Yes We Like Movies
How perfect is it that Omicron showed up right when we decided to take the plunge on AMC A-List? 99 cents for the first month of movies à la carte, and the theaters were full of last year’s postponements. Now even if we avoid indoor spaces everywhere else, going to a movie theater will definitely give us disease.
We would have used our A-List status to see Licorice Pizza, Red Rocket, Benedetta, The Lost Daughter, Nightmare Alley, The Matrix, Being the Ricardos, The King’s Man, Venom 2, The Eternals…the maximum three movies a week, to get our money’s worth.
They say Omicron is inevitable now, but we’re still avoiding the indoors. This year, we booked and then canceled a tour that was supposed to happen during the height of Delta. It felt awful, but like the right decision. It’s wild that our last live show was at an art museum in Frankfurt on February 25th, 2020. We’re looking forward to playing very loud music in small, dark spaces packed with people and hoping the act of looking forward and hoping is enough to actualize us getting there.
Nüvies
Until then, we’re watching movies. May we introduce you to an internal concept we’re calling “nüvies"? That’s new + movie + umlaut. It’s a new form of media.
The most visible part of a nüvie is disguised as a movie. Don’t be confused! Although it looks and feels almost like a regular movie, it’s actually just the onboarding portion of an alternate reality game (ARG). This game often begins at home, because nüvies require extensive foreknowledge of canon in order to be enjoyed. The player is expected to pre-party with a comic book, Twitter thread, and/or review, and this expectation persists even after they’ve left the theater (or ended the stream).
Movies are self-contained entertainment experiences, and films, at their best, inform conversations and spark lifelong inspiration. Nüvies offer none of this.
Instead, they’re maddening pop-puzzles that must be solved using crowdsourcing technology. Nüvies are convoluted by design and rely on our confusion. Things used to just be bad, but now they’re so intentionally bad and obtuse that we’re left with an itch only subreddits can scratch. The brain’s reward system makes learning about these itches and ultimately scratching them feel worthwhile, and that’s their trick. They’re the entertainment equivalent of adding an item to your finished to-do list only to feel the satisfaction of crossing something off.
Other definitive qualities of nüvies: they’re inexplicably paced as long trailers, heavily market-researched, and feel like the motion smoothing (“soap opera mode”) on a new television looks, which is to say they boast an unsettling combination of high-resolution imagery and low-resolution information. Nüvies are so tethered to existing IP that it becomes tedious and complicated for them to introduce new concepts or characters; they often outsource world-building details to ancillary products like games, podcasts, and comic books. The Matrix: Resurrections is a nüvie. Tenet is a nüvie. Venom: Let There Be Carnage is inexplicable as anything but a nüvie. In fact we’ll even chance the theory that any theatrical release with a colon in the title is a nüvie, making nüvies the dominant cultural form of our time. Even heartbreak feels good in a place like this.
Year-Beginning List
We did a few things this year, like release a covers record and premiere a new A/V composition at Sónar Festival. Claire’s been writing a ton. We released a single and video we’re really proud of, and yes, we made NFTs. But we’d rather tell you about some things we’re doing early next year.
On January 12 the first two episodes of the Apple Original podcast “Wild Things” will be released. It’s about Siegfried and Roy. Rob and Jona composed the Campari-soaked-cassette theme song and scored the entire eight-part series. SARMOTI!
During the pandemic, we built a studio in our backyard. For the first time in our lives we have a purpose-built space for making music. Almost everything we’ve ever released has been either made in a bedroom or in a studio we briefly commandeer and misuse. Now we have our very own amalgam of both!
So we’re having fun making music again. Right now we have a bunch of unfinished songs in different states of undress, but there are at least two that can no longer be contained. One is called My Idea, and the other is called Eve Babitz. We’ll release them sometime in January, which seems close enough to be real. We like it when we’re whipped into a deadline-driven frenzy. Fuck strategy!
In February we’ll premiere an hour+ found footage mix of TV, commercials, movies, and other weird media that has been bouncing around in our heads since we’ve been capable of retaining visual information. Certainly you too have a local TV commercial jingle stuck in-between your ears forever? We’re calling stuff like that DREK. Our friend Bret Berg has a Twitch show on Tuesdays called the Museum of Home Video that’s been essential viewing for us throughout the pandemic (they call it “college radio for your eyes”) and we’ll air it there first. We’ll tell you more about that next year.
We’ve also been playing a lot of chess, and we’ll keep doing that.
Love to you all, and hoping you’re staying safe. See you at the nüvies.