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1 month ago | 
tonemadison.com | Grant Phipps |LakeFront Row
Often, the most striking aspect of an experimental short film exists beyond the creative depth of the work itself. For viewers, it can be a reflexive thrill to regard the disparity between a written synopsis and the radical techniques an artist uses to visually and aurally convey their emotional state(s) or subvert our collective, conditioned concept of narrative.
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2 months ago | 
tonemadison.com | Grant Phipps |LakeFront Row
Listen to writer-director Nathan Deming speak about his work for just a minute, and you’ll grasp how he humbly wants his characters to find commonalities even in the trickiest of situations. He has positioned them in a formidable cinematic micro-universe, an undertaking partly inspired by Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Dekalog miniseries (1989).
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2 months ago | 
tonemadison.com | Steven Spoerl |Dan Fitch |Grant Phipps |LakeFront Row
All throughout 2024, Madison musicians’ resilience and artistry were on display. In a city where the deck seems to be constantly stacked against meaningful support for its local musicians, that’s no small feat. Even when a new setback appears, our music community retains its clear and irrepressible appetite for creation. Defiance is, by extension, inherent to so much of the excellent music that Madison musicians release every year, giving listeners art to rally around, uplift, and celebrate.
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Jan 23, 2025 | 
tonemadison.com | Grant Phipps |LakeFront Row
Since the first edition of The Horizon Line Madison, a new newsletter tracking local film screenings, went out on December 26, 2024, its namesake has accrued additional significance as a tribute to the last memorable lines delivered on screen by David Lynch.
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Jan 14, 2025 | 
tonemadison.com | Steven Spoerl |Dan Fitch |Grant Phipps |LakeFront Row
All throughout 2024, Madison musicians’ resilience and artistry were on display. In a city where the deck seems to be constantly stacked against meaningful support for its local musicians, that’s no small feat. Even when a new setback appears, our music community retains its clear and irrepressible appetite for creation. Defiance is, by extension, inherent to so much of the excellent music that Madison musicians release every year, giving listeners art to rally around, uplift, and celebrate.
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Dec 11, 2024 | 
tonemadison.com | Grant Phipps |LakeFront Row
The year of 2024 had its share of hurdles. At this time of year in 2022 and 2023, I contentedly looked back on some of Tone Madison‘s finest stretches of film coverage. Compared to those past couple of reflections, the job of our film section in 2024 wasn’t as straightforward as 2022’s impassioned, full-on revival of in-person screenings, or 2023’s deep explorations of local programming.
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Nov 4, 2024 | 
tonemadison.com | Grant Phipps |LakeFront Row
Moths and pupa have served as indelibly beautiful literal and figurative visual motifs in cinema. Prismatic winged patterns were used to seminal, flickering effect in Stan Brakhage’s three-minute experimental short, Mothlight (1963). That fervid fascination has imprinted onto recent narratives like The Moth Diaries (2011), The Duke Of Burgundy (2014), and Crimson Peak (2015) in the past 15 years.
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Nov 1, 2024 | 
tonemadison.com | Grant Phipps |LakeFront Row
This is our newsletter-first column, Microtones. It runs on the site on Fridays, but you can get it in your inbox on Thursdays by signing up for our email newsletter.
It’s a streaming, short-form content world, and we’re just living it. Wait…are we actually living in it or just enduring and apprehensively passing through its besieging oversaturation?
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Oct 2, 2024 | 
tonemadison.com | Grant Phipps |LakeFront Row
“Voice is like a fingerprint on a film,” says Milwaukee-based video artist, poet, and filmmaker Gabriella Cisneros in a recent phone conversation with Tone Madison. Cisneros is elucidating her decision to use her own voice to narrate and shape her latest, most personal and accomplished work to date, Impermanence (2024). The eloquent remark recalls the process of translating the written word to visual media, notions of authorship, and the heightened sensory dimensions that we apply to art.
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Sep 16, 2024 | 
tonemadison.com | Grant Phipps |LakeFront Row
When done right, a one-night movie—that is, set over the course of one night, and approximating real time—creates an urgency that is hard to refute. Characters may cherish a last hurrah together, or find themselves in a first chance encounter that sways their attitudes and changes their lives forever.
