Our theme for the month of March is “cities.”

The 2021 film opens with two dapper, mustachioed people sitting at a candlelit table. One eats a PB&J sandwich while the other peruses a newspaper. One of the pages features a missing ad that reads “Last seen in D.C,” accompanied by the picture of a sloth. The camera follows these two unnamed protagonists as they travel on horseback & on foot to a house whose front door is marked with an ampersand. Upon entering the house, they are met with the sights & sounds of Montclair, New Jersey, band Pinegrove playing the song “Moment” from their 2020 record Marigold.

Based on a short story written by lead singer Evan Stephens Hall (& reproduced at the end of the credits), Amperland, NY follows a somewhat absurd but slow story of transitions, searching, watching, & waiting. The compilation, filmed at Pinegrove’s upstate NY home studio from which the film & its accompanying soundtrack record get their name (a play on the word “ampersand”), spans twenty-two tracks, clocking the film in at just over eighty minutes.

The re-recording of tracks as far back as their 2015 release, Everything So Far, aligns with Pinegrove’s collaboratively continuous creative philosophy: their website includes a hub called “Pinetabs,” where the band has posted the tabs & lyrics to yet-unreleased songs as an invitation for fans to participate in a sort of “musical mad libs,” making up their own melodies, phrasing, & instrumentation for songs they have never heard.

This sort of conversational spiral is reflected in the lyrics of Pinegrove’s songs, which often feature a single speaker “I” interacting with some unknown “you”—who at times is perhaps identical to the first person speaker. Viewers of Amperland, NY are invited into this at once illuminating & awkward experience of introspection, which requires both perception & being perceived.

Beginning & ending in a studio room decorated with blocks of solid colour & references to earlier Pinegrove records, the film-slash-concert transitions throughout the house by means of band members (dressed to match their corresponding studio backdrop colours) or the two intermittent questers-turned-audience moving through the space. Often these protagonists disappear, & the camera seems to stand in for both them & the film’s viewers as it pans & cuts during each track.

These slow & natural-seeming punctuations give viewers a sense of progress despite the absence of significant narrative progression. Viewers are treated to close-ups of dripping jam & sizzling onions, as well as an interlude in which the two protagonists play a comical game of badminton while watched by the members of Pinegrove—a reversal of the audience-performer relationship maintained over the rest of the film. Dialogue is sparse & delivered silent film-style—through intertitles in Amperland blue, with the same stylised lowercase typewriter font characteristic of Pinegrove’s website & album covers.

Near the end of the film, the protagonists discover that Lincoln Rothko the sloth is not missing but has left the U.S. to pursue a career in slow cinema. Indeed, Lincoln is credited as one of the executive producers in the Amperland, NY film credits, adding yet another layer to the film’s not-quite-factual, not-quite-fictive constellation.

Since my friend Mimi recommended it to me, I often have the YouTube link open in my web browser as one of my many emotional support tabs—allowing me to listen to the music as I work on other things & periodically click over to see what odd & stylised happenings are taking place in Amperland at any given moment.

Image courtesy of Pinegrove

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