REVIEWS

Like biting into a homemade bánh mì and tasting parsley instead of cilantro, Chris Acker’s opening track “Shit Surprise” establishes his fourth full-length LP Famous Lunch as one about the mundane sufferings. A local artist by way of Washington State, Acker and his backing band the Growing Boys have a penchant for writing pretty-as-a-picture country songs with goofy but vivid imagery. Often depicting small, homegrown scenes like jumping into brown water in nothing but Calvins, his lyrics reveal bittersweet lessons about the self and life. Wearing influences of Bob Dylan and Townes Van Zandt on his sleeve, Acker calls this record a “growing pains album” on his Bandcamp as he tries to evolve his voice as a songwriter. In many ways, Famous Lunch demonstrates that growth. Like the aforementioned “Shit Surprise,” Acker maintains his witty, tongue-in-cheek humor before getting real on “Stubborn Eyes,” diving into generational trauma and his complicated relationship with his father. Emotionally poignant moments like these cut throughout the album like a drizzle of sherry in turtle soup. “Game 6 of ‘86” tells a dramatized version of baseball player Bill Buckner’s story. In the song, Buckner grows up poor with a father who drinks himself to an early grave, fueling Bill’s baseball obsession as a way to escape his circumstances. A “self-critical perfectionist,” he eventually made it as a professional, but his career-defining moment would come to be a game-losing missed catch in the ‘86 World Series. Despite the cruel twists of fate that led him here, Buckner still had another game to play and plenty of life ahead of him—an apt reflection of the album’s themes of negative self-image and seeking peace. Despite life’s shit surprises, a little bit of self-compassion goes a long way. —Dalton Spangler

If we are lucky, we will one day grow old and in wisdom from the many trials and lessons of our earlier years. The years after your 20s, as middle age approaches, offer a taste of this, with enough life experience to allow for proper reflection and, hopefully, growth. On their most recent release, A Good Melon, New Orleans power pop outfit Kelly Duplex works through major life changes and necessary destruction and rebirth. There is space given in these songs for grief—all changes, even the best ones, can bring forth complicated feelings—but never does it overtake the album. Mastered by Nick Pope (BRUCEY, The Fruit Machines, Island Days), the songs on A Good Melon are polished but not slick, amplifying lead vocalist and songwriter Shane Avrard’s emotions rather than masking them. There are some quiet moments—notably, the acoustic “Blue” and shoegaze-adjacent “I Put It By The Drum”—but Kelly Duplex are at their best when they embrace their jangly power pop sound, with standout tracks including the glimmering indie rockers “Rewind” and “Seeing Is Receiving.” A Good Melon is a full emotional journey, opening and closing with two versions of the same song: the melancholy acoustic opener “Chew Toy” and the more energetic, electric guitar-led “Chew Toy (Mad Version).” The lyrics remain the same but the spirit is different; we may not be able to change what has happened to us, but our perspectives and feelings will shift, with time. —Mary Beth Campbell

Give Way is a new jazz-tinged modern classical project from sometimes-local musicians Emily Mikesell (trumpeter/composer/producer/arranger) and Kate Campbell Strauss (saxophonist/composer/producer/arranger). The project originated at the University of New Orleans (UNO) during the middle months of 2020, and the two sent drafts back and forth to each other while quarantined in their homes, adding more to each draft through creative impulses and trusting their intuitions. Mikesell studied jazz at Florida State University and UNO, regularly plays with Trumpet Mafia and the New Orleans Jazz Orchestra, and has an indie pop project under the name of Smiloh. Campbell Strauss studied music at Pomona College and UNO and is currently the director of jazz ensembles at Bowdoin College. Both of their backgrounds in traditional jazz settings come to meld with an ethereal, dream pop sensibility, and the limitations (and advantages) of long-distance, digital music-making. The short six-track LP is accessible to those not well versed in jazz or classical music and works to create a soundscape of repetitive, lulling motifs that are somewhere between big band and modern classical, though certainly leaning towards modern classical. The instrumentation consists only of trumpet, flugelhorn, and soprano, alto, tenor, and baritone saxophone, allowing space and inflection for the listener. It’s not empty space, but layered, just enough to sit in it and let it cascade around you. —Daniella Cherner

Nail Club, the minimal synth project of New Orleans-based musician and artist (and ANTIGRAVITY contributor) Sara Nicole Storm (Latex Cop), creates cinematic, gorgeously unsettling music that will haunt you hours after you’ve listened. Storm’s lyrics are intentionally obscured, forcing the audience to pay attention and interpret the songs as they are presented. Fittingly then, Nail Club’s latest EP is titled Prima Facie, the Latin phrase that means “at first sight” or “based on what seems to be the truth when seen or heard.” The songs on the EP are a collage of deliciously dark and sinister synths, distorted vocals, and sound clips of women discussing relationships in different forms. Opener “Reassure” starts with dialogue from an older film about “needing someone” before transitioning into a haunting track with sharp, trip-hop synths and beats. “Your Son’s Divine” is an entrancing dark wave track with droney vocals interspersed with self-help sound clips about being isolated in a marriage. Album closer “Figurative Normal” begins and ends with clips about being a “likeable girl,” the music and vocals in between evoking urgency and tension. Prima Facie does not hit you over the head with Storm’s thoughts on relationships and gendered experience; instead, it is up to us to determine what is the truth. This is music that could have been created for a heroine in a David Lynch film, the female gaze in musical form. —Mary Beth Campbell

Will Roesner originally hails from Baltimore, and lived here in New Orleans for about six years before moving to Seattle in mid-2024. Per his website bio, “singer/songwriter Will Roesner makes songs like most people change their socks.” Perusing his Bandcamp page, that statement rings true. Fairy Music alone contains a whopping 23 tracks, and according to his website, from December 2023 through June 2024, he had a project of releasing one song a week. After this hearty endeavor, he decided to follow up with another ambitious project: writing and recording a new song for each day of August 2024, after having just moved across the country. His style, summarized most simply as indie, brings to mind groups like Pinegrove and just a touch of Alex G. His gentle guitar strumming and soft, low vocals lull us to rest and can sometimes make the tracks run together, but he adds a pleasant surprise here and there with a bit of vocoder and a drum machine—sometimes pulling us somewhere exploratory and introspective (“Good As I Thought”) and sometimes somewhere frightening and gothic (“Castle”). Those experimental asides number in the few, though, and this album remains soft indie rock through and through. —Daniella Cherner

Over their first two albums, U.K. post-punk quintet Squid tackled topics such as Great Britain’s late-stage capitalism slide into far-right politics (Bright Green Field) and socio-political issues at a more global level (O Monolith). Cowards, their latest release, steps back a bit further, widening their lens to focus on the broader concept of evil in its various forms. While incredibly timely, this is an ambitious concept to build an album around. Squid, however, write songs not to capture a vibe but rather because they seem to be genuinely interested in understanding the world around them. Known for their avant-garde post-punk stylings, Squid are slightly more subdued on Cowards, using more standard time signatures and incorporating string arrangements and layered vocals, allowing more space for lead singer and drummer Ollie Judge’s lyrics about the darker aspects of humanity to take the stage. Having said that, Cowards is not an entirely soft-spoken affair, and Squid’s experimental side is still present. As with their previous efforts, each song has a protean quality, shifting into different forms and tones from the first notes to the last. With an omniscient, god-like narrator, Cowards shifts through horrifying topics like cannibalism (“Crispy Skin”), the Manson murders (“Blood on the Boulders”), the manipulations of fame (“Showtime!”), and the climate crisis (“Well Met (Fingers Through the Fence)”). But the real horror is not derived from these salacious topics; rather, it is in acknowledging the uncomfortable truth that we are all capable of evil acts, and that it is our own complacency and not some great, all-powerful dark force that allows this evil to persist. —Mary Beth Campbell

Originally hailing from Lawrence, Kansas, Loyola senior Giovanni Ventello makes indie folk rock in the vein of Big Thief, Parkland, and Lee Bains + The Glory Fires. This is the second full-length release on his Bandcamp. It’s pretty par-for-the-course for folk rock: vocals with a tinge of a Southern accent, quiet and personal lyrics, finger-picked melodies, and a host of guitars, including resonator, lap steel, and pedal steel. The album starts out on the folk side with a 49-second introductory track (“Mud”) before moving into Southern rock territory with “The Apologist.” We continue into the realm of mid-tempo bar folk on tracks three and four, “Too Well,” and “Likeness,” reminiscent at times of Better Oblivion Community Center, a project from Phoebe Bridgers and Conor Oberst. Ventello meanders back into gentler folk with the country twang of “Far From Me” and continues in that vein with the soft fingerpicking of “Today I remembered to water my cactus.” Track seven, “Piles,” which starts off softer before feedback-laced guitars edge their way into the track, leads us to a droning, fuzzed out climax that’s louder and more expansive in its emotion. Ventello gives us decent variety in this sophomore LP, showing both his softer side and his ability to rock. —Daniella Cherner

Cory Doctorow has spent decades advocating for internet freedom and writing speculative fiction, either offering dystopian scenarios where human communication and invention is locked down or more optimistic visions of worlds where it is allowed to flourish. This novel, by far the strongest in his series focused on Martin Hench, a crime-solving forensic accountant, is a bit of a shaggy dog tale involving a Catholic priest, a rabbi, and a Mormon bishop operating a shady computer company in the 1980s. The company markets overpriced and underpowered computers through religious-based multilevel marketing schemes, making files and disks deliberately incompatible with other devices of the day to lock users in—until a rival startup sets out to liberate the data. It’s a nostalgic throwback to an era before PCs and Macs conquered the computing world, when idealistic Bay Area hackers took breaks to see punk bands like Dead Kennedys, but it’s also Doctorow’s way of examining what went wrong that left computing controlled by a handful of mega-companies—and what kind of energy might be required to change things. As in other titles in the series, Doctorow’s nostalgia and throwback cyberthriller tropes can be a bit much, but it’s still a quick, fun, and even thought-provoking read.  —Steven Melendez

Mike Miley’s approach to David Lynch’s filmography rejects any image of the surrealist as a singular, centrally-framed visionary. Rather than trying to identify the artist’s direct influences, Miley favors a more Barthesian understanding, using Lynch’s own descriptor that people are dreamers who receive “radio” signals. We are offered insights for woven intertextual surfaces and those frequencies Lynch was tuned into through examples in music, literature, and cinema. These intersect in chapters using Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are to talk about Blue Velvet (1986), the shared mass delusions and broken dreams of Hollywood in Mulholland Drive (2001) through the lens of Nathanael West, or hysterical self-implosion in Eraserhead (1977) and transcendence in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992) via Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. Metaphysical fallouts from nuclear hyperobjects in Cormac McCarthy’s works, the faustian legend of Robert Johnson in the history of rock‘n’roll, Dylanesque ballads, and Lana Del Rey’s atmospheric pop can be found here, too. If you think you understand David Lynch films, this is a book for you. And if you don’t understand them, here’s a chance to give them another try! You’re sure to find Miley’s insights more far-out than far-fetched—a timely retrospective for the late czar of the bizarre.—Romey Petite

Sydney Stutterheim focuses predominantly on four artists and their methods of using accomplices in their book, Artist, Audience, Accomplice: Ethics & Authorship in Art of the 1970s & 1980s. One such incident is Chris Burden‘s 1972 performance piece Deadman, where he laid on the posh streets of Hollywood with a tarp covering his body as cars drove past while people watched, waiting for something to happen. This piece inevitably caused the police to intervene, and Burden faced a lawsuit. The accomplices in his piece were ultimately the gallery owners and the people who were present, allowing Burden to gain notoriety as an artistic risk-taker. Meanwhile, Stutterheim notes that, in other neighboring parts of Los Angeles, the Asco collective had a similar piece where a man laid on the road of a neighborhood known for gang activity, but received no notoriety. Stutterheim analyzes the legality of specific artists’ histories and pinpoints where they went wrong. For instance, Stutterheim critiques Hannah Wilke’s legal confrontations with her ex-lover whereby any “likeness” of his person or of their work created together is removed from the narrative of her works. Stutterheim also focuses on Martin Kippenberger‘s use of assistance to create art pieces which left little to no credit to the actual designers during the height of “artist as celebrity.” Stutterheim lastly targets the work of Lorraine O’Grady who sought a collective of future artists and accomplices to undo “white personae” within the gallery spaces of New York. Artist, Audience, Accomplice will have readers pondering censorship, the legality of ideas, and whether one has been an accomplice while being in the audience of art. —Sara Nicole Storm

Japanese Breakfast frontwoman and author Michelle Zauner’s critically acclaimed novel, Crying in H Mart, has been on my shortlist since I read her essay of the same name in The New Yorker back in 2018. It follows Zauner’s journey of grief and connection with her cultural cuisine as she processes the death of her mother, Chongmi. With a new Japanese Breakfast album release in March, a film adaptation of the book in production, and my own parent’s cancer diagnosis on my mind, I decided it was time to undertake the emotional journey that is Crying in H Mart. Anchored by a mutual love of Korean food, Zauner details her fraught mother-daughter relationship through profound moments of conflict, joy, and pain. Reminiscent of diary entries, it’s a sincere attempt to fully explore and preserve their complicated relationship. In detailing formative memories—of childhood family visits to Korea, festering wounds from a rebellious adolescence in Oregon, and truly gruesome realities of caretaking for her dying mother—Zauner comes to fully appreciate the depth of Chongmi’s strict, recondite brand of devotion while she grapples with losing it. In rediscovering the Korean dishes that nourished their relationship through eras of hostility and intimacy, food becomes an outlet for honoring her mother’s memory and her own multiracial identity. Crying in H Mart is an earnest reckoning with grief, of a complex love cut devastatingly short. It’s a tearjerker, but it’s also funny; Zauner holds nothing back. —Terra Durio

Federico Fellini had a tender eye for both the strange and familiar, and his later films, shot in bold Technicolor, excelled at drawing viewers into an absurd and manic world that was supposedly representative of his own life. By casting a female protagonist in his first color feature that juxtaposed erotic decadence with oppressive religious iconography, Fellini was making a statement against the compliance of femicide which was commonplace at the time. Our main character, Giulietta (Giulietta Masina), is not what you’d expect from the looks of her Frederick’s of Hollywood style wig collection but is rather a somewhat frumpy, moon-faced housewife whose sole ambition seems centered around pleasing her philandering cad of a husband, Giorgio (Mario Pisu). Strikingly handsome in contrast to his wife, Giorgio has forgotten their anniversary and pulls up with an entourage of friends, spoiling Giulietta’s carefully planned candlelight dinner. Their rowdy guests insist on conducting a séance, and Giulietta, being the good sport that she is, obliges—both proving that she is not the type of nagging, hysterical wife that might drive a man to violence as well as serving as the moment that realism and surrealism begin to merge. Giulietta slips into a trance during which two spirits, Iris and Olaf, make their presence known to her, and guided by their voices, she embarks on a Tarot-like journey through the arcana of self-discovery. Throughout the film, Giulietta encounters many different archetypes for feminine power and wisdom including a witch, crone, artist, oracle, psychoanalyst, and even her own mother—all offering opinions around a woman’s true purpose. Every encounter brings her closer to understanding her own desires and fears, yet one scene stands clearest—when Giulietta’s vibrant and uninhibited neighbor, Suzy (Sandra Milo), brings her to an elaborate tree house in the woods where she’s invited to sunbathe. Suzy serves as a muse whose commitment to self-pleasure is emphasized through physical structures that support her libertine lifestyle. She unabashedly declares, “I fulfill my desires, I don’t deny myself a thing. I eat, dance, play, fight.” Despite an inordinate amount of criticism, Juliet of the Spirits will go down as one of my favorites. (The film will be shown on March 12 at the Broad Theater as part of the Gap Tooth Cinema series.)  —Isabelle Guzman

The first time I saw Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, director Johan Grimonprez left me behind almost immediately with his visual scatting about the Congo Crisis of 1960. Flashing game show lights, 1950s advertisements, an Asian elephant being transported in a sling, Zsa Zsa Gabor smoking a pipe, and Magritte talking about the pipe not being there at all are hurled at you while you try to pick up the details of the prize fight between the high-minded treachery of propagandist death merchants and liberationist Africa’s solidarity network. This directorial approach reminds me of the egghead jazz bros who get into bebop for the mental stimulation but couldn’t feel their way to the notes with a gun to their head—a comparison that is constantly underscored by the fawning adoration with which Grimonprez treats the jazz musicians who provide the film with the titular soundtrack. But my love for the Congo far outweighs my disdain for showboat filmmakers, so I decided to try again. There aren’t so many creative documentary interpretations of the 20th century’s most decisive moment that I can afford to turn my nose up at this one. Happily, I found that the film grows exponentially more coherent with each viewing. Once I surrendered to the ride, I was enthralled by his assemblage of so many narrative components, the thousand different ways he demonstrates how all roads lead to the Congo. In spite of the scattershot start and seemingly endless footage of Khrushchev banging fist and shoe all over the United Nations, Grimonprez keeps Patrice Lumumba—one of the most luminous visionaries ever to tread the boards of history—at the center of the story, and does justice to the injustices done to him and his embattled land. It’s a tale told with bitterness—Lumumba’s triumphs drown in betrayals, and his fight for freedom in the Congo is framed between soul-crushing interviews with the dead-eyed colonial mercenaries who were always going to kill him. Throughout the film he’s a dead man walking; the bright spots along the way for the most part belong to the Black American musicians who would not be turned against Team Congo, despite the best efforts of white American propagandists. If any serious criticism remained after my third and fourth viewings, it’s over why Grimonprez missed the opportunity to display the defiant beauty of Congolese sovereignty. That brief moment in the sun has much more glory than the film allows to shine through, and the demise of Lumumba was no extermination by the brutes. Patrice Lumumba knew how to cheat capitalist death. He let no word that wasn’t the unalloyed gold of truth leave his lips, and he spoke it everywhere it wasn’t allowed. And though he paid for it with his life, he was too brave and clever to let assassins write the end of his story. When Lumumba saw death coming, he told it to wait as he said his farewells. Knowing the goons would catch him soon, Lumumba went from town to town, making speech after speech, everywhere planting the seeds of a dream to replace the one that would die with him. In his last letter, he spit at the feet of his betrayers and told the world not to despair. “Do not weep for me,” he said. “Africa, Asia, and free and liberated people from every corner of the world will always be found at the side of the Congolese. They will not abandon the light until the day comes when there are no more colonizers and their mercenaries in our country.” The end of Lumumba’s story can only be written once we take responsibility for liberating the DRC from the nightmare hellscape in which it continues to be trapped, and it’s a crying shame that Johan Grimonprez didn’t have the artistry to allow his audience to leave the film cradling that all-important truth in trembling hands. But the crucial thing is that all roads really do lead to the Congo, so any film that promises to place the bleeding heart of the world before you, in all its power and its pain, is one you ought to see—even if it’s cynical and a bit pretentious. —Holly Devon

Grounded in themes of resilience, activism, family, spirituality, and community, A Time to Break Silence: African Roots/American Fruits, presented by National Conference of Artists and New Orleans Martin Luther King Jr. Exhibition Council, showcases work by 56 multiracial, multigenerational, and multiregional artists. New Orleans Freedom Rider Civil Rights activists Doratha “Dodie” Smith-Simmons and Jerome “Big Duck” Smith are this year’s honorees, and at Ashé and the Keller Library, scenes of protest, dignity, violence, and triumph are given equal space to demonstrate the legacy of racism and the groundwork necessary for sustainability and success. Alma Bryan Powell’s watercolor of a friend’s baptism, painted in soft planes of light and shadow in The Gospel is for Everyone, takes on a deeper dimension of faith and survivorship in the context of Andrew Sheldon’s Portrait of Sadness and Grief, representing Emmitt Till’s funeral and grieving mother. Other works compress time, as in Antoine Prince’s call-and-response oil on canvas that merges the KKK’s bombing of Birmingham’s Black 16th Street Baptist Church with 2024’s “Alabama Riverfront brawl” viral video of a Black worker who was attacked by five white men refusing to move their pontoon for a riverboat that needed to dock as another Black man grabbed a folding chair to help defend him. Nearby, David Cotton’s triple portrait in oil, Father’s Sons, has the warmth and intimacy of an old family photo, replete with camera flash highlights. In Barbara Hodges’ assemblage on board Mother Pearl – The Change Maker, a broken 45 record (The Staple Singers’ “Respect Yourself”) and cowrie shells are arranged as a halo that is one-half divination and one-half Statue of Liberty, attended by uplifting quotes and sheet music to “I’m Gonna Sit at The Welcome Table,” an early spiritual that gained popularity in the Civil Rights movement. In a demonstration of solidarity and intersectionality, multidisciplinary artist José Torres-Tama petitions for immigrant justice in We Suffer in Silence & Are Disappeared at Night. Spend time with Larry Ra’s Nine of Mine, referring to the Scottsboro Boys, as part of Ra’s dynamic historical BRAVE paintings series at the Keller Library. Nine portraits are arranged as the number 9, referring to their false arrest and conviction of raping two white women in 1931. (This exhibition is on view until March 31 at both venues.) —Veronica Cross

Loyola University’s stunning exhibit at the J. Edgar and Louise S. Monroe Library honors the legacy of beloved New Orleans photographer Harold Baquet (1958–2015), featuring his work alongside the photographs of talented local artists—including Edward Buckles, Eric Waters, and Delaney George—each capturing the essence of Black culture, music, and influence in the Crescent City. I had no prior knowledge of Baquet’s work until I unexpectedly stumbled into the exhibit. As the elevator doors opened, I was immediately transported into a visual time capsule, surrounded by striking images of Black icons. One 1983 photograph captures Lena Horne sitting modestly, possibly in her dressing room. Another powerful image from June 1983 depicts Allen Toussaint at the piano, lost in his music. My favorite was a candid shot of Fats Domino on his birthday, mouth wide open as he takes a hearty bite of cake. Their presence gleams from the walls, radiating reverence. Glass displays throughout the gallery offer a deeper look into Baquet’s legacy. Additional photography in the exhibit was captured with Baquet’s work as inspiration, featuring collections by Tod Smith, Jamal Barnes, Camile Farrah Lenain, Ashley Lorraine, Girard Mouton III, Akasha Rabut, and Trenity Thomas. While black-and-white photography dominates the exhibit, Delaney George stands out with her sharp and vibrant use of color, capturing New Orleans’ latest fashion and cultural influences. My favorite pieces feature three striking, six-foot-tall images: dance sensation CHIPO, captured up close in a forest, and model Jadah Henery, dazzling in silver strings—each representing pride and emotion with intentionality. Ashley Lorraine captures a masked figure towering on stilts before a weathered shotgun house, showcasing the city’s deep-rooted spiritual traditions. The colors in their work highlight evolution and freedom, offering a contrast to the sometimes melancholic emotion in Baquet’s photographs. There is often a narrative that Black artists—especially Black men—don’t receive their flowers in real time—but this exhibit tells a different story. It not only documents the peaks and valleys of Baquet’s journey but also amplifies his lasting influence. (A Tribute to Harold Baquet: Picturing Blackness will be on display at the J. Edgar and Louise S. Monroe Library, Diboll Design Center, 4th floor, until April 24.) —Nijah Narcisse

New Orleans arts triennial Prospect.6: The Future Is Present, The Harbinger Is Home closed in early February, and I continue to ponder aspects of two of its installations that reimagine nature in poetic, tragic, and fantastical ways. Hannah Chalew’s Orphan Well Gamma Garden at the Contemporary Arts Center and Didier William’s Gesture to Home at the Historic New Orleans Collection center nature to discuss legacies of colonization and existential crisis. New Orleans-based Chalew creates sculptures, drawings, and installations that from afar have the appearance of natural environments and vegetation, reflecting the city’s verdant geography and its polluted water table from poorly-regulated industry. Using combinations of actual live plants, salvaged pipes and rusted metal parts, plastic grocery bags and plastics she makes from sugarcane, and loads of discarded plastic stuff, these three-dimensional environments are the stuff of Mad Max, if Max’s vengeance leaned toward environmental justice. Chalew also paints said salvaged pipes and other scrap metal to appear as wood and branches, riffing on the old decorative convention of faux bois seen on antique chairs, for example. Chalew goes a step further, creating inks from both natural and manufactured sources such as iron oak gall and sheetrock—signaling better ways of making materials to build with, calling on old wisdom, and adapting to available resources. Beneath this delightful garden abundant with greenery and floppy elephant ears lurks the monster-face flip-flop you lost last week, and the “dirt” it’s stuck in is an unknown surface covered in brown paint. That’s Orphan Well Gamma Garden, and its seduction is the stickiest honey that centers you in a site of waste and possibility. In William’s installation Gesture to Home, the walls are lined with large-scale paintings of cypress trees. On a glossy floor that evokes water, five sculptures of human bodies emerge from cypress plinths and knees, evoking the swamp forests of the Atchafalaya Basin. Monumental is an operative word here. Each sculpture could be a monument in itself, with a protagonist perched upon this plinth. The space is low-lit, permitting the painting’s phosphorene glow to reflect on the high gloss floor, and the time of day within the paintings is either dawn or dusk. The effect is spiritual, but closer to an unnamed force rather than a specific convention. This indeterminate time of day spoils specificity, as does the essentialized nature of the bodies that do not reveal gender, caste, or age. Offering that the trees in this scene could be as old as 1,000 years, the artist frames them in his Prospect.6 statement as potential witnesses to pre-colonial time before the rise of occupation. William was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, a former colony whose debt for its independence from France lingers on its poverty and political instability. He notes the outward gaze of the eyes that cover the bodies and tree parts they emerge from as fully aware of the environment. The hybridization of human and vegetal life is a copious metaphor for the myriad violences against colonized peoples and land. If you were a predator, would you prey on something that had so many eyes, so much awareness? So, as Chalew’s faux bois “branches” are a harbinger of environmental collapse, so too are William’s abundance of eyes a harbinger of subjugation. —Veronica Cross

The oft-quoted verse by Bertolt Brecht asks, “In the dark times / Will there also be singing?” His response? “Yes, there will also be singing. About the dark times.” On February 10 and 11, this prophecy was realized by the never-more-relevant BrechtFest, an annual display of music and antifascism in honor of the brilliant German writer who never lacked dark times to sing about. Created by David C. Symons and Harry Mayronne, BrechtFest featured a talented assortment of New Orleans performers who joyfully channeled Brecht’s singular mind and universal message—that those who choose fascism are ridiculous as well as dangerous. Karen Kunkel, a BrechtFest regular, sang her Brecht like she was being electrocuted, turning her usual performance blend of ethereal innocence and true high notes acrid with terror, an apropos interpretation. Bremner Fletcher’s full-throttle moneybags capitalist rendition of “Supply and Demand” should immediately supplant an entire semester of Intro to Economics at universities everywhere. Lest Hitler walk away with all the glory as the featured villain of the evening, the night kicked off with a Brecht marionette’s reenactment of his House Un-American Activities Committee hearing, a cogent reminder of just how unapologetically authoritarian this country can be. But it wasn’t all political jabs and satirical German shouting. The dulcet tones of Yusa and Anna Laura Quinn, and David Buchbinder‘s marvelous arrangement of “To My Countrymen,” brought in a heart-throbbing loveliness to remind the audience how wonderful life is wherever fascism isn’t. Something like this can only be pulled off through total commitment from the performers. This group had it in spades, and so BrechtFest proved a rousing and restorative night for anyone whose revolutionary fervor has been dampened by the fascist chill of our political weather. —Holly Devon

My first reaction to the word experimental in the context of musical promotion is generally fear. The gimmick of minimally organized cacophony claiming to push the envelope has been repeated ad nauseum since Stravinsky‘s The Rite of Spring first debuted, but rarely do I find the experiment yields any new results. But my skepticism was dispelled from the moment I sat down—I was a few minutes late and the experiment was already in full swing. Jeff Boston plays all kinds of things that might not occur to others as instruments, like records whose empty circling sets a rhythm without melody, and an accordion fashioned of a small water trough with a pair of old brown workmen’s boots perched on top. His lyrics are wry and philosophical, containing such earthbound gems as “I have no space to think unless I clean my sink.” His “semi-aquatic” banjo plays plaintive underwater songs, the kind of amphibious music we’ll be listening to at our Atlantis dive bars after the flood comes and we all grow gills. On the last Jeff Boston song, the loom band joined him onstage, a seamless transition into the next set featuring the previously untapped musical potential of the loom, the real star of the night. Phoebe Vlassis, a beloved local textile artist, saw a whole new horizon for her solitary craft when she dreamed up this show, and her perfectly constructed narrative arc treated us to some banger tunes that also taught us the cosmic magic of the loom. Vlassis, with her easy stage presence and wry charm, reminded us that there is nothing more human than weaving—from baskets to the clothes on our backs. She brought us a weaver’s love song that she gathered from her travels in the northwest of Greece, her country of origin, surrounding her audience with the expansive weave of time. But she also unflinchingly guided us along the dubious turn textiles took into the dark age of industrialism with a lively number from Britain’s textile labor movement called “Poverty Knock!” The lyrics, in which the loom represents the endless demands of the sweatshop, had been printed and were passed down the rows so we could all sing along. We did so with gusto. To introduce her closing number, Vlassis gave a sardonic speech about the joys of being your own sweatshop boss, and how good it is to make eco-fashion at a pace that works out to pennies on the dollar. Then she and the interpretive dancer for the evening did some jerky choreography which perfectly communicated the robotics of the modern economy, bringing in some sick electronic beats to complete the picture of contemporary loom life. It was edgy, it was honest, and by God it worked—the tightly woven snarls of the modern quagmire were plainly visible. And so the show was over—or was it? Had we forgotten that this whole time the loom was moving, it was weaving something? I had, so when the beautiful cloth of warm rich tones, a different thread for every song, was revealed, I was moved almost to tears. There was the miracle of creation right in front of us, to which we had borne witness and participated, transcending the modern frustrations of the final number with its ancient power. The audience reflected this miracle with furious applause, and when it died down at last, I heard someone exclaim behind me, “I loved that.” So did I. —Holly Devon