mentally and making passages that went with different scenes. That’s the same process I’m going through right now with this new short, which is called “ETA.” The newest Garage Band actually has a really cool feature where you can plug in a movie and let the movie play while you’re composing and recording. So when I’m recording now, I’m also watching what I’m composing for. But with the other score, “Deja in Wonderland,” she was sending me ideas and snippets and photos, and I was composing around those, and she was giving me lots of feedback. So I would just keep making sketches until I came up with something that she thought she could edit to, and in that case, it was more like the music and movie were being constructed in tandem with one another.

M: I was going to ask you what you’re working on next, but I guess that’s it, right?

A: Yep. I want to work on another record, but it will not be a thing that I work on this year. Usually, I make a record over the summer, and this summer, I’m pretty busy with that score as well as a video essay project I’m working on for Cinematary [ed. note: the video has since come out, and you can watch it here], so I don’t think I’m going to get a big chunk of it done this summer like I have in the past. But it’s definitely a thing on the horizon. I’ll probably go back to the process I used on Synth Tests and Welcome and Unwelcome Spirits—making individual tracks and seeing how they coalesce into a larger whole later on down the line. If I had to guess, it will probably come out early to mid 2020. But who knows.

M: Election music.

A: Election music. Maybe that will be the theme next time.

M: Maybe you can make titles that will be inappropriately appropriated by politicians, like Bruce Springsteen.

A: Exactly.

M: What are you listening to these days?

A: I’m listening to more pop music than anything else. As you know, you and I did a teaching project last year where we taught a unit structured around the music of Jay-Z and Taylor Swift, and doing that project has gotten me into Taylor Swift and gotten me more interested in listening to the other pop stars that I enjoy, like Carly Rae Jepsen and Hailey Steinfeld and people like that, as well as Beyoncé’s concert film and the soundtrack that got put out for that, HOMECOMING. So I feel like I’m listening to a lot of pop divas more than anything else at the moment—other than the ambient electronic music that I’m always listening to when I’m working or going to sleep. That’s kind of a mainstay.

M: So your last album was “haunted by pop music.” Do you think all this listening will bleed into your music in any way?

A: I don’t know. I think there’s a technical limitation. I can only make music that sounds so much like pop. That “Landslide” cover is about as close as I think I can get to making legit pop music. With the Bon Iver cover, I was trying to make a pop song into a drone track. You can definitely tell that there’s a verse and a chorus there, but it all sort of bleeds into each other. I think I’m more comfortable in that mode. “Landslide” took so long to make, and I don’t think that is my wheelhouse. But I can’t help but be influenced by the structure and melody of pop music in whatever I make.

M: It is the era of the DJ in pop music.

A: That’s true.

M: I have one more question to ask. Obviously your music is on Bandcamp, and you communicate a lot with people via the internet. The internet and electronic music are really closely intertwined.

A: Aphex Twin would not exist without file sharing.

M: Yeah, exactly. And you as an artist probably would not exist as an entity without the internet and Bandcamp. What are your feelings on the role of the internet in your music and your distribution? Is this just a necessary thing that you do, or are you actually interested in the internet as a medium for music?

A: My answers for this are pretty much the standard answers you’ll hear from about anybody. There are gifts and curses to the internet being a music-distributing landscape. It democratizes music, because anyone can upload their stuff—i.e. me—but it also makes there be so much of it that you can’t get your music heard, and you can’t find the music that you might otherwise be into because there’s just so much out there. In terms of how I feel about the internet as a platform, there’s a reason I’ve chosen to take the route of Bandcamp to release my music, because I think that Spotify and Apple are both pretty nefarious companies when it comes to the way they treat artists (ed. note: in fact, since this interview, Spotify has stopped allowing artiststo upload their own music directly); Bandcamp is really the only platform that allows for the artist to actually be compensated however they would like to be compensated, whether they are fine giving it away for free or they want a specific amount of money to distribute physical copies or whatever. I have recently changed my setting on Bandcamp from being a pay-what-you-want artist to being an artist where all of my music costs money to buy. Both of my records now cost $7. I’ve gotten maybe three or four purchases total, so that has put a limitation on how many people are listening to my music, because it seems like there’s a paywall, even though you can stream it on the page if you want to. But I also think that when all music is given away for free—i.e. Spotify or Soundcloud or the pay-what-you-want artists on Bandcamp—music is essentially valueless, and the audience doesn’t necessarily feel that what they have access to actually has tangible value. Whereas if you actually pay money, you’re more likely to actually listen to it. Putting a numerical dollar amount on my music has sort of functioned as a way to make my music appear more valuable, whether or not that has actually been the case. I think I don’t have an audience because people aren’t likely to stumble across my music. My music doesn’t have any marketing push behind it, so the only way you’re going to hear about it is if you are my friend personally or you follow me on Twitter and you happen to see one of my tweets pushing my album.

M: You don’t want to go the Soulja Boy / Lil Nas X route of relentlessly self-promoting?

A: Relentlessly hacking and meme-ing my way to popularity? Again, I think there is a low ceiling for how popular any ambient electronic artist can get, even if I was to try to game the system that way. So I’m pretty resigned at the moment to making music for myself and being happy with whoever stumbles across my way who happens to appreciate the music. I’m really doing this as a creative outlet for myself more than anything else. But I do put a lot of thought into the presentation of my music: the track titles and album artwork and the construction of albums. So I want it to be listened to and engaged with, but I’ve accepted my fate that there’s only so much I can do to make that happen.

You can listen to / buy Andrew's music at his Bandcamp page.