The New Yorker - 30.03.2020

(Axel Boer) #1

anowbanb. Inevitably, they age. A few pi.ctut'ol,
cropped to include the car's interior, convey
the parallel progress of Dikeman^11 own life.
Early images show the blurred W:e of a baby,
who, in later ahot1, as a young man, takes the
wheel while Dikeman photographs her elderly
earents from the passenger seai:.-Ertn OtbeJ
(~.com.)


Hannah La Follette Ryan
Since moving to New York City, in 2015,
La Follette Ry.an has photographed the hands of
subway commuters: filtJ gripping bags, phones,
and cash; W:quered nails and bitten cuticles;
fingers curled around straps and splayed out
protei::tively against another body. The images,
which the artist pos!B to an In1tagram account
(@subwayhanda), are not staged; she shoots
the series prinwily (and stealthily) with her
iPhone. Id one scrolls through the river of pho-
tos and videos-there are more than a thousand
in all-the hands become alien and abstracted,
assuming the air of UDCaDDY sculptures. Re-
cently, as the coronavirus pandemic has accel-
ented in New York, La Follette Ry.an has begun
to share emerging pattenl$: hands squeezing
small plastic bottles of aanitizer, vigorousfy
wiping down phones, wearing 1.ate:r: gloves, and
clutching tissues. The urgency of the moment
has shifted her aeries from a work of unconven-


HIP-HOP


tional portraiture to one of artful photojournal-
ism.-Htlm 'RDmel' (~onbut4plm.)

MUSIC
Sekaiom to linen "° online.

Anastassis Philippak.opoulos:
"piano works"
CONTDflOUln'Cl..USIC.\l. With tension DD the rise,
"piano works," a mesmerizing new collection
of a dozen brief pieces by the Greek compDKr
Anaswsis Philippakopoulos, offers a needed
refuge &om wrmoil and auiety. Phili akopou-
los is a member of the Wandelweiser ~llective,
a loosely knit internatimial aggregate whose
members are bound by their fa.cimtion with the
philosophkal weight and dramatuJgical potential
of silence. Each of his compositions, ranging
from two to four minutes in length, reflects
long months of labor and notes selected with
a jeweller's aaetitude. The album begins with
llCVCll worb written between 2013 and 2018, in
which single notes~ like pearls in monodic
strands; in the lint of "five piano pieces" (2005-
2011), stark, dissonant clusters register with
an almost shocking impact. Melaine Dalibert.
himself a composer whose worb similarly deal

Lil Uzi V.rt'1 otherworldly new album, "Eternal A.take." (and its deluxe ver-
sion, "LUV vs. the World 2j crash-landed onto Earth, much to the delight
of anxious fans, and immediately sucked up all the oxygen. The breathless-
ness of its reception-almost as ebullient as Uzi's raps themselves-cap-
tures the energy of a moment that some had begun to believe would never
come. Label trouble had beset the Phil2delphia rapper fur nearly three years,
making "Eternal Atake" feel like a freedom song and a well-earned victory
lap. One of music's most intriguing figures, Uzi both absorbs and creates
trends and spits them out as magic: his melodics are more syrupy, his flows
more slippery, his beat sdcctions more im:sistJ.ble.. Above all, it sounds as if
U7.i is having more fun than anyone else, and, in the midst of actual con-
tagion, his is the kind of infectiousness we could all use..-Briana Younger

6 THE NEY~ MAl\CH 30, 2020


in patience and space, is an ideal interpreter of
such beguilingly mocleat music, and thi1 seuitive
m:onling letJ every clemil resowul.---Stftie Smith

Ellen Reid: "p r i s mn
OPERA Ellen Reid won a Pulitzer Prize, in 2019,
for her first opera, "p r i a m," an ezploration of
the shattered pieces of a saual-asaault survivor'•
world. The work opens with a cryptic spoken
chant-misremembered words from the night of
the attack-followed by a game called Rescue, in
which the survivor, Bibi, and her mother, I.wnee,
n:play the incident and give it a fairy-tale ending.
These paasage1 trigger momentary fantasies of
intoncating melody, but the comfort is short-
lived, and the tone plungea again into paralping
despair. This recording, from the Decca Gold
label, tells the story as vividly as James Darrah's
1aging did at New York's Prototype Festival,
last yur. Reid's music is specific-the sound of
bruised innocence struggling tD heal-and the
condw:tur Julian Wachrier, leading NOVUS NY
and the Choir of Trinity Wall Street, renders
it incisively. Anna Schubert (a delicate Bibi)
and Rebecca Jo Loeb (a mOllJtroua Lumee) are
reaponsive to the trauma swirling beneath the
music's surW:e~Ouumna: 7.a1rr

Four Tet: "Sixteen Oceansn
ELECT110N1C Kieran Hebden, the prolific En-
glish producer known u FourTet, recently ex-
tended his already prodigious catalogue with
"Si:zteen Oceans," a record that plunges deep
into a weightless space between ambient radi-
ance and minimal dance groovea. Songs such
u "'Baby," molded from the spliced vocals of
the singer Ellie Goulding, drift into gleaming
pop, a sound Hebden has alWll}'ll treated with
tencleme11, but the album 1oon careens into
wistful, meditative abstractions that prove him
to be electronic music's most deliberate day-
dreamer. Hia closing soundscapea are sparse
and hypnotic, woven from lulling vocal samples
and spangled synths that pnctically slow down
time-a temporary sedation in thia moment of
sheer panic.-J'41= Lopu

Howard Merritt:
"Live at the Flamingo"
DISCO Under the name San Francisco Disco
Preservation Society, the d.j. Jim Hopkins
has spent the put scvcral years digitally ar-
chiving club, radio, and promo nmes going back
to the seventies-including, in some cases, a
full night's audio. DJ Howard Merritt's "Live
at the Flamingo (NY), New Year's Eve 1979-
1980" ii a prime cnmple. Merritt playal at
several legendary gay venues, including the
Flamingo, New York City'• first ~usively
gay disco, and, at more than five hours long,
this set is as ta.cinating as documentary as it is
as music. In the en bc:fon: automation, lengthy ~
overlapping eegues between records were rare, ~
but he esecute• several with aplomb here. His :::i
handoffs are smooth and surpriaing-Prince's ~
quic:kailver "Say Dancer" morphs into Michael _,
Jackson's equally slippery "Off the Wall." It'1 a :l:!
disco smorgaabord that helps make up for the ~
Brooklyn Museum's Studio 54 ell:bibit being ~
unavailable~Midiaelangrlo Mato

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