Local multi-instrumentalist and Root Strata label cofounder Jefre Cantu-Ledesma has titled his newest solo album, Love is a Stream (Type), but the watercourse this robust and unexpectedly sharp collection of dazzlers brings to mind is Niagara Falls.

Whether he’s playing a pastoral variant of psych rock with his more recent project The Alps or improvising a soundtrack to one of Paul Clipson’s gorgeous 8mm films, a careful attention to timbre and a nimble, even delicate, shaping of sound through the graduated addition of sonic elements have always been trademarks of Cantu-Ledesma’s musicianship.

Love is a Stream is, in some ways, a sustained exploration of what happens to timbre when you keep piling sounds on top of each other. Cantu-Ledesma smears what sounds like racks of overdriven keyboards and the warped buzz of a hundred guitars into thick, shimmering fog banks, as if following Iggy Pop’s lead when he remixed Raw Power in 1997 so that it sounded more “in the red.”

That old saw about how the Velvet Underground’s first record may not have sold well but everyone who heard it went on to form their own band could also be said of Austrian composer/producer Christian Fennesz’s 2001 release Endless Summer (Mego).

Revolution seems to be on the minds and in the hearts of many in LGBT folk these days. The desire for change is palpable at the marriage equality marches that have now become regular occurrences, even if one isn’t marching under the banner of marriage equality. Indeed, the large and sustained outpouring of grassroots activism that has sprung up since Proposition 8 “passed” last November has been hailed, however ill-fitting the comparison, as “Stonewall 2.0.” […]

“Banish Green!” That was the self-imposed restraint director Nagisa Oshima put on himself when making his first color film (and second feature) Cruel Story of Youth (1960). Green, as Oshima goes on to explain in an essay recounting his decision, was the color he most associated with the symbolic center of Japanese domestic life: the tatami mat-lined living room, usually adjacent to a small, cloistered garden. This room had been long occupied by a previous generation of Japanese filmmakers such as Yasujiro Ozu (whose “pillow shots” couldn’t be greener) and Kenji Mizoguchi. For Oshima, it was a cage. “Characters, rooms, gardens were all utterly repellant,” he writes, “and I firmly believed that unless the dark sensibility that those things engendered [was] completely destroyed, nothing new would come into being in Japan.” […]

In an online interview, experimental filmmaker and violin drone pioneer Tony Conrad relates a story: one night, underground drag superstar Mario Montez wandered into the apartment Conrad shared with filmmaker Jack Smith, and at Smith’s behest began an impromptu performance. When Smith flicked on a beaten up 16mm projector to serve as a makeshift spotlight, he and Conrad became transfixed by the play of light that reflected off Montez’s sequined outfit. While it would be glib — and certainly fun — to declare that 1960s structural film was born from the glittering gyrations of a drag queen, Conrad’s anecdote is but one development in his longstanding fascination with the excessive sensory effects of shooting light out into the void. […]

Commenting on the relationship between his identity as a filmmaker and his identity as a novelist, the late Alain Robbe-Grillet told the New York Times, “We are friends, but never collaborators.” Like many of Robbe-Grillet’s pronouncements concerning his own work, the statement is pithy and guarded, and cannot be taken entirely at face value. […]

In the liner notes for his 1978 album, Ambient 1: Music for Airports (Editions EG/Polydor), Brian Eno wrote that the music contained within, “must be as ignorable as it is interesting.” Though that watershed release launched a thousand new age imitators under the banner of ambient music, Eno’s ambivalent criteria still holds as a descriptive litmus test for any music that only partially depends on focused engagement in order to be fully appreciated.

Or as Adam Wiltzie, one half of the dreamy instrumental duo Stars of the Lid, puts it: “There is a narcoleptic feeling that I want to get within each tune. If the piece doesn’t make me fall asleep, then it’s probably not finished.” […]

“I was just on the Farne Islands, off the northeast coast of England, near where I live, and at this time of the year they are covered with Atlantic gray seals that have come to birth their pups,” environmental sound recorder and musician Chris Watson explains, recounting his latest field trip over a shaky Skype connection. “There are whole communities of female seals that sing and have these beautiful haunting voices. It’s sort of this siren voice. You can imagine sailors being drawn to it from across the waves.” […]

“When we use magical in a positive sense,” filmmaker Lawrence Jordan explains, parsing an adjective that is frequently brought up in discussions of his work, “it really means my eye is fresh at this moment and what I’m seeing is a discovery.” Jordan’s films — in particular, the animated collages composed of Victorian magazine illustrations, Gustave Doré engravings, and flashing stars and orbs for which he is most famous — are the visual records of such moments of discovery. […]

The pull quote snagged by most critics from John Cameron Mitchell’s Shortbus was Justin Bond’s quip “It’s like the ’60s, only with less hope,” delivered while surveying the myriad sexual couplings and groupings in his salon’s back room. Bond’s pithy line encapsulated the film’s ideal of community through polymorphous perversity, even if that vision is tempered by an awareness of the initial sexual revolution’s blind spots and a hangover from the 20 years of sexual-identity politicking in its wake. Yet Mitchell’s film is neither jaded nor self-serious and never pimps out its graphic sex scenes for purposes of cynical titillation. Reflecting the loose, workshop methods with which Mitchell and his cast developed the film, sex in Shortbus is for the most part something revelatory, experimental, and at times quite playful. But Mitchell draws the narrative parallels a little too neatly: when else could the film’s sex therapist finally achieve orgasm but at the story’s, uh, climax? […]