New year, new wave

aka: my big-screen music video premiere next week

Hi team Dillamania,

Just wanted to let those of you in or near Auckland that next week I’m premiering “The White Tower”, the second music video for The Sea Plus (aka my newest band) at a fairly special screening.

Last year, local independent filmmaker F. Theodore Elliott began doing a series of screenings at the Bridgeway Cinema called the Auckland Independent Filmmaker Showcase, featuring a wonderfully (ludicrously?) diverse range of programming from crowd-pleasers to brazenly experimental. This upcoming instalment on next Thursday looks to be no exception, with ten works that seem to range from webisodes to self-produced shorts to music videos. Content aside, the events are a great opportunity for filmmakers to connect (and also great for those who want to meet filmmakers).

The video for “The White Tower” expands on a lot of the hand-painted techniques I’ve been using in the projections at our live gigs and briefly in our first video for “The Brief Reign of the Empire of Macedonia”, while adding some digital manipulation to the mix as well. I’m having a lot of fun playing around, and hopefully you’ll enjoy it too. And if you can’t make it, it’ll be online shortly thereafter.

In other news, I haven’t been writing at all lately, apart from the stray and terse Letterboxd review, and I miss it. I might start working up some essays, instead of doing what I normally do, which is contemplate writing an essay, structure it mentally, wonder if I should be writing it on “the Nazi platform” or “that WordPress I probably have around somewhere which also probably has Nazis” or “yet another new blog, maybe I need to create a website, oh hell *that* sounds like work”, and then watch said essay fade into the mental ether. Anyway: take that as a promise, a threat, or an empty promise. (My list of projects on the go is laughably large, and just one - finishing and releasing my second feature, Gut Instinct - could be a full-time job for the remainder of the year. But sometimes the more I do, the more I get done.)

Recent read: Dan Izzo, Sellout. A great narrative about the rise and fall of the punk/emo major label dalliance, from Green Day to Against Me! Probably not the sort of book that will appeal to anyone who doesn’t recognise names like Jawbreaker or Jimmy Eat World, but if you do, it’s a great collection of compressed narratives inside a larger narrative of how the music industry irrevocably changed.

Recent listen: COH, Radiant Faults. I wasn’t a big Coil fan based on the random album I own (Horse Rotorvator), but on recommendations from a friend I found a few I really enjoy, and COH (aka “Ivan Pavlov”, which on a quick Google is probably itself a pseudonym) made a record with Coil founder Peter Christopherson under the name Soisong … sorry, gone all Wikipedia on you. Anyway, it was a long tumbling road to discovering this album, but if you like ambient spaciness, give it a try.

Recent watch: well, lots, and that’s why I use Letterboxd, but one film I saw in my recent American sojourn that snuck on to Neon is Time Bomb Y2K, a documentary about “the Y2K bug”, which might seem like dated nostalgia. But it’s by definition also about a group of people coming together worldwide to fight a problem, and largely succeeding, which adds a very different emotional valence. I was fortunate enough to attend a screening in New York with the editing team, which was a great chat about the complexities of bringing a project like this (blessedly narration and interview free - it’s all archive footage) together. Give it a watch - for any Americans on the house, I think it’s on HBOMax, or maybe it’s called Max now? Justwatch is good for these things, anyway.

Happy summer, or winter,

Doug