Month: August 2011

of Montreal’s music is hard to define, given it changes more often than frontman Kevin Barnes’ sequined and feathered outfits during a live show. One album might be heavy on the drum machine and synthesizer, while another showcases Barnes’ best high-pitched Prince wail with more traditional strings and percussion. The Atlanta band boasts a prodigious body of work; in a decade and a half, Barnes and Co. have churned out 10 albums, eight collections and 29 singles and EPs, including their most recent effort, thecontrollersphere (Polyvinyl). Barnes and of Montreal’s two art directors—wife Nina Barnes (a.k.a. geminitactics) and brother David Barnes—will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our brand new Q&A with him.

Nina: Urga (Close To Eden) and Burnt By The Sun by Nikita Mikhalkov are two movies close to my heart. They have a humanity and a beauty that life in itself only offers in brief moving moments. Urga takes place in Mongolia and describes the sudden friendship between a Russian truck driver and a Mongolian shepherd. The rural setting is not untouched by China’s “one-child policy,” and the wife of the shepherd commands her husband to go to Ulan Bator to buy contraceptives. There’s a scene where the shepherd hunts down his wife on a horse and catches her with a lasso. It’s kind of brutal and beautiful at the same time, and then she slaps him as he tries to make love to her. It’s filled with humor and that Russian drunken sentimentally that I love so much. Also, I think I’m in a direct line from Genghis Khan. It’s just a hunch, but none the less … Burnt By The Sun, on the other hand, is an epic movie centered around a Red Army soldier over the course of one day. The main character, played by Mikhalkov himself, is at his family’s summer cottage when he learns that Soviet tanks are approaching. He thinks nothing of it. A friend from the party comes to visit, a snake in paradise, working for the secret police. I will not reveal the ending, but it’s a historically accurate portrayal of the terror within the state and the betrayal of friendship. Simply breathtaking.

Videos after the jump.

of Montreal’s music is hard to define, given it changes more often than frontman Kevin Barnes’ sequined and feathered outfits during a live show. One album might be heavy on the drum machine and synthesizer, while another showcases Barnes’ best high-pitched Prince wail with more traditional strings and percussion. The Atlanta band boasts a prodigious body of work; in a decade and a half, Barnes and Co. have churned out 10 albums, eight collections and 29 singles and EPs, including their most recent effort, thecontrollersphere (Polyvinyl). Barnes and of Montreal’s two art directors—wife Nina Barnes (a.k.a. geminitactics) and brother David Barnes—will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our brand new Q&A with him.

Kevin: I can’t stop listening to Sufjan Stevens’ The Age Of Adz & the All Enlightened People EP. It has become an obsession I don’t want to end. A pure and gritty, beautiful and painful listen. Mr. Stevens stabs me directly in the heart, bringing my own pain to the surface, yet I want him to twist the dagger deeper—and for eternity. I guess because it feels more like a joint suicide than murder, and anyways, we always rise together, martyred and vindicated. Most of the songs run in a length of at least three times the amount of the average pop song, but they never get boring or tedious. Somehow these compositions/productions speak directly to that quadrant of our brains that divines the infinite in the most minute and voiceless elements of our human condition. He is a singular creature, he gives us so much to chew on, and he is without context. What more can one ask for?