Photo by Samuel Gehrke
Stephen Malkmus releases a new single/video, ‘Shadowbanned,’ from his new album, Traditional Techniques, out March 6th on Matador/Rhythmethod. Following lead single ‘Xian Man,’ ‘Shadowbanned’ bursts with flute-laced swagger and Malkmus as attuned as ever to the rhythms of the ever-evolving lingual slipstream as he sings of “Amazon wheatfields and rivers of Red Bull//drip gush drip//data driven skip//to the part where the left bros parody TED talks.” Its video, directed by Jan Lankisch, features friends and fans of Malkmus, such as Kim Gordon, Mac DeMarco, Sharon Van Etten and Jason Schwartzman, performing ‘Shadowbanned’ as a cartoon version of Malkmus (find a full list of appearances below). Their footage is interwoven with clips from older videos by Malkmus and Pavement in which the singer has been blurred, pixelated algorithmically replaced in order to render him invisible.
Starring: Mac DeMarco, Jason Schwartzman, Kim Gordon, Sharon Van Etten, Kurt Vile, Conor Oberst, Orono Noguchi, Eric Koston, Mary Lattimore, Joe Beddia, Matt Korvette, Jake Morris, Polly Roche, Keshav Purushotham, Sharmila Banerjee, Lucía Castellanos, Charlotte Gfeller, Qais Essar, Maple Judd, Lia Wang, Lara Vinciguerra, Pernille Krogvig, Frederike Wetzels.
“The video was inspired by reading about female singers and musicians who were photoshopped from their album covers by an Iranian music streaming site,” says Lankisch who realised ‘Shadowbanned’ with the help of Janosch Pugnaghi, Gesa Gadow, Lina Sieckmann and Miri Gossing. The video represents two polar opposites: the involuntary erasure of a person in visual imagery and one’s desire to perform as a persona, thereby leaving the constraints of one’s everyday identity behind. “Identity is a matter of design. People like to play with characters and pretend to be someone else.” For this reason, Lankisch and Pugnaghi developed a filter for Instagram called “Being Stephen Malkmus,” which operates via face detection. The face of the user is overlaid with a stylised version of Malkmus’ face. The “Being Stephen Malkmus” Instagram filter is available today.
Traditional Techniques, Malkmus’ third solo LP without the Jicks (or Pavement), is new phase folk music for new phase folks, centred around Malkmus’s 12-string acoustic guitar. It’s the product of Malkmus and Chris Funk (The Decemberists) with Matt Sweeney (Chavez, Superwolf) playing guitar throughout. The album creates a serendipitous trilogy with the loose fuzz of the Jicks’ Sparkle Hard (2018) and the solo bedroom experiments of Groove Denied (2019). These three very different full-lengths in three years highlight an ever-curious songwriter committed to finding untouched territory. Informed by a half-century of folk-rock reference points, Malkmus drew from a whole new musical palette including a variety of Afghani instruments to support an ache both quizzical and contemporary.
