Music often comes from a deep place, and in the case of Hannah Cohen’s stunning and heartrending second album, it’s very deep indeed. Mainly inspired by a painful break-up and the anxieties that loss can trigger, Pleasure Boy cushions its sadness in an exquisitely nuanced soundscape of aching melancholy and lush melody where Hannah’s vocal conveys all the different shades of heartbreak. Following the album’s completion, she’s survived the calamity and found a new level of happiness, but to paraphrase the classic Sixties hit, there will always be something there to remind her with Pleasure Boy.

‘Pleasure Boy’, like her debut ‘Child Bride’, was produced by Thomas Bartlett, aka Doveman, whose work with artists such as The National, Antony Hegarty and David Byrne singles him out as one of America’s current finest producers and collaborators, though he’s also a talented pianist. The dynamics of ‘Pleasure Boy’ was the result of Hannah and Bartlett, “bunkering down with my songs, experimenting with different tones and sounds, and layering them. My first record was so airy and roomy, I didn’t have patience for that again, I wanted more movement, something more mysterious and witchier, so we created this sound wall together.”

“I wanted the music to hurt, to have a visceral effect,” Hannah says. Her voice sometimes sounds delirious or icy; other times she recalls the vulnerable, piercing beauty of Harriet Wheeler (The Sundays) and Karen Peris (The Innocence Mission). But Pleasure Boy‘s sound wouldn’t exist without the vision that launched it. The album title arrived as the record took shape. “Pleasure Boy is a character of who it’s about, someone who represents gluttony and decadence and richness,” Hannah explains. She admits it was a tough record to make, given she was aiming to heal emotionally while feeling “devastated and hurt. But it wouldn’t be the record it is if I hadn’t done that.”

Pleasure Boy will be released 30th March on Bella Union. 

Oscar-winning screen siren Sophia Loren’s classic Sunflower finally gets the release it deserves as it arrives on DVD and VOD on 26 January 2015, in a stunningly re-mastered version, presented in its original widescreen format courtesy of Argent Films.

Loren (Two Women, A Special Day) and award-winning leading man Marcello Mastroianni (Dolce Vita, 8½) are newlywed lovers torn apart by war, despite almost impossible odds they never give up on one another. Originally released in 1970, the film comes to DVD in a newly restored version, taken from HD elements, befitting its sumptuous photography (by Giuseppe Rotunno, who lit most Italian headliners including The Leopard, he was Fellini's cinematographer and received an Oscar nomination for All That Jazz), and production values. 

Sunflower is presented for the first time in its entirety featuring eight minutes of previously unseen scenes and comes complete with an exclusive documentary Sophia, Yesterday Today Tomorrow, woven around an intimate interview with Loren. The DVD comes with alternative language options: the English language version and optional Italian audio with new improved, switchable, English subtitles.

One of the first music festivals of 2015 has been announced. Beyond Therapy Records and Communion After Dark Present the Florida Underground Industrial Music Festival. This will be the sixth year of the Florida Underground Industrial Music Festival (FUIMF) and it will take place in Tampa, Florida on February 7th 2015. Artists to play the FUIMF will be...

Tactical Sekt
Ludovico Technique
iVardensphere
OOtz OOtz
Mr Kitty
Die Sektor
Finite Automata
Synthetic Solution
 
Headlining the festival this year, and playing their first show in the Southeastern, United States will be EBM icons Tactical Sekt. The festival also features Orlando's own Ludovico Technique. The Tribal-Industrial artist iVardensphere. Post-Punk/Synthpop rising star Mr Kitty, who is also making his first appearance in the Southeastern, USA and EBM-Industrial mainstays Die Sektor. Florida based artists OOtz OOntz and making their return to the FUIMF will be Finite Automata and Synthetic Solution. The FUIMF also features DJs Electronic Commando, Griffin, Maus, and Sinsekt.

Tickets are on sale now with VIP tickets available too. VIP tickets are limited and include special balcony access at the venue. A private bar and a festival poster autographed by all the artists playing.

Lauded by critics as film of the year, Manakamana is a stunningly original and breathtaking cinematic experience. The film follows pilgrims as they make an ancient journey by cable car to worship high above a jungle in Nepal and makes its home entertainment debut on DVD and VOD courtesy of Dogwoof on 9 February 2015.

The Hindu Manakamana Temple is almost a mile above sea level, instead of a lengthy journey on foot, worshippers can now take a 10-minute cable car journey up in to the mountains to pray at this sacred place. Using a 16mm camera co-directors Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez join a varied mix of subjects on their pilgrimage. 

The scenery is mesmerising, as are the characters - a diverse mix of commuters - from a group of old women discussing how much things have changed, a group of young men taking selfies, an elderly man and his grandson, a mother and daughter eating ice-creams, a married couple and their chicken and a herd of goats. Every shot follows a different set of passengers as we learn about them and their lives.

Arrow Films, the distributors of Gods Pocket, The Hunt, A Hijacking and Love Is All You Need, are pleased to announce the release of the critically acclaimed Stations of the Cross, which will be available on demand & digital and on Blu-ray & DVD from 19th January 2015.

14 year old Maria (Lea Van Acken) is a member of a strict branch of Catholicism that rejects all the reforms that were made in the Church since the 1960s. Maria lives her everyday life in the modern world, yet yearns to follow Jesus fully, to become a saint and go to heaven. Christian, a boy she meets at school, almost draws Maria away from her goal with an invite to join the school’s gospel choir, but her strictly pious mother (Franziska Weiz) pulls her back in line, seeing his tentative approaches as a temptation to sin, along with participating in what she sees as the ‘Devils music’.

Told in fourteen individual tableaus that parallel Christ’s journey to his crucifixion, Stations of the Cross is both an indictment of fundamentalist faith and the articulation of an impressionable teen’s struggle to find her own path in life.