Ashland Mines

Dazzling and raucous, Ryan Trecartin's first feature-length video takes cues from chat rooms, social networking web sites, YouTube, John Waters, and Pee-wee’s Playhouse, and then turns them upside down and inside out to create an entirely singular video genre. In I-BE AREA, Trecartin intertwines the stories of an incredible ensemble cast to follow a day in the life of I-BE II, the rebellious clone of I-BE.

The video revolves around an unending "meeting" - a busy, aimless meeting that goes in circles to evade a traditional narrative arc. The meeting is essentially a party, and the entire company bumps and grinds with itself everywhere from in boardrooms to airplanes. K-Corea INC. K processes ideas of automation and containment, embodied by these hyper-controlled locations and by the seemingly looping actions that take place in them. Meetings, where discrete parts of a corporate body come together to attempt to "get on the same page," display the futility of corporate unity, and of individual purpose or voice remaining intact within a corporate culture.

Trecartin returns to his conception of family-as-business-enterprise, casting parent figures as managers and executives on one end of the spectrum, estranged children as freelancers on the other. The director plays four sisters named Ceader, Britt, Adobe and Deno, the boundaries of whom are indistinct. It is difficult to tell where one sister ends and the next begins. The sisters' questing—for identity, for romance, etc.—leads them on an episodic series of adventures, several of which are defined as "premises." A Trecartin premise plays out as a predetermined situation where the character initiating it has already set the tone, terms, and trajectory of the experience in their mind. The actual, lived event serves only as the shading-in of the outline.

In P.opular S.ky (section ish), a character played by Trecartin informs us that she wants ‘to live in a world where narration is the devil’. The ability to script oneself is an inalienable right, and anything that opposes that right must be rejected.

Originally released in 1998, "Icy Lake" is one of only three recordings by Dat Oven, a NYC-based house duo made up of Jeffery Gratton and Shunji Morawaki. Icy Lake connects the dots between legendary but oft-forgotten moments in 90s nightlife, vogue/ballroom culture, grime's Eskibeat movement, and the radical club constructions of the NS/F2M families. This documentary documents the re-discovery and re-release of the record by on a co-release on Fade To Mind and Night Slugs.