exystence club

In The Juniper Tree, an interrelationship between the ethereal and terrestrial seems to cloak the everpresent Icelandic landscape. The film, written and directed by Nietzchka Keene in 1986 and released in 1990, is disbelieving of binaries such as life and death, natural and supernatural, stillness and unrest. It is perhaps best known as the genesis point for Björk’s career as an actor, but in its compelling feminist retelling of the Brothers Grimm story of the same name it recasts tropes of witches and wicked stepmothers as women in tune with nature’s gifts and fighting for survival under the suspicious gaze of patriarchy. Throughout, the land dwarfs the characters, and a sense of studied quietude saturates even the tensest moments. Tenderness and terror…

We last encountered Midori Hirano in the company of a pair of Berlin electronic improvisers, noting that “A grounding cadence of piano arpeggios, a tremulous wash of strings, the fluting pulse of synthesizers, Berlin experimental artists Sebastian and Daniel Selke (“the brothers”) and Midori Hirano mix together organic and electronic sounds in this meditation on the scale.”
Here the Berlin-based artist — who trained on classical piano but has more recently shifted to analog and modular synths — revisits the spare, searching aesthetic on her own, mostly on synthethic keyboards but also on piano.
On the synthy side, consider the purity of “Before the Silence,” as it negotiates a brief but luminous keyboard riff. It rolls like a wheel,…