Whenever you watch a film by Harmony Korine, it’s tempting to try to locate the director therein. Sometimes he’s right there—perpetrating random acts of chaos behind a wrinkled mask in Trash Humpers, or perched on a couch, drunkenly seducing a dwarf in one of Gummo’s tamer vignettes. But where is Korine, himself? Do his own feelings of isolation or experiences in a Tennessee commune inform the refuge for Parisian celebrity impersonators in Mister Lonely?

He won’t answer that. He’ll say he doesn’t see himself in his movies or even want to know anything about himself, that all he’s concerned with seeing in his films is whether they hold true to his singular vision for them, though he doesn’t articulate precisely what that vision entails. 

He’s cagey, sure, but at 40 years old, Korine seems remarkably even-keeled—especially for those who recall the fidgety, giggly, puffy-eyed enfant terrible who trolled The Late Show with David Letterman in the 1990s. The persona on stage seemed so spaced out, so clever, so entertained by himself, that you had to wonder whether he was built for the long haul.

He wasn’t the voice of a generation, per se, because by the ’90s the notion of “one voice” was preposterous—Cobain was already dead when the Korine-penned Kids came out, with Tupac following soon. Plus, Korine’s films were so strange. Grotesque, even. He didn’t speak for everyone; instead he gave voices to people we rarely heard from: the poor, abused, scheming misfits who fill the vignettes of his 1997 directorial debut, Gummo, with its Rust-Belt-meets-Vaudeville-meets-black-metal pathos. Along with 1999’s exploration of mental illness and incest, Julien Donkey-Boy, that first film held a lens to folks who were previously invisible in popular culture—without subjecting them to freak-show-style ridicule. His boldly bizarre oeuvre endeared him to Werner Herzog, Gus Van Sant and Lars Von Trier (if not The New York Times). 

But so here’s where you’re supposed to talk about drugs and jail and how he antagonized passers-by into beating him senseless while David Blaine held a camera, how he got strung-out and burned down a house or two, that the fashion mogul agnès b. flew him to Paris to get sorted but that he was still “rotting from the inside out,” and that it took a South American vision quest and a return to Nashville to get clean and get married and grow up. And even if that all more or less did happen, imposing a tidy narrative like “Harmony grows up” feels a little contrived, no?

Because nothing is conventional with Korine. Certainly not his newest, grandest production, Spring Breakers, in which Disney princesses Selena Gomez and Vanessa Hudgens (as well as Ashley Benson plus Korine’s own wife, Rachel) share the stage with James Franco (doing his best Riff Raff), as well as rapper Gucci Mane and the infamous ATL Twins. It’s a tale of wayward youth, hedonism and bikini-clad robbery, with a Skrillex-infused score that detonates from the opening frame.

How does a one-time advocate of the rule-mandated Dogme 95 alternative cinema movement go on to release an explosion of “pure pop poetry”? Korine phoned FILTER from his Nashville home to explain why he made this film, why he needed to keep Gucci Mane out of prison and the importance of discovering a burning couch in an empty parking lot at 3:00 a.m.

Read more...

Macklemore is walking on people’s heads. For real: The 29-year-old rapper is stepping from hand to hand and head to head above the crowd at the Neptune Theatre in Seattle. The faces of the kids holding him aloft bear the illuminated, determined countenance of apostles enduring a holy trial. Around them, the audience of 800 is going bonkers, dancing in a blizzard of confetti exploding from cannons, while onstage, under spiraling spotlights, 24-year-old producer Ryan Lewis bumps the triumphant beat to “Can’t Hold Us.” Next to him, 21-year-old singer Ray Dalton wails on the hook: “Can we go back, this is the moment/Tonight is the night, we’ll fight till it’s over/So we put up our hands like the ceiling can’t hold us...”

Read more...

There are some conspiracy theorists out there who believe our Neanderthal ancestors were influenced by a group of extraterrestrials that visited Earth during the Stone Age. These ancient aliens were directly involved in the evolution of the human species through genetic engineering and cross-breeding. If this far-fetched theory was depicted as a popcorn flick, the five-piece Brooklyn indie-rock outfit Caveman could supply its soundtrack…for reasons beyond the name alone.

Read more...

In the early 2000’s, Atlanta was the place to be for cutting-edge hip-hop. With pioneering artists like Outkast, Goodie Mob, Ludacris and Jermaine Dupri paving the way, the ATL was fertile soil for homegrown, emerging Southern talent. During this Hotlanta heyday, it seemed that every member of any Dirty South crew was getting a record deal based on mere association—which rarely ended up equating to long-term success. However, Outkast protégé Killer Mike has proven to be an exception to this trend.

Read more...

Since the release of their 2010 album Pickin’ Up the Pieces, Fitz & The Tantrums have ridden what seems like a never-ending wave. On the strength of their vivacious Motown-influenced singles “MoneyGrabber,” “L.O.V.” and “Winds of Change,” the Los Angeles–based sextet has performed for increasingly bigger audiences across the globe, while still somehow managing to make it home long enough to write and record a follow-up.

The Guide joined bandmates Michael “Fitz” Fitzpatrick and Noelle Scaggs for a friendly conversation about their new album More Than Just a Dream. Over lunch at a bistro in Los Angeles’ Silver Lake neighborhood, they discussed the marathon sprint to write their new album, how they learned to hit the high notes and what will always make them happy to empty their wallets.

Read more...

When Wavves—the duo of founder/songwriter Nathan Williams and bassist Stephen Pope—went into a studio in Los Angeles’ Los Feliz neighborhood to record Afraid of Heights, their fourth full-length and first for emerging label Mom + Pop, they didn’t know they’d be spending an entire year there.

“A part of it was working at our own pace,” Williams says. “Since we were paying for it ourselves, I thought deadlines would be counter-productive, so we just recorded until we felt it was done. That just happened to be a year; luckily it wasn’t longer than that, ’cause I’m broke.”

Read more...

If we lived by Hunters’ rules, we’d all be living out our childhood dreams. The Brooklyn–Philly-based punk duo of Derek Watson and Isabel Almeida had a lot in common when it came to their pasts. Namely, it was that they had nothing in common with anyone else. Hyperactive, dislocated and largely misunderstood, neither of them is able to really sit still, leading to all the splendor that a flair for the spastic can bring. The music they create is no exception.

Read more...

Despite a teenage stint as Auckland’s most obvious graffiti artist, Unknown Mortal Orchestra frontman Ruban Nielson’s goal was never to stand out. “I didn’t get caught, even though I tagged my actual name,” he says, his voice crackling with amusement. “There was this kid who was a tagger and got caught by the police and he had to change his tag. Me and him always had a little beef. So I changed my [tagger] name to ‘Ruban’ just to rub it in.”

Now 32, Nielson is still apt at hiding in plain sight. Slouched in a booth at a Mexican restaurant in Los Angeles’ Echo Park neighborhood, he could pass for any other Friday night patron—save for a mysterious, peering eyeball tattooed across his Adam’s apple.

This anonymity hasn’t always existed. Having found success with his previous band The Mint Chicks (which featured his brother Kody, now of Kiwi upstarts Opossom), Nielson discovered that life in the public eye was limiting.

Read more...

Despite the cult of personality that surrounds him, Jason Lytle just wants to be a normal guy. “Sometimes I wish I wasn’t so rooted in reality,” he says over the phone, taking a break from some housework, “because I spend a lot of time keeping up my yard, and a lot of time making sure my car runs, and all of these normal functions, paying my taxes.”

Read more...

Being snowed in might force most people to subsist on beans and toast or down a bottle of Jack to pass the time. But for the members of Welsh band The Joy Formidable, it provided the ideal opportunity to hunker down and record a second full-length album. 

At the end of a recent American tour, the trio found themselves stuck in Portland, Maine, with mountains of snow outside their door. The wintry weather provided the perfect, sealed-off atmosphere for lead singer and guitarist Ritzy Bryan, bassist Rhydian Dafydd and drummer Matt Thomas to finally lay down the tracks that had been buzzing around their tour bus for the previous few months. 

“I relay the story now and people think, ‘You’re fucking crazy,’ because it was really cold, we’re snowed in and I think to people it sounds like, ‘Oh, you got cabin fever,’” says Bryan. “It sounds kind of strange but we were just having a really great, fruitful time. We really couldn’t record fast enough. It was not a difficult second album at all.”

Read more...