If you want a total nostalgia cosmic ride here is one of the best playlists with 230 entries on YT. It is one of the best archival finds – with lots of goodies fromBruton Musicwas founded in 1977 by Robin Phillips in the UK specializing in producing soundtracks for TV gameshows, movies, animations (such as La Planete Sauvage), TV series, and documentaries from the 70s and 80s. Alessandro Alessandroni, Amedeo Tomasi, Nino Nardini, Armando Trovajoli and lots of other crazy Italians. There is also Thierry Durbet, Georges Rodi, Alain Goraguer, and many other unduly forgotten French synth and keyboard wizards. Expect Italo-disco greats and relaxation music providers such as Geoff Bastow, James Asher or Paul Keogh.
Into the Night is a Belgian apocalyptic sci-fi drama thriller streaming television series created by Jason George, inspired by the 2015 Polish science fiction novel The Old Axolotl by Jacek Dukaj. The series premiered on Netflix on May 1, 2020. It is Netflix’s first Belgian original series. On July 1, 2020, the series was renewed by Netflix for a second season. wiki / imdb
Yakamoz S-245 (TV Series 2022)
Yakamoz S-245 is a Turkish apocalyptic sci-fi drama thriller streaming television series created by Jason George, inspired by the 2015 Polish science fiction novel The Old Axolotl by Jacek Dukaj. The series premiered on Netflix on April 20, 2022 and is a spin-off of the Belgian series Into the Night.
This is a stand-alone story but is linked To Into The Night and crosses over with it. wiki / imdb
I don’t care who you are. You’re my son. You’ll always be my son. Whoever you are.
Titane (2021) dir Julia Ducournau
“Following a series of unexplained crimes, a father is reunited with the son who has been missing for 10 years. Titane: A metal highly resistant to heat and corrosion, with high tensile strength alloys.” (imdb)
Titane will still be probably my favorite movie of both 2021 and 2022. I know I am taking big risks here. Still, I consider J. Ducournau one of the best directors around and one of the few ones that is taking the French extreme cinema (also known asNew French Extremism) farther afield. It comes as no surprise that it is produced by NEON. She is inheriting an unflinching, uncompromising Franco-Belge horror cinematography, yet I think she is unique altogether for her forays into what someone in a recent article aptly called “Being a Women is Full of Horror”. There is also a hint of J G Ballard out there (CRASH and Atrocity Exhibition) and Cronenbergian New Flesh.
There is nothing out there even closely comparable to this movie. Got first hint of Ducournau during her previous success – a cannibalism coming of age horror drama RAW (2016), while Titane is the final proof she will always have an ace up her sleeve.
Do not want to give any spoilers so I am going to restrict just to try and detail the way utter brutality is undermined – and imploded by some of the most tender and delicate scenes and enduring relations I have ever encountered on screen. Everything seems or feels impossible or made up – and somehow it appears strangely plausible. To me it brought back an incredible documentary mockumentary – The Imposter from a few years ago in this gender fluid way it approached family relations or inserting into a family or tacitly substituting for a disappeared son and it all makes perfect sense. There’s no judgment no condemnation here.
Fucking a car or getting pregnant with a car baby is after all not a far-fetched thing in a world of Holy Motors. There are scenes of absolute elation – ecstatic dancing and incredible fireman partie full of homoerotic charge. There are scenes that would put most slasher movies to shame. The imagery is super slick – almost videoclip (music video) like and this adds an entirely new quality to just having a plot. Its imagery and iconography seems entirely coherent inspired by a whole world burning – from California’s fiery hell to Australia’s unstoppable bushfires.
It’s hard to ignore that we seem yo be moving backwards – since the decoupling from Russian Oil dependence (politically justified) means another coupling and extractivism madness further afield. Beyond SAVE DIESEL bumper stickers (seen a few of those with my own eyes) or the all-powerful car industry lobby in Germany, there is an incredibly destructive death drive present, animated by a machinistic fetish car crash eroticism (one found in car advertising all over the world) one that has been rarely touched upon since cars became the skeleton in the closet. When we think of 1988 Akira anime we think of atomic energy – yet what is missing is that atomic energy rebranded as green – os supposed to make up for those fossil million year old sources under dictatorial control. Energy vampirism goes hand in hand with a pact with the devil and nobody seems to acknowledge this. A Kardashev level 1 civilization is being grilled, charred away – because what we have is self-combustion dependency, burn-out as a source of constant energy. Peak libido is following the price of oil while the West still cannot believe it depends on Russia or Saudi Arabia for running its motors (including war machines that are supposed to backup those oil reserves). The high-octane heroine Titane – survives a car crash, she’s the first plated cyborg that matches the exhaust pipes of our times. She is no inocent, she’s a killer, transformative and shape-shifting – yet protecting her machinic progeny (not clear if it’s real or just an effect of hallucinations caused by her prosthetics. Reducing with cars literally? No, it’s not a metaphor.
We love and live in a time when car manufacturers race to fake their own emissions and build artificially-sensitive systems that can distinguish btw the simulation and the real world conditions and avoid supervision and regulation and sell more (no matter what costs). Car manufacturers are primary authors of petrofictional cleanliness and carbon neutrality no?
They’re writing the end chapter of this petrofictional 21st c era that seems to want to circumvent any leftover human agency and decide in spite of government regulation, treaties, UN horror reports, climatologists consensus on climate crisis forums. YES (they seem to say) emperatures have to rise and Earth has to be transformed into a dessicated husk. I think one cannot embody or be attuned to these burning reality without such movies as Titane coming out of this bonfire.
Two space hunters are tracking down a machine trying to free itself. After taking it down, they witness a mystical phenomenon: the ghost of a young woman pulling herself out of the machine, as if the spaceship had a soul. Trying to understand the nature of this entity, they start chasing the woman through space… (official http://bloodmachines.com/)
This minis series (actually a movie in 3 chapters) was really hard to find, especially (like me) if you are not in a country where SHUDDER channel is supported (bad luck!). Shudder started making small genre productions, mostly horror but also SF, and the quality has been rising constantly. Many hidden gems still hide out there. Blood Machines was not in my tractor beam range for a long while, even if I knew about the Kickstarter crowdfunding project (since 2016). I knew Seth Ickerman’s was a French giant of retro 80s exploitation retrowave stylishness – mixing post-ironic, highly outrageous martial arts videos with bravado and VHS post-production VFXs. His Turbo Killer collaboration videoclip (Blood Machines 1) – with its cosmic space opera Cadillac cheap thrills grandeur and fashionista looks drowns everything in a pool of dark brooding space junk mysticism. Ickerman would be part of this new generation that adds a ton of pseudo- analog digital glitches, post filters that ooze unrepentant and nostalgic visuals. They are perfectly at home within the fold of synthwave retromania – nostalgia industries, while at the same time keeping it really really sleasy, steamy exploitation (Blood Machine has a +18 label).
Wanted to write about Blood Machines since a whole while and now friend Bogdan Lypkhanu, investigator of tantric SF, gave me the final ass kick.
Blood Machines has garnered either lots of hate as a grossed-out pile of plot-less, ham acting style dump or the perfect space opera tribute. I not so much interested in its tribute or retro aspect as in how it departs from most SF cinema depictions of spaceships in space opera sub-genre movies. Most spaceships (with the notable exception of Nostromo, Event Horizon, Lexx or Aniara more recently) are not really depicted as explicitly sentient, and I would say there is a lack not only of imagination, but of ‘wet imagination’, of corporeality in depicting a feeling, squelching, howling spaceship.
The organic – blood and flesh aspect of a biological spaceship brings me to biopunk – on a mystical cosmic, evolutionary scale, where various machinic ‘souls’. I am looking forward to spaceships where cellular and tissue aspects coexist, showing me how the universe is hosting artificial/grown entities with homeostatic millieus that pulsate, decay and mutate.
Maybe there’s more than a whiff of gender essentialism at work – rising from the fact that a lot of ships had female sounding heteronormative names (Mima), and this gets carried along in various cinematic space operas (except Millennium Falcon!). There is the cheesy lesbian undertone or even cultic Saphic love aspect to this Amazon tribe, a hidden vibration btw the spaceship protecting tribes and their eco-AI objects of care. The male characters gynophobia makes them even more of an offshoot of your Golden Age of SF captains, commanders, bounty hunters and space policemen.
It is a pity that Blood Machines is still partially stuck in a hetero male universe since there are new venues in space opera being explored by SF authors such as Benjanun Sriduangkaew – his Machine Mandate does not feature any cis males only lesbian characters, lots of sex and sleek shipminds. Both the two male pilots seem like a lot of comic relief ballast – atavistic remainders of a narcissist male hero obsessed genre that carries them on board in order to sacrifice them in the end (which is good!). The female-only tribes (‘oilsuckers‘) native to the movies exoplanet and the various ‘extracted’ mindship AIs are at the forefront of the movie. I really liked the way it reverses the Matrix Neo waking up in his pod, with the AI being extracted fully embodied in a human shape. Also the fact that the AI is somehow taking over the old mechanic co-pilot.
The AI taking this female human shape is also pretty stereotypical since it just follows that all spaceships search for the typical female white body (same as like the Ex Machine Alex Garland movie). Curious to finally seeAsian or African shipminds, that do not end embodied embody as white females. This typical pinup fembot girl is out of cult mags like MONDO2000 or Metal Hurlant comics (key SF cult comic French US book that left a long imprint) and Blood Machines never strays far from this. It is almost like these small, 21st c indie productions are the ones that the previous generations (from 1970s on) did not have the budget for, the tools or CGI acumen to do! That being said there is the Heavy Metal animation and a certain je ne sais quois, an undeniable french touch – +fose of eurotrash to it, that makes it quite a relief after the onslaught of the standard US SF. I am also excited a Romanian post FXs studio from Bucharest has been working on it – Avanpost media.
This penchant of the cyberdelic imaginary for what i would call – space fitness is also a big limitation, and restricts everything to these particular types of athletic, dancer bodies – as if one cannot fly in the universe if one is not trim, fit, flawless and more importantly streamlined. One of the interesting things is that a lot of the so-called space billionaires, beside the fact that they are mostly prone to be white, married (or divorced) and hetero white males, are also not at all what u might call owners of super sexy bodies. In fact they are completely unsexy and still they got a chance to fly high or entertain dreams of planetary escapism.
On screen one can only make into space or in the cosmos if one sports these type of healthy ‘efficient’ bodies that are increasingly being peddled both under hyper consumer capitalism and by art festivals. In order to prove one’s job dedication one has to keep this physicality on view & under control, keeping it fit at all times and under display – and under no circumstances is this body to look tired, flabby, wasted or out of shape. In Blood Machines the male spaceship hunters, hunting down rogue AI shipminds after some unspecified revolt of the machines, are definitely both unsexy and decrepit. I also like the grimness of the crusty Amazons, and the fact that they are multigenerational. Reminded me a bit of the natives of Zulawski’s Silver Globe from 1988.
At the same time there is in Blood Machines also a lot of sex magic at work, Pentagons, Pentagrams and ritualistic dance floor action. And for me this side of it was the most important – the fact that the spaceships are actually like huge interstellar beasts, whose hearts are still beating, even in a junkyard situation like stranded whales. The obvious – neo-gnostic – disembodiment of the shipmind, where the AI minds are ritualistically liberated is probably the most obvious part. These techgnostic rituals where vividly depicted, especially as Conspirituality is becoming almost a universal pop phenomenon. Erik Davis has been tracing out some of the consequences of that.
Call me a old trash SF hound, but I loved the last orgy scene where you get all these reversed crosses on the pubic hair of the embodied AIs. In a very trashy dance (end) scene these bodies are actually being choreographically and invisibly moved (even worse than in the recent remake of Suspiria) while linked to distant shipwrecks smashing into each other. There is also this glow – ‘auratic’ celeb glam to it, in a cover magazine way that puts to shame the usual very tired tropes of neo noir femme fatale cyberpunk (like the recent Reminiscence 2021 WB movie). There is a cosmic ‘satanist’ Thelema magick SF glory to this violet- magenta – lava lamp imagery, and the way space junk starts recomposing some tantric mandala is definitely one of my favorite movie endings, even if completely exxxploit, predictable and fan service (most probably).
The Psychedelic Video Museum is the world’s first museum of psychedelic art and video. It is the fruit of a decade long effort which began in April 2010, and the foundation of the Daily Psychedelic Video, a group blog that’s been serving the internet it’s daily menu of selectively curated psychedelic videos from across the web.
The videos on this website were carefully selected from within the Daily Psychedelic Video collections of more than 4,000 videos that were posted on the website between April 2010 and April 2020. Together, they constitute the first ever attempt to showcase the variety and creativity of psychedelic video artists from across the globe, since early 20th century and to this day.
You can roam our virtual exhibition halls choosing to advance chronologically, from early 20th century psychedelia to this day, or by region, by exploring global hotspots of psychedelic creativity such as Germany, France, China, Japan and Israel. Alternatively, you can also explore psychedelic videos of different themes, styles and moods: feelgood psychedelia, contemplative psychedelia, marine psychedelia, poppy psychedelia or hip-hop psychedelia.
Whichever way you decide to move through these collections, be sure to do so in an explorative psychedelic frame of mind. These videos are a mindstate-dependent form of art. They don’t have to be viewed under the influence to be enjoyed, but they dramatically benefit from a relaxed, fanciful, contemplative gaze which allows the shapes and colors on the screen to resonate in our minds and bodies.
Some examples
Everyday Objects In Macro – Macro Room
A mind-bending video shows the reality of everyday object in extreme close-up.
A BOX with Secret (Шкатулка с секретом) – Valery Uragov (1976) An awesomely psychedelic yellow-submarine-style soviet animation from 1976.
APOGEE／Spring Stranger - スプリング·ストレンジャー Awesome, elevating video by Japanese group Apogee
My…MY… – Lei Lei (2011) A person wakes up naked and embarks on a strange journey
MGMT – When You Die (2017) A morbid but stunning and impeccably done video by MGMT. Directed by (Mike Burakoff & Hallie Cooper-Novack).
Hashish – The Drug of a Nation – Boom Pam A song by Israeli band Boom Pam.
Jeff Minter: Heart of Neon ou cannot talk about psychedelic video games without talking about Jeff Minter. Teaser for the documentary Heart of Neon about the legendary game designer (by Paul Docherty).
Berg – Kanahebi (2015) Animated marine life forms. Animated by Hideki Inaba.
TimeSpace Warps 