melle_chantilly

Music

My ears are better! I spent all morning yesterday listening to Empusae, Ah Cama-Sotz and 100blumen, so that's a sign, right?

Then I put on United States Of Mind, which I hadn't heard in its entirety in ages and I just don't like that album. Also, it was released during a shit period of my life and that doesn't help. But except for “Tour De Force”, I don't really care for any of the songs on it.

Then I tried listening to Tzolk'in - HAAB', which I heard about for a while but never listened to before and really liked it! Yay, new music! Needs more listens but I like.

"Hecq - I" (Watch on YouTube)

Then I finally tried listening to Mare Nostrum by Hecq. A few words about this record: Ben Lukas Boysen was invited to record Marenostrum in Barcelona, the 9^th biggest supercomputer in the world and he produced 4 20 minutes tracks of ambient music based solely on his field recordings. I didn't know what to expect and was really wowed. The first few minutes felt a bit abrasive and then I eased into it and found the soundscape more and more soothing and fascinating. It is a music that really speaks to my mind and imagination.

Watching

Yep, I finally caved and watched Prometheus. Oh boy. I didn't expect much, since I didn't hear a lot of good about it since it was released. And that's good, because it didn't deliver much.

Mild spoilers, if there is anything to spoil (debatable) and TW rape and abortion discussion: the characters feel completely hollow, and badly written to boot. In Alien you could sense Ripley and her mates came from somewhere, had an history, a past, a tangibility, regrets, aspirations, here, nada. When Oliver observes Shaw's dream, it is ridiculously cliché and badly written and really doesn't help the character at all. The scientists and the crew are absurdly incompetent to the point that the plot makes zero sense. I had more sympathy and understanding for the teenagers in Blair Witch Project 2 killing each others in a frenzy than for these people taking their helmets off on a foreign planet and playing with alien goo.

Then everything was super predictable, and felt rehashing of the previous movies of the franchise. Look, decapitated robot head saves the day! Hey, what can we do to the female badass lead? Stick an alien in her tummy! Gnarly!

I thought the Giger deviations were interesting (how they took the alien design and split it two, one simpler, cruder, organic design, and a space suit and man-made pods galore. Of course it makes no sense at all that these two things would combine to make the aliens we know, but who cares). The result is that the sexual metaphor isn't a metaphor anymore, the alien attacks are plain sexual (this is the most penis shaped alien form of the franchise) and the final attack on the Engineer is very striking and powerful. I was warned about potential triggers with the abortion scene (it was not a problem for me, although I think the rehash of that story line sucks), but the alien/Engineer scene was actually a lot more disturbing in that regard to me.