Linda Eder, his ex-wife and one-time muse, calls it his “unhealthy obsession with Broadway.” His associates in the pop recording world think he’s nuts. But composer Frank Wildhorn, as passionate about baseball as he is about theater, says that Broadway is Yankee Stadium. “Where else would I want to play?” he says. So after striking out last season on two new musicals, “Wonderland” and “Bonnie and Clyde,” Wildhorn is back at bat with a revival of “Jekyll & Hyde.” It is his one Broadway success after he segued, in 1990, to musical theater following a lucrative career as a songwriter of hits, including Whitney Houston’s “Where Do the Broken Hearts Go?” The revival, starring Constantine Maroulis in the title role and Debra Cox as his love interest, comes on the heels of producers Mike Medavoy and Rick Nicita announcing that they are developing the film version of “Jekyll & Hyde.” Indeed the show has proved so popular post-Broadway that one of its anthems, “This Is the Moment,” has been dubbed “This Is My Mortgage.” And while Broadway has been inhospitable terrain for Wildhorn — this is his eighth New York opening — Europe and Asia have proved much more fertile ground.  Eleven productions of his musicals are slated for Asia this year alone. He recently spoke with ARTINFO’s Patrick Pacheco about his hopes for “Jekyll & Hyde” and why this prophet goes unappreciated in his own land. To see a video of part of their conversation, click here. 

Do you really want to get your heart broken again?

Of course not. What can I tell you? I fell in love with the theater. I was at the top of the heap in the pop business and all my friends were saying, “What are you doing? You’re crazy!” But when I was a USC undergraduate, a history major, I got involved in the theater department. John Houseman, the artistic director there, and I had this wonderful and strange relationship. He didn’t like my music because he didn’t really like anything post-Rachmaninoff. But he liked my spirit and he was very encouraging.

Did any shows come out of that USC period?

Yes. “Jekyll & Hyde” started there. And “Rudolf,” my show about the Hapsburg Empire. It’s in Vienna.

“Jekyll” ran for four years on Broadway and the word was that it never made its money back.

That’s a total myth! It absolutely made its money back. And it continues to play all over the world. It has been an enormous success. And it doesn’t get credit for bringing the pop music business and the musical theater together in ways that benefitted both of them tremendously. I forced them to do it. The record companies sold lots of records and Linda Eder and Bob Cuccioli [the original stars] became very well known.

What are your goals for this revival?

I told the producers that I wasn’t interested in a revival. I wanted to re-imagine it. And Jeff [Calhoun, the director] was the perfect choice because he’d never seen a performance of it. He had no reference point. If you know Jeff, he’s all about heart. He put is heart and soul into “Bonnie and Clyde.” He’s doing the same to this.

You’re incredibly prolific: “Camille Claudel,” “Count of Monte Cristo,” “Havana,” “Excalibur,” “Carmen,” “Mata Hari,” “Cyrano,” “Dracula.” The list goes on. Some critics have suggested that they are under-developed. 

No! Quite the contrary. The shows sometimes take seven years to write. If you’re working in one musical vocabulary for so long, you’re going to get stale. If I’m working on “Dracula,” I love to take a break and work on “Havana.” If I’m working on a big romantic European musical like “Rudolf,” I want to do “Wonderland” the next day, this eclectic pop score. I just can’t do one thing at a time.

But there is a skepticism when someone is so prolific. Do you think that’s why New York critics have been so rough on you?

I understand that. But that’s so not fair. What? Am I supposed to write less? Don’t forget, I’m always doing demos. Being in the studio is a workshop for me on the shows. So we do readings and workshops plus the constant demos. The shows get worked to death.

You write for singers. Given how much work you do in Asia and Europe, have you found the caliber of talent to be equal to here?

Their A-team is as good as our A-team. They’re killer singers. On top of that, look, the prestigious opera house in St. Gallen, Switzerland commissions you to write “The Count of Monte Cristo.” You have a 50-piece orchestra, 30 in the cast, and 30 in the choir. You have over 100 people making your music. It’s been running for four years. Here on Broadway, I’d have to work with 15 players and a bunch of synthesizers. In Prague, my “Carmen” has been running for five years with the biggest Czech star in the country, Lucie Bila, with not only 60 in the cast but also a full gypsy circus with trapeze artists, lions, llamas, and camels. The copyrights are healthy for all these shows, nobody’s pissing on them, the songs are being recorded [laughs]. What’s the problem?

What of your new shows are we next likely to see on Broadway?

When I make the attempt, which I probably will soon, it’ll most likely be with “Monte Cristo.” It’s a fear. I’m afraid.

Of what?

The critics will kill it. 

Do you think it’ll damage the franchise?

I hope not. But I’ve never done it that way. “Dracula” was not a success here. But it’s been a success around the world. I’ve never taken a show that was a success around the world first and then brought it here to Broadway. I wrestle with the idea of bringing “Monte Cristo” here but I love it.  “Carmen,” also. But there are other mediums to do it in it other than Broadway.

You mean a movie?  You mentioned there’s a 3-D Czech film of “Carmen.”

If J. Lo or Shakira want to make a vehicle for themselves out of “Carmen,” there are other mediums other than Broadway. A movie or an HBO special. I hope that making the deal on “Jekyll” with Mike Medavoy and Rick Nicita — two powerhouses — will open up all kinds of possibilities. There are different ways of slicing these things now thanks to the success of “Mamma Mia!” and “Les Mis” and other film musicals. And I’m just starting to touch the surface. 

For more conversation between Frank Wildhorn and Patrick Pacheco, watch the video below: 

It was announced today at the Berlinale that a fictional movie will explore David Bowie and Iggy Pop’s fabled musical collaboration in West Berlin.

“Lust for Life,” as the film is titled, will be set in 1976-77, the period that generated Pop’s “The Idiot” and “Lust for Life” and Bowie’s “Low” (all released in ’77). Bowie and Pop relocated to Munich, and then Berlin, after initial recording sessions on “Low” at the Château d'Hérouville in the Oise Valley, near Paris.

The rest of “Low” and the two Pop albums were cut at Hansa Tonstudio at Köthener Strasse 38 in the Berlin’s Kreuzberg district. It was popularly know as “Hansa Studio by the Wall.”

Scripted by Robin French, co-writer of the BBC’s Andy Samberg sitcom “Cuckoo,” “Lust for Life” will be directed by the British filmmaker Gabriel Range (“Death of a President”). Per the Hollywood Reporter, French’s sources include the Paul Trynka biographies “David Bowie: Starman” and “Iggy Pop: Open Up and Bleed.”

The contribution to “The Idiot” of Bowie’s electronic experimentation, which would crest on “Low,” made it an atypical Pop album, whereas “Lust for Life” was more of a return to Pop’s proto-punk records with the Stooges. In this BBC video interview, Pop suggests their working method was far from intimate.

A press statement from Egoli Tossell, the Berlin company that will co-produce the film with Range’s Altered Image, stresses that the film’s main protagonist will be neither Bowie nor Pop: “‘Lust for Life’ is not a traditional rock biopic, for no one dies at the end,” the statement says, asserting that “the central character of the film will be the divided city of West Berlin itself, which in the 1970s became a magnet for artists, hedonists, and political activists of all stripes.”

Notwithstanding Berlin’s centrality to the film and the fascination exerted by Bowie and Pop’s inspired partnership during a chaotic moment for rock ’n’ roll, the two men’s personal dynamic will be the eventual draw for most viewers. It was the inspiration for the relationship between Bowie manqué Brian Slade (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) and Iggy surrogate Curt Wild (Ewan McGregor) in “Velvet Goldmine,” Todd Haynes’s unwieldy 1998 glam-rock tribute.  

Bowie and Pop had partially come to Berlin to get clean of drugs and apparently lived there modestly – “semi-monastically,” says The Telegraph’s “Open Up and Bleed” review.

“There’s oodles of pain in the ‘Low’ album,” Bowie later said in a Details magazine interview. “That was my first attempt to kick cocaine, so that was an awful lot of pain. And I moved to Berlin to do it. I moved out of the coke center of the world [Los Angeles] into the smack center of the world. Thankfully, I didn’t have a feeling for smack, so it wasn’t a threat.”

Bowie had broken his cocaine addiction by 1978. With Bowie’s support, Pop broke his heroine addiction in the mid-’80s. Their meeting at Max’s Kansas City in Manhattan in 1971 was the start of what passes in rock ’n’ roll mythology as a beautiful friendship.

There’s no word yet on casting. Pop and Bowie were both 29 when they arrived in Berlin. One imagines that every eligible American and British movie actor in that age range (and some not so eligible) will be speed-dialing their agents to get them a shot at playing the Godfather of Punk and the ex-Thin White Duke.

When portraying the life of a famous figure on screen, especially one with a colorful history, it’s easy to veer into caricature. The music biopic is the most difficult to get right – how many times has a performance seemed more like a parody, or a great imitation? In a music biopic, an actor has to capture a dual life, one on stage and one off, while the filmmaker needs to make a film that somehow taps into the energy of the music – a quiet film about a loud singer is off-putting. In honor of David Mamet’s upcoming HBO biopic on the life of Phil Spector, ARTINFO has compiled the 10 best music biopics of all time.

Click on the slideshow to see our annotated list of the top 10 music biopics of all time.  

Over the last three decades, Steven Soderbergh has been the most versatile, not to mention hyperactive, of Hollywood directors and, as befits the movie that he has said will be his swan song, “Side Effects” showcases much of what the just 50-year-old filmmaker does best.

Soderbergh had often spoken of moving on. When I included him last year as one of 10 directors to watch I kind of assumed that, given his range, he would ultimately stick with cinema. (There’s one more movie in the can — a long-germinating Liberace biopic, “Behind the Candelabra,” with Michael Douglas as the flamboyant pianist and Matt Damon as his lover, will be cablecast on HBO.) But, even retired, Soderbergh serves an example. His intellectual curiosity, technical facility, and ease in moving back and forth between performance documentaries, star-studded studio pictures, low-budget experiments, genre flicks, blatant Oscar-bait, and unclassifiable cinematic “follies” like the “Solaris” remake and his four-hour “Che” (two of his strongest efforts, in my opinion) makes him a model modern filmmaker. Without him, his only two peers, Richard Linklater and Gus Van Sant, will be more or less out there by themselves.

“Side Effects,” which might be described as a psychiatric thriller (as “Contagion” was a forensic one), is a skilled, sveltely directed piece of work co-starring Rooney Mara, sans tattoo, as a young woman who commits an appalling crime while under the zombie influence of an experimental antidepressant drug, and Jude Law as her beleaguered, increasingly hysterical psychiatrist. Soderbergh semi-regular Catherine Zeta-Jones has a juicy supporting role as another shrink. The script, by Scott Z. Burns (who wrote “Contagion”), is laden with moral ambiguities: Does legal culpability lie with the doctor or the patient? What about the pharmaceutical companies? Who is the victim and how much consciousness is required to establish intent? What is acting anyway? (The latter is a long-standing Soderbergh concern and “Side Effects” derives considerable tension from the “performing” performance delivered by its small, thin, intense leading lady.)

Terse yet anecdotal, “Side Effects” moves smartly along; it’s maximally involving and skillfully atmospheric. Shot as usual by the director himself (under the name Peter Andrews), the action shifts from one mega institution to another (prison, hospital, facility for the criminally insane). The system is all encompassing and Manhattan’s chill solitude casts an additional pall. The city seems simultaneously grandiose and sedated. Still, there’s a certain glibness. For all the cosmic perspective afforded by Soderbergh’s soaring crane shots, the lift they provide is not sufficient to support the viewer’s suspension of disbelief. The great Hitchcock has been evoked by many reviewers. Critics will certainly be sorry to see Soderbergh go, but I doubt their flattery will persuade him to stay.

For all its rug-yanks and transference of guilt, “Side Effects” is less a master class in audience-manipulation than a throwback to the sweaty, character-driven thrillers of the Michael Douglas era. “Side Effects” has numerous points of contact with “Fatal Attraction” and “Basic Instinct.” Like them, it’s not particularly PC but unlike these much maligned, proudly florid crowd-pleasers, it lacks a certain unbridled nastiness. The palette is not the only thing that seems subdued in “Side Effects.” Perhaps this is the movie in which, preparing for a change, Soderbergh gave vent to his own depression.

Read more J. Hoberman at Movie Journal. 

Ralph Fiennes, currently co-starring as British intelligence chairman Gareth Mallory in “Skyfall,” is likely to play a different kind of government “espiocrat” in the film of John Le Carré’s 2010 novel, “Our Kind of Traitor.”

Hector Meredith, an awkward, blustering spymaster with his own Secret Service fiefdom, will also differ greatly from Justin Quayle, the shy diplomat in Kenya whom Fiennes played in the 2005 film of le Carré’s “The Constant Gardener.”

The in-demand Danish actor Mads Mikkelsen is expected to play “Our Kind of Traitor”’s pivotal figure, Dmitri “Dima” Vladimirovich Krasnov, a charismatically sleazy oligarch who proclaims himself “the world’s number one money launderer.” Desperate to protect his family from the murderous new leader of his Russian crime syndicate, Dima is willing to talk business with the British. That there’s no great chasm between the goals of British espionage chiefs and Russian mobsters is central to Le Carré’s moral critique of the post-Cold War order.

Dima contrives to meets a jaded Oxford don, Perry Makepiece (Ewan McGregor), and his brilliant lawyer girlfriend, Gail Perkins, on an Antiguan tennis court and persuades Perry to hook him up with British intelligence. Meredith takes over the case and assigns a disgraced British operative, Luke Weaver, to investigate Dima.

Following an assignation between Perry, Gail, and Dima at the men’s 2009 French Open final between Federer and Söderling, Dima and Meredith meet up at a Paris tennis club. If carefully handled by director Justin Kurzel, their transaction could echo some of the tension in the unforgettable (but silent) meeting of George Smiley (Alec Guinness) and Karla (Patrick Stewart, fleetingly seen) in the BBC’s 1982 miniseries of Le Carré’s “Smiley’s People.”

Since playing the banker and terrorist financier Le Chiffre in “Casino Royale” (2006), Mikkelson has confounded expectations as a European costume-drama star (“Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky,” “A Royal Affair”) who’s equally at home in mythical action films and fantasies (“Valhalla Rising,” “Clash of the Titans”) – and art-house movies. His portrayal of the nursery school teacher wrongly accused of molesting a child in Thomas Vinterberg’s “The Hunt” earned Mikkelsen the Best Actor award at Cannes last May.

According to Screen Daily, Mikkelsen and Fiennes are in “advanced negotiations” to participate in “Our Kind of Traitor.” There’s no word yet who will play Weaver, who is one of Le Carré’s most arresting characters, or Perkins.

The $35 million thriller, which will go before the cameras this summer, is being produced by StudioCanal – the French company behind the 2011 movie of Le Carré’s “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” – and the UK’s Film4. The script was written by Hossein Amini, best known for “Drive” and “Snow White and the Huntsman.” (Amini’s directorial debut, the thriller “The Two Faces of January,” opens this year.)

StudioCanal’s chairman and CEO Olivier Courson has confirmed that the French production company is working with Working Title Films on its version of “Smiley’s People,” the third and final version of Le Carré’s “Karla Trilogy,” and that the actors whose characters survived “Tinker Tailor” are on alert for a possible 2014 shoot. “The Honorable Schoolboy,” the trilogy’s middle part, has never been filmed.

Shortly before closing time yesterday at the Louvre’s new outpost in northern France, Louvre-Lens, a 28-year-old woman used a permanent marker to write graffiti on Eugène Delacroix’s iconic painting “La Liberté Guidant le Peuple” ("Liberty Guiding the People") — a piece that had been relocated to the museum from its Paris parent institution in November. Louvre-Lens, which is pressing charges, says that upon initial inspection the damage should be easily repairable.

According to Le Monde, the woman wrote on the bottom part of the painting, and France 2 describes the resulting damage as covering about five square inches of the canvas. The graffiti is said to express demands “whose object is not yet known.” The perpetrator was apprehended by a museum guard and another visitor and turned over to the police.

In a statement, the Louvre-Lens said that a restoration expert from the Louvre was due to arrive from Paris yesterday evening to examine the damage. Depending on her findings, the painting will either be cleaned in Lens or returned to Paris for repair. The statement added that “this sad occurrence does not call into question our desire to share the Louvre’s masterpieces with everyone in Lens, where the museum has already welcomed 205,000 visitors since its opening.”

The text that the vandal wrote on the Delacroix canvas — which, according to a report in Libération, has already been removed without damage to the painting — read “AE911,” Agence France-Press reports, a mysterious inscription that some are speculating may refer to the abbreviation for the group Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth.

Artist Michael Lin is unafraid to shake up traditional art methods, and a key focus lately has been using them in collaboration with craftsmen from a range of disciplines. Currently based in Shanghai, the artist spent much of his early life in California — born in Japan and raised in Taiwan until age 8, he didn't return to China until after finishing graduate school in 1993, when he moved back to Taiwan to start his own art practice.

Since then, Lin’s work has been gaining international exposure, with commissioned work in public spaces around the world, and participation in major museum shows and biennales; signature themes include floral prints derived from traditional Taiwanese textiles. His mixed-media installation “What a Difference a Day Made,” on view at the Shanghai Gallery of Art in 2008, examined the significance of everyday life through daily goods like brooms, washing basins, and clothes hangers purchased from a local thrift store.

His latest project, “Model Home – A Proposition by Michael Lin,” which showed at the Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai, was a multifaceted exploration of the process of contemporary art production as well as the expansion of our urban landscape. Through the work, Lin incorporated migrant workers’ “untrained hands” into his own art practice by asking them to paint the inside of the museum space. As an interesting interaction, he collaborated with professional architects to design a “temporary home” for the workers to live in.

He recently invited ARTINFO to his studio for a look at some projects in the making. 

Watch the video of Michael Lin's studio below:

The SFJazz Center, the new $64 million building designed specifically for jazz in San Francisco’s Hayes Valley neighborhood that opened in late January, is a smart, three-story structure that blends steel, glass, concrete, and white oak to striking effect and contains an acoustically wondrous auditorium. The center’s second floor features three tiled murals. Two of these are in public view in the upstairs lobby: One, titled “Jazz and the City,” depicts storied San Francisco clubs, including Jimbo’s Bop City, home to all-night jam sessions during the music’s heyday, and the Keystone Korner, last of the city’s iconic jazz rooms. Another, “Jazz and the Nation,” references iconic jazz sites in New York and elsewhere in the United States. A third, in the Lester Young Green Room (named for the late saxophonist), titled “Jazz and the Afterlife,” plays on Judgment Day paintings, imagining a swinging place for the damned.

These commissioned murals were created by the team of Sandow Birk, a Los Angeles-based artist is whose past work has embraced social themes across a wide spectrum — inner-city violence, graffiti, prisons, skateboarding, and a consideration of the Qur’an as relevant to contemporary life in America; and Elyse Pignolet, an American of Filipino descent who grew up in Oakland, California, who works primarily in ceramics and who often addresses the “permanence and traditions of ceramics with the fleeting and transitory nature of the contemporary world.”

I met Birk and Pignolet in San Francisco while covering the SFJazz opening for The Wall Street Journal. As waiters passed cocktails under the large red tent outside the center on opening night, the two artists described the long process of designing and installing the work. (A video documenting that process can be viewed here.)

They shared their excitement at the prospect of at last seeing their murals in their functional setting, with concertgoers mingling before them. We caught up again, via email, to discuss the murals further.

How did this project come into your lives?

Birk: We were invited by Robert Mailer Anderson to apply for the commission to do some sort of murals in the building early on. He’s been a long time art collector and friend and he has also been involved in SFJazz for a long time, so he put our names forward as candidates for the mural projects. We have done several large-scale public projects before, so we knew the process of creating works for public spaces — the ups and the downs. We were thrilled at the possibility of doing the murals but also were dubious that we’d make it through to the final realization of the murals, since there are usually so many things that can go wrong, from the selection process to through the design stage and to the final fabrication and installation.

What were the parameters set by SFJazz? What did they ask for?

Birk: Contrary to what we expected, we actually got pretty free reign from concept through design of the images. We went into a pitch meeting in which we showed them our past work, proposed the idea of doing ceramic tile murals using blue and white “azulejo” colors drawing from historic tiles around the world, and then gave them a budget proposal. From that we were selected for the murals and went into the design phase.

Pignolet: It was understood after the first proposal meeting that the themes would be jazz, the history of jazz in San Francisco, and that we were to do ceramic tile murals in the “azulejo” tradition. After the initial proposal we did have the freedom to create our own concepts and compositions. 

How did the process work, from idea to illustrations to crafting the tiles and installation? 

Birk: It was a long process over nearly two years, mostly spent on the design. There was lots of research — from reading to watching old footage to discussions with musicians about jazz history.

Pignolet: Once the designs were finalized, we were able to project our images directly on the blank white tiles in a 10’ x 10’ section, rough sketch the final image, then paint with the ceramic under glazes, then clear glaze, then fire in the kiln. The fabrication took several months of us painting everyday. The installation was also done by us, it took about a month working everyday.

What can you tell me about your development of the style and techniques that are in evidence here?

Pignolet: I’ve always been attracted to this tradition of mural making. I like that our murals are tied to this long history of tile murals that can be seen in many cultures throughout the world. 

Birk: Elyse and I have both been inspired by the azulejo murals that we’ve seen in Portugal and Mexico City, and other places we’ve spent time. Elyse has a background in ceramics and we knew we wanted to do the murals on tiles, especially since they are all in high-traffic areas in the building’s lobby and Green Room, where people will be leaning on them and maybe spilling drinks on them or rubbing against them during concert nights. So we wanted sturdy, solid murals that could stand up to that and that also drew on the global traditions and history of ceramic murals.

There’s so much bad jazz art out there – were there things you were consciously trying to avoid in approaching this project?

Birk: Yes, there’s a lot of “bad” jazz art. One of the things we did at the beginning of the process was to look at a lot of other artworks about jazz and decide what we didn’t want the murals to be — which was a procession of jazz greats playing their instruments, maybe floating in a rainbow haze with notes floating around. Paintings of people playing music is never as interesting as hearing music, and the greats of jazz are so well known and numerous that going that route would just be stepping into a quicksand discussion of who’s depicted and who isn’t. Plus, the murals are right outside the door where you’re going to be actually seeing the greats play, so you don’t need to depict them. Once we knew what we didn’t want, we started looking at how we might approach the history of jazz from a different angle. One of our early ideas was to somehow depict not the people of jazz, but the language of jazz, the slang from jazz history that has influenced American language. But that road got abandoned pretty early on.

Pignolet: We decided that since the murals were going to be in the place where jazz is played, that instead of showing the “people” of jazz we could show the “venues” of jazz. A history of jazz through the famous places of where jazz was played. This idea appealed to us because it felt very inclusive. By representing one iconic place for jazz in San Francisco, it stood for everyone who ever played within those walls for as many years as those walls stood up.

Were there other direct inspirations that have nothing to do with jazz?

Birk: We definitely were inspired by other paintings. As we said, the history murals of Lisbon were a huge inspiration, and we were also looking at the paintings of Brueghel and Hans Memling, his panoramic landscapes in which there are several scenes all happening at once and time is crunched together. Those are fantastic and we looked at a lot of those. 

How do hope your work affects the concert-going experience? 

Birk: Like we said earlier, we really thought about how the SFJazz Center is the place where jazz will be happening, so we wanted to viewers to think about other places where jazz has happened, through time and in other venues. When I think of jazz, I think of small, smoky clubs and bars, dark alleys, late nights, crowded rooms, spontaneity. SFJazz is fantastic, but it’s not a small club, even though it’s intimate. So we wanted to remind people of all the small clubs where jazz was born and thrived. 

Pignolet: I guess I hope that we put enough details and thought into our murals and that people could possibly discover new things with each visit to SFJazz. The hope would be that the concertgoer could be interested in the murals over multiple viewings.

The “afterlife” one is in the Green Room, where really only musicians will see it. Did you approach this one differently?

Birk: Oh yeah, very much so. The first two murals in the lobby were envisioned almost as one mural, one cityscape spanning history and the nation. The Green Room mural is in a more private place, so it’s much more about the joy and the fun and the party of jazz. It’s a spoof on the tradition of religious “judgment day” murals, where club-goers are permitted past the velvet rope by a bouncer into the “afterlife,” where a stern cop either sends them upstairs to heaven or down to hell. Those bound for heaven are relieved and elated, until they look down and see the scene raging in the nightclub of hell, while all the instruments not used in jazz are stuck in heaven, left out of the party.

So I guess we’re all damned then, but enjoying it?

Birk: Sort of.

Over the last year, Meghan Remy has gone through a surprising transformation. “Gem,” the latest album she recorded under the name U.S. Girls, moves away from the earlier, lo-fi and noisy bedroom recordings that dominated her first few albums toward an assured and warped pop sound – imagine Phil Spector’s bombast filtered through the stomp of T. Rex and the sonic experimentation of Brian Eno. Her voice, once buried in feedback, emerges through the haze to reveal a newly confident singer and songwriter interested in exploring a wide range of topics including love, longing, and the politics of the sex industry. ARTINFO caught up with Remy on the phone Thursday as she made her way toward Atlanta with collaborator and husband Slim Twig (Max Turnbull) for a show that night. We spoke about playing solo versus with a full band, being a visual artist, and David Bowie.

You played with a full band on your European tour, but you’re back to playing solo on this tour. Do you prefer one to the other?

I don’t know. It would be nice to somehow combine the two. But I enjoy playing alone. Playing with a band kind of rekindled my love for playing alone [laughs]. I don’t know, I think it maybe gave me some confidence or something.

After this tour, you plan on starting to record songs for a new record. Where do you plan to move sonically after “Gem?”

I think I definitely won’t make a record that’s as pop as “Gem” was, but take what I learned on “Gem” and apply that and kind of try to mesh the old with the new – the old way of doing things with the new way of doing things, meet somewhere in the middle. I definitely won’t get rid of the clarity in the vocals, at least. That’s something that I think is here to stay.

What about working with different collaborators as opposed to doing it all on your own?

I think it will be a mix of both. I always do a little bit of the work on my own but I’ll work with Slim Twig again. He’ll most likely be producing the record and then the same people who played on “Gem” will play on the record if I need them. They’re just around, you know?

What is the collaboration like between you and Slim Twig?

It depends on the song. If it’s a cover he’s usually there from the beginning because he actually knows how to play instruments whereas I just know how to fuck around on instruments. So if it’s a cover, Max is there from the beginning recording all the parts for the song and bringing the guys in and telling them what to do. A lot of the times I would just record the vocals separately, alone, over what was recorded. Other times I would bring him – “Slim Baby” was a demo with a drum machine and vocals, and he helped build that into the song it became on the record. But the instrumental things on “Gem” I recorded alone.

How has your environment changed the songs? I know you live in Toronto now [after living and recording Chicago] – has that had an effect on your songwriting and recording process?

Yeah, definitely. It’s different because I used to always record at home, and I don’t really do that anymore – we just record in our rehearsal space. I think it’s made me budget my time a little more wisely. The hours that I do go in I try to get something done and, you know, not fuck around too much, whereas when I had unlimited time at home I would just be experimenting a lot, which has value. I have boxes and boxes of tapes with me just noodling, you know?

Do you ever go back to those tapes and pull out ideas?

Yeah, I do. I did that on the “KRAAK” record. There’s definitely good sounds on those tapes that can be the start of songs, or melodies, things like that.

You mentioned cover songs earlier. What’s the process of choosing a song to cover? Are they songs that speak to you at that moment?

Any song I like I want to cover [laughs]. I don’t have anything I want to cover at the moment, though – maybe a David Bowie song or something.

Berlin-period Bowie or Spiders from Mars?

Someone told me once, and it’s always stuck in my mind, to cover that song “Move On.” That’s a good song. I’m just getting into David Bowie fully. I always thought he was fine and I had a couple of his records, but Max really loves David Bowie so I’m learning a lot more about him. He’s way better than I ever imagined. Except for the new song.

You don’t like the new song?

I’m not sure [laughs]. I’ll have to hear the whole record.

The visual aspect to all your work is really strong – from the album covers to the music videos. When do visual ideas enter the mix for you?

I think about things visually all the time in my life, not just in regards to my music. I’ve kind of always thought in photographs or possible music videos or, you know, composition or something. That’s the way my brain works. The ideas for the videos always come after the song, though.

A lot of the videos so far you’ve made on your own.

Yeah, I really like it. It’s really stuck with me and I want to experiment more with that. I need to learn how to edit myself – I have help editing now – but yeah, I have plans to shoot something on film, which I’ve never done. I want to try to do that and just continue to make lots of videos for all the records. It makes the record more interactive and come to life instead of just being, you know, plastic.

What are you shooting on film? Another video for the album?

I don’t know what it would be yet – I have to get the money to do it. It’s really expensive. It’ll be Super-8mm. Max did a video for his record “Sof’ Sike,” which I helped out with and I really liked how it works and how it came out – it looks so good. But it costs hundreds and hundreds of dollars. I think I would just save up the money and just shoot something, I don’t know what it would be – a music video or just a little trial. We’ll see how it goes.

You’re a visual artist as well. Do you see your art and music as part of the same project?

I feel like, more and more, I’m getting into visual things. I would say I definitely spend way more time working on collages than my music. I think the music is secondary; music just happens to be the thing people pay attention to. I would like that to change, but yeah, I don’t really know anything about the art world or how to get involved with that except for just making things at home and putting them on my blog and giving them away.

U.S. Girls will play at Death by Audio in Brooklyn on February 16. 

The great Chilean filmmaker Raúl Ruiz, who died in August 2011, has left as his swan song a chimerically cryptic meditation on approaching death. Playfully elegiac, “Night Across the Street” – the title a simple metaphor for the big sleep – memorializes Ruiz’s childhood enchantments and traumas and the imponderable mysteries of adulthood (love and the mystique of art, for example) while refusing sentiment or self-pity.

Completed four months before he died, the movie eschews the narrative logic of Ruiz’s English-language mainstream thrillers “Shattered Image” (1998) and “A Closed Book” (2010), the sumptuous art-house projects “Time Regained” (1999) and “Klimt” (2006), and the somber Portuguese costume drama “Mysteries of Lisbon,” for my money the best film (and miniseries) of 2011. Though it’s not as surreal as such gorgeous Ruizian allegories as “Three Crowns of the Sailor” (1981) and “City of Pirates’ (1983), this last effort shares their ghostly ambience and sense of the baroque, structurally if not imagistically. If not transcendent, it lingers long in the mind.

Based on stories by Ruiz’s countryman Hernán del Solar, “Night Across the Street” is couched as a memoir. Don Celso (Sergio Hernández), Ruiz’s surrogate, is an old man in the throes of retiring from his office job – toward the end, his colleagues, who greatly admire him, salute him at a dinner and present him with a giant objet d’art in the form of a boy soldier’s head to which he presses his cheek. Interpreting such symbols is perhaps less important than relishing the movie’s amberish glow, its silkily gliding camerawork, and its emphatic iteration of strange or beautiful words such as “Antofagasta” (a Chilean port city).

Sensing his end is near, Celso believes that every new guest that comes to stay at his boarding house is his assassin. Time is not linear and reality not fixed, however, and when Ruiz pulls away from a shot of Celso in the sitting room to reveal that the landlady and other characters we have come to know have been massacred, it appears that the lodgings are a haunted house. One implication is that when one person dies, for her or him everyone else dies.

In his waning days, Celso holds imaginary conversations with the visionary French novelist and pacifist Jean Giono (Christian Vadim), in whose poetry class he has enlisted. These are intercut with memories of his visitations by his boyhood heroes, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Long John Silver (reappearing from Ruiz’s oblique 1985 version of “Treasure Island”), who regales the young Celso (Santiago Figueroa) with stories, and Beethoven, whom he takes to the movies. Baffled by technology, the composer freaks out during a Randolph Scott Western.

The old man also remembers being threatened with a beating by his father for not getting perfect grades – despite his hard work and intellectual prowess. He harps on his childhood name, “Rhododendron,” which takes on several meanings – a wooden fish, the gun he imagines killing him – but throbs with the idea of Celso’s lost boyhood: think “Rosebud.” Instead of Charles Foster Kane’s long lost sled, Celso has a pocketful of marbles.

There is a solemnity about Celso, intimating an unfulfilled life. There remain unanswered questions about his romantic history – especially in regard to the pretty office typist (Valentina Muhr), who says Celso was her only love and is clearly a phantom from the past. Ruiz wrote over a hundred plays, directed over a hundred films, and had a long marriage, but who knows what ghosts haunted him?

“Night Across the Street” isn’t quite a Borgesian palimpsest. However, it’s worth noting that its maker’s love of “Treasure Island” and its modernist magical properties was shared by Borges. Its dreaminess not only makes it an apposite homecoming for the mariner’s son Ruiz, but prompts a quoting of fellow traveler Stevenson’s own epitaph: “Home is the sailor, home from the sea/And the hunter home from the hill.”