Based in coastal Provence, Dominique Charpentier is a young French pianist and composer whose music is also informed by other instruments such as accordion, guitar or ukulele. Starting the piano at a very young age and honing his skills by covering a huge range of musical styles on his YouTube channel, the musician has gradually ... [Continue Reading]
cinema
Mihály Víg: Werckmeister Harmonies
Released in 2000, Hungarian film maker Béla Tarr’s Werckmeister Harmonies is a singular film that asks a lot more questions than it answers. A challenging and visionary experiment, the film chronicles the arrival of a circus featuring a stuffed whale and a mysterious Prince in a small rural community somewhere in Hungary. In ... [Continue Reading]
Arcade Fire & Owen Pallett: Her
A lonely professional letter writer going through a difficult divorce process, Theodore (Joachim Phoenix) falls in love with “Samantha”, an artificially intelligent Operating System (OS1) voiced by Scarlett Johansson. Written and directed by American screenwriter Spike Jonze [[amazon text=Being John ... [Continue Reading]
Mica Levi: Under the Skin
A solitary female alien (Scarlett Johansson) drives around suburban Glasgow and the Scottish Highlands, befriends isolated men, lures them into her white van and brings them to derelict houses where they disappear. A mysterious biker follows her movements and cleans up afterwards. This is the basic premise for British director ... [Continue Reading]
Dustin O’Halloran: Swings
Love stories, infidelity and midlife crises are conventional and recurrent themes in cinema, but indie film maker Drake Doremus manages to offer a fresh take on the genre with his new film Breathe In (2013). By using hand-held cameras and letting his leads semi-improvise the dialogue, the director strikes a fragile and ... [Continue Reading]
Clint Mansell: In full bloom
Part-Gothic drama and part-Hitchcockian thriller, Stoker (2013) is a stylish and beautifully choreographed film scripted by Wentworth Miller and directed by South Korean director Park Chan-Wook. After his acclaimed Vengeance trilogy - Sympathy for Mr Vengeance (2002), Oldboy (2003), Lady Vengeance (2005) - and Thirst (2009), ... [Continue Reading]
Hanan Townshend: Lacrimosa
Although the French composer is credited as the main songwriter on the official soundtrack for Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life (2011), Alexandre Desplat's music only accounts for a fraction of the total number of tracks which actually made it into the final edit of the film. The majestic score also includes more than 35 ... [Continue Reading]