Lindsay Powell, who releases records under the name Fielded, has spent most of her career subverting expectations and genre conventions. According to their Bandcamp page, Fielded started as an experimental noise project before growing into something closer to R&B. But from moment one, her take on the genre was restless, relentlessly playing with what R&B even means.

Her first album, Ninety-Thirty-Thirty, includes songs heavily indebted to '80s synth-pop and features multiple saxophone solos. Boy Angel is a quirky electronic exploration with huge saw-wave synths, jittery percussion, and sky-high vocal stacks. While 2020's Demisexual Lovelace …

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Lee Chang Dong's seventh feature film, Possible Love, is inspired by true events from 2009, when a Korean conglomerate fired a third of its staff - 2,600 employees - after which many died by suicide. Possible Love is the latest in a long line of Lee movies that engage with themes of class or labor or religion or compressed modernity, that uniquely Korean affliction, without feeling didactic.

A different kind of movie would have captured the heat of that labor struggle. Possible Love picks up with the characters in the aftermath, a murkier time that defies easy understanding. The film opens with an epigraph: "Thou shall not covet." What foll …

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It remains to be seen if people really want to watch vertical content on horizontal TV screens, but many filmmakers and creators were confident that their latest projects would play well at Alza - New York City's first microdrama film festival. Founded by former Tribeca Festival chief operating officer Pete Torres, Alza, which took place October 16th through 18th, was billed as a showcase for the "the creativity, innovation, and growing cultural impact of stories made for the vertical screen." The festival featured a selection of microdrama and film premieres as well as industry-focused panels with executives who all seemed to genuinely beli …

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Dinosaur Jr. frontman J Mascis is known as something of a slacker guitar god. He stands stoically onstage, barely moving, as he seemingly effortlessly works through deft guitar solos and lopsided riffs. Unfortunately, Mascis has developed a similar reputation as an interview subject, quietly sitting and offering deft nonanswers.

That's not to say that Mascis can't be funny or charming. As our interview was winding down and I was thanking him for his time, he started to loosen up a bit. He told me about his youth as a mini golf "enthusiast." "I had a 3-foot putt for the win" at a mini-golf tournament, he said, but "that's when I realized tha …

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It's hard to overstate Jad Abumrad's impact on the podcasting world. He created and hosted Dolly Parton's America and Fela Kuti: Fear No Man, two Peabody Award-winning shows that offered unprecedented looks at the lives of two of the most important music icons of the last century.

Before that, though, he created Radiolab, an experimental NPR show that leaned heavily on creative sound design and eventually helped redefine what a podcast could be. In the early days of podcasting, shows were often just a couple of people talking at each other at a table (some still are), or lazily repackaged radio broadcasts. Radiolab instead told deeply repor …

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For more than a decade, Apple has told other companies to build smart home devices for its platform. This week, Apple launched its own. The Apple Home Collection is a lineup of cameras, thermostats, sensors, a smart door lock, and a video doorbell, all codeveloped with LG Electronics and Schneider Electric. They arrive alongside HomeView, Apple's first smart display.

Even after 12 years of HomeKit, Apple's smart home ecosystem still felt underdeveloped, especially compared to the competition. Amazon's and Google's ecosystems support more products, and both have popular in-house brands: Ring and Nest. Apple had nothing of its own to point cu …

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