Father John Misty has shared the music video for his Chloë and the Next Century track ‘Buddy’s Rendezvous’, directed by filmmaker and photographer Emma Elizabeth Tillman. The deluxe box set version of the LP includes a 7″ single featuring a cover of the track by Lana Del Rey, and today her rendition has also been made available on digital platforms. Listen to it and watch the new video below.
Talking about the visual, Emma Elizabeth Tillman explained in a press release:
‘Buddy’s Rendezvous’ is a world unto itself. It is a place out of time. My dream for the video is that it would surrender itself to the power of the song. An unnamed man (played by Craig Stark), fresh out of jail and down on his luck makes his way across the fractured landscape of Los Angeles to meet his daughter (played by Arrow DeWilde). All the while he is beset by memories of a more innocent time. Despite her hesitance, his daughter and her boyfriend (played by Gilbert Trejo) agree to meet her father and find moments of sadness and sparks of tenderness in the connection made. Although the video and the song can be considered love letters to Los Angeles, the themes are universal. Disappointments, regrets, forgiveness, tenderness, perseverance, and love. The incredible performances by Arrow, Craig, Gilbert, and David Haley all coalesce to bring this vision to life. Cinematography by James Wall on 16mm evokes the down and out feeling of LA, merging past and present. This video could not have been accomplished without the talent of producer Bria Little and creative director and editor Jonathan King.
Grace Ives has announced her first headline world tour, sharing a video for her Janky Star track ‘On the Ground’ to mark the news. The tour kicks off in her home city of Brooklyn and includes dates in Philadelphia, Toronto, Chicago, Los Angeles, and more, before Ives heads to Europe in November. Tickets go on sale this Friday, June 10 at 10am. Check out the Sara Magenheimer-directed visual for ‘On the Ground’ and find the full list of dates below.
“Grace was one of my students who eventually became my assistant and friend,” Magenheimer explained in a statement. “I have been rooting for her for years, so in a way this video is a love letter to her, a way of showing how much I see in her and how truly incredible I believe she is. This video is also a celebration of music videos as an art form. I referenced Warhol’s work for MTV and Deee-Lite’s videos to honor the way in which this humble form has acted as a Trojan Horse, bringing experimental moving image art into homes across the world. I love the punk vibe of this medium and this video embraces its young wild history.”
Grace Ives 2022 Tour Dates:
Thu Sep 8 – Brooklyn, NY – Elsewhere Zone One
Fri Sep 9 – Philadelphia, PA – Johnny Brenda’s
Sat Sep 10 – Washington, DC – DC9
Mon Sep 12 – Toronto, ON – Drake Underground
Wed Sep 14 – Chicago, IL – Schubas Tavern
Fri Sep 16 – Denver, CO – Lost Lake Lounge
Tue Sep 20 – Los Angeles, CA – The Moroccan Lounge
Wed Sep 21 – San Francisco, CA – Cafe Du Nord
Fri Sep 23 – Seattle, WA – Barboza
Sat Sep 24 – Vancouver, BC – Fox Cabaret
Sun Sep 25 – Portland, OR – Doug Fir Lounge
Mon Nov 14 – Manchester, UK – YES
Wed Nov 16 – London, UK – The Lower Third
Fri Nov 18 – TBA, ES – TBA
Sat Nov 19 – Paris, FR – TBA
Thu Nov 24 – Berlin, DE – Introducing at The Reed
Fri Nov 25 – Amsterdam, NL – Paradiso
Ugly Season is the sixth album from Michael Hadreas (aka Perfume Genius), the decade-reigning master of forlorn indie pop. Each album in his body of work deviates from its predecessor, spiraling into increasingly ambitious territory. Nonetheless, Ugly Season still feels unexpected. The album is an acrobatic menagerie of sounds, something of an amorphous mystery. Like Scott Walker announcing his out-of-left-field reinvention with the brooding opening of ‘Farmer in the City’, Ugly Season begins with a foreboding orchestral passage which instantly evokes an all-consuming abyss. The album, never stagnant, moves beyond its menacing interlude into an invigorating and unpredictable work, casting a disorienting spell. Ugly Season is both a welcome evolution for Perfume Genius and an experimental pop triumph, championing all things defiant and beastly.
Initially, Ugly Season arose as a collaboration with choreographer Kate Wallich. Performed through sessions with fellow musicians Blake Mills and Alan Wyffels (also Perfume Genius’ longtime romantic partner), the album scored Wallich’s contemporary dance performance The Sun Still Burns Here. A few weeks after finishing the music for Ugly Season, Perfume Genius recorded Set My Heart on Fire Immediately, a more structured and pop-styled rumination on similar ideas of collectives and kineticism. Whereas Set My Heart… released shortly after its recording, Ugly Season hibernated for three years. Nonetheless, the two albums are companion pieces, born of similar internal landscapes, yet channeled into opposing directions. Set My Heart… revealed Perfume Genius at his apex as a pop maestro, with compositional precision and adventurous dancefloor-friendly production. Ugly Season, a more experimental endeavor, luxuriates in spaces between words. It’s an atmospheric kaleidoscope of moods and sounds: neither fully avant-garde nor pop. It’s both the most exciting and excited Perfume Genius has ever sounded.
On Learning, Perfume Genius’ debut from twelve years ago, he sang in haunted and quivering whispers backed by piano accompaniment. The songs were intimate articulations of queer melancholia, performed with stripped-back and sincere balladry. UglySeason, the longest and most expansive Perfume Genius record to-date, decenters the delicate humanity of his earlier work, pushing further into abstract spaces (the opener is ironically titled ‘Just a Room’). These new songs embrace a cryptic emotionality, eschewing conventional songwriting narrativity. Instead, they’re corporeal expressions: alien waves of sound articulating feelings beyond mere words.
Built from free-form improvisation, the songs evolve in unpredictable directions. ‘Pop Song’—surprisingly not an ironic title—sways with ethereal synths and grooving percussion against a rapturous lyrical description of collective self-sacrifice. It’s a joyous and spiritual track, building towards a grand catharsis. Yet the album immediately follows ‘Pop Song’ with ‘Scherzo’, a skin-crawling instrumental piece. ‘Scherzo’ unfolds through a dissonant jumble of keys played at impulsively shifting tempos. The transition between the two songs is jarring, from an uplifting pop attraction to a deranged concerto performed by a seemingly unstable pianist. Unlike Perfume Genius’ tonally consistent early albums, Ugly Season never settles into a singular mood or sound. Dark, baroque passages of orchestral strings and organs (‘Just A Room’) thrive next to intense and simmering quasi-reggae sounds (‘Ugly Season’) and droning art-rock-esque electric-guitar-frenzies (‘Hellbent’).
Yet despite Ugly Season’s diverse palette, it’s more than just a playlist of eclectic songs stitched together into album form. The tracks imagine a high-camp, queer utopia: a space of subversive communal belongings and becomings. Whereas the emotional core of early Perfume Genius manifests through the songs’ lonely intimacies, Ugly Season never feels isolated. The music often gestures towards social spaces. ‘Eye in the Wall’ (likely the best song Perfume Genius has ever released) evokes a hypnotic and sweat-drenched rave and then slows into a dream pop-esque comedown. Even in their most experimental moments, these songs rarely show a glimmer of alienation. They’re big songs that bustle as a soundtrack for tangoing bodies.
Ugliness is the crux of Perfume Genius’ imagined utopia. The spaces he conjures thrive on raptures and loves outside of normative standards. To move forward is to reject conventional notions of beauty and embrace the ugly. On the title track, Perfume Genius narrates as a being “Turned from God/ Slick with rot/ Thick as vaseline/ Knee deep and filthy” yet, whenever the chorus arrives, he declares: “Bitch, it’s ugly season/ And I love it.” The song is a self-affirming body horror: a celebration of a new flesh. Ugliness is never shunned but, rather, revealed as a platform for deeper connectivity. Ugly Season offers a carnal space where so-called hideous outcasts assemble and rave, where old values are shed, new ideals embraced, and new potentials are imagined.
Beyoncé is returning with a new project titled Renaissance, which is set to arrive on July 29, her official website, social media bios, and posts by variousstreamingservices suggest. The follow-up to 2016’s Lemonade apparently comprises 16 tracks and is subtitled ‘act: 1’, though it is unclear if the full project will be released on July 29 or if there are more installments to come.
Beyoncé teased the new record last summer in an interview with Harper’s Bazaar. “With all the isolation and injustice over the past year, I think we are all ready to escape, travel, love, and laugh again,” she said. “I feel a renaissance emerging, and I want to be part of nurturing that escape in any way possible. I’ve been in the studio for a year and a half. Sometimes it takes a year for me to personally search through thousands of sounds to find just the right kick or snare. One chorus can have up to 200 stacked harmonies. Still, there’s nothing like the amount of love, passion, and healing that I feel in the recording studio. After 31 years, it feels just as exciting as it did when I was nine years old. Yes, the music is coming!”
Back in November 2021, Beyoncé shared the song ‘Be Alive’ as part of the soundtrack for the Venus and Serena Williams biopic King Richard.
Katy J Pearson has shared ‘Float’, the latest single off her forthcoming album Sound of the Morning. The track, which follows previous offerings ‘Talk Over Town’, ‘Alligator’, and ‘Game of Cards’, features black midi’s Morgan Simpson on drums and was co-written with Pet Shimmers frontman Oliver Wilde. Check it out below.
“I wrote this track with Oliver Wilde, a founding member of the excellent Pet Shimmers – he’s been at the centre of the Bristol music community for several years,” Pearson said in a press release. “For the new album, I wanted to collaborate with some of my peers that I admire, so I jammed with Oli for a few weeks – he’d come round with his laptop and interface and we’d write songs together. ‘Float’ is one of the tracks that came out of those writing sessions and as soon as we wrote it I knew that it had to be on the record; it was one of my favourites to write and I love it. It has such an atmosphere and I think you can really feel the emotion and pain of the song; it’s about life experiences and all the things that lead up to certain moments. It’s quite nostalgic and given the past two years we have had, references wondering about when things will become more stable again.”
Phoebe Bridgers appeared on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon last night (June 15), where she and her band performed her recent single ‘Sidelines’ in skeleton-themed football uniforms. Watch it below.
Released in April, ‘Sidelines’ was written and recorded for Hulu’s Sally Rooney adaptation Conversations With Friends. Bridgers has shared two separate videos for the track, the most recent one featuring footage from her ongoing Reunion Tour.
Sylvie Millstein presented the Hellessy Resort 23 fashion collection in New York, marking the return of the brand to physical events. Describing the collection Millstein said: “A true return to the concept of Resort, with a touch of tropical spirit.”
Among the collection’s highlights are the striking, yet easy dresses, which are meant to be worn with flat, holiday footwear. Particularly, the Portofino shirt dress with detachable pareo is considered a staple to be worn both in the city and on the beach. Vizkaya dress in electric iris with long back bustle feels like a red carpet moment for the Hellessy woman going out for dinner, during warm, elegant evenings, alongside a half shift / half cascading drape dress, in combination watercolor print or in black/ecru silk.
beabadoobee has shared a new single from her forthcoming album, Beatopia – out July 15 via Dirty Hit. Her latest is called ’10:36′, and it follows earlier cuts ‘Talk’, ‘Lovesong’, and ‘See You Soon’. Listen to it below.
“‘10:36’ was written after Fake It Flowers and just before Our Extended Play, and I had envisioned it to be on that EP, but I was just sitting on that riff for ages and then I properly made a demo during lockdown,” beabadoobee explained in a statement. “It was called ‘10:36’ because that was the time I finished writing it. It’s basically about how I have this weird dependency on human contact to sleep.”
As part of the latest round of the BFI Short Form Animation Fund, the BFI will invest £1.1 million in 15 original, bold and ambitious animation projects. As part of the Fund’s second round, the BFI partnered with StoryFutures Academy, the National Centre for Immersive Storytelling, to support two immersive virtual or augmented reality projects from a slate of 15. A total of ten projects received up to £120k for production, and another five received up to £10k for development.
With National Lottery funding of about £25 million per year, the BFI Film Fund supports filmmakers who have diverse, bold, and distinctive projects, with progressive ideas that reflect people of all backgrounds.
Talking about the investment Natascha Wharton, Head of Editorial, BFI Film Fund, said: “The BFI Short Form Animation Fund, made possible thanks to National Lottery funding, was designed to enable our talented UK animators to develop their practice, so it is exciting we are starting to see those films showcased and celebrated at international festivals. With round two, we saw a real breadth of styles and ideas come through in the applications, and we’re delighted to be unveiling such a diverse slate of projects today.”
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