Weekend Reads (Jun 24): Projekt Records, Power Metal, Genndy Tartakovsky, Wikipedia, Vaccine Debates
Recommended weekend reading material for June 24, 2023.
Every week, I compile a list of interesting and thought-provoking articles to offer you some enjoyable weekend reading material.
As I’ve mentioned in an earlier newsletter, Projekt Records celebrates their 40th anniversary this year. Here’s a list of 40 Projekt releases that best sum up the label’s sound an aesthetic.
It was 40 years ago this year, in the summer of 1983, that south Florida-based electronic musician and Alternative Rhythms 'zine editor Sam Rosenthal launched Projekt Records. He regarded it initially as a vehicle for his own solo music, released under the alias Projekt Electronic Amerika (PEA), but he also had an eye for the flourishing local scene. Indeed, the first ever Projekt release was the Projekt Electronic South Florida cassette compilation (a second volume followed shortly after).
One significant release missing from this list is Soulwhirlingsomewhere’s gorgeous 1993 debut, Eating the Sea, which I wrote about earlier this month: “[E]ven if Plaster had called it quits immediately after releasing Eating the Sea, his debut is striking enough that it would’ve solidified Soulwhirlingsomewhere’s place in the darkwave pantheon all on its own.”
Related: Paying subscribers can check out my various Projekt-inspired playlists and podcast episodes.
Subscriber Playlist, June 2023: Of These Reminders, Volume 2
Playlist Breakdown: “Write in Water” by Love Spirals Downwards
Subscriber Playlist, March 2020: “Of These Reminders (A Projekt Records Sampler)”
I’ve also written extensively about Projekt Records and its releases on Opus.
Aaron Waite sings the praises of power metal.
Thanks to the magic of the almighty algorithm, I soon came across another power metal band, less a lovechild of Flash Gordon and Thor and more akin to LARPing with guitars. I was immediately entranced by this more restrained take on the genre. Fellowship’s The Saberlight Chronicles became a staple in my car, in my headphones while working, and in my earbuds while doing dishes. I haven’t felt this uplifted and inspired by an album since Becoming the Archetype’s Celestial Completion or Oh, Sleeper’s Children of Fire. Over eleven years had passed since my spirit connected with a metal album on such a personal level. It’s a heartfelt, refreshing, fast, and catchy ball of cheese — and I don’t think the band would have it any other way.
I do love some good power metal. My current favorite is Unleash the Archers. 2020’s Abyss is filled with soaring riffs, sci-fi storylines, and powerful vocals courtesy of the awesomely named Brittney Slayes.
Paul Glanting reflects on synthwave’s curious form of ’80s-inspired nostalgia.
Despite a spiritual lineage to the ’80s, synthwave has little to no resemblance to the decade’s more famous genre outputs (new wave, post-punk, etc.). Instead, synthwave centers around moody scores, which bounce with optimism, ominous dread, and even ambivalent sublime. Melodrama might be synthwave’s defining characteristic. Ironically, despite the genre’s emotional tempests and frequent presence in films that hypothesize futuristic scenarios, synthwave’s sound is rather austere, often resembling 16-bit video game soundtracks more than de facto orchestral scores.
While the music can be appreciated independently of the films, their themes have aged remarkably well. Terminator and Blade Runner explore a simultaneous devotion to and a distrust of unchecked technology. Robocop and They Live examine our trusted institutions failing us, falling prey to neoliberalism. They all have one eye on current affairs and the other on life after the apocalypse. However, as tempting as it is to declare this modern sonic output as a recreation of the soundscapes of the ’80s, it must be asked: was this actually what the 1980s were like?
There was a span of time where I was obsessed with synthwave artists like Mild Peril, Perturbator, and S U R V I V E. I don’t listen to it quite as much as I used to, simply because it all began to sound very same-y to my ears. That said, there are some artists, like Makeup and Vanity Set, who are doing interesting things within the genre’s well-defined aesthetic.
Animation Obsessive reports on this year’s Annecy Festival, the world’s largest animation festival, including statements by guest-of-honor Guillermo del Toro.
In the discussions of what’s next for animation, it was del Toro himself who stole the headlines. During his Annecy master classes this week, he revealed his plans to quit live-action films after finishing just “a couple more” of them — and to dedicate himself entirely to animation from then on.
At the same time, del Toro attacked certain trends in commercial animation, where cliches and stereotypes can seep into characters’ motions and interactions and stories.
Del Toro has always been an advocate for animation. After his adaptation of Pinocchio won the “Best Animated Feature” Oscar, he pushed back against the foolish notion that animation is a for-kids-only medium.
Related: Here are all of the winners at Annecy 2023, including best feature, best short film, and audience favorites.
Matt Zoller Seitz interviews Genndy Tartakovsky (Samurai Jack, Dexter’s Laboratory) about his latest series, Unicorn: Warriors Eternal, as well as his approach to animation and storytelling.
All storytelling is mystery. Even when you’re doing something that’s mainly comedy or action, you’re still telling a mystery, in a way. The audience will fit all the pieces of the story together. And you know, this could be a fault! I finished this show and I wondered if it was too much, especially coming off Primal, which is the ultimate in simplicity. This one is complex, with the storytelling and everything unfolding — and where it goes, it grows. There are plot twists and a lot of other stuff that I am generally not a fan of but that I felt needed to be there for this one. But I still want to try to give the audience the minimum amount of information that’s needed to draw them in.
That’s storytelling. You’re drawn in. If you don’t trust where the story is going, or if you’re already bored, then I’ve failed.
Marvel’s latest TV series, Secret Invasion, features an AI-generated opening credits sequence, which has raised more concerns and criticism concerning AI’s impact on art and entertainment.
Over the past nine months, we’ve reported frequently about protests, lawsuits, controversial contest wins, and several bans inspired by the onset of image synthesis. In that sense, seeing complaints and threats of canceling Disney+ subscriptions on social media aren’t that surprising. But this time, even people associated with Marvel are speaking up.
Jeff Simpson, a concept artist who directly worked on the Secret Invasion TV series for Marvel, tweeted, “Secret Invasion intro is AI generated. I’m devastated, I believe AI to be unethical, dangerous, and designed solely to eliminate artists’ careers. Spent almost half a year working on this show and had a fantastic experience working with the most amazing people I ever met.”
Wikipedia is one of the web’s largest websites, with millions of articles viewed by billions of people around the world. As a result, it presents some very unique challenges when it comes to design, which are discussed in this interview with two of the site’s designers. For instance, even a seemingly simple change to the site’s table of contents feature was fraught.
Ultimately, we were focused on delivering the best reading and editing experience we could, somewhat regardless of familiarity for experienced users. For example, moving the table of contents from being inline below the lead section to being a sidebar, from a familiarity perspective, was a huge shift, and a lot of experienced users couldn’t get past that. For them, it violated the platonic form of a Wikipedia article or something, like if the table of contents wasn’t inline, then the article wasn’t a Wikipedia article. And while they tried to justify that preference from a functionality standpoint, their reasons weren’t strong, and I think it was mostly about them being uncomfortable with the unfamiliar. Meanwhile, all of the testing and the functional justifications we, and some community members, put forth made it super clear that the sidebar was the better approach. So, that’s how we made that particular decision.
Katelyn Jetelina discusses the pros and cons of debating vaccine science, especially with anti-vaxxers like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
While scientists are great professional arguers (in fact, debate is ingrained into the definition of science), scientific debate is not usually done in the same way as political debate between candidates vying for your vote or high school debate teams.
Instead, scientific debate is typically done in writing and focuses on very specific scientific questions. This allows for careful presentation of data and citation of sources. It can be slow and boring, but it is much more effective.
Live debates can easily be hijacked when arguers use logical fallacies and rhetorical tricks that give the appearance of “winning,” but in reality are a path to nowhere.
Kennedy recently appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast, where he spread his misinformation and conspiracy theories without any pushback or criticism.
With Elon Musk voicing his support for Rogan and Kennedy, scientists are expressing doubts about Twitter’s importance and utility. In other Twitter-related news, “cisgender” and “cis” are now considered slurs on the free-speech-defending platform, employees are suing the company for not paying out bonuses, Twitter was evicted from a Colorado office after not paying rent, and Twitter is refusing to pay its Google bill, which could impair its ability to combat spam and child sexual abuse material.
Yes siree, that Elon Musk is a true business genius.
Related: Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg are going to square off in an MMA cage match. We really do live in the dumbest timeline.
Finally… Liberals, progressives, and leftists are often lampooned as politically correct killjoys, but Chris Lehmann highlights the Right’s own war on fun and leisure.
Cernovich’s prohibitionist outburst is but the latest installment in a rightist putsch against anodyne consumer objects and pastimes that verges on the paranoid. In the wake of the successive anti-LGBTQ+ boycotts against Bud Light and Target, Turning Points USA founder Charlie Kirk has been interrogating the contents of his fridge to determine which condiments may contain the dread bacillus of wokeness. Kirk also spent the recent Juneteenth holiday sternly instructing Americans that they “should be working today” instead of observing “a CRT-inspired federal holiday that competes with July 4th.” He went on to expose his own ignorance of the holiday’s origins while claiming that it was designed to “smear and slander white America.” The whole performance culminated of course in the reactionary troll’s lament that he was unfairly being maligned as racist. Beyond all these hoary tropes of MAGA click-harvesting was the broader right-wing agenda of gratuitous fun-spoiling: Not only does Juneteenth represent a powerful vindication of the cruelly deferred promise of freedom for all Americans; it’s never been the case that national holidays operate on a zero-sum basis, with one somehow intended to delegitimize and undermine another.
Looking at the ongoing culture wars, and the constant stream of righteous indignation that so often flows from people who would otherwise claim to possess the joy of Christ, I’m reminded of G. K. Chesterton’s claims to distrust “hard, cold, thin people.” That is, people so focused on proving the rightness of their own cause that they lose any sense of warmth, joy, and humanity.
From the Blog
One of my goals with Opus is to shine a light on music that might otherwise fall through the cracks, and that’s doubly true for Christian music. Consider Saviour Machine, a gothic metal band that was obsessed with the Book of Revelation and the end times. 30 years ago this month, they released their self-titled debut album, which caused a stir thanks to the band’s appearance and lyrics.
[Eric] Clayton’s deep baritone evoked the specters of Andrew Eldritch (The Sisters of Mercy) and Wayne Hussey (The Mission) while possessing an operatic flair that proved absolutely necessary for his lyrical ambitions. Given his appearance, there’s no way Clayton would possibly deign to sing about the usual rock n’ roll topics. Rather, his lyrics drew from Revelation’s bizarre imagery to focus on spiritual warfare, demonic activity, government conspiracy, and the end of time itself.
To be fair, this sort of stuff was pretty common for Christian metal of the late ’80s and early ’90s. (Look no further than the cover of Deliverance’s Weapons of Our Warfare or Mortification and Vengeance Rising’s catalogs.) But none of those bands had a dude in face paint with a jewel on his forehead singing “Naked she lies on the crucifix crying/The tears of the innocent die/The dragon slides between her thighs” or “She drinks the blood of prophets/And she drinks the blood of saints/Between her legs they crawl in torment/For the souls they lay to waste.”
(Despite being obvious references to Revelation 12:1 – 6 and 17:1 – 6, that imagery still led to Saviour Machine being banned in some Christian bookstores for being too provocative. The fact that the band took their name from a David Bowie song undoubtedly raised a few eyebrows, as well.)
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