LIFEGUARD Deliver A Gritty, Hard-Hitting New Single
The youthful trio of Asher Case (bass, baritone guitar, vocals), Isaac Lowenstein (drums, synth), and Kai Slater (guitar, vocals) have been making music together since they were in high school, nearly a quarter of their lives. Noisy and immediate, cryptic but heartfelt, they draw inspiration from punk, dub, power-pop and experimental sounds, and bring them all together in an explosive cacophony.
Recorded last year in Chicago with producer Randy Randall (No Age), the album captures a claustrophobic scrappiness that evokes the feeling and energy of house parties and tightly-packed rooms, where ears are easily overwhelmed, and ragged improvisations connect with the same force as melodic hooks.
David Keenan on Ripped and Torn:
Ripped and Torn, the debut album by Chicago three-piece Lifeguard, may or may not take its title from the legendary Scottish punk fanzine of the same name. Or perhaps it references the torn t-shirts that rock writer Lester Bangs claimed the late Pere Ubu founder Peter Laughner died for 'in the battle fires of his ripped emotions.' Or maybe it points to the trio's ferociously destabilising take on melodic post-punk and high velocity hardcore, signposting their debt to the kind of year zero aesthetics that would reignite wild improvisational songforms with muzzy garage Messthetics in a way rarely extrapolated this side of Dredd Foole & The Din.
Either way, Lifeguard stake their music on the kind of absolute sincerity of the first wave of garage bands, garage bands that took rock at its word, while simultaneously cutting it up with parallel traditions of freak. The half-chanted, half-sung vocals are hypnotic. Songs aren't so much explicated as they are exorcised, as though the melodies are plucked straight from the air through the repeat-semaphoring of Asher Case on bass, the machine gun percussion that Isaac Lowenstein plays almost like a lead instrument, and that flame-thrower guitar that Kai Slater sprays all over the ever-circling rhythm section. Indeed, the trio play around an implied centre of gravity with all of the brain-razzing appeal of classic minimalism, taking three-minute hooks into the zone of eternal music by jamming in – and out – of time. And then there are the more experimental pieces – 'Music for Three Drums' (which surely references Steve Reich's Music For 18 Musicians), 'Charlie's Vox' – that reveal the breadth of Lifeguard's vision, incorporating a kind of collaged DIY music that fully embraces the bastardised avant garde of margin walkers like The Dead C, Chrome, and Swell Maps.
But alla this would be mere hubris without the quality of the songs. The title track 'Ripped & Torn' suggests yet another take on the title, which is the evisceration of the heart. Here we have a beautifully brokedown garage ballad, with the band coming together to lay emotional waste to a song sung like a transmission from a lonely ghost. 'Like You'll Lose' goes even deeper into combining dreamy automatic vocals with steely fuzz on top of a massive dub/dirge hybrid. 'It Will Get Worse' is pure unarmoured pop-punk crush while 'Under Your Reach' almost channels the UK DIY of The Television Personalities circa 'Part Time Punks' but with a militant interrogation of sonics that would align them more with This Heat. Plus the production, by Randy Randall of No Age, is moody as fuck. Are they really singing 'words like tonality come to me' on 'T.L.A.'?! If so, it would suggest that Lifeguard are one of those rare groups who can sing about singing, who can play about playing, and who, despite the amount of references I'm inspired to throw around due to the voracity of their approach, are capable of making a music that points to nothing outside of the interaction of the player's themselves.
And sure, there's a naivety to even believing you could possibly do that. But perhaps that's what I have been chasing across this entire piece, the quality of openness that Lifeguard bring to their music. You can tell these three have been playing together since junior high/high school: the music feels youthful, unburdened, true to itself, even as it eats up comparisons. Lifeguard play underground rock like it might just be as serious as your life, but with enough playful ardour to convince you that youth is a quality of music, and not just of age. With a sound that is fully caught up in the battle fires of their own ripped emotions, Lifeguard make me wanna believe, all over again.
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Otago Daily Times
20 hours ago
- Otago Daily Times
The fascist position on yoga
For more than a century, elements of the far right have been attracted by yoga's rigours, the author of a new book tells Miles Ellingham. Stewart Home just wanted to do a headstand. That said, one shouldn't always take what Home does at face value. Over the course of his career, Home (born Kevin Llewellyn Callan), a writer, artist and activist, has written a novel about dragging Diana, Princess of Wales's corpse around a Scottish stone circle, formed a series of anti-art movements and publicly announced his intention to levitate Brighton's Pavilion theatre. This time, though, he's adamant he really did just want to do a headstand. In 2009 he took up yoga, which was offered as part of his gym membership. Home threw himself into the practice, subjecting himself to more than 1000 classes between 2009 and 2019, many of them just down the road from the East London Tara Yoga Centre, the scene of an investigation into "bad guru" Gregorian Bivolaru, who allegedly tempted followers into "an international web of trafficking and sexual exploitation". But Home wouldn't have known about that back then. What he did know was that some of his classmates were acting weird. Home has a high threshold for weirdness, but this was surpassed when a fellow student sidled up to him and proclaimed herself a "starseed" — a sort of New Age angel-alien hybrid sent to Earth to cleanse humanity. Home was also thrown by the cult-like, authoritarian guru-student relationship of his classes, which concluded in a traditional namaste gesture of respect. He elected instead to hold his fist in the air and mutter: "No god, no guru." Home wanted to do a headstand. However, after some cursory research, he realised something troubling: so did the Waffen-SS. The opening chapter of his book Fascist Yoga: Grifters, Occultists, White Supremacists, and the New Order in Wellness begins with a definition of the practice it interrogates: "The term 'yoga' refers to both a physical culture system that is slightly more than a century old and a set of religious practices whose origins pre-date those of postural yoga, though they were reinvented in the late 19th century." Home's book does not claim that yoga, with its nebulous origins, is inherently fascist, nor that all yoga practitioners are primed for far-right indoctrination. Rather, after its adoption in the west, a Venn diagram emerges. In one circle, there's yoga, Tantra, occidental Buddhism and Hinduism, New Age spirituality and basic hippydom. In the other, authoritarianism, fascism, proto-fascism, white supremacy and far-right conspiracy theory. Home wanders through the gateway between these two circles, emerging into a dark, contradictory realm where death camp guards sit in a lotus position, bare-chested Italian militiamen play catch with live grenades and "Miss Jelly Fish" is flattered without reservation. More on Miss Jelly Fish later, but first we begin with "the Great Oom". Pierre Bernard should never really have been called "the Great Oom". The title was a mistake by the New York press, which didn't know how to spell the "om" mantra correctly. Nevertheless, the name stuck. Bernard was extremely influential in the spread of yogic practices in the West during the early 20th century. He started out as a carnival attraction, gaining attention by publicly inserting surgical needles into himself. Later, he began espousing hypnotism and Tantra and, in 1905, founded the Tantrik Order in America on the West Coast. He claimed to have learned his practices from a wandering guru called Sylvais Hamati, whose existence, Home points out, is not evidenced by Bernard's biographer. Soon after founding the Tantrik Order, Bernard moved to New York, where he launched yoga classes for the ultra-wealthy elite. His disciples included the Vanderbilt heiress Margaret Stuyvesant Rutherfurd, along with the British fascist Francis Yeats-Brown and a racist journalist called Hamish McLaurin. In 1910, Bernard was charged with kidnapping two teenage girls. Modernity rolled fascism into being. But, despite modernity, fascism needed its own mythology, so fascists looked east. Two of Bernard's disciples, Yeats-Brown and McLaurin, collaborated on a book, Eastern Philosophy for Western Minds, which traced "Indo-Aryan texts" to an ancient encounter between "highly developed" ancient Aryan invaders of "the purest possible white stock" and "a dark-skinned people infinitely beneath them on the evolutionary scale". Yeats-Brown found fame the same decade with his memoir The Lives of a Bengal Lancer, which was adapted into a film — reportedly a favourite of Hitler's — starring Gary Cooper. Yeats-Brown was not the only British fascist yogi of his time. There was also the army officer Major-general J.F.C. Fuller, who is partially credited with inventing blitzkrieg warfare. According to the historian Kate Imy, Fuller studied "the Vedas and the Upanishads [and] took a deep interest in the yoga philosophy". Fuller was, for a while, a disciple of the occultist Aleister Crowley, although the pair fell out, Home writes, "over Crowley's indulgence in sex magic with other men". In April 1939, months before the Nazis invaded Poland, Fuller was an honoured guest at Hitler's 50th birthday, a three-hour motorised military parade in Berlin. The path to 20th-century fascism, as Home outlines, is punctuated with yoga and racist interpretations of eastern philosophy. Another example was the Italian aristocrat Gabriele D'Annunzio, often credited as the "John the Baptist of fascism" after leading the 1919 rogue annexation of the port of Fiume (now Rijeka in Croatia). D'Annunzio, a strange narcissist, claimed to be "the greatest Italian writer since Dante". Among his proto-fascist legionnaires was Guido Keller, a manic depressive, cocaine-fuelled aviator who posed as Neptune on photoshoots and slept in a tree with his pet eagle. During the occupation of Fiume, Keller founded the "Yoga group", whose manifestos adopted the (then-neutral) swastika as a symbol. "D'Annunzio and his followers saw in Hinduism what they saw in the mirror — bold and sensuous vitality — plus an aura of eastern holiness," Mark Thompson, a historian of early 20th-century Italy, said. "This vision gave them another licence for hedonism ... Critics of the yoga industry say it peddles the same clueless 'Orientalism' and with it, possibly, the proto-fascist ideology that celebrated warriors and master heroes for real." Not long after the annexation of Fiume, Heinrich Himmler — influenced by German Indologist Jakob Wilhelm Hauer — looked to Hinduism as an Aryan religion. According to the German historian Mathias Tietke, Himmler avidly consumed the Bhagavad Gita and later intuited its philosophy as a justification for the Holocaust. Tietke's research reportedly found that the SS death camp guards were officially recommended yoga and that Himmler even touted Wewelsburg Castle near Paderborn as a centre for "yoga exercises, meditation, Bhagavad Gita readings and yogic nutrition". According to Home, Hitler didn't appear to share the same yogic enthusiasm as Himmler. That said, one widely reproduced photograph shows his future wife, Eva Braun, in a picturesque, lakeside back bend — though whether she's explicitly practising postural yoga is "impossible to tell". Pre-1945, the fascism-yoga Venn diagram hardly resembles its traditional shape — it's just a broad circle with two slim crescents on either side. Prominent figures residing within this overlap included the Italian imperialist "super-fascist" Julius Evola (the modern far-right's treasured philosopher) and Mircea Eliade, a Romanian academic who wrote a thesis on yoga practices before throwing his weight in the 1930s behind the Iron Guard, a religious fascist movement that carried out multiple assassinations. In his essay Ur-Fascism, Umberto Eco — who was not a fascist but had been forced to participate in fascism as a child — attempts to answer a difficult question: what is fascism? Eco writes that defining fascism is like defining a game: there's no single characteristic, but you know it when you see it. This, he contends, is due to an overlapping sequence of features or "family resemblances". Many of these are also applicable to new age spirituality. One is a "rejection of modernism". We see this both in the new age movement's rejection of a materialist world and in far-right traditionalists bemoaning social progress. Another is what Eco calls "the cult of action for action's sake". He describes this as the fascist belief that action is beautiful in itself, that "thinking is a form of emasculation". This almost sounds like something out of Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love ("the resting place of the mind is the heart", a monk tells the book's central character). Eat, Pray, Love leads us to another of Eco's fascist identifiers: its "appeal to a frustrated middle class", which certainly applies to yoga. "If you understand being mainstream as appealing to thin white women with money to burn," Home writes, "then you can't get more mainstream in the world of modern postural practice than [the online magazine] Yoga Journal ... A 'recommended yogi reading' list on its website includes Eliade's Yoga: Immortality and Freedom. I'm still seeing this work repeatedly recommended to yoga teachers and practitioners with no warning about the fact it was written by someone active in fascist politics at the time it was composed." After reading Home's book, I met him near his old yoga studio. Home and I sat in the shade of an overhanging tree, meditative but not cross-legged upon a rock. I put it to him that if, say, ping-pong happened to have a number of fascist devotees, it doesn't necessarily make it fascist. "But what about if the guy who came up with the game of ping-pong had a bunch of fascist and white supremacist followers," he responds. "Also, ping-pong doesn't have the mystical trappings of a cult." Home argues that fascist yoga continued into the late 20th century, only in a slightly more veiled way. "A lot of the earlier fascist yogis are referred back to," he says of subsequent followers. "So even someone like Harvey Day, who is explicitly anti-racist in his books, can't resist mentioning the Aryan origins of yoga and will reference Francis Yeats-Brown and other people, and I think it's the credulity around the beliefs, it's what I describe as anti-essentialism and belief in one's own truth. Also, with QAnon and antivax stuff, you see this being discussed more." Home sees a telling similarity between the reverence QAnon adherents feel towards their saviour, Donald Trump, and the ardent spiritual devotion for Hitler displayed by the Nazis. "There's a very clear parallel between the two things," he says. Whether QAnon's "esoteric Hitlerism" is consciously borrowed or simply emerges from the same mythic structure, he continues, "hinges on research I haven't done". Travis View, via his QAA podcast, has been examining the QAnon movement since its origins in 2017. View points out perhaps the most obvious recent collision point between far-right QAnon conspiracy theory and new age beliefs: Jacob Chansley, AKA "the QAnon Shaman". Chansley became the mascot of the January 6 insurrection after he stormed the US Capitol in facepaint and a fur horned headdress. Having gained access to the Senate chamber, Chansley led the rioters in quasi-Christian prayer but, View explains, he was also fascinated by Native American mysticism and occultism. "I also think there's a broad overlap," View says, "between the hyper-individualism of the far right and new age wellness thinking. There's a distrust of, for example, public health measures and a belief that you have a moral obligation to take care of your own health entirely. This is why there's so much overlap in anti-vaccine belief; it's a far-right belief, but also something you'd see in crunchy yoga circles." Another similarity, View says, is that both camps prioritise esoteric knowledge. "If you're very deeply into spiritualism, there's a belief that there's esoteric knowledge that is suppressed and you can 'awaken' to it ... and then on the far right, they have the same belief, but it's that the media and the education system is controlled by Jews or whatever, and in order to escape this thinking, you have to awaken to the lies of society. Both promote a personal hero's journey you have to go through in order to reject mainstream orthodox knowledge." Fascist Yoga asserts that yogic postural practice and, to an extent, new age spirituality more broadly, is a natural home for people who crave methods of sexual coercion and control. People such as Frank Rudolph Young. The author, who died in Chicago in 2002 at the age of 91 (an impressive innings, if short of the 330 years that he had expected), wrote multiple books on seduction, mental domination and — you guessed it — yoga. In his 1969 title Yoga for Men Only, he claims the practice can enhance male "sex power" and "manly sex appeal". Young also identified 42 different personality types and details how to manipulate them. One example Home mentions is Miss Jelly Fish, who Young advised to "flatter without reservation ... despite her embarrassed smile". Miss Jelly Fish hails from a self-published mail-order book called X Ray Mind, published under the pen name Maravedi El Krishnar. She has a "soft, sweet voice" with a "bashful smile", the book suggests. She also "prefers isolation and the company of girls half as pretty as herself". Young also told readers to gaze into the mirror and imagine themselves possessing "incomparable mental power". Home's book is not only a useful tool for understanding a historical precedent, but it also gives context to a persistent problem: that people can excuse almost anything via their own enlightenment and that wellness is not always preached by well-meaning people or for well-meaning reasons. Just two months ago, for example, Israeli newspaper Haaretz published an article headed "Destroying Gaza 'with love': Israel's new YogiNazis", which featured a settler, Rivka Lafair, who Channel 4 described as "a poster girl for Israel's powerful far right". Haaretz quotes Lafair addressing "everyone who doesn't understand how it's possible to be spiritual, to teach yoga and hold retreats, while calling for the expulsion and annihilaSHon [sic] of your enemy". Her answer, the article reads, is clear: "I love my people with an undying love, and I hate my enemy with an undying hatred ... One does not contradict the other." After much consideration, Stewart Home does not recommend pursuing postural yoga. Outside his local gym, however, he triumphantly demonstrates his headstand. He prefers a tripod headstand, which is associated with gymnastics as opposed to the basket headstand recommended by yoga teachers. While he's upside down, I ask if he can feel the spirit of fascism? "No," he replies. "I've exorcised it completely by writing the book." — The Observer
NZ Herald
a day ago
- NZ Herald
Kerikeri's world-class events facility, the Turner Centre, turns 20
'I remember driving into Kerikeri, what I thought was a reasonably small town, and seeing this massive events centre. And I was like, 'Wow, these guys are lucky'. Little did I know a few years later I'd be up here running the place. Careful what you wish for, eh?' While that initial surprise may have worn off after three years in the job – following a stint running Wellington's popular CubaDupa festival – Paul said he still found it remarkable. 'For a town under 10,000 people, to have a 400-seat theatre and an event centre that can accommodate 1000 people is just amazing. It's probably one of the very few towns around the world that [has] a facility of this size for the population.' With the Turner Centre widely regarded as the best performing arts venue north of Auckland, many touring groups bypassed Whangārei and headed straight for little Kerikeri instead. 'It's meant that we've had access to performances that you would never otherwise get in a small town. The capability of the stage and the capacity of the fly tower and the rigging system means we can bring up the likes of the Royal New Zealand Ballet or the [New Zealand] Symphony Orchestra.' The Kerikeri-based Northern Dance Academy perform The Nutcracker in 2015. Photo / Peter de Graaf The other thing that made the Turner Centre unusual was that it was planned and paid for by locals, not by the council or Government. 'That's a big part of the Turner Centre story. The whole building was built and fundraised by the community. So there's a real investment in the place, and that's why we see it so well attended.' The dream began in the 1970s when arts enthusiasts John Dalton and Doug Turner were putting on shows in the Memorial Hall, a possum-infested former fruit-packing shed. As the population and interest in the arts grew in the 1980s, they decided something bigger and better was needed. Doug Turner in 2011. Photo / Peter de Graaf Aided by fellow volunteers, they spent the next two decades planning, lobbying, cajoling and fundraising. What was initially known as The Centre at Kerikeri was opened on August 5, 2005, by Prime Minister at the time, Helen Clark. Its bold design, by local architect Martyn Evans, included a distinctive swooping roof to create space for stage machinery. The roof also gave the centre its early nickname, 'the ski ramp'. John Dalton died in 2012, followed by Doug Turner just late last year. The venue was renamed the Turner Centre in 2011; the main auditorium had already been named after Dalton. The centre's distinctive roof led to its nickname, "the ski ramp". Photo / Peter de Graaf, RNZ Turner's daughter, Susan Corbett, said her father would have loved to see this weekend's 20th anniversary show. 'He would have thought it was absolutely wonderful. And he'd be very pleased to see that everything that he and John dreamt about all those years ago has come to fruition, and is still happening – and in very exciting ways with Gerry keeping things moving on.' Corbett said her parents owned Kerikeri's Cathay Cinema for 35 years. They would host art exhibitions and plays at the cinema before joining Dalton organising shows in the Memorial Hall. Corbett said their legacy showed the value of dreaming big. 'Why not dream big? And it's just as well they did, because we probably wouldn't be able to afford it today. Their dream has happened, and the community has got this wonderful asset because of it.' A scene from Kerikeri Theatre Company's The Sound of Music in 2021. Photo / Peter de Graaf In total, building the two stages of the Turner Centre – The Plaza event centre was completed in 2012 – cost around $20 million. Gerry Paul said a commercial building expert had told him building the same venue today would cost more than $100m. Operating a large venue in a small town was not without its problems, however. In 2024, with rising maintenance costs and the after-effects of the Covid pandemic threatening to overwhelm the Kerikeri Civic Trust, the Far North District Council took over ownership of the building. The trust was still responsible for equipment, staff and programming. In the past year, Paul said the centre had been used by 43,000 people, had 558 bookings and given away 5000 free event tickets to youth. A shift since 2022 towards greater inclusion had included a series of 'pay what you can' events and initiatives such as community kapa haka. Bay of Islands College cultural group Te Roopu o Pewhairangi perform at the Turner Centre's 10th anniversary celebration in 2015. Photo / Peter de Graaf John Oszajca, a US-born actor and singer-songwriter who now lived in Kerikeri, said the town was 'incredible lucky' to have a venue like the Turner Centre. Now the president of Kerikeri Theatre Company, Oszajca said he had performed at the centre as a musician and actor, as well as bringing plays to life on the stage. One of his personal highlights was co-producing the musical Little Shop of Horrors in 2024. He said the venue had become a second home to him. 'I think having high-calibre performing arts, which you couldn't have without a venue like this, makes the quality of life notably better. It's one thing to live in a beautiful town. It's another thing to live in a beautiful town that has amenities, and it's another thing again to live in a town that offers inspiration to the people that live there, both as artists and as patrons.' The centre had also served as a springboard for young performers who had gone on to forge careers in the arts. One of those hoping to follow in their footsteps is 17-year-old Jack Laird, a Year 13 student at Kerikeri High. Laird had just played the part of Scuttle the Seagull in The Little Mermaid; this Saturday he would be one of more than 100 performers taking part in the centre's 20th anniversary show. On this occasion he would be playing drums for hard rock band Bandwidth Riot, winners of the recent Far North Smokefreerockquest. Having a venue like the Turner Centre meant a lot to Kerikeri youth, he said. 'It's so nice to have that venue, that outlet, to be creative and just give us a voice. I don't know what we'd do without the Turner Centre.' Also performing in Saturday night's anniversary show would be the Bay of Islands Singers, Kerikeri Theatre Company, Taylah Barker from Fly My Pretties, a duo from Americana folk band T Bone, local rocker Merv Pinny and Ngāti Rehia Community Kapa Haka, with local legend Troy Kingi the headline act. - RNZ
Newsroom
a day ago
- Newsroom
Layoffs ‘imminent' for Wellington staff at Wētā FX
Around 100 employees are to lose their jobs at digital visual effects and computer animation company Wētā FX. A spokesperson at the Miramar-based company, founded by Sir Peter Jackson, says Wētā FX yesterday informed their crew that they are proposing changes to around 100 roles in its support departments, largely based in Wellington. 'A consultation period has since started with the crew that are proposed to be impacted. Following a period of feedback and review, the changes will be confirmed and impacted crew will be informed,' they say. 'If the proposed changes are confirmed, they will be phased in with specific dates or role transitions dependent on individual agreements and circumstances. 'Wētā FX currently has approximately 2200 crew globally, most of which are contracted artists that are not impacted by the proposed change process. As with all visual effects houses, artist numbers fluctuate based on the needs of current projects, so it is not uncommon for crew numbers to shift over time. 'A number of macro factors have led to the proposed changes, including current challenges facing the global entertainment industry. 'In addition to unexpected delays in projects being greenlit due to financial considerations, the industry continues to feel the long-tail impact of the pandemic, industry strikes, and changes in audience content consumption habits. 'As a leader in visual effects, which happens at the end of a film's creation in the post-production process, Wētā FX is navigating the after-effects of these disruptions to ensure ongoing sustainability.' A Wētā employee, who asked to remain anonymous, says while this round of layoffs doesn't impact artistic departments, contractors in these departments have been told their work agreements will not be renewed at the end of this year. 'This is might seem normal for the way the VFX industry works but this is happening at a completely different scale than it usually would,' they say. 'Managers are asking their crew members if they would consider taking extended unpaid leave of up to nine months with no guarantee that their job would be there after the nine months.' Another employee at Wētā, who does not want to be named, also believes the restructure will also impact contractors, who are expecting to have their work agreements discontinued. 'Understandably, many of us are anxious about the scale of this move and what it means for the future of our careers, our families, and the local creative industry,' they say. News of the job losses comes just two years after another substantial round of layoffs. In 2023 billion-dollar global game tech company Unity Software terminated its service agreement with Wētā, causing 265 redundancies. A number of staff were hired back by Wētā, though there were further redundancies several months later, an employee tells Newsroom. The San Francisco-based company purchased Wētā Digital in 2021 for US$1.625 billion (NZ$2.64b), while its VFX teams continued under the Wētā FX arm – of which Jackson holds majority ownership. Wētā, which earlier this year announced plans to establish a permanent Melbourne headquarters, has provided visual effects to Avatar, Game of Thrones, The Lord of the Rings and Planet of the Apes.
