Rising Swedish pop artist Ellinor Olovsdotter releases her second album, Living Life Golden, featuring collaborators Azealia Banks, Cirkut, Dr. Luke, Joel Little, Skrillex, MØ, Dave Sitek, Twin Shadow and more. Elliphant is not your average pop star—she has managed to subvert the status quo since she began recording as an amateur in 2011. Alongside her work as a serial collaborator, Elliphant has released three EPs and a 2013 album, A Good Idea.

via Ten Music Group/Kemosabe Records

›› ISSUE Feature: Fashion Shoot and Interview with Elliphant

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Olivia Bee’s dreamlike images capture the fleeting moments of youth, intimacy and adventure. The Portland-born photographer was first recognized as a teenager for Enveloped in a Dream, which explores female friendship and the burgeoning self. Bee’s second body of work, Kids in Love, continued to chronicle friends and loves with hazy romanticism. These two works make up her new book, also entitled Kids in Love, which gives voice to the millennial generation and their experience of youth with a foreword by Rookie Magazine founder Tavi Gevinson.

via Aperture

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Japanese artist Yayoi Kasuma is world-renowned for her performance art and environmental installations, which infuse spaces with colorful psychedelia, repetition and pattern. Her latest installation marks the US debut of the The Obliteration Room, an all-white interior which visitors gradually cover with dot stickers of varying colors and sizes. The Obliteration Room is currently showing at David Zwirner, New York, and Give Me Love documents its transformation from a clean, white slate to an overwhelming, color-infused collaborative space. The book also includes Kusama’s recent large-format paintings from the My Eternal Soul series and a selection of new, large Pumpkin sculptures, a form that Kusama has been exploring since the 1950s.

via David Zwirner Books

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As frontman of the Smith Westerns, Chicago-based Cullen Omori was an ascendant indie star before he even left high school. Following the band’s 2014 breakup, 25-year-old Omori confronted that legendary creative obstacle: the paralyzing fear that your best work is already behind you. Omori cites this anxiety as impetus for his solo debut, New Misery.

He capably transcends the pitfalls of reinvention on this album, which he recorded with producer Shane Stoneback (Sleigh Bells, Vampire Weekend, Fucked Up). New Misery expands Omori’s range well beyond the guitar-driven, garage-glam rock of the Smith Westerns and into a synth-laden sonic palette that showcases Omori’s personal take on the classic pop formula. The result is all-embracing, with apparent influences as disparate as Hall and Oates and Joy Division, and invokes the true-to-life sensation of stepping onto a new path, hoping the best is yet to come.

via Sub Pop

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Midnight Special is the fourth feature from acclaimed director Jeff Nichols, who made a name for himself through homage-heavy material including Mud and Take Shelter. Set in Nichols’ signature Deep South locale, Midnight Special is part car-chase, part psychological sci-fi and part conspiracy thriller featuring Michael Shannon, Joel Edgerton, Sam Shepard, Adam Driver, Kirsten Dunst and newcomer Jaeden Lieberher.

The film centers on a father (Shannon) and his son, Alton (Lieberher), who possesses unexplainable, messianic and potentially-infinite special powers. The duo is on the run from the NSA, who seeks to control Alton’s power, as well as a hick doomsday cult who believes Alton is their savior. Nichols’ pacing is impressively restrained for such a thrilling and imaginative plot, and the film emerges as a tribute to the power of faith, the primal instincts of parenthood and the existential mystery of the human condition.

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Krisha is Trey Shults’ directorial debut that swept this year’s SXSW. A moving portrait of a family Thanksgiving, Krisha plays right at the deep-seated emotions between a turbulent septuagenarian addict, Krisha (Krisha Fairchild), and her long-estranged family. The camera—at times aloof, at times frenetic and cramped—follows Krisha’s subjective world of anxiety, overreaction and perhaps misinterpretation. The soundtrack and score prompt creeping horror as emotional baggage seethes just beneath the surface. Using a mix of amateur and professional actors, Shults brings a transcendent sensibility to what would otherwise be a quotidian family gathering. It’s no surprise he has worked under director Terrence Malick (The Thin Red Line, The Tree of Life, Badlands); the humanist quality of the camera’s gaze and subtle metaphors embedded in Krisha deliver an emotional authenticity that is truly rare.

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From the multi-talented filmmaker Benjamin Dickinson, Creative Control explores how relationships—working, platonic and romantic—will look with the not-too-far-off technology of augmented reality. Dickinson co-writes, directs and stars in the film, aided by a cast of actors and non-actors alike: Reggie Watts (as himself), Das Racist’s Heems, Vimeo co-founder Jake Lodwick and Vice co-founder Gavin McInnes. Of particular notice are the performances by Alexia Rasmussen and Nora Zehetner (Brick) and the film’s deliberate cinematography, helmed by Adam Newport-Berra.

While Creative Control can only conjecture at how augmented reality might affect society, it sardonically critiques our screen obsession while exploring the darkest corners of human impulse. The film holds its own among romances set in a world of disruptive technology, such as Spike Jonze’s Her (2013) and Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004). Overall, Creative Control’s experience far exceeds the sum of its parts, with a soundtrack primarily comprised of classical pieces, à la A Clockwork Orange, and visual effects conceptualizing a not-too-improbable future.

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A collection of previously undiscovered Jeff Buckley recordings, You and I offers an intimate portrait of the singer-songwriter whose tragic death cut short his burgeoning musical career. Buckley had released his seminal 1994 album, Grace, and was recording his next, to be titled My Sweetheart the Drunk, when he drowned in the Mississippi River outside of Memphis in 1997.

Many of Buckley’s recordings have been released posthumously, including his haunting rendition of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.” You and I reveals his taste and talent through a wide range of unreleased covers and two original tracks. These 10 recordings, long rumored to exist as the “Addabbo Sessions,” were discovered in the Sony archives during research for the 20th anniversary edition of Grace.

The album includes a solo studio version of “Grace” as well as Buckley’s resplendent interpretations of Bob Dylan’s “Just Like a Woman,” Ray Charles’ “Don’t Let the Sun Catch You Cryin’,” The Smiths’ “The Boy with the Thorn in His Side” and others originally recorded by Led Zeppelin, Booker T. Washington “Bukka” White and Sly & the Family Stone. Referred to as “a fan’s Holy Grail,” You and I discloses Buckley’s raw and profound potential, as he infuses covers with a moving sensibility and articulate talent.

via Legacy

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