Magma Mag

‘Causers Of This’ infects your mind with pure psychedelia, splicing such conflicting sounds as soul, freak folk, hip-hop and electronica, and the result hits you like Animal Collective on a comedown, or Ariel Pink with Seasonal Affective Disorder. Although a mere 33 minutes, ‘Causers...’ is a woozy kaleidoscopic voyage, sending you in and out of consciousness with each splendidly shoddy lo-fi recording. Opener ‘Blessa’ is feather-light dream-pop which hypnotises your ears into complete submission, whereas soulful vocals blend with hip-hop beats in ‘Fax Shadow’, proving Toro Y Moi as quite the chameleon. ‘Talamak’ is the record at its most energetic, as the anaesthetic starts to wear off for a psychoactive dance-off between body and mind.

Call it glo-fi, chillwave, hypnagogic pop or… well, pretty much anything you like

Stylishly soporific, the glo-fi pioneer's debut is a blissed-out masterpiece

the idea that Toro Y Moi isn't really that different from Washed Out, Memory Tapes is basically an ambient Neon Indian, and so forth. This one's a little more difficult because there really are clear aesthetic similarities between these guys. Still, there are distinctions. Looking at Toro Y Moi in comparison to Washed Out and Neon Indian, the main difference is that the latter two put more of an emphasis on hooks. Their songs are generally catchier and more straightforwardly composed. Bundick, on the other hand, is more producer than songwriter. While they might lack the immediacy of a "Deadbeat Summer" or "Feel It All Around", his tracks often have deeper, more interesting layers.

The album starts out strong with a string of tracks that showcase Bundick's range. First two songs "Blessa" and "Minors" exhibit his pop sensibilities, setting a wash of vocals over looped electro-funk instrumentals and crisp drum programming. Here Bundick strikes a nice balance between sticky vocal melodies and the undulating arrangements that feature through the rest of the record. On other tracks in the first half, he takes on genre experiments with similar success-- first jaunty piano soul on "Imprint After" and then sparkly disco with "Lissoms", the album's most propulsive moment. While these songs are all enjoyable, "Fax Shadow" serves as the best representation of Toro's potential. It's the most complex track here, and in its Dilla soul sampling and distorted beat pattern, Bundick shows production skill far beyond most of his peers.

This craftsmanship carries him through most of the album, but begins to fade towards the end. Bundick doesn't run out of ideas at this point, but his balance of arrangement and song feels off. "You Hid" is wobbly but one-note, lacking punch, and the closing title track is too cluttered. If Causers of This stayed consistent through the end, it might be up there with the assured debuts of his peers; instead, it's just a few notches below.

Voltando à tua própria música, achas que a canção “Blessa” é um episódio essencial para Toro Y Moi? Achas que, de certa forma, foi a canção que definiu o projecto? De certa forma acho que sim. Eu quero continuar a mudar e a desafiar-me a mim mesmo e essa canção foi a primeira daquele tipo que eu escrevi. Aprendi muito musicalmente e tecnicamente com ela.

O que é que nos podes dizer acerca do teu outro projecto, Les Sins? Sentiste que tinhas de criar outra persona para criar coisas diferentes, para explorar outros territórios? Sentiste-te de certa forma limitado dentro de Toro Y Moi? Sim, Les Sins é basicamente música de dança, que era uma coisa com a qual não queria que Toro Y Moi estivesse associado. Mas obviamente, isso não significa que eu não goste de música de dança. Toro Y Moi, é o mais ilimitado dos dois projectos. No máximo, Les Sins é o projecto mais limitado.

Porquê o nome, porquê Toro Y Moi? A mim parece-me um nome bastante exótico… [risos] Inventei o nome quando tinha 15 anos. Desculpa ser um desmancha-prazeres, mas foi completamente aleatório… Tão típico dos adolescentes…

While wholly generic, to the position of near-pastiche at times, the debut long-player from Toro Y Moi – aka South Carolina’s Chaz Bundick – is nevertheless engrossing and entertaining, lifting as it does from sources as exquisite as the squelch-and-fizz beatscapes of J Dilla and the blogosphere-borne chillwave sounds of summer 2009.

Come the album’s midsection, echoes abound of not only Dilla (Fax Shadow, especially) but also more recent purveyors of glitched-and-grafted forward-thinking hip hop: Flying Lotus stands proud as the primary parallel to be drawn. Lissoms, meanwhile, could be a stray cut from Hudson Mohawke’s attention-grabbing EP of 2009, Polyfolk Dance, and alongside the shadowing of stateside influences Bundick does a decent impersonation, more than once, of Scotland’s aquacrunk scene.

Harris, who worked for the Sunday Times and the BBC when Blair came to power, was once friendly with the P.M. but later soured on his political decisions, especially Blair's support of the Bush Administration's plan to invade Iraq. (With some ghoulishly good timing, Blair had to spend six hours last month defending his Iraq record in the Chilcot Inquiry.) The book, published in 2007, was widely seen as Harris's score-settling.

The Ghost Writer is as comforting in its temperate pace and eerie mood as it is chilling in its plot particulars. Polanski feigns interest in the genre's requisite chases, but he's best at stranding the Ghost in wide frame, on a turbulent island, and tightening the noose around his neck as he gets closer to an awful truth.

From his debut work at the Polish Film School, a one-minute shocker called Murder that showed a sleeping man being stabbed to death in his apartment by an intruder, to his new thriller The Ghost Writer, Polanski has plumbed the themes of isolation, persecution and claustrophobia

If an auteur is a director with an obsessive personal vision — or, in simple terms, a man who keeps remaking his own movies — then Polanski is the very auteuriest. Even if he weren't drawn to pictures about hunted, holed-up men, he could hardly avoid the connection between iconography and autobiography, for his life is at least as notorious as his films. As a child, with his Jewish parents in concentration camps, he survived the Nazis by hiding and running. In Hollywood, his blond starlet wife Sharon Tate was slaughtered by Charles Manson's own Satanic gang. Then, after his great success with the knotty, despairing Chinatown (still his best film), there was his 1977 sexual encounter with a 13-year-old; when he thought he was sure to serve a long jail term, he fled the U.S., never to return. He seemed secure living in Paris, making films in France and Germany, until a visit to Switzerland last Sept. led to his detention on an international arrest warrant. He completed the editing of The Ghost Writer while under house arrest.

The kinship to Polanski's oeuvre is clear enough. The Ghost could be a blending of the director's 1976 The Tenant, in which he starred as a man who rents an apartment where the previous tenant committed suicide and soon believes the neighbors are scheming to force him to kill himself, and the 1999 The Ninth Gate, in which a book dealer sleuths through a antique volume that might be the Devil's autobiography.

this high-grade pulp entertainment is too delectably amusing and self-amused, and far too aware of its own outrageous conceits to sustain such a dolorous verdict

Based on the novel “The Ghost” by Robert Harris, who shares screenwriting credit with Mr. Polanski

Mr. Polanski is a master of menace and, working with a striking wintry palette that at times veers into the near-monochromatic — the blacks are strong and inky, the churning ocean the color of lead — he creates a wholly believable world rich in strange contradictions and ominous implications

a well-made, sleekly retaliatory, pleasurably paranoid tale in praise of enterprising (and also brave) investigative journalists and in condemnation of political skulduggery in general and right-wing Anglo-American collusion in particular.

Meanwhile, at the shoreline, a severely modern, concrete bunker of a beach house filmed on German location tries to distract us from the evident fact that we're really not on Martha's Vineyard. After all, the director, a wanted man in the U.S., can't set foot there

a gripping conspiracy thriller and scabrous political satire, a Manchurian Candidate for the 2010s, as addictive and outrageous as the Robert Harris bestseller on which it's based. Polanski keeps the narrative engine ticking over with a downbeat but compelling throb. This is his most purely enjoyable picture for years, a Hitchcockian nightmare with a persistent, stomach-turning sense of disquiet, brought off with confidence and dash.

McGregor is the journo, never named: cynical, boozy and miserable in the classical manner.

Resemblances to Tony and Cherie Blair are very far from coincidental: both Harris and Polanski have clearly calculated that a libel lawsuit would make for an uproarious day in court, precisely the sort of legal appearance that Mr Blair does not care to make, in fact or fiction. This consideration adds a kind of meta-pleasure to the narrative.

This is certainly one of the director's most commercial films in a while, perhaps since his great thriller "Chinatown," although a comparison to that film with its Robert Towne screenplay so rich in early 20th century California social and political history would not serve "The Ghost Writer" well. This is a slicker, shallower exercise. It's hypnotic as it unfolds, but once the credit roll frees you from its grip, it doesn't bear close scrutiny.

In "The Ghost Writer," Polanski most clearly means to evoke Hitchcock. Like the master, Polanski builds his scenes through ominous music, the rhythms of his editing, a heightened sense of place and a central figure, an innocent, who struggles to gain control of a living nightmare.

There is another ghost here too, that of Tony Blair. Lang happens to share many characteristics with the former British PM especially an all-too-cozy relationship with the American president that threatens his legacy. Polanski's co-writer, Robert Harris, who also wrote the novel on which the script is based, is a political journalist who was once close to Blair.

Henry Jenkins argues that familiarity with video games makes Inception easier to understand. That last point is quite interesting: is Inception the first great video game movie? Not based on one specific game, but rather, on the whole stylistic structure of video game storytelling?

Jenkins points out how much of Inception rests on the notion of different “levels,” and of worlds within worlds. (More than a few people have pointed out the similarity between Inception‘s “Snow” dream and an early level in Modern Warfare 2.