‘I Didn’t Believe feat. Elizabeth Rose (Extended Version)’ by Flight Facilities

Alongside the irrepressibly cool LA duo Classixx, Sydney’s Flight Facilities have pretty much refined the appropriational balance inherent to all nu-disco: the very word implies revision, reconstitution, or amendment, and both acts seem to have opted for a satisfyingly even-handed approach to old and new sensibilities.

“All You’re Waiting For” and now “I Didn’t Believe” both forgo rhythmic and tuneful complication for precise pop comfort, and they mirror each other’s penchant for female-led hooks that stay simple and memorable. The new video for this Elizabeth Rose co-production also cops vibes and dance cues from vintage Soul Train clips, while the jangly guitar work is certainly riding the crest of a wave that Nile Rodgers’ reintroduction to the charts all but cemented. Especially in “I Didn’t Believe“‘s case, it’s simply old technique dressed up in modern frequencies. Rose on the other hand, singing with the wonderstruck wistfulness of her youth, breathlessly embodies the possibilities.

‘Julian! I Want To Be A Dancer!’ by Sibille Attar

On the rather ecstatically named “Julian! I Want To Be A Dancer!” we find Stockholm singer Sibille Attar injecting herself into a fictional tête-à-tête long foregone; sampled dialogue from ballet impresario Boris Lermontov, of Powell and Pressburger’s 1948 film The Red Shoes, opens the track, as Sibille playfully envisions herself on the receiving end, inheriting the pointe slips of Moira Shearer’s overdetermined dancer Vicky. She addresses her controlling tutor Lermontov and composer lover (the titular Julian) with equal amounts of disdain, defiantly proclaiming that she’ll turn the tables one day and make them dance to her tune, her voice skewing and slanting over a dawdling bass riff that’s pure Old-School Malkmus — a confident display for someone who’s likely oblivious to the fate that befalls them in Act 3.

It’s a spirited two-and-a-half minute reclamation of power for one of the silver screen’s most tortured female marionettes — it’s just a shame that the sentiment was pretty doomed from the start.

‘Darker’ by Gucci Mane feat. Chief Keef

Ice cream face Mane (formerly Guwop for like 32 whole minutes) teams up with the scourge of Chicago’s youth to hype up his all dark everything, but it’s Trackman’s menacing, after-midnight production that really pulls the shade over it all. The main piano refrain stops just short of going full “Tubular Bells,” but the effect is no less chilling, while the sound of church choirs echo so faint in the back they may as well be ghostly apparitions.

If the mood feels like following trap music down a dimly lit cobblestone alley, the lyrics go some way to paint the scene: Mane’s preoccupation is keeping his crew hopped up on the strongest of opiates and behind the most tinted of windows, and the hues involved are all purple, brown and blackish. Though not even Chief Keef’s verse can steer the subject away to something other than cars and codeine brews; diversions are few and wordplay is thin. But when it comes to staggered beats this intoxicatingly noirish, you can’t lose.

‘Only You Can Show Me (ft Mereki)’ by Goldroom

Okay, so no leisurely yoga poses here, but still a fun carousel of awkward, everyman dancing and colourful clothing that’s still a cut above your seasonal GAP swatches. So what’s in this Summer? Zesty limes and oranges, green kiwi and passion fruit pink, cool mint and maybe even a little ocean breeze blue. So fresh!

‘Numbers On The Boards’ by Pusha T

(Remember when I used to post music? Good times.) Apart from the core concept of racking up points for Team Push where it counts, the various basketball and American sports personality references here all escape me, but it’s still easy to appreciate the work ethic of someone so focused on the bottom line — “Twenty-five bricks, move work like chore / Hit Delaware twice, needed twenty-five more” he details over a basement refrigerator thrum, laying out the hard-pushing ethos that earned him his name and the drug-dealing itinerary of a past he’s too proud to let go of.

Above ostentatious displays of his ”drug and show money” and procured fashion choices —loose-fit Givenchy, anything but Michael Kors— Boards is all about his workmanlike commitment to slinging on the streets, which, as he reminds us going out, he has been doing for near thirty-six years; no small admission for a rapper who’s currently gaining as much in popularity as in age thanks to Kanye’s unstoppable GOOD initiative.

Filmed in France and lensed by ubiquitous Ed Banger art director So Me, the video is particularly great at utilising Paris’ naturally overcast, desaturating drizzle to accentuate the starkness of the beat, the greyness of the morality and the whites of his hungry eyes.

‘Cannonball (Live on Jimmy Fallon)’ by The Breeders

‘STAND UP COMEDY’ by Miranda July

Ms. July performed what could be best described as a one-woman variety show for Rachel Comey a few weeks ago and it’s predictably wonderful, but unpredictably everything else.

mhisadj:

Valentina - Wolves (The Svens Vocal Remix)

Serious club-vibes with this remix & I am diggin’ it.

Get it. And pre-order the EP @ iTunes.

NOWNESS Presents - Waterpark

Evan Prosofsky, the cinematographer behind Grimes’ “Oblivion”, Toro Y Moi’s “So Many Details” and many other analogue film gems has now turned his attention to directing, and “Waterpark”, his experimental and wordless 16-minute debut, demonstrates just how proficient he is, not only as a composer of images, but as a crafter of filmic mood and rhythm, and as an explorer of space.

His subject is the West Edmonton Mall and its showpiece waterpark, the biggest indoor waterpark in the world. It’s a marvel of large-scale engineering, suitably filmed in periphery-filling wide shots and observed with a quiet awe. Filmed over a three year period on Super 16mm stock, the vertiginous scaffolds, snaking waterslides and checkered glass ceilings are surveyed as if surreal landscapes from a ’70s science fiction movie. Transplanted palm trees and computer-controlled wave machines are billed as star attractions, offering semblances of a tropical paradise geographically out of reach, and Prosofsky needs little more than a few glances of his camera to capture the mall’s canny artificiality. Viewed from the top, the pill-shaped terrarium almost resembles a glassy escape pod, etched into the greater mall’s concrete mothership.

Soundtracking this all is fellow Canadian Alex Zhang Hungtai, a.k.a. Dirty Beaches, whose time-dilating drone provides Prosofsky’s images with an aural dimension vast enough to fill in for those dimensions lost in the transition to flat celluloid.

This is particularly blissful to me as West Edmonton Mall was one of my fondest holiday destinations growing up (children are so easily pleased). I’ve been down that rickety submarine, ate multi-coloured popcorn from that old gourmet popcorn store, and spent countless dollars at that home console arcade that you used to be able to play on a timed-token basis, which I’m no longer sure still exists because that was an AWESOME idea, and companies hate awesome ideas. You pretty much won’t find anyone else with rosy memories of foreign shopping malls, but I was a child. In CANADA. The country seemed as barren as Antarctica to me back then, so this monstrous pleasure dome was nothing short of an oasis.

Odiseo (by CANADA)

A sumptuous, efflorescent, and thoroughly NSFW advertisement (think a James Bond title sequence but hornier and on strong psychotropics) for Folch Studio’s new erotic print publication Odiseo, which winningly combines sex-related thinkpieces with naked ladiezz, in what’s probably a concerted effort to make the act of looking at naked ladiezzz more mature.

wearecrystalcastles:

Crystal Castles / Affection

Part of Crystal Castles’ appeal has always been their camera and press-shy mystique, which most likely manifested as a means to side-step the PR circus and avoid overexposure in an exposure-hungry age. But primarily it serves to bolster their carefully honed aesthetic of the withdrawn and mercurial goth introvert, the likes of which you’ll readily find in any fifth form cafeteria, casually skulking in the fringes on their lonesome, nose furrowed deep in Plath or Nietzsche.

The duo’s intimate insularity is so alienating and deliberate that it’s easy to perceive them as two members of an exclusive clique, or two close siblings distrusting enough to invent their own internal language of codes and ciphers — which is why it’s always striking when they come out of the woodwork for videos like this, to see them finally lift the funereal veil from their costumes of reticence and momentarily show the world just what the hell their deal is.

What we glimpse, at least on Alice’s part, is almost always a resistive form of non-performance, a lethargic goth posturing as affected as a punk rock snarl, which navigates a similarly uneasy divide between “I don’t care” and “but look at how much I don’t care.”

Whether propped up like an uncooperative mannequin in the video for “Suffocation,” or strangling herself with her own mic cord and pretend-shooting herself in the head, Kim Pine style, in this latest for “Affection”, Glass’ pantomimes are knowingly apathetic fuck yous to enthusiasm and life in general; “Catch a moth falling in your hand / Crush it casually,” Glass instructs here in desultory sing-sigh, as the harsh light of a torch beam illuminates her corpselike paleness—her own macabre version of being in the limelight.

It would feel a lot more phony if it wasn’t delivered by a group who rarely make these types of appearances, or a group who weren’t already 3 albums deep into besotted goth territory.

For now it sort of reminds me of the Fitzgerald sisters’ slideshow at the beginning of Ginger Snaps (a deserving touchstone for budding misanthropes), in that it’s a teeth baring exercise of the most passive kind, created by two people who’d rather be dead than be the rest of us.