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In 2008, Nicholas Carr wrote an influential essay in the Atlantic titled “ Is Google Making us Stupid” ? Since that essay’s publication the use of the Internet and its effect on our brains has become a highly divisive topic which has produced a large spat of journalistic and academic articles in its wake. [Read More]

Sanullim is something of an anomaly in rock history. At a time when vintage rock was dying and new cultural tropes were diversifying the palette of pop music, Sanullim appeared on the margin in a country whose pop music landscape, heavily censored by the authoritarian bureaus of Park Chung-Hee, mainly consisted of traditional trot ballads and dance-pop music. Sanullim’s heavy bass lines, thunderous drums, chromatic fuzz guitar-work, and psych-image lyrics were a revival shock in a system which had gone dormant since the early 60s scene singlehandedly engendered by Korean rock godfather Shin Jung-Hyeon. [Read More]

The abstraction of hiphop – sonically & visually – is a progression other commentators have discussed in relation to instrumental/beats artists like Flying Lotus and the unparalleled Dilla. But what of the lyrical persona in the abstract world? Which is to say, in this constantly expanding kaleidoscope universe, what happens to the MC? [Read More]

If Martin Scorsese had stopped making films after the 90s, he’d still prove an invaluable part of cinema history on the basis of his current film preservation efforts. Scorsese’s World Cinema Foundation, which works to “help developing countries preserve their cinematic treasures,” has gone a long way in preserving and promoting little seen, almost lost films from a wide range of countries. [Read More]

The Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film last year was bestowed onto an Argentine mystery romance; a film that intermixes the pathos of unspoken love and the torture chamber of memory, and parallels these alongside the shadowy contours of law and corrupt politics. As the film frames all these disparate elements within a novelist’s remembrance of a rape and murder investigation that he was involved in as a young attorney in the court halls of Buenos Aires in the early 1970s, it continuously draws analogies to the mercenary political machinations of a dictatorial Argentina. This brilliantly scripted and acted film was written and directed by Juan Jose Campanella, a director who has now catapulted himself onto the international film scene with this minor masterpiece. [Read More]

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