Empty Metal
This week the From Below will be showing *Empty Metal *(2018) on Thursday, October 16, at 7pm.
Here is the link to RSVP. Doors will open at 6:50 and we’re starting the film at 7:10!
I don’t normally lift whole plot descriptions from elsewhere for these emails, but I love the run-on sentence Google provides the casual browser with enough to do just that today, for it captures in form the unfolding modifying adjectives, the and-ness of clauses and parentheticals and phrases, that make up *Empty Metal. *I quote, “A punk band is ensnared in a murder plot by an indigenous family whose mother communicates telepathically with her meditation companions, a Rastafarian hacker and a Buddhist whose son is a member of a secret militia. While this motley crew go about their business, the drones fly overhead, seeing all.”
An independent low-budget feature starring musicians from the New York experimental noise scene, *Empty Metal *studies the competing insurrectionisms of the moment and explores political violence, race, surveillance, sound, and responsibility. The film is born from the cycle of street struggles that emerged in the wake of the murders of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and Eric Garner. The directors tarry with Left and Right millenarian fashionings that fear, relish, prepare for, respond to, or bring on the end of the American status quo. Co-director Adam Khalil’s feature length projects often orbit around apocalypse. Burial (2022) explores the ruins of a Lithuanian power plant, and *Inaate/Se *(2016), retells the Anishinaabe Seven Fires prophecy. Empty Metal fits in this thematic trilogy and offers plenty visually, taking a mixed-format editing approach that I think pays off while still containing real political meat for contemplating the continuities and ruptures of mass politics 7 years later.
It feels worth mentioning in preface to a movie so much about strange webbings how *Empty Metal *made it’s way up the curatorial list to the From Below’s screen, buoyed on a series of coinciding events. Friend-of-the-From Below Wolf recommended this movie to me years ago when Sunk Heaven, one of the stars of the film, came to Portland and performed just down the street at another DIY space, XChurch. Very recently Wolf and Jamie’s band Surgery Season released their first recorded track Medford, which has some resonant themes with the film for those with the ears to hear. Make sure to check out the song if you haven’t, the album when it comes out, and any upcoming Surgery Season shows! A connection to Sunk Heaven made another appearance this week, as the performed in support with Norwegian band Soft as Snow on east coast leg of their North America tour. >From Below frequent flyer Peri produced the visual animations for Soft as Snow’s tour, who just made their stop over in Portland this weekend at the Lloyd center. We love our friends’ art!
Fuck the police, Stefan, Charlie, and Stark
P.S. >From Below house-band Horsebag is playing another show with some really excellent acts this very Saturday evening at a fundraiser for the Gaza skate team. Hope to see you there! 4235 NE Beech St.