The gathering has the vibe of a pilgrimage, the preparations unfolding with quasi-religious grandeur. Several enormous speakers, arranged on a dance floor of sand, have the coldly inanimate majesty of the monoliths in "2001: A Space Odyssey" (1968), as if they were sonic portals, transmitting pulses from an alien dimension. The music that pours forth, composed by the electronic artist Kangding Ray, is magnificently transporting, and the ravers surrender to the beat with glorious delirium.
Just as "Sirāt" is a twisty thriller that takes you unexpected places on its tragic journey into the dystopian desert unknown, the heady filmmaker behind it, Oliver Laxe, is not your average interview. His fourth European feature, "Sirāt" is his breakout: It wowed critics at Cannes, shared the Jury prize, and won the Cannes Soundtrack Award for Best Composer for Kangding Ray.
cementing its legacy as one of the world's most well-known electronic duos. On YouTube, the grainy black-and-white video for "Galvanize" has 118 million views, while 1999's "Hey Boy Hey Girl" - which features a glorious ensemble of dancing CGI skeletons - has surpassed 90 million. The visuals for "Let Forever Be," directed by Michel Gondry, is a kaleidoscopic masterpiece using practical effects rarely seen today and remains a personal favorite.
For Fredric Jameson, for instance, while modernism "thought compulsively about the New and tries to watch its coming into being", postmodernism "looks for breaks, for events rather than new worlds". The latter definition, encapsulating the cultural logic of late capitalism, is all the more intriguing in the context of music culture, since it has found so many breaks to play around with.