INTERVIEW:
Deakin (Animal Collective)
on producing Panda Bear's Sinister Grift, scoring OBEX, and his evolving connection to musicianship and engineering
Josh Dibb is a musician, producer, studio and mixing engineer, carpenter, and more who performs as Deakin. He’s a founding member of the band Animal Collective, a consistently morphing musical project now spanning over two and a half decades with zero sign of stopping.
From an early age, he would make music and sounds on a multitrack recorder with his childhood friend and eventual bandmate Panda Bear between jokes and a Waldorf curriculum. Going through plenty of change and tumult as they aged into adulthood, they would keep in touch and find their way back to each other through several moves, new schools, and big choices. Animal Collective became a glue that tied them together across continents.
After 35 years, the partnership continues with Panda Bear’s new album Sinister Grift, out now via Domino. Deakin was brought on in its early stages as producer and mixing engineer after an abnormally long stint of touring and recording for Animal Collective.
I had the privilege to sit down with Deakin back in late February for dublab. He spoke to me over Zoom from his Baltimore studio for just over an hour to talk about producing and mixing Sinister Grift, scoring the film OBEX, his evolving connection to musicianship and engineering, working in service of others’ music, his qualms with the Dolby Atmos marketing push, and finally tackling his debut solo album.
Read the interview on Substack.
Listen to the interview on the dublab archives.
REVIEW: The Last Year of Darkness
I’ve never really liked screen depictions of club culture. Too often, they’re overwrought and hold little substance beyond visual flair. Not that eye candy holds no value—Blade’s blood rave is quintessential to “hell yeah” culture—but club and rave scenes sit parallel to sex scenes: important tools to show bonds between characters and their own states of mind, but frequently made artless and left lacking. The Last Year of Darkness is the first raver film I truly love.
A psuedo-documentary set in Chengdu, director Ben Mullinkosson pulls in and out of Funky Town, a club that sits at the ground floor of a five-over-one, vaguely hidden by the walls and noise of a massive subway station construction project. It’s the only way this small place in China’s fourth biggest city can host drag performances and queer parties with regularity, and it’s here that a drag queen, a classical musician struggling with depression, a Russian expat house DJ, and a resident DJ and promoter of a queer night regularly congregate.
We follow this cast of real people in and out of their daytime lives and within the walls of Funky Town, watching both unscripted reality and pre-scripted scenarios with no clear thread. Yihao the drag queen flirts with Gena the bicurious expat (and co-cinematographer) in the chillout lounge after Gena suggests they go on a date. Gena swipes on everyone in the vicinity opening dating apps across two phones, then resigns to downloading Grindr after no success. Kimberly the classical musician discusses self-growth and meditation with a friend in the smoking area, when another friend in the foreground starts feeling sick and desperately tries holding her vomit in; the camera steps back to show her throwing up into a small cup as the conversation continues in the background. Kimberly later reflects on her loneliness over text to her co-promoter for Funky Town’s queer party, Darkle, and in another sequence gives her friends, boyfriend, and the filmmakers a scare on a tall rooftop trying to get close to the edge. The camera’s presence is felt throughout the film but uses a subtle hand, allowing situations to happen naturally across long shots with fluid discussions. In these later sequences, where we’ve become quite close to these characters, it quickly feels wrong to be watching them and knowing so much of these real people.
At a post-screening Q&A moderated by Steven Yeun at Brain Dead Studios, Mullinkosson maintained he had no intent to make a film during his time in Chengdu—he was there in vacation mode on the basis of a fat check from a Meta commercial, looking forward to skating, eating, and partying. It was at Funky Town that Yihao planted the seed with a half-joke, asking Mullinkosson when he was going to make a film about him. Three years of filming and two years of post-production followed; all the while, the subway station got closer and closer to completion.
It’s Yihao who confronts Mullinkosson’s filmmaking by the end. After a drag performance, he paces in his dressing room distraught and confused. He doesn’t even like drag. He hates looking like a girl. He feels exhausted after every performance. He winces at the camera with a crack that it’s drag that gave him AIDS. Suddenly, he directly addresses Mullinkosson: “Ben, I don’t think your documentary can record me or anyone’s real life. I think real life is something you need to feel for yourself.” It’s the only time someone addresses the filmmaker by name.
There’s been a recent line of self-indictment in cinema in the past few years. In Jordan Peele’s Nope, the fictionalized descendents of a real Black man who starred in the first “motion picture” exploit our human instinct to peer at spectacle—until they heroically choose to look away. Charlotte Wells’s Aftersun examines how the moving picture distorts our memory, inherently telling stories even if the camera feels objective; a still camera pointed at the world is still a point of view. In the last year, Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon and Glazer’s Zone of Interest set the towering examples as critiques of their own medium, asking what the point of telling stories about real atrocities is if we avoid our gaze in the mirror.
Much like these films, despite an acknowledgment of the moral quandary, The Last Year of Darkness is a completed film that’s been released. You have either watched it or have the option to watch it. Mullinkosson admits to finding the moment with Yihao in the edit again and agreeing with him. He also connects it to the sinking feeling he got as he filmed Kimberly on that rooftop where it seemed like she might fall: as Kimberly and her boyfriend argued about their relationship sitting near the edge, Mullinkosson stood behind the tripod and couldn’t parse what was said, thanks to an audio glitch. He intently left the camera alone anyway. In the film, after a long shot over a few minutes (the film’s most extended) of the couple against a wistful sunrise, he finally picks up the tripod and tries to move closer. Suddenly, Kimberly stands up and her boyfriend immediately grabs her. She maintains she just wants to see a better view, protesting at the group surrounding her who insist they have to leave. According to him, Mullinkosson almost ceased work on the film after that morning. It was Kimberly who looked back at the footage and convinced him to leave it in by telling him one thing: “Yihao is the drag queen. I’m the drama queen.” She and her boyfriend later agreed to go into the studio and ADR their rooftop argument for the scene’s inclusion in the film.
This is what I ultimately find lacking in today’s depictions of club culture, and more broadly of youth culture in general: real personality. Characters stand in for cultural tropes or archetypes, speaking for both everyone and no one at all. Here, the film has the boldness to present the lives of these real people as matters of fact. It doesn’t matter that there are some pre-scripted scenarios, or that we naturally put up our guards when a camera is placed in front of us—these little performances are the point.
Post-2010s, real-life dance culture has become too self-aware and too self-important. Rebelliousness is culturally tied to a greater good, like punk before dance, erasing specific cause and in great irony becoming for the sake of it. Dancing’s release becomes amorphous suggestion, not something naturally felt or seen in the body. In a search for intention in what’s, at its face, a culture of partying, this sort of empty storytelling has become a ritual of justification: parties advertise themselves as potentially life-changing places of congregation, DJs write essays for Instagram captions after particularly gratifying sets, and dancers everywhere are left searching for the next and bigger high.
What makes The Last Year of Darkness ultimately fascinating is its honest acknowledgment of its own flaws and its insistence on following through regardless. It reflects its subjects in that way: these kids have all found solace in the performance of dancing, deejaying, doing drag with each other; they also know they love drinking, doing balloons, sucking and fucking, and regretting some of it the next day. They sometimes feel crushingly lonely despite seeing each other as community. They may not be saviors to each other in the end but they know things will feel better for now as long as they show up. Yihao continues in his camera confrontation to Mullinkosson: “It’s not political. Nothing. It’s a natural state of being.” These subjects are real people with their own problems that don’t stand in service of a greater story. It’s maybe even morally questionable to see yourself in these people as a viewer.
It helps that Mullinkosson wants you to see these people as real people. They’re his friends. The moral question is something bigger to contribute to, not to remove yourself from. Here is his contribution.
This is the importance of the illusion of objectivity here: Mullinkosson and his editor Bobby Moser mostly present these people and their stories without fluff in the hopes that you connect with them without bias. We meet them like we meet random people in the club, stumbling upon connection. Their natural humor and curiosity is allowed to bleed through—Darkle gets a potentially all-timer last line in “I’m grateful I’ve sucked a lot of dicks in my life.”
Instead of a film that could easily get lost in the darkness of a club, they wisely use much of what they’ve shot outside Funky Town to provide a snapshot of a city. Funky Town eventually closes, after all—the subway station was always going to open, taking down the construction walls and silencing the morning noise.
Once we’ve gotten to know these people, Mullinkosson allows the documentary to become a film. The climax holds the sole needle-drop heart-tugger: Yihao, in the back of a van and presumably on the way to a show in full makeup, starts practicing his lip-syncing to a live recording of David Bowie’s “Life on Mars?” playing off his phone. We start hearing the music cue in full clarity, but instead of the original recording with a band, it remains Yihao’s choice of the live performance, Bowie simply singing over a piano. Over it, we revisit the cast of subjects: a struggling delivery boy skater from the start of the film meets up again with his friends and talks about embracing his humanity; Gena continues learning Mandarin; Kimberly happily dances with her boyfriend and ends up back on that beautiful rooftop, joyously embracing Darkle and eating with Gena; Yihao picks up his medicine in the daylight. We see Yihao in drag one last time as he enraptures a crowd, trawling the stage to Bowie’s soaring voice, then falling to his knees as the last notes of the piano fade. Yihao’s crowd erupts in applause as Bowie’s audience does too. After 80 minutes of assorted stories, a thesis pokes its head here: is there a life to be had on the margins? Yes, as there always has. There always will be life to live, more to celebrate, someone to love, anywhere you may be.
The film starts on the subway and ends on the subway, approaching one place and following its subjects to another.
The Last Year of Darkness is out now on MUBI.
REVIEW:
One Battle After Another
it’s, of course, Paul Thomas Anderson who writes the ultimate Gen X letter of penance. he’s the platonic ideal of that child of MTV, initially making grand gestures towards the hopelessness of the post-Reagan world, then slowly growing into his real soft shell, hopelessly in love with the world around him, with all its dips and valleys. the boy who wrote Magnolia came back around to write Licorice Pizza, about a boy and a girl in the Valley with problems that aren’t rapturously life-ending, but will leave them with little pocks like puberty and young adulthood tend to do.
so when it comes time to pop that kernel about a young Black revolutionary he’s held onto for decades, he finally lets in the populism he’s happily allowed for himself into his work. he starts with that Pynchon-esque smirk and gives in to a grin, telling stories about small revolutions in little towns despite the towering, fascist fences that loom all around them. a group of white supremacists calling themselves the Christmas Adventurers have a lot of little meetings about their genetic duty but end up mostly trying to keep unqualified whites out. more importantly, back in the day here, organized groups in the tradition of the Weather Underground, the Black Panthers, and the Irish Republican Army directly freed new American hostages while flaunting racial and economic freedom, and in that present day, organized communities of slackers, skaters, and sinners have rigorous systems to protect their neighbors without breaking a sweat. the post-COVID darlings of contemporary satire like Succession and Eddington angle for your grimace, observant but eager for you to acknowledge it. Pynchon-Anderson seek for a smile instead, someone content with the burden of knowledge and seeking whatever inspiration regardless, reveling equally in the idea of the French 75 living on and a late-age incel-turned-Klan wannabe who has a sexual awakening thanks to a revolutionary well after his hair’s grayed out. and maybe even a perfectly-executed car chase modeled after a rollercoaster ride.
there’s all these signals of the culture war sprinkled in throughout to stake characters’ allegiances and lack of them while the film moves at its brisk pace, but the real stakes of this world are presented with, at the very least, sincerity, and at the most with grand emphasis. Ghetto Pat (Leonardo DiCaprio) really cares about the people fenced off as prisoners of the culture war in obscene ICE prisons, so he fights as part of the French 75 to free them, albeit with the role of creating spectacle. later, deep into a revolution that doesn’t stop out of necessity or convenience, he decides to prioritize bringing a new life into this world safely and puts a pause on his own life to ensure his baby grows up to see some potential of a better world, one where she can be part of making it better. 16 years later, Pat (now Bob) comes to Sergio St. Carlos (Benicio del Toro) for his help in rescuing his missing daughter. St. Carlos, picking up on what Bob is putting out, tells him about his own place in the revolution, quick to describe his immigrant protection operation as “all legit, from the heart. no cash.” (sounds like something a young Paul Thomas Anderson might’ve told Charlie Rose back in the day.) a business owner at heart, he wants to protect not only his people but anyone he perceives to be fighting for a better life. he knows the common man to be deserving of a life of security and respect. as such, “no cash.” the whole stretch of Baktan Cross in act two is this ode to why we all fight to see the dawn with one dusk after another. Bob tells Sergio, “Life. LIFE!”
the thing about populism is that it’s mostly built on good ideas that many agree on, but not on results with tangible effects on our lives. most Americans agree that it’s hard to get by right now, that a gestapo police force kidnapping and imprisoning brown people based on nothing but perception is evil; they also mostly agree on a general outlook of optimism, despite any evidence laid bare in front of them. a blockbuster movie like this presents lessons and passion, but those loose threads that Anderson always leaves for you to reconnect with later in life and with another watch are comparatively lacking in this one.
wonderful to watch in full 1.43:1 all the way on IMAX 70mm. there’s not as much back-to-back visual flaunting as usual, but some of those VistaVision shots shine, especially in night sequences and almost whenever Sean Penn is on screen. the second act, breathlessly moving through the town of Baktan Cross, is the most thrilling. Teyana Taylor is electric, just as she was in A Thousand and One, and she gives one of the best supporting performances in recent memory; on the biggest screen imaginable, as Perfidia sneaks out of the house to “go do the revolution,” you can see about eight different thoughts flash across her face in mere seconds before she slips out the door. Regina Hall turns in such a foundational performance. Penn is, of course, pitch-perfect and made for the role, perhaps the funniest he’ll ever be. Chase Infiniti does an incredible physical performance throughout that makes her an instant star for the big screen, like Pom Klementieff in the last two Mission: Impossibles. relatedly, the final car chase is technically commendable (and still rose my heart rate during the second watch), but the paternity test device is something straight out of M:I. i expected Infiniti to do the Tom Cruise head twist.
REVIEW:
Nickel Boys
this decade so far has been defined by cinematic self-indictment, yielding personal stories like Aftersun, construction-and-deconstruction blockbusters like Nope, and attempts at American historical repentance like Killers of the Flower Moon. RaMell Ross’s narrative debut is the culmination of these efforts—or potentially just the climax, but undeniably the American film of a generation.
Ross works as director and camera operator, conceiving of the film entirely in literal and metaphysical point-of-view. we see either through the eyes of Elwood or Turner, our two protagonists, sometimes blurring between them. the only interruptions are out-of-body but simultaneously informed by the person we’re watching through—like dreams and memory alike. jumping off Ross’s initial experience with documentary filmmaking, scenes are interspliced with archival footage from real-life history, photos and news items assembled for the setting at hand, and written dream sequences, all spanning across decades between the 20th and 21st centuries. the film cycles through the real (our world) and the manufactured (the film’s world). there’s a conscious decision here to frame the film in 1.33:1—the original aspect ratio standardized for the photo imprint on 35mm film, and eventually the computer monitor screen standard (from the early days of the computer to the introduction of widescreen monitors in the 2000s) known better as 4:3—to bridge the decades across the screen. it also serves as a harsh limit for the audience within the confines of someone else’s viewpoint.
those of a certain age associate the digital sheen of an RGB matrix and VHS scanlines with memory and recollection. using the first-and second-person perspectives, Ross reminds us that the picture in all its forms has been a tool of memory from the very start. Elwood and Turner dream in classic Hollywood films, television, and home movies; via news cameras and NASA footage, still photographs, newspaper scans, and webpages; of straightforward memory and with experimental dream sequences. all is archival. nothing is a straightforward snapshot in time. dreams are piecemeal recollections and revisions of what we know; memory is the active function of the brain which dreams as it rests.
a crack in the glass may show itself as a lack of real development in these characters, from Elwood and Turner to the rest of the boys of the Nickel Academy, from the adults on the outside to the men running the place inside. we see glimpses of their personalities and motivations, but nothing in-depth to be so revealing of their aspirations and desires. it’s likely to be a feature, not a bug. the boys are hidden away from the world, stripped of all meaning but to be slave labor for the era of civil rights marches. they are not allowed to be more than what they are, and they haven’t come very far in figuring out who they are before they’ve been locked up at Nickel Academy. in some cases, they’ll never become fully-fledged people—instead, they’ll be pieces to connect to a horrifying act of American history, dug up in search of some “truth” and presented to a people who refuse introspection. for the employees of the Academy, they’ll consciously never show an ounce of humanity to the boys, and so there’s no reason they can be seen as anything other than evil itself, walking upon this earth. yet, to the outside world that holds no curiosity for an Academy with consistently disappearing juveniles, they’ll simply be seen as upstanding American neighbors. without further info, will you be able to empathize with these boys as realized people?
a turn of the story comes, but it’s both misleading and inadequate to simply call it a twist. in little peeks on the screen and barbs in the dialogue, we see some kind of horror creeping our way. Ross doesn’t lean into building up a moment to gasp at, instead riding the unease of what’s clear to come to make the audience exhale with anguish. at this point, the point-of-view construction has settled in. the audience has long been filling in the gaps of what can’t be seen on the limited field of vision. when the camera suddenly chimes in on the story at hand, an entire world comes into focus. Ross comes to achieve the view of what feels like an all-seeing eye, across time and across all life—the viewer’s eye, processing narrative.
it’s reaffirming and revelatory to see this film on the heels of David Lynch’s passing. how deeply painful it is to remember. how evil it feels to reconstruct the story of a real person through yourself. how terrifying and wonderful that all of our lives are what we conceive out of dreams.
REVIEW:
The Mastermind
at the AMC Burbank 16, you can often hear the crack of the building shifting as an adjacent theater’s film has a big subwoofer moment. hearing them scattered through The Mastermind as it slows to a quietude feels like some intentional and inspired sound mixing, watching the paint chips rumble off the surface of Americana as JB (Josh O’Connor) bumbles through towns and cities taking from every kind of mother he can manage. the Vietnam War rages on in the background, the draft has presumably shifted into Nixon’s lottery, and peace protests are easily quashed. the institutions have failed JB, an art school dropout, and so he, the son of a judge and a mother who reluctantly keeps him afloat, is destined for a life of breaking the social contract. here come the 1970s.
REVIEW:
Licorice Pizza
if Boogie Nights and Magnolia were dispiriting Valley epics about how the carelessness of others can break you down and rot you from the outside in, this is the companion piece to Punch-Drunk Love, surveying the boundless wells of joy that simple affection and acknowledgment can drill out of the nameless figures of the city-state. Licorice Pizza goes a different route from Punch-Drunk, forgoing the dreamlike happenstances and superhero story for a more subtle (but still Valley-weird) coming-of-age one.
Alana Haim is Alana (juxtaposed against a cast full of the children and parents of Hollywood stars) who finds a charming boy by the name of Gary Valentine. she humors his crush; he manages to bring back some of the fun in her, all buried under the weight of her 20s. unsure of her north, men extract from and reflect onto her—including Gary, who’s got a lot of growing up to do. she tries growing up herself, only to be thrown asunder (literally, from the back of a motorbike) and charmed for more pathetic purposes.
Gary knows what it’s like to be seen. he’s a child actor, regularly bumping shoulders and heads with the world-famous and making sure he’s at least in the room. he can’t help but see Alana. he takes a moment to stare when she sits next to him at the bar to accept his date offer; he sees her behind the bright headlight of a motorbike eight holes away on the golf course, when she falls straight onto her back, and runs full speed to her, only to give her a long, silent look before picking her up onto her feet.
in 1973, Nixon’s America, Joel Wachs runs as a Republican populist for Los Angeles’s mayorship. he’s an expert in seeing people where they’re at: he emphasizes to every reporter that he’s too busy working for everyone to focus on dating one person. (the real life Wachs would establish neighborhood councils for the first time in Los Angeles, getting residents to be, but most importantly feel, more involved in civics.) he gains the trust of Alana by telling her her presence in the office has made him more present with his work. he ends up exploiting her eagerness by using her as an impromptu beard for his aggrieved boyfriend, who he can’t be seen alone in a room with. in the end, Wachs would come in fifth in the race. how could he really see others as they are if he so viciously hid from his own reflection? perhaps voters could tell. in fact, despite two more runs in the next 40 years, he would never become mayor at all.
despite it all, the growing pains and the detours thrown at them, Alana and Gary always spot each other a mile away and will run towards each other. it’s apparent they’ll never be in love, but they’re bonded by some combination of admiration, respect, and care for each other. in other words: love.