Leaf (2015)

Pianist/composer Nathan Speir draws inspiration from a wide variety of sources including late and modern classical and jazz composers, New Age artists, minimalist composers and sacred Byzantine music. His new album which was just released last week captures the essence of his journey through life and lessons learned along the way. It’s titled The Emotive Leaf.
Nathan shares his reasoning behind his title track, the way in which music can promote empathy, and his fascination with space and astronomy.

How much power does a single man, let alone a single leaf, have in the industrial world? In this wordless, all-ages graphic novel, our protagonist discovers a leaf that radiates a vibrant light. He returns to a detailed metropolis - depicted in somber grays and blues - and searches for answers. During his quest, he stumbles upon a man who knows what's really happening in the city's labyrinthine ducts; a woman who spends her life studying and classifying obsolete flora; and the truth about the ever-dwindling environment. Leaf is a graphically stunning story that unfolds with a dream-like pace. Shaded in pencil and punctuated by spot colors, drawn in a delicate but concretely realized tonal approach reminiscent of Shaun Tan's The Arrival and Chris Van Allsburg's Jumanji, Chinese cartoonist Daishu Ma's first foray onto American shelves is ultimately a hopeful vision of the coexistence of the urban and natural worlds.

Some Highs Are Out of this World. Star Leaf is a sci-fi thriller about an extra-terrestrial form of marijuana discovered in the Olympic forests. The main character is a veteran of the Afghanistan war, and the film has PTSD and its treatment with cannabis as an underlying theme. Shot entirely on Washington's Olympic Peninsula, the movie stars Julian Gavilanes and Russell Hodgkinson of Sy-Fy's Z-Nation.

Hikers find a secret grove of extra-terrestrial marijuana and must fight for their lives when they anger the other-worldly forces protecting the plants.

Hikers find a secret grove of extra-terrestrial marijuana and must fight for their lives when they anger the other-worldly forces protecting the plants.

Over the past two decades, The Album Leaf’s Jimmy LaValle has known music as a daily pursuit. Each morning he enters his studio with a disciplined work ethic, balancing concrete objectives with the open-ended intention of simply writing something. On top of six solo albums and myriad other releases, the routine has amassed a vast library of experiments; he gravitates back to some, tinkering, building, refining, and putting aside again in a cycle of constant production. He last released a full-length album in 2016; NPR praised Between Waves, noting the “cinematic sprawl… an evocation of drama, loss and fraught emotional atmosphere,” and it’s no surprise in the time since LaValle has become prolific in the film scoring space.