I’m unsure whether anime still stands at an equal rank to Western television for most people, but I think it definitely should – there are countless of anime that avoid the most common tropes of the medium and are great works in their own right. The foremost example for me is Legend of the Galactic Heroes, often hailed by its fans as ‘the endgame of anime’.
This year The Festival of Political Photography focuses on food. Even for conscious consumers, the daily necessity of eating creates a tendency to interact with food mainly through habit and ritual. But viewed from unfamiliar angles, mundane foodstuffs can look provocative.
During a bout of textural appreciation, I first encountered reference to ASMR deep in the comments of a noise upload. ASMR is also noise, but not music. One ASMR video shows nothing more than two forks scratching a foam covered microphone. There’s also a low key, sleep inducing simulated kidnapping.
This massive reform is an exhausting project to get going, but once rolling along it has a chance of offering new options for collaboration and pooling together disciplines and people in a way that promises something fresh. It brings with it some bad, some good, and a whole lot of confusing, but the final tally should be on the side of the positive.
An album creates a whole; a collection of songs that together tell a story much wider and complex than they would alone. It feels like nowadays I just tend to listen to individual songs and kind of miss the big picture that an artist or a band is creating with the whole of an album. But every now and then I’m lucky enough to stop, take a moment, and listen to the whole story instead of just hearing the beginning.