Dustin Wong & Takako Minekawa @ Sunset Tavern
Dustin Wong is a guitarist who can make minimalism in a rock context sound ecstatic and sunshiny. Takako Minekawa is a pop miniaturist whose exceedingly charming music comes at you from strange angles. Together on their latest album for Thrill Jockey, the home-recorded Savage Imagination, the duo creates intricate, enchanting songs that somehow emit both a playful insouciance and a sacred radiance. Wong and Minekawa have found a perfect balance between pop cuteness and rigorous highbrow composition. DAVE SEGAL
It’s a sentence that reads like a dream: Stevie Wonder is coming to KeyArena to perform Songs in the Key of Life in its entirety. Released in 1976, Wonder’s double-LP-with-an-EP-attached was extravagantly adored in its time—winning the Grammy for album of the year, topping the Pazz & Jop critics poll, and selling 10 million copies in the US—and will remain beloved as long as people have ears. Still, in my experience, such full-album showcases can be a mixed bag. Yes, you’re guaranteed to hear songs you love (no fear of “And now from my new album…”), but you also know exactly what’s going to happen (no surprises). Nevertheless, Stevie Wonder materializing in three dimensions to perform every single track on his ravishingly beautiful and complex Songs in the Key of Life is a once-in-a-lifetime experience, and I can only imagine the explosion of goose bumps, tears, and perhaps even nether-juices that’ll greet the choral opening of “Love’s In Need of Love Today.” And that’s just the start. DAVID SCHMADER
For being such ardent nonconformists, the black metal and crust punk scenes have the strictest musical boundaries and sternest ideologies. One wrong move and you’re a sellout. It’s a double whammy for Deafheaven, a band of Bay Area punks who appropriated elements of black metal into their sound. While their demo was gritty enough to win the approval of those fickle scenes, the crossover appeal of their 2013 album Sunbather burned some bridges. Maybe it was the pink cover. Maybe it was the melodic focus. Maybe it was that Deafheaven didn’t relish their poverty and misery and instead wrote about pining for the carefree life of the leisure class. Regardless, Sunbather is already heralded as a classic, and the naysayers will come around to it once they get tired of living in their parents’ basements. BRIAN COOK
Pan Gongkai is bigger than he seems at the Frye. He’s a legend in China, an ink painter who also creates installations including video (as at the Venice Biennale in 2011)—and he’s a state functionary, heading up Beijing’s biggest art school. (His father, also, was an ink painting legend.) We see Pan in tight focus, in just a handful of mounted ink paintings ranging from window-size to architectural and made just for the Frye. The blooms of ink are unsketched and must be made all at once in a frenzy of focus, which freezes on the paper. JEN GRAVES
Antarctica: A Year on Ice @ Varsity
Humankind’s fascination with Antarctica is nothing new. In 1922, Ernest Shackleton gave his life while trying to solve its mysteries, but Antarctica Fever, as a cinematic phenomenon, didn’t kick into high gear until 2000. Since then, George Butler, Werner Herzog, and several other directors have all put their stamps on it. New Zealand communications-technician-turned-filmmaker Anthony Powell doesn’t share their name recognition, but he spent 10 years working on Antarctica: A Year on Ice. There’s a plethora of time-lapse photography in which clouds dance and aurora australis undulate, but he mostly focuses on the 5,000 people who work there during the summer, a number that dwindles to 700 during the winter. Like something from out of a science-fiction novel, it’s a world devoid of children, pets, and grass, yet people of all nations live together in harmony. What outsiders might see as hell—penguin carcasses, mummified seals, terrifying winds—these hardy individuals see as an escape from quotidian life. As a film about Antarctica’s sights and sounds, Powell’s effort pales in comparison with Herzog’s fanciful and idiosyncratic Encounters at the End of the World, but as a film about human beings in extreme isolation, he’s tapped a particularly rich vein. KATHY FENNESSY
