Sufjan Stevens is proud to present The BQE, a cinematic suite inspired by the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and the Hula-Hoop. Commissioned by Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), The BQE was originally performed in the Howard Gilman Opera House in celebration of the 25th anniversary Next Wave Festival in October of 2007.

The Brooklyn-Queens Expressway is an incidental 12.7 miles of urban roadway built over the course of several decades (1939-1964), spear-headed by the master architect Robert Moses to accommodate for the increase of commercial and commuter traffic in New York City's outer boroughs. The roadway was a painstaking piecemeal project, poorly planned, badly built, and relentlessly encumbered by the obvious obstacles of the era: red tape, neighborhood protests, World War II, and a congested borough whose sequestering layout proved ill-fitting for the automobile. The resulting expressway-a pockmarked, serpentine, congested BQE-has become one of Brooklyn's most notable icons of urban blight. And, for Sufjan Stevens, an object of unmitigated inspiration.

The official album release of The BQE follows nearly two years after its original performance at BAM, providing the songwriter (and his various collaborators) ample time to wrestle out all the thematic incarnations of the project, and to attempt an appropriation of Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk ("total work"). The resulting album might be best described as a grand creative franchise-incorporating movie, symphony, comic book, dissertation, photography, graphic design, and a 3-D Viewmaster® reel-in which a songwriter's interrogation of one of New York's ugliest landmarks expands athletically to forums and formulas outside of the song itself. In fact, the BQE is everything but a song.

First and foremost, The BQE is a self-made home-movie documentation, exhibiting how all the architectural colors of Brooklyn and Queens are fabulously intersected by this ramshackle artery of highway traffic. Shot renegade style on do-it-yourself film cameras, the animated footage of grid-lock crisscrossing the brick and mortar of Brooklyn flickers and cascades Koyaanisqatsi-style on three simultaneous screens. The 16mm cinematography (heroically shot by Reuben Kleiner on a 1960s Bolex) utilizes time-lapse photography, in-camera editing, slow motion, and post-production mirror effects to transform urban blight into a splendor of graphic compositions.

The BQE is also accompanied by an idiosyncratic musical soundtrack (composed by Stevens for band and chamber orchestra), evoking a romanticized musical choreography of perpetual motion vs. gridlock. Borrowing variously from Gershwin, Terry Riley, Charles Ives, and Autechre (to name a few), the music showcases skittish woodwinds wrestling out impressionist articulation (in 7/8) and imperial brass anthems evoking various incarnations of the music of the automobile.

The BQE further extends its mythology by anthropomorphizing the expressway and its theoretical conceits into a 40-page comic book (cover by Matt Loux, masthead by Christian Acker), in which three extra-terrestrial superhero sisters (Botanica, Quantus, and Electress) use hula-hoops to combat the "the Messiah of Civic Projects," Captain Moses, and his totalitarian social architecture. The comic book, written by Stevens and gorgeously drawn, colored, and inked by longtime friend and collaborator Stephen Halker, visualizes in graphic form many of the political motifs of the movie and soundtrack: mid-century urban theory, modernism, post-modernism, hoop dynamics, and the spiritual practice of Subud.

By incorporating an anachronistic graphic novel, the album utilizes artifacts from the Golden Age of the American highway (1930s-1960s). This also inspired the inclusion of a stereoscopic Viewmaster® reel. Seven 3-D images-also created by Stephen Halker-are meant to accompany the seven movements of The BQE. While an ostensibly gimmicky object of kitsch, the 3-D reel, upon closer inspection, becomes a fitting metaphor for the thematic premises posed by the BQE: its circular geometry mirrors the hula hoop, its numerology (seven divisions) runs parallel to the seven movements of the musical suite, and its historical circumstances shed light on the modernist themes of the album.

Originally unveiled at the World's Fair of 1939 in Flushing, Queens, the Viewmaster promoted 3-D panoramic illusions of the American landscape (the Grand Canyon, the Redwoods, New York City, for instance), advertising various tourist destinations as a way to inspire American drivers to boldly go (via automobile and super highway) where no man has gone before. Incidentally, the first portion of the BQE included the Kosciusko Bridge, connecting the boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens over Newtown Creek as an efficient means of funneling tourist traffic to the World's Fair. From this reading, the BQE and the Viewmaster reel are odd accomplices in the modernist conspiracy to mobilize Americans nationwide.

Many of these thematic abstractions are rendered as a meandering social treatise-via prose-poem psychobabble liner notes by Sufjan Stevens. In this case, the songwriter borrows from multiple theoretical sources to evoke how the vainglorious battle between the "Artist" and the "Object of Inspiration" ultimately leads to self-absorption, existential exhaustion, and morbid futility in the Finding The Right Metaphor. For Stevens, this metaphor (in its struggle to creatively render an object as irreducible as the BQE) expands into a multitude of forms and figures, like a shape-shifting chimera of infinite significance-resulting in an album that refuses to be just one thing.

The BQE is available as a double-disc format (CD/DVD), which includes the original 16mm/8mm film (in widescreen "triptych" display), the original motion picture soundtrack, a 40-page booklet (with extensive liner notes and photographs), and the stereoscopic image reel (playable in all View-Master® viewers).

The limited edition vinyl is available as a double gatefold and includes the soundtrack on 180-gram vinyl, a large-scale 32-page booklet with liner notes and photographs, and a black-and-white version of the 40-page Hooper Heroes comic book.

Atlas Sound - Logos (new song) (live)

http://www.myspace.com/lullatone

"In the world of Seymour and Tomida, cuteness is merely beauty of another kind." ──Pitchfork


Lullatone招牌的微型、簡約流行歌曲這次以睡前的聲音玩樂為主題，人聲與節奏是重點，器樂伴奏極少，不變的是大孩子的可愛與好聽旋律。Walk through the minimal avant-pop stylings of Nagoya's favourite bedroom tune-maestros. The Bedtime Beat is a vision of pop perfection, at just over 20 minutes long this LP confirms that minimal is certainly the new cute! Between the bath water solo of 'The Bathtime Beat', the incredible beatbox grooves care of Yoshima Tomida and some of the most elegant and evocative melodies (delicately recorded on tape) from Shawn Seymour, this record sets a new benchmark for micro-pop.

試聽：
http://www.myspace.com/flicasound  


在2008年底，個人第二張專輯《Nocturnal》將於日本當紅獨立電子廠牌Schole發行之際，馬來西亞獨立電音創作人flica （a.k.a. Euseng Seto）已開始準備第三張作品《Telepathy Dreams》。歷經八個月，從創作、製作混音乃至發行都一手包辦，這顯然是Flica頗為重視的一次嘗試，也確實是其音樂性更加嚴肅成熟的表現。招牌的鋼琴、吉他等樂器主軸與微模結構的電音節奏搭配依舊漂亮流暢，卻成為較為陰暗情緒的載具。然而，正如同黑白照片可以冷調，也可以溫暖，flica的明亮音色中飄浮著憂鬱，沉靜的氛圍蘊含著激情，觸動了夢的意識，在靈魂的層次有了連結。


關於flica：

flica是來自馬來西亞吉隆坡的電子原音創作人／平面設計師euseng seto的代號，自2005年起即開始其音樂創作活動，與朋友合組電音二人組合muxu，2007初開始以flica名義實踐探索個人較實驗的電子音樂風格，及後與當地獨立廠牌mu-nest合作出版首張個人專輯《windvane & window》，悠然舒泰的有機風格讓他打開在日本的知名度，引起日本電子音樂圈的注目，2008年12月更在日本著名環境電音廠牌schole出版專輯《nocturnal》，受歡迎程度更上一層樓。

http://www.myspace.com/hyakkei  
http://www.hyakkei-jp.com/ 


2003年在日本大阪成立的三人樂團百景Hyakkei，罕見的二男一女組合，以以基礎三件樂器組建自由流動的旋律線，有別於時下後搖團流於哀傷自溺與過度強調的大爆炸，百景以明亮清爽的吉他、旋律漂亮的貝斯與快速俐落的鼓點帶動情緒，轉折間盡顯樂團的高度自信。

試聽：Ichinichi

延續Tenniscoats在Room40以田野錄音為主的嘗試，他們再度與廠牌老闆Lawrence English合作，到東京的公園、河邊演奏錄音。七首精緻、充滿空間感的小品捕捉到這個日本最具代表性迷幻民謠二人組在原生環境的自然音樂表現。

地點：深圳鹽田區大梅沙海濱公園公共海灘
After party時間及地點：深圳本色東門俱樂部10月31日晚上12點開始到11月1日早晨

2008年，在每年於德國所舉辦的世界最大電子藝術節-柏林國際跨媒體藝術節中的混合媒體類發表「filmachine」，同時也進行表演。另外，也接手由國際交通安全學會所委託的之行人穿越道燈號音樂曲目的製作。並曾於銀座地區的十字路口作現場測試而引起相當大的話題。


2009年，以在柏林所展開的音樂活動「Transmediale」開始了首次橫跨歐洲數國的巡迴演出「ATAK NIGHT 4」。今年六月也即將發行獨奏新專輯。


2006年和2007年分別在東京大學、東京藝術大學擔任兼任講師 – （資料取自超響 TranSonic 2009）


Tracklisting:
1  For Maria (5:34)
2  Blue (4:25)
3  Sky Riders (4:04)
4  Blue Fish (6:27)
5  Angel Passed (8:31)
6  Painful (3:44)
7  Open Your Eyes (4:10)
8  Ida (2:39)
9  When Attitudes Become Form (4:16)
10  One Plus Two (2:40)
11  Untitled (1:48)
12  Wht (4:38)
13  Erosion (5:37)
14  Our Music (4:40)