Category Archives: Trance

GRRL and Made of Oak have teamed up to release their debut track, 'Inertia'.

Available on Psychic Hotline, the record is an energetic cut which delivers trance-tinged techno, dubbed as 'a preview of more to come'.

Read this next: Focus on the weird: GRRL's myriad inspirations inform their world-building club sound

The pair oftentimes found themselves playing at the same parties as time progressed, and whilst they played their own dissimilar strains of music in the moment, they never realised that their musical fascinations aligned.

Having since had a conversation about peak-hour club music, the pair decided to collaborate, with the intention of creating a track that is "layered and multi-textured enough" to fit into each of the duo's sets.

'Inertia' is the result - and the release is accompanied by artwork and fascinating visuals created, produced and directed by Aaron Anderson and Eric Timothy Carlson, who has worked with names such as Bon Iver and Leon Vynehall.

Read this next: Leon Vynehall: "fabric has always been a mythical club to me"

Alongside the release, GRRL and Made of Oak will combine and present their first official collaborative performances in New York's Pioneer Works in Brooklyn on July 27, before hitting Los Angeles' Gold Diggers on August 4. Each of the events will be free to attend and include DJ sets from duo Sylvan Esso.

You can listen to GRRL x Made of Oak's single 'Inertia' now here.

Niamh Ingram is Mixmag's Weekend Editor, follow her on Twitter

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GRRL and Made of Oak team up for collaborative track - Mixmag

The Virginia Street Brewhouse has been bringing many upcoming and deserving local artists to their stage for quite a while. I recently stopped in to check out False Rhythms, a local reggae band out of Gardnerville. In the last year plus, they have been making their mark in northern Nevada.

Historically Ive had mixed feelings about reggae. Theres plenty to really like, but theres also that style that just puts me to sleep. But there will be no sleeping when listening to False Rhythms. Maybe some dreaming, but definitely no sleeping.

False Rhythms was first put together by brothers Garrett and Dalton Moore in 2012. Austin Hawkins came on board in 2017 on bass guitar, and Robbie Wheeler replaced their original drummer in 2018. Keyboardist Chris Shott finished off the lineup when he joined just before COVID hit in early 2020. The original name of the band was Obviously Confused, which indicates to me that these guys have a good sense of humor.

This is a reggae band with plenty of energy. Not being familiar with all the sub-genres of reggae, I would be hesitant to label it. My observation is that they have a lot of energy in many of their songs that borders on rock and roll. They also offer up a rhythmic dreamy trance-like sound thats a little more like what Ive heard before (but not the sleepy stuff).

Lead guitarist Garrett Moore has a sound and style that is reminiscent of Jerry Garcia at times. Dalton Moore keeps the reggae groove rolling along with the classic syncopated rhythms on rhythm guitar and he has a great singing voice for this kind of music.

What would reggae be without a tight rhythm section? Hawkins (bass) and Wheeler (drums) supply that by building a solid foundation for everything to ride on. Hawkins is passionately animated in his playing style, as you can readily see in the photo gallery. Shotts keyboard playing fills it all in and adds color and depth to their arrangements.

As with any new band, it takes a while to get the ball rolling. I spoke with Hawkins about their progress over the years. He said that they spent many nights playing at house parties and local bars, but over the last couple of years the gigs have been getting much better. Plus, theyve been building a great following.

Its kind of neat getting recognized in Walmart! Austin Hawkins

He also shared what he called a story of redemption that the band experienced. Last year when False Rhythms played the Mountain Vibe Music Festival they didnt have such a good set and were very unhappy with themselves. This years show was different. They were part of a showcase with 20 other bands and played a great set that was well received. It was a very redeeming moment for the band, Hawkins said, and meant a lot to them.

False Rhythms writes everything they play. Having recently opened for such well known, nationally touring reggae artists as Afroman, The Green, and Eli Mac (Americas Got Talent), they feel that they are on the right track.

Coming up very soon is a show at Cypress in Reno on July 15, and then they will be at an Arts Festival in Tahoe Paradise Park in Meyers on Aug. 19.

Dont worry about a thing, every little thing is gonna be alright. Bob Marley

To reach out to them, or to check their gig dates you can find them on Facebook or Instagram.

Nick McCabe is a Reno-based photojournalist and musician. Hes been shooting concerts in the Reno-Tahoe area since 2006 and writing articles and reviews since 2012, as well as doing interviews on occasion. His musical education and playing experience goes back to 1967. He is a founding member of the Reno Tahoe Forte Awards, and he still plays music locally for enjoyment. First concert: Jimi Hendrix. Last concert: well see.

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False Rhythms fill the Virginia Street Brewhouse (photos) - This Is Reno

When you've been doing the same thing for several years, it's not difficult to lose that bright-eyed excitement you once had. But for legendary DJ-producer Paul van Dyk, the same love and passion for electronic music still stand, even over two decades later.

Ardent and ever-evolving, the'For An Angel'icon has a never-dying love for his craft. Dancing between the many sounds of electronic music, Paul van Dyk never fails to find the sparkle and fire in a genre he's loved and fueled for almost 30 years.

"My musical approach has always been somewhat [droll?] in just the terminology of like, this is trends, this is techno. To me, it's electronic music and you'll hear me banging techno as much as fluffy electronic and trance-y melodies. It's a combination, a culmination of what electronic music has to offer that excites me," he tellsBandwagon.

Even through the isolation and loneliness of the last two pandemic-stricken years, the renowned DJ's excitement never faltered. Since 2020, the 'Duality'hitmaker released two albums and played an array of virtual festivals across the world, hoping that his listeners cansolace in his energetic beats and signature trance melodies.

But much like the entire music community's sentiment, nothing beats a live crowd.

"All the streaming was trying to create some sort of substitute for the lack of interaction and any sort of connection to the audience, but nothing can be been live in the venue with your audience, creating those memories together, and being excited about the music," he shares.

"We are social individuals, we need to kind of create memories together and then take them back home with us. Then, ideally, you think back to those moments with all your friends at this festival and listening to that song and that puts a smile on your face, and you move on. I think this is what music can do, what these social gatherings can do, and I think we all miss that over a very long time."

When asked what he missed about performing in front of a live crowd, Paul van Dyk says, "It is really the interaction. I have a clear idea of what I want to do but in order to kind of make a night, it needs that feedback, that interaction with the audience, and you cannot replace it with anything else. It's absolutely a must."

"Having been on multiple festivals already, it's getting to experience that kind of kick-in-the-butt energy that everybody needs and enjoys. It's an hour where we all experience this same, special thing."

That "kick-in-the-butt energy" is soon making its way to Singapore, where Paul van Dyk will be ushering in the reopening of one of the city's most exciting nightclubs, MARQUEE.The'Wishingful Thinking'act previously joined the club's first-anniversary celebrations through a virtual set but this time, he's bringing his heart-pumping beats to their live stage.

"I'm really, really excited to come back to Asia, it has always been a very welcomingI don't want to say 'market' because it's so business orientated, but more so community. I just feel very, very welcomed when I'm in Asia, it's like such a lovely and friendly vibe and feel to it. I also like the food, the people and whenever I'm there, the shows that are amazing. So what else is not like?," he shares.

"Singapore is like one of my favourite cities in the world. Being back despite the fact that [there's still a pandemic] excites me, it also gives me a lot of hope that we are kind of moving back towards normality somehow."

For his highly anticipated, Paul van Dyk will be playing his well-loved hits and new material from his upcoming album,Off The Recordwhich comes as the first instalment of a year-long project unfolding throughout 2022. Created throughout the pandemic, the record is an introspective yet energetic collection of tracks that precursors a storm of thrilling festival-ready tunes.

"We're releasing it in like three batches One is called Off The Record, which features music that's like... it's not chill or anything at allit's very energetic but somewhat more deeper and more like technology orientated in a way. That comes from the fact that I was sitting at home looking outside the studio window and seeing the same tree, instead of travelling around the world and experiencing festivals and clubs and the music together with everyone else," says Paul van Dyk oh his upcoming album.

"The music that is leading the way to the next section is called For The Record, which is the 138 BPM festival, sort of like music. Then at the end of the year, everything comes together as The Recordit's everything that we released throughout the year plus some new material," he adds.

Paul van Dyk will be performing at MARQUEE Singapore this 16 July, making the trance icon the first international DJ to perform at the nightclub since the start of the pandemic. Online tickets are sold out but tickets will be available at the door based on capacity.

Listen to Paul van Dyk's 'Guiding Light' here.

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Paul van Dyk on keeping things exciting, coming back to Asia, and his upcoming album 'Off The Record' - Bandwagon

This article discusses the ending of the Netflix film Incantation (2022) and contains spoilers.

The new Taiwanese horror film Incantation (2022) uses a mockumentary format to explore the story of a woman dealing with the effects of a curse she unleashed years before. From our review:

Ronan (Tsai Hsuan-yen) has finally recovered enough from the events six years before to take custody of her daughter Dodo (Huang Sin-ting), who has been living in a foster home. However, Dodo is soon affected by strange baddies and becomes dangerously ill.

Ronan was formerly part of a group of ghostbusters on YouTube who visited the Mother-Buddha worshiping Chen clan and unleashed a curse upon themselves and all who learned of it. Ronan was pregnant at the time, but could not care for the baby after she gave birth because of her fragile mental state, so Dodo was raised in a foster home. Six years later, Ronan has reclaimed her child, only for their reunion to shatter the peace she had found.

As Dodo becomes more sick, Ronan becomes more determined to save her. She contacts a priest and his wife and they do a dangerous ritual on the girl, but it backfires when Ronan violates the terms of the ritual and feeds Dodo. Meanwhile, Ming, the owner of the foster home that Dodo grew up in, researches the curse and gets the video from the night six years ago in the tunnel restored. Like the priest and his wife, Ming dies gruesomely in his attempt to help save Dodo.

Ronan takes all of Dodos belongings to the foster home and makes a video for her in case she wakes up, instructing her to forget her mother and be happy. Then, she returns to the tunnel, having covered her body in inscriptions, and completes the rituals including offering up Dodos ear. She asks for the audience to join her in saying the blessing before revealing that she lied and its actually a curse. (This is the most chilling part of the film, as the audience feels they have been made a part of it.)

The more people who are cursed, the more diluted it becomes so Ronan hopes that in tricking the audience to curse themselves, she can save Dodo. She explains that even saying the incantation will cause the curse to come upon someone. Looking upon the face of the Buddha-Mother is the heart of the curse, hence why they keep it covered. In one final attempt to cure Dodo, Ronan lifts the cover from the face, showing it to the audience and causing herself to go into a trance and hit her head until she passes out.

Incantation ends with a clip of a now happy and healthy Dodo, implying that the spreading of the curse worked. She will now be able to lead a normal life because it has diluted enough that she is no longer ill.

What do you think of Incantation (2022) and the ending? Comment below.

You can watch Incantation (2022) with a Netflix subscription.

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Incantation (2022) ending explained - Rowan attempts to lift the curse - Ready Steady Cut

Savannah Conley performed at Nowhere Bar on Saturday night in downtown Athens after kicking off her first headlining tour this week. Conley represents a new generation of emerging Nashville artists that are combining the country and roots rock of the Music City with new hard rock, indie-pop and lo-fi influences.

Conleys music has a definitive influence from her hometown of Nashville, with some songs even feeling reminiscent of female country legends like Carrie Underwood orShania Twain.

Most of her songs had a way of pulling listeners in and surprising them, beginning with softer intros and verses and building up to explosive releases in the chorus. She is promoting her newest EP, Surprise, Surprise, as well as songs that will be featured on her upcoming debut album.

When asked about her emotions about headlining, Conley only had one word to describe it: Terrifying.

Its a different animal, she said, It feels very different than supporting slots and Im way more comfortable celebrating other people. That's my comfort zone, but this is really fun.

Although Conley says shes out of her comfort zone as the headliner, the crowd would never be able to guess from the captivating show she put on for the small, yet intimate crowd present for her set.

Conleys heart wrenching lyrics and effortless belting put the entire venue under a trance inside the smoky bar full of pool tables. Throughout her set, Conley silenced the entire venue with the only other noise being the soft clinks of billiard balls from the attached room.

One of the most vulnerable parts of the entire show occurred halfway through Conleys set when she sent her band away and picked up an acoustic guitar to perform solo.

As she was adjusting her guitar, getting ready for the next song, one of the audience members, Madison White, softly called out to Conley and asked if she could play her song All I Wanted,which she immediately agreed to.

Although Conley joked that she hadnt played the song in years and even took a few moments to refresh her memory of the songs chords, her execution of the song, with simple acoustic playing and soaring vocals, entranced the audience yet again.

White, a recent UGA graduate, saw Conley at the Georgia Theatre four years ago when she was opening for The Head and the Heart, and has been a fan of the singer-songwriter ever since.

I did not know who she was when I saw her open for The Head and The Heart, but I loved All I Wanted and its been a song that I have on repeat every now and then, said White. She has a lot of soul and passion in her music, and its very evident.

Although Conley hails from one of the most famous music cities in the U.S., she commented on the music community in Athens. I really love Athens its special here, she said. Im from Nashville, which is like Music City, but you guys love music in such a pure way. It feels great to be here, and we love this place.

Conley will continue touring the Southeast throughout the remainder of July, and fans can expect a debut album from Conley towards the end of 2022.

Read the rest here:

Savannah Conley brings first headlining tour to Nowhere Bar - Red and Black

Stranger Things season 4 featured an epic scene paired with Running Up That Hill by Kate Bush. Shortly after the season aired, many viewers became intrigued by the song and it received a massive resurgence in popularity, despite being almost 40 years old. Stranger Things creators, the Duffer Brothers, say they were never expecting the Kate Bush song to become so popular, but they will most likely not try to recreate the same success in season 5.

In Stranger Things season 4, characters are getting killed off by a creature from the upside down known as Vecna (Jamie Campbell Bower). Vecna places them in a trance that appears to be inescapable. However, the crew figures out that playing someones favorite song can possibly snap them out of the trance and free them from Vecnas grasp.

In episode 4 of season 4 of Stranger Things, Max (Sadie Sink) becomes possessed by Vecna, but before she is killed, her friends play Running Up That Hill by Kate Bush. This gives her enough motivation and energy to fight Vecna and escape from his world. This moment is quite suspenseful and is a favorite scene of season 4 for many Stranger Things fans.

After this, the popularity of Running Up That Hill skyrocketed, giving Bush her first US top 10 hit of her career. Its still dominating the charts as fans cant escape this dangerously catchy tune.

In an interview with Collider, the Duffer Brothers talk about the recent popularity of this song. Matt Duffer says he found it very bizarre and says that people were telling him that it was going viral on Tik Tok, which he didnt really understand. Its true that many Tik Tok users were using the song in many videos on the service, leading to even more people discovering the Kate Bush track.

The Running up that Hill, the Kate Bush thing, [is] so bizarre, Matt said. Im not on TikTok, but people are like, Oh, its all over TikTok! I dont even really understand what that means, but its just bizarre how that stuff happens.

Running up That Hill has been an important motif for season 4 and it even made a return in the finale. Pop culture can often impact one another and that is certainly true with this scenario.

Old Songs finding new popularity from Stranger Things is nothing new. Songs like Should I Stay or Should I Go by The Clash and every Breath You Take by The Police are used in creative and memorable ways. Most recently, Master of Puppets by Metallica got a boost thanks to the amazing finale scene of Eddie (Joseph Quinn) playing the song in the upside down.

However, the success of Running Up That Hill remains an anomaly and the Duffer Brothers do not expect to have the same success with another song in Stranger Things season 5.

Whether it happens again with another band, I dont know, Matt shared. Its certainly the type of thing youre not going to, in Season 5, attempt to replicate. Im already getting asked that question, its like, What song are [you] going to do in Season 5? Im like, Were not going to do that again. Because if we do it, it will fail.

Volume 2 of Stranger Things season 4 is currently streaming on Netflix.

RELATED: Stranger Things Season 4: Eddie Munson Actor Shares How He Prepared for Metallica Scene in Finale

Excerpt from:

'Stranger Things' Season 4: The Duffer Brothers Respond to Renewed Popularity of Kate Bush Song - Showbiz Cheat Sheet

Express News Service

KOCHI: Art is for everyone. This maxim is the Utopian Dystopia - the art, design and tech festival being held at Maradu near Kochi. Mammoth installations, all grand to take in and containing a multitude of information, stories and ideas welcome the visitors. There are bright, vivid murals on the walls, and exhibitions of visual arts - painting, sculptures and whatnot.

Performance art is another highlight. With architectural designs that break the conventional standards, tech festivals and virtual reality (VR) film festivals, conferences and open mics, Utopian Dystopia has something for everyone.

Visitors get a welcome aperitif in dark, grey rooms, where art and technology create a ethereal experience. Thats just an aperitif. Utopian Dystopia boasts over 400 artists from across India, including NFT and digital creators, architects, scientists, and designers.

This is a new concept. Not just established artists, but new and young people are exhibiting their works here. And the result is that there are new ideas in every corner, says visual artist Girinath Gopinath, who has been a regular in the Indian art circuit since 2005. The response from the audience has been great. I didnt expect so many people to visit an art event here.

Girinaths installation Bionic-Bull, too, is part of the exhibition. The 3D- printed artwork is part bull, part bulldozer. One of the most thrilling installations here is the Mycelium Lego, a hexagonal architecture marvel and there is mycelium - a type of mushroom/fungus on them. The artists behind the magical mushroom structure are two architects, Asif Rahman Junaid from India and Giombattista Areddia from Italy.

Running into an artist known as Lady Lazarus (Priya Varughese) is another amazing experience. She writes poems for each visitor. All one has to do is have a chat with her. Within minutes, she would write wonderful poems for you.

A big thumbs-up goes out to the team behind Utopian Dystopia -- curator Asif Rahman Junaid, an architect, deputy curator Vinod Ramaswamy and NFT curator-artist Unnikrishnan M Damodaran.The themes are, of course, Utopia and Dystopia, says Arif. The idea came to us during the peak of the pandemic, in 2021. It was kind of a dystopian time.

All the work here is, in some way, connected to the themes -- how technology and new media have aided in creating a society that could be either a utopia or a dystopia. At the same time, we are connecting every element of art - visual arts, technology, design, fashion, music.

Many of the artworks are by new artists and, for most of them, this is their first exhibition. Breaking the boundaries of what is considered art, one can see scientists and technology enthusiasts and NFT artists at Utopian Dystopia.

For instance, there is a brain-mapping interactive artwork by Abhijeet Satani. His work has emerged as a highlight, a crowd-pleaser. He can help you experience the pain felt by plants when we destroy them, says Arif. He connected brain mapping with environmental destruction.

Another crowd-puller is artist Rocky Jacob (Papa Rocky). His interactive installation is all about music. Visitors can join him to create music live. Everything here has been beyond our expectations, says event coordinator Kafeela Parvin. We didnt expect such a massive response.

Vinod nods, and says daily about 1,000 people have been visiting the event, which was inaugurated by filmmaker and actor Basil Joseph on July 2. Over the weekend, 3,000 people visited the venue, he adds. Art is not something meant just for the elite class. People generally believe works such as sculptures and paintings are only for those who know art. Thats not true. Art can be enjoyed by anyone, and that is what is happening here.

Concerts galoreUtopian Dystopia is an experience with installations, murals, NFT exhibition, education expo, flea market, fashion events, food courts, workshops for children and the very first VR film screening. Another highlight of the event is the wide selection of music concerts. At least 35 music artists and bands are performing at the eight-day festival, says Kafeela. The concerts are drawing huge crowds. Musician Arun Kumar, the concert director of Utopian Dystopia, has included many up-and-coming music bands, covering various genres, including psychedelic, alt-rock and trance, says Kafeela. The concluding day (July 9) is set to be a heavy one. The lineup would feature popular alternative rock band Avial, organic trance band Shanka Tribe, and alternative hip-hop band Street Academics.

BrainstormingKerala Startup Mission, along with Design Kerala and Little Martians, has been organising conferences, talk shows, panel discussions and debates at the event.

At Utopian Dystopia, the mega art event being hosted in the city, the conventional boundaries of creativity have been smashed. With over 400 emerging artists, 22 installations, music concerts, flea market and food court, this annual event has arrived

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A deadly medley - The New Indian Express

Movie Releasing On 1st July 2022CHANDIGARH: Love songs make our life more captivating with their pleasing feel. To keep this trend going and not end, Geet Mp3 has shared with us such beautiful songs from their upcoming Guri and Ronak Joshi starrer film, Lover. The songs of the film will define different emotions of how a lover feels passionately in love; smiles and cries, forgotten in love, and sometimes a rebellion in love.

The movie Lover is set to release on 1st July 2022 produced by KV Dhillon to deliver a true definition of what madness in love looks like, the second song of the film 'Lover' was released lately, which made the audience swayed in feelings of love. Moving ahead, the makers of the film will also release other breath-taking tracks, romantic as well as full of grief.

The tracks will have a special reason to be this beautiful that is, such renowned singers of the Music industry; Atif Aslam, Rahat Fateh Ali Khan, Nooran Sisters, Sachet Tandon, Asees Kaur, and Jass Manak singing the lyrics penned down by Babbu, Jass Manak, and Love Lohka. The music has been composed by Sharry Nexus, Sniper, and Rajat Nagpal.

Presenting the greatest love story of the year, the producers, KV Dhillon express their excitement, saying, this movie is our dream project, and the praises that this movie is already receiving has made ur dream come true. Also, this has built our confidence grows stronger. We are certain that the songs that we are delivering are spreading their magic all over.

LOVER, releasing on 1st July 2022

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Feel The Trance with the most Romantic Chart Bursters Of The Year With 'Lover' songs - Punjab News Express

Jaden Ivey sat in the bowels of Barclays Center in downtown Brooklyn, speechless and emotional. It was almost as if he was in a trance. The moment he had worked for his entire life had arrived. He was in the NBA, a member of the Detroit Pistons, who took the Purdue star with the No. 5 pick in the 2022 NBA Draft.

Unbeknownst to him, though, as the 20-year-old sat and stared at a screen, sporting a sharp, navy-colored velvet sport coat and Pistons cap, talking to the Detroit media, his future was still up in the air. Rival teams were blowing up the Pistons phones, per sources, trying their best to create the awkward draft moment when a player parades around in public wearing the wrong teams colors. The Knicks, per sources, were most aggressive in trying to land his services. The Pistons, though, stood firm and elected to move forward with Ivey, who they werent sure would be available at No. 5 coming into Thursday nights draft.

For Ivey, going to Detroit means more than achieving his dream. His mother, Niele, played for the WNBAs Detroit Shock in 2005 when Ivey was 2 years old. His father, Javin Hunter, was born in Detroit and is a former NFL wide receiver. His grandfather, James Hunter, was an all-pro defensive back for the Detroit Lions in the 1970s and 80s. Ivey was born in in Indiana, but Detroit is home. He still has family there. It was almost as if his life had come full circle.

The Pistons took Ivey to create what they hope will be a dynamic backcourt for the next decade-plus, pairing him with last years No. 1 pick Cade Cunningham. Ivey told The Athletic he has admired Cunningham from a distance. Cunningham, being the No. 1 pick, was an inspiration to the underrecruited guard. Now together, the two fight the same battle of turning Detroit back into a relevant entity in the NBA world.

Thursday night, as he made the media rounds following his ushering into the NBA, the newest Piston guard briefly chatted with The Athletic about his first conversations with Detroit general manager Troy Weaver and head coach Dwane Casey, the biggest misconception about his game and his relationships with the players on the Pistons roster.

You can read the exclusive interview below.

(Editors note: The conversation has been edited for both length and clarity.)

Did you ever get a sense during the pre-draft process that the Pistons would take you if available at No. 5?

Yeah. After my workout with the Pistons, I really liked the organization. Dwane Casey, what we were talking about. Troy Weaver. I felt comfortable with the organization and coaching staff. They were very genuine. The facility I was at, it was a very nice facility. I cant wait to get to work there.

Whats the biggest misconception about your game?

I feel like I can showcase my midrange game at the next level. Its something Ive been working on all summer. I feel like I can showcase that at a high level.

What were those first conversations with Troy Weaver and Dwane Casey like?

They were very intense. I felt like they really wanted me. They were very genuine conversations. They talked about winning, and thats what I want to do. We talked about setting a defensive presence when I get there and bringing back winning to Detroit.

(Weaver) challenged me to be a great defender. I want to do that. He wants me to be part of this culture that theyre building on that side of the ball. I want that challenge. They want to win. I want to help them win. I want to show that I have some dawg in me.

Do you have any relationships with the players in Detroit?

Yeah, I know Isaiah (Stewart), Saddiq (Bey) I know a lot of the guys. Isaiah Stewart went to La Lumiere (Indiana), so I keep in contact with him and support him. Its a brotherhood at La Lumiere. Cade Cunningham Ive seen him in the draft. He was the first pick in last years draft. He gave me a lot of inspiration, being the No. 1 pick. The fact I get to play with him will be very special.

Last thing: I heard Stephen A. Smith said he was happy for you but mad you arent a Knick. Spike Lee said something to you at the podium. Has this whole situation been weird? Can you put it into words?

Tonight is special, to be honest. Just to be here, knowing how hard I worked to be here, to be drafted to the Detroit Pistons, an organization that, as a kid, I went to Pistons games. Its a high-energy, high-level style of play. Theyve got that dawg type of play, too, which is what I like. I want to get back to that. Im looking forward to that.

(Top photo of Jaden Ivey: Brad Penner / USA Today)

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Jaden Ivey Q&A: Chatting with the Pistons No. 5 pick at the 2022 NBA Draft - The Athletic

I.

ACCORDING TO MAYA DEREN, the Ukrainian-born experimental filmmaker, writer, photographer, and choreographer, a truly creative work of art creates its own reality. When a friend once suggested to Deren that she become an anthropologist, given her interest in the field, she insisted that she would never be satisfied in analyzing the nature of an established reality but would always want to make her own.

Despite the brevity of her career, Derens influence as an avant-garde director and film theorist in the 1940s and 50s is more than safely established. Sally Berger has shown how important her work was to later artists, such as Carole Schneemann, Barbara Hammer, and numerous others. But her original contributions to the study of rhythm and dance, and their connection to spirituality and trance, have been overlooked by specialists in those fields, as she remains a figure read almost exclusively by film scholars. But Derens work was not only wild but wildly interdisciplinary, drinking from, as well as collaborating with, radically disparate sources and traditions.

In particular, the critical comments in her notebooks on the cybernetic anthropology of Gregory Bateson (first published in the magazine October, in 1980), I believe, deserve much more attention than they have received from researchers on culture and cybernetics (the notable exception being Ute Holls remarkable 2002 book Cinema, Trance and Cybernetics, originally written in German and published in English in 2017).

Deren was born in Kyiv, in 1917, as Eleonora Derenkowska. After her family fled to the United States in 1922 to escape antisemitism, she studied journalism and political science at Syracuse University, where she met her first husband, the activist Gregory Bardacke. Together, they moved to New York, where she finished her degree at New York University in 1935 and became an active socialist agitator, working for the Young Peoples Socialist League. The couple separated before the end of the decade, and Deren went on to get a masters degree in literature in 1939, studying symbolism in French and English poetry. It was not until 1943, at the age of 26, that she made her first film, in collaboration with her second husband, Alexander Hammid.

With a modest budget of about $275, Meshes of the Afternoon is by far her most famous work, an almost mandatory presence in most lists of best American short films. The silent piece shows Deren in a disorienting and oneiric course in which she finds different versions of herself, as well as a dark figure that looks a bit like Death itself (with a mirror for a face). (Initially produced without a soundtrack, Derens third husband, Teiji Ito, would later compose a highly percussive musical accompaniment, a haunting track that heightens the anxious, dreamlike mood of the film.) At the time, many treated Meshes of the Afternoon as a psychoanalytical drama, others seeing a surrealist synthesis of film noir. And while the film has had its share of imitations, nothing else looks quite like it. Despite the simple narrative and editing elements, all repurposed from classical cinema, the combination that Deren and Hammid offer us is still familiar in an extremely disturbing way, not unlike the movies signature doppelgnger figures.

Her movies are carving of the visible, giving us little to no context or explanation besides their titles. Derens work lacks any of the conceptual excess or the abstract plasticity that would come to characterize so much of experimental cinema in the United States. While dealing with the tortuous relationship of the body in motion and all the spatial-temporal subversions made possible by montage, she put her own likeness at play. Each material was an inventive opening into a world, as well as the mode of its operational closure and its functional limits. As an artist, Deren mixed a passionate interest in the singular, technical affordances of the cinematographic form with a desire to reorganize our rhythmic perception.

This is made evident by works like An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form and Film (1946) and Cinematography: The Creative Use of Reality (1960). Deren wanted cinema to reformulate the dimensions of ritual and magic that have always accompanied our species. Cinema for her was not simply an ingenious way to display traditional narrative forms, like the epic poem or the novel, but a new irruption of the interactive trances otherwise so thoroughly repressed in modernity. She comes to the point of saying, in Anagram, that all art should be ritualistic, consciously manipulated to create effects and refashion reality. She understood this orientation toward ritual to be much more in phase with the epistemological state of scientific modernity than any notion of naturalistic expression in art, an extension of her overarching interest in anthropology and in dancing rites.

Deren completed six films in her whole career, four between the years of 1943 and 1946, including the hypnotic works At Land (1944) and Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946); this was also the period in which she also wrote the texts most associated with her legacy. After her trips to Haiti, however, which began in February 1947, she took 14 years to finish her final two movies, often considered minor works Meditation on Violence (1948) and The Very Eye of Night (1958) both slightly awkward but conceptually original experiments in cinematic expression. Some historians suggest that Derens interest in Haiti acted as a sort of break or detour in her career as a filmmaker, but researcher Catrina Neiman points out that you could well argue the very opposite: Derens brief and intense career in cinema distracted her from her deep and systematic interest in studying dance and religion.

Her experience in Haiti clearly changed her in a singular manner, but her deep interest in the connection between dance and spirituality, rhythm and trance, started years before, when, in 1940, she came in contact with the work of choreographer Katherine Dunham. A student of anthropology from the University of Chicago, Dunham researched Afro-Caribbean dancing practices in Haiti and Jamaica before becoming a very successful performer and the director of one of the first African American dance groups in the country. Neiman describes how Deren worked as Dunhans assistant for nine months, traveling with her group during a tour along the West Coast, and considers how her own field work seemed to have influenced Derens later decision to travel to Haiti.

The fact is that Derens Divine Horsemen, the amateur ethnography that she produced from her time in that country, is a remarkable achievement. An intense and insightful work on spirituality and rhythm, the book is extraordinarily well written, if a bit disconnected from most of the conceptual dilemmas of academic ethnography at the time. Deren also filmed a series of rituals in Haiti which later became Divine Horsemen, a documentary only edited and released in 1985, more than two decades after her death.

Despite some informal training with Gregory Bateson and Joseph Campbell, Deren herself admits to being an amateur ethnographer, an artist who initially intended to use what she saw in Haiti as material for her work, but who found herself so thoroughly seduced by the surprising complexity and formal beauty of the spiritual practices that she encountered that she could not help but struggle to further understand them: I had begun as an artist, as one who would manipulate the elements of a reality into a work of art in the image of my creative integrity; I end by recording, as humbly and as accurately as I can, the logics of a reality which had forced me to recognize its integrity, and to abandon my manipulations.

Of course, that is only partially true. Deren did attempt to be scientific, but she was still an artist, and as much as the book is an attentive work of research, it is also a dazzling piece of writing made with powerful rhetorical, even lyrical, manipulations.

Her final description of ritual possession in the book, for instance, is a virtuosic performance in which Deren not only describes the rituals with careful prose, but also includes her own bodily engagement with the rhythmic trance. This is not participant observation but something else entirely. And after describing a protracted choreography of invocation, Deren submits that it is impossible to conceive how this culminating collective effort to establish contact with the world of les Invisibles could possibly fail. This is both a generous assessment and an indication of how Derens powerful emotional reactions deeply inform her account. When Deren describes Erzulie, the loa of love, it is difficult not to read it as a description of herself and her art, her finding in that divine entity the expression of human capacity to conceive beyond reality, to desire beyond adequacy, to create beyond need. This impression is only made stronger when we learn that she carried this identification with Erzulie with her upon returning to the United States, sometimes describing herself to friends at parties as a sort of avatar of that divine entity of love.

For Deren, an act of identification was always a process of transformation into something else. You cannot separate the artist from the theorist of religion and rhythm, the woman making trancelike movies from the woman writing hypnotically about trance. And why would you even want to? Her entire work can be said to reenact, by different strategies, a desire to use cinema to create radically new collective rituals and choreographies, by any medium necessary.

But what of the plateau in the title?

II.

In 1946, Deren started attending lectures by Gregory Bateson at the New School. Bateson was, at the time, developing his own singular style of anthropology, taking elements from the early developments of cybernetics, as well as from biology and ecological thinking. Deren also met Batesons wife, Margaret Mead, a distinguished anthropologist in her own right and, like her husband, a participant in the famous Macy Conferences on Circular and Causal Feedback Mechanisms. These conferences gathered, besides the couple, other towering figures of the blooming field of cybernetics, including Norbert Wiener, Claude Shannon, John von Neumann, and Heinz von Foerster.

Bateson and Mead had recently done fieldwork on the Balinese culture of Indonesia, and they offered Deren the possibility of editing the material they had filmed. In her notebooks, Derens excitement is palpable when she picks up the rolls of film from the couple. She describes how incredible it is to manipulate the velocity of the recording with her own muscular energy, calling it the ultimate copulation between her and the film. Derens aim was to make a movie that would work as an intercultural fugue of ritual gestures, but she soon abandoned this objective when, after exchanging letters with Bateson and Mead on the subject, she realized the difficulty in establishing simple connections between such disparate contexts.

During these lectures, Bateson was developing his reflections on the plateau, which came to be later used and expanded by Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus (1980). Bateson produces the concept (or image) while describing a scene in which a Balinese mother played an erotic game with her son, pulling on his penis in a playful manner. The anthropologist is struck by the fact that the mother seemed to provoke the son right to the point in which he was close to a small climax, only then to interrupt the game abruptly, much to his frustration.

Bateson is struck by this scene because of how it seemed to deviate from the general pattern of schismogenesis, a concept that he first proposed in 1935 after studying the Iatmul people of New Guinea. Schismogenesis is a concept that describes processes of cumulative social interactions that lead to inner division in social groups, and it comes from an understanding that the most basic characteristic that would make men prone to struggle would be this hope of release from tension through total involvement.

That is, Bateson speculated that nearly every social interaction that is cumulative and directed toward climax, such as war and social conflict in general, has curves that were bounded in a way that is comparable to orgasms. In other words, since the achievement of a certain degree of bodily intensity is usually followed by a release of tension, this meant that the orgasm could serve as a sort of basic prototype for social interaction. Bateson first recognized these circuits of behavior in the Iatmul, but he thought they could be found all over Western society as well. He came to use the concept to describe the arms race between the US and USSR as a case of symmetric schismogenesis, a cumulative escalation of tension which recursively intensifies the behavior on both sides, as opposed to cases of complementary schismogenesis, like that of a master and a slave or of Marxist class relations.

Going back to the Balinese mother and child, Bateson understood that in teaching the child to divert or defer the accumulated tension instead of dissipating it in immediate consummation, the Balinese offered another model for the social disposition of interactive tension. He saw other patterns of behavior in Balinese culture that would tend to avoid climax in such a manner (in trances, in social conflicts, and in their traditional forms of art). This libidinal economy departed from Western culture and from this general theory of schismogenesis.

Deren seemed excited about Batesons ideas, but she quickly grew skeptical. On her notebooks, she registers disagreement with the diagram that Bateson made of the process. She writes:

Batesons treatment of the frustrated Balinese climax principle has always bothered me, particularly as illustrated by that diagram of the ascending line, stopped off with a cross, and then just a dotted line indicating, I suppose, where it should have gone. It did not seem as simple a thing as a conclusive negative abortion.

Deren offers her own version of the process:

Actually, that line, after it gets ascending, does not merely disappear at the point of the X on Batesons diagram. What happens is that the energy which would be required for the ascendant acceleration of a climactic curve is channelized instead into a plateau of duration. The duration in time, therefore, is enormously extended and can even withstand interruption, as an accelerating curve cannot.

The main difference between Batesons and Derens definitions perhaps lies at the end, in which she says that the channeled duration of a plateau can bear interruption in a way that an ascending curve cannot. Pleasure does not only happen in quantized leaps; it can be gradually and continuously modulated, like the subtle toning of a muscle. This transformation of the ascending climax, as tension distended in another plateau of intensive interaction, resonates with elements from Deleuze and Guattaris own later reading, as Ute Holl has already pointed out.

Deren writes in her notebooks that this frustration of climaxes in the Balinese would have as its purpose: The channelization of energy which would, in climactic activity, be spent and really dissipated in conclusive exhaustion-that it is converted into a tension plateau which serves the continuity both of personal and communal relations. Where Bateson initially saw a sort of denial of culmination through intensive stabilization, Deren projects a progressive intensification, going beyond the dotted line of the curve without reaching permanent stability. This is not to deny the structure of the climax, but to distend and modulate its thickness.

Ultimately, Deren thought that Batesons diagram said more about Bateson and his method than it said about the Balinese. She also pointed out to him that taking a long time to reach climax in sexual activity is not considered a negation for many, but, is, in fact, a desirable feat. Where Bateson apparently saw a sort of denial of orgasm as principle of temporal modulation, Deren saw another version of orgasm and distention, one which could possibly result, of course, in a different vision of this libidinal economy.

This is all to say: Dissipative discharge after cumulative tension is not the only available model for an orgasm. To consider sexual climax a basic model of tensional activity for social interaction, at the very least, one must include the possibility of multiple discharges with no recovery time, in the female orgasm, and of dry discharges in the male apparatus (without even getting into further complications of distension and modulation, such as you can find in tantric practices, and so on). It is remarkable to note that Deren and Batesons debates are happening directly prior to and congruently with the Kinsey Reports in 1948 and 1953. Theirs is shaped by anthropological field work rather than the medical field, but all these studies circle similarly explosive questions of pleasure, sexual difference, and the social body. Deren also departs from other elements in Batesons models of social interaction, bothered by his tendency to model every social exchange as a directional signpost, which she thought indicated his inability to capture the energetic, dynamic dimension of sociality.

Even if Deren studied with Bateson, it is evident how much the teacher had to learn from his student, and how much the field had to gain from Deren. As Holl explains, Bateson seemed to have incorporated some of Derens criticisms in his later work, especially in his work on the social matrix of psychiatry, and she adds that Deleuze and Guattari would then serve themselves of Batesons idea of a plateau of duration to conceive of the structure of the second volume of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, A Thousand Plateaus. For them, the plateau constitutes a multiplicity that is always to be found in the middle, with no beginning or end. This ideal can be understood as the structural germ of their shared conceptual perspective; and the possibility of distending intensity further ties into their infamously cryptic notion of the Body Without Organs, inspired by Antonin Artaud, which proposes an active state of experimentation that can destitute our rigid and strictly functional relationship with our bodies.

Much more could be said about plateaus and bodies without organs, of course, and a lot of that work has been done to death. Like Deleuze and Guattari, Deren was inspired by this possibility of interactive distension in Bateson, but she diverged from him by gesturing toward the radically open ongoing possibility of plotting out new types of libidinal diagrams, predicated on different hydraulics of intensity.

All of this, not coincidentally, is what Deren produced with her cinema: choreographic experiments in possession that work their effects upon their audience through the use and subversion of climax and continuity, by opening to every artistic medium for what it can reveal, by using montage as a speculative toolkit for enacting old trances with new media. Bateson knew how to extract coherent circuits out of social interactions, but Deren discovered how art was capable of shaping and transfiguring these selfsame circuits into diagrams for living differently.

III.

In 1960, a young Korean artist named Nam June Paik visited the German avant-garde composer Karlheinz Stockhausen. His intention was to explain that fixed form would have to be maintained in experimental art because it was inspired in sex (a single direction, a single crescendo): ([C]an you imagine a multidirectional crescendo? We only have one heart), climax, catharsis human nature Ying Yang Nature of Nature Proton and Electron. But before Paik could say anything, almost as if anticipating his point, Stockhausen began to say that fixed form is like sex: it has no freedom whatsoever. Then Stockhausen told Paik of the possibility of a calm and free kind of love.

Deren was not saying what Stockhausen was saying. Besides affirming that dissipative discharge is not the only kind of culmination, Deren knew that there are multiple ways of composing a crescendo. In other words, she not only questioned the totalizing dominance of the dissipative climax, but she regularly offered alternatives through art. In her films, she invokes a successive frustration of climaxes so as to erect plateaus of tension, circuits which, as Sarah Keller writes, construct meaning through resonances, not resolutions. Even when a form is completed, it is only an illusory gesture which can be unmade in the next movement. Her cinema is made from sustained and ingenious sets of frustrations, amplifying the usual deceptive ambivalence of montage, as deployed in more traditional filmic narrative, or even most experimental film. Its the kind of simple but brilliant reversal of expectations that you get in the impossible gags of Buster Keaton, but with a kind of ritualistic cyclicity as its motor, in place of vaudeville.

Philosopher of art Susanne Langer defines rhythm as the the setting-up of new tensions by the resolution of former ones. In Derens work, because the resolution is always reversible, the circuit always carries along with itself the possibility of its own undoing, of dissolving and being reassembled in another plane. The repeated movements in At Land create an almost abstract space, in which gesture becomes iterative protocol, seeming to happen both before and after it appears on screen. And in her article on editing, Creative Cutting (1947) (composed while she was attending Batesons lectures), Deren writes that [i]t is impossible to overestimate the compelling continuity of duration which movement carried along the splice can create. This carrying of movement along the splice seems to be the most essential procedure of Derens cinema. In her notebooks, she describes the same idea by saying that continuity and intensified duration is achieved in film by not letting any movement be completed.

For Deren, the interruption of a gesture deepens the tension rather than dissipating it. A step begins on the beach but finishes on a dining room; a character seems to approach the viewer, but the movement keeps repeating with no conclusion, modulating its tensive disposition. Thus, a leap can encompass the whole cosmic span of time. Made partly through a desire to reconcile contemporary art with 20th-century physics, Derens metamorphic montage is a thorough demonstration of Alfred North Whiteheads idea that, in time, there is a becoming of continuity, but no continuity of becoming.

In her writings, Deren suggests that every cinematographic composition is based on the transformation of duration into tension. If cinema does that explicitly, or didactically, we can say that of any art form that it negotiates the transformation of a set of material tensions inside a field of formal problems, turning it into a game of rhythmic intensity. Every form of art is choreographic in so far as it binds and unbinds the bodily appetites of an audience through a diagrammatic interaction with an ordered set of material tensions. This also means that every form of art is erotic in the rhythmic modality of its negotiation of pleasure and pain.

Considering Derens reiterated resistance to the application of psychoanalytical theory to art, it is as if she were arguing against the notion of pleasure as a reduction of tension, one which Freud himself would come to complicate in his 1924 text on masochism. (You dont have to be a practicing masochist to surmise that pleasure can reach unbearable levels of intensive interaction.) To theorist Elizabeth Grosz, Freuds entire work can be understood to be a generalization of and abstraction from the model of male orgasm to the fundamental principle of life itself.

Instead of thinking about art and sex as ever more complicated detours toward death, fatal iterations of the same tensive arc of predictable discharge, Deren helps us think about life as a spiraling deferral of pleasure and pain, ever binding and unbinding, a complicated, discrete and unstable flow of contingent creation. These ideas help refine our understanding of her rich, if limited, body of film work, just as her art helps us see a rhythmic actualization of her conceptual notions on life, death, and the spaces between.

Deren dedicates one of her texts to her father, who first talked to her about life as unstable equilibrium (an idea which she surely took to heart). She is that rare artist who reveals and points to the mechanisms behind the effects, while, at the same time, avails herself, shamelessly, of all available tricks and gimmicks. She chose the name Maya herself, after all, which in Sanskrit means illusion or magic, the powerful but illusory dimension of matter, which the German idealist philosopher Friedrich Schelling understood to mean potency and possibility, materiality and illusion all wrapped into one. As Holl suggests, Derens knowledge of the rules of transformation did not stop her from becoming possessed by the trances she herself created.

She thought that she was a deviant Bateson and Margaret Mead too, for anthropology was the study of deviancy from social norms, best advanced by deviants. Like Georges Canguilhem, whom she probably did not read, Deren understood that deviancy is not a diagnosis but an orientation toward, or away from, a given norm. In some way, she understood herself to be a witch, an agent of catalyst, an advocate for change, for experimentation with new dimensions of interactivity. Witchcraft worked, she wrote in her notebooks, as an activated projection, in material terms, of how a witch functions. She also thought, in what I think is a non-trivial insight on the theory of social organization, there is no society or organization designed to change itself, and this is what the whole hitch is.

If the current collapse of civilization involves the excavation of old libidinal plumbing if Bolsonarismo in Brazil, for instance, is mainly a morbid gathering of juvenile discharges and decrepit, impotent masculine drives we need the power of both avant-garde and popular art forms to draw up some powerfully new erotic possibilities. Derens movies offer these, just as her writings invoke radical possibilities for rhythmic interaction. Tension, sexual and otherwise, is the interactive thickness of life itself, and its phase-space contains many more possible rhythms than the selfsame contours of discharge, our familiar, anxious cumming-unto-death.

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Tension and Drive: Maya Deren and Gregory Bateson's Plateau - lareviewofbooks