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Oscilloscope Laboratories has acquired North American rights to “Obex” following its debut at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. The surreal, black-and-white fantasy film was directed by Albert Birney (“Strawberry Mansion”) who wrote the script with Pete Ohs (“Jethica”). Birney also stars in the film.

The film was widely praised for its imagination and style, with Variety calling it “entrancing and singular” and comparing it favorably to “I Saw the TV Glow.” It follows Conor Marsh (Birney), a man living a secluded life with his dog, Sandy, until one day he begins playing Obex, a new, state-of-the-art computer game. When Sandy goes missing, the line between reality and game blurs, and Conor must venture into the strange world of Obex to bring her home.

The producing team includes Birney, Ohs, Emma Hannaway and James Belfer, the founder and CEO of production company Cartuna. “Obex” marks the company’s third collaboration with Birney,...

Hand-labeled VHS tapes line the shelves of the living room where Conor Marsh (Albert Birney), a 36-year-old man living alone with his dog Sandy in 1987 Baltimore, spends many hours watching late-night horror movies and broadcast programs he’s recorded on a setup composed of three stacked Ctr TV sets. This analog library of thrilling fictions and ephemeral images preserved on tape is part of the bevy of references in “Obex,” a miniature epic of melancholic whimsy endearingly conceived in black-and-white with a lo-fi aesthetic.

This ingenious fantasy about the perils of finding comfort in screens while avoiding flesh-and-blood connections is the product of the close artistic partnership between Birney — who wrote, directed, edited and stars — and Pete Ohs, credited as the cinematographer, co-writer and co-editor. Together, Birney and Ohs are also behind most of the modest, yet sagaciously employed visual effects. The result of their joint artistic labor amounts to...

A kite shaped like a horse, a cicada-filled Baltimore world, and a black-and-white aesthetic almost perversely hooked on its own disaffected weirdness — writer/director Albert Birney’s “Obex” is a surreal, early-’90s’-esque odyssey into its main character’s (also played by Birney) addiction to his vintage Mac and inability to form actual human connections. With the lo-fi scrappiness of a dot matrix printer and the hallucinatory male-specific anxiety of David Lynch‘s “Eraserhead,” “Obex” tells the story of an awkward-under-his-skin computer programmer named Conor who escapes dreary black-and-white Baltimore into a fantasy world to defeat a demon named Ixaroth.

Birney, who previously co-directed the sci-fi adventure rom-com “Strawberry Mansion” with Kentucker Audley, writes, directs and stars in the movie as Conor Marsh. Living alone with his dog Sandy, he makes custom dot matrix printer photo reproductions for money over the post, while a neighbor Mary (Callie Hernandez) brings...

A scene late in Albert Birney’s Obex cuts tenderly to the heart of our growing nostalgia for analog forms of technology. Conor (Birney), an awkward man in his 30s, is having a fireside chat with Victor (Frank Moseley), who’s quite literally a bulky 1980s-era television set with a human body. Victor says that Conor looks familiar, and then the context hits him: He was the family TV in Conor’s childhood home, purchased by Conor’s father. While the family watched Victor, he also watched over them. Conor, who lost his father as a child, is reassured by Victor, who says that the dead man loved his son very much.

This moment is staged by Birney in the same tone as many of Obex’s most moving scenes: with a wry absurdity that at once parodies and honors Conor’s tunnel vision. Victor is an artifact of Conor’s past,...

Panda Bear is back to announce Sinister Grift, his seventh solo album, out February 28th, 2025. He’s also shared the album’s lead single, “Defense (featuring Cindy Lee),” as well as a batch of 2025 North American tour dates with Toro y Moi.

Panda Bear, the solo project of Animal Collective member Noah Lennox, crafted Sinister Grift at his Estudio Campo in Lisbon, Portugal with fellow Animal Collective member Josh Dibb (A.K.A. Deakin). Sinister Grift follows his 2022 collaborative album with Sonic Boom, Reset, and will be the first solo Panda Bear album since 2019’s Buoys. In addition to Josh Dibb and the rest of his Animal Collective bandmates appearing on the album, Sinister Grift also features contributions from Cindy Lee and Spirit of the Beehive’s Rivka Ravede.

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“Working on this record felt like a sacred and warm return,” Dibb said in a press release. “Noah...

Animal Collective have unveiled a psychedelic, 23-year-old cover of Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams.” Listen to it below.

The cover arrives as part of the reissue of Animal Collective’s debut album, 2000’s Spirit They’re Gone, Spirit They’ve Vanished. Along with remastered versions of the record’s original 10 tracks, the seminal psych-pop band also included a bonus EP (entitled A Night At Mr. Raindrop’s Holistic Supermarket), which consists of five previously-unreleased songs from the time they were working on Spirit They’re Gone.

One of those songs is the imaginative arrangement of “Dreams,” which switches out the original’s steady groove for a looping soundscape of synths and booming kick drum hits. Dave Portner (aka Avey Tare) took on lead vocal duties, and, though the original release was credited simply to “Avey Tare and Panda Bear,” future Animal Collective member Josh Dibb (aka Deakin) mixed the track.

Animal Collective released their latest album,...

22 years after the release of their debut album, the Baltimore-bred quartet Animal Collective is as prolific as ever. Members Avey Tare (Dave Portner), Panda Bear (Noah Lennox), Deakin (Josh Dibb) and Geologist (Brian Weitz) released their 11th studio album this year—the delectably jammy Time Skiffs—to a wave of acclaim the band arguably hasn’t received since their indie-tronica staple Merriweather Post Pavilion in 2009. On the heels of Time Skiffs’ success, the band has already hit the studio to record their forthcoming release, rumored to hit shelves and streamers from the band’s longtime label Domino Records in 2023. This year has […]

The post “Pretend Sonic Youth Composed the Score to Jaws“: Deakin and Geologist of Animal Collective on Scoring The Inspection first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

22 years after the release of their debut album, the Baltimore-bred quartet Animal Collective is as prolific as ever. Members Avey Tare (Dave Portner), Panda Bear (Noah Lennox), Deakin (Josh Dibb) and Geologist (Brian Weitz) released their 11th studio album this year—the delectably jammy Time Skiffs—to a wave of acclaim the band arguably hasn’t received since their indie-tronica staple Merriweather Post Pavilion in 2009. On the heels of Time Skiffs’ success, the band has already hit the studio to record their forthcoming release, rumored to hit shelves and streamers from the band’s longtime label Domino Records in 2023. This year has […]

The post “Pretend Sonic Youth Composed the Score to Jaws“: Deakin and Geologist of Animal Collective on Scoring The Inspection first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Got a bright idea for a film, a comic or even a hi-tech watch? For many, Kickstarter could be the answer – and now it's launched in Britain

Time was, in the olden days, that in order to create a video game, or fund a film or album, or make a comic, you needed a generous and deep-pocketed patron, or a corporation behind you which thought there was something – profit, in other words – in it for them. There might have even been a grant from an arts body somewhere. Remember them?

Crowdfunding, where large numbers of people donate small sums of money to a project, has changed that. Kickstarter is not the first online funding site for creative projects – ArtistShare was launched in 2003 to enable musicians to bypass record labels, and was followed by other sites such as IndieGogo – but it has gained the most traction and attention.

Since the site...

It started out as a proposal for a tour doc, but 'visual album' follow-up to Merriweather Post Pavilion, Oddsac, is more countercultural arthouse meets B-movie shlock

Not that he'd admit it, but there must have been times when Josh Dibb has wondered if he's the butt of some cruel cosmic joke. As the rest of his band Animal Collective were making the leap from Pitchfork-approved psychedelic squawkers to critically acclaimed custodians of the zeitgeist with 2009's Merriweather Post Pavilion, Dibb was off on an extended sabbatical, building a barn in his native Maryland. Now for the follow-up to Merriweather he's back in the fold, and what happens? He's up to his waist in swamp water with a smoke bomb strapped to his face.

The occasion is Oddsac, a 54-minute "visual album" in which Dibb plays something of a leading role, appearing as a Nosferatu-style vampire who attacks a camping party...

It was hard enough watching Animal Collective's "visual album" Oddsac and coming up with a review of a movie that stretched the boundaries of narrative, logic and terror. But then the next day I actually sat down to interview some of the smartest guys in the music business, and the director, Danny Perez, who helped them put together a visual album that, in a strange way, fits perfectly with the sonic collages the band has created. They wouldn't tell me how they created some of the more mysterious sounds heard in the film, or how some of the fascinating visual tricks were achieved, but we did talk about how the film reflects the band's musical evolution over the past few years, and how their collaboration changes when working with a director like Perez. Absent Noah Lennox (a.k.a. Panda Bear), band members Josh Dibb (Deakin), David Portner (Avey...