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
Jack Kamps (’16) has been paid to do many things, such as teach preschoolers, pastor youths, schlep things in warehouses, bake pastries, design curriculum, serve coffee, maintain gardens, and fix computers. Jack is currently a student at Princeton Theological Seminary—though they tend to spend more time working at a few local farms, plotting a future cheesecake business with their spouse, and listening to/talking about the latest Material Girls episode than doing their homework.
