Rapidshare Alexander Ebert

BioAlexander Ebert was only five years old when he discovered how much he loved recording. He found himself taping a cappella versions of songs from the Stand By Me soundtrack, complete with vocalized basslines and mouthed drums. “You could hear my sister in the background crying at one point. She’s two, and I’m trying to coax her into performing with me,” he explains.“Recording is like painting for me,” says the singer. “When I’m by myself arranging a song, I’m running around naked, I’m eating crazy food, I’m yelling, I’m dancing. I change things, I try crazy things and silly things and serious things, and things I probably wouldn’t feel comfortable trying in front of a bunch of people.

I just love recording and writing, so I’m always doing that.”But, up until last year when he started crafting the songs for his album Alexander alone in his bedroom, all of his musical endeavors had been collaborative — including his ten-person band, Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes. “I’d make demos and sometimes we’d use elements in the demos, but it was never upon me to do the entire thing,” Alex says. “I wanted to be able to build an album basically with my hands, like building a house by myself. And, by the way, building a house is something I’d love to do as well – to just be out in the middle of it by myself and understand what it is to do that.”During breaks from touring with the Zeroes over the past year, Alex would hole up in his Los Angeles bedroom, working with a bare minimum of recording gear beyond a microphone and simple M-Audio direct box. He had his guitar, a Lowery organ he picked up at a St. Vincent’s thrift store in Los Angeles for seventy bucks, a clarinet he used for the bridge on “Truth” and a violin he’d found somewhere in Tucson on tour. He had his own voice, his breath, his knees to slap, his fingers to snap and his toes to tap.He explains that some of his inspirations for the “mouth sounds” heard throughout the album come from all-time favorites of his like the 1970 chart-topping ditty “In The Summertime,” by British band Mungo Jerry.

“You can find me whistling or singing that song all the time,” says Ebert, who also cites children’s clapping games like Patty Cake and the Disney tune “Zip A Dee Do Da” as loose inspirations.There isn’t a single sound on the ten-song album that Alexander didn’t perform himself. “I knew I wanted violin on the bridge of ‘Glimpses,’ but I had never played violin,” he says, by way of example. “I was just about to make the call to have a friend come play it, but I first asked myself why I wouldn’t try it myself. I suppose, a fear of sucking. So, as an experiment, I took a walk and filled myself with as much love and fearlessness as I could, just to see what my take on it would be then.

Of course, in that state, the adventurer took over and said ‘Fuck, yes, let’s do it.’ After all, I had a violin just sitting in my living room. To me, it’s a very humble album with sky’s-the-limit sort of qualities, and so I didn’t really shy away from doing whatever I felt like doing.”And though there is tremendous depth, beauty and poignancy to be found in songs such as “Truth,” “In The Twilight” and “A Million Years,” an impish track called “Awake My Body” seems to epitomize the album as a whole.

“I was feeling exhausted and wanted to encourage myself and my body,” He says of the tune. “Not in the sense of body image, but more like an appreciation of the cells themselves. It’s about trying to be the physical representation of my spirit, whatever the hell that is, whatever the heaven that is. It’s about what it means to wake up and be really alive and embrace the three dimensional world.”Alexander comes out on March 1st. Alexander will play select shows in Los Angeles and at South By Southwest before returning to the studio to complete work on the upcoming second LP from Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes.

Ingmar Bergman's 'Fanny and Alexander' (1982) was intended to be his last film, and in it, he tends to the business of being young, of being middle-aged, of being old, of being a man, woman, Christian, Jew, sane, crazy, rich, poor, religious, profane. He creates a world in which the utmost certainty exists side by side with ghosts and magic, and a gallery of characters who are unforgettable in their peculiarities. Small wonder one of his inspirations was Dickens.It is 1907, in an unnamed Swedish town. The movie plunges into the Christmas Eve celebration of an enormous family, introducing the characters on the fly as they talk, drink, flirt and plot.

They are surrounded by voluptuousness; the Ekdahl family is wealthy and the matriarch, Helena, lives in an enormous home crowded with antique furniture, rich furnishings, paintings, sculptures, tapestries, rugs, flowers, plants and clocks - always clocks in a Bergman film, their hours striking in a way that is somehow ominous. One room spills into another, as we see when the half-drunk guests join hands for a song while parading through the flat.Advertisement. Family intrigues are revealed: Gustav Adolf, Helena's third son, is a philanderer whose adventures are forgiven by his merry, buxom wife, Alma, because she likes him as he is. The second son, Carl, is a failed professor, married to a German woman no one likes (although they should), deeply in debt to his mother. The first son, Oscar, runs the family theater, and is moved to tears in his Christmas Eve speech to the staff before joining the party. Oscar is married to Emilie, a grave beauty, and they have two children, Fanny and Alexander.

Much of the film is seen through their eyes, especially Alexander's, but other moments take place entirely within the imaginations of the characters.Gustav's marriage is eccentric, Carl's is sad, and Oscar's is filled with love - for his family, and the theater. We learn quickly that Gustav is having an affair with Maj, Oscar and Emilie's lame, plump young maid.

Alma knows it; indeed, it is openly discussed by everyone in the family. We also learn that Helena, a widow, has been the lover and is still the best friend of Isak Jacobi, a Jewish art dealer and money lender. (Bergman has said there is a little of himself in all the male characters.)A day or two later, during a rehearsal at the theater, Oscar is playing the ghost of Hamlet's father when he loses his place, forgets his lines, doesn't know where he is.

Within a day or so, he is dead of a stroke. All of this is witnessed by the solemn Alexander, who is awakened in the middle of the night by his mother's animal cries of grief.And then it is summer, and everything has changed, and his mother is engaged to marry the Lutheran bishop, Edvard Vergerus, who is a tall and handsome man, everyone agrees, but as Helene sees them leaving after the wedding, she says, 'I think we will have our Emilie back before long.' The first third of the story, taking place in winter, was filled with color and life, even life in death. Now Fanny and Alexander are taken to a new world, the bishop's house, which he inhabits with his mother, his sister and his aunt, and which is whitewashed and barren, with only a few necessary pieces of furniture, locks on every door, bars on the windows.The maid tells the children that the bishop's first wife and two daughters drowned in the river; Alexander says he has been visited by their ghosts, who told him they drowned trying to escape after being locked up for five days without food and water. The faithless maid reports this story to the bishop, who whips Alexander, but not before a struggle in which the boy stubbornly makes clear his hatred for the bishop.Already in the film, we have seen the ghost of Oscar more than once, morose, pensive, worried about his children. There is a touching scene where his mother wakes from a dream on the veranda of her summer cottage and has a loving conversation with him.

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(If elements of 'Hamlet' creep in, with the ghost of Alexander's father and his mother's hasty remarriage, they are not insisted on, and coil casually beneath the surface of the action.)Now we see another bit of magic. Isak Jacobi, acting for his friend Helena, enters the bishop's house and offers to buy a trunk, and then smuggles her grandchildren out of the house in the trunk - and yet how can it be, when the bishop runs upstairs to look for them, that the children also apparently in their room?Perhaps it all has something to do with the magic arts of the Jacobi family.

Isak has two nephews, Aron, who helps in the business, and Ismael, who is 'not well' and is kept in a locked room and can be heard singing at night. Brought back to Isak's vast house, which is stacked to the ceiling with treasures to sell or barter, Alexander awakens in the middle of the night to urinate, loses his way back to his room, is startled by a conversation with God and discovers that God is actually a puppet being manipulated as a joke by Aron. Then he is taken to meet Ismael (played, without explanation, by a girl), and it appears that Ismael can 'see' what happens in the bishop's house and can control events there so that the bishop dies horribly by fire.Advertisement. There are fairy-tale elements here, but 'Fanny and Alexander' is above all the story of what Alexander understands is really happening. If magic is real, if ghosts can walk, so be it. Bergman has often allowed the supernatural into his films. In another sense, the events in 'Fanny and Alexander' may be seen through the prism of the children's memories, so that half-understood and half-forgotten events have been reconstructed into a new fable that explains their lives.What's certain is that Bergman somehow glides beyond the mere telling of his story into a kind of hypnotic series of events that have the clarity and fascination of dreams.

Rarely have I felt so strongly during a movie that my mind had been shifted into a different kind of reality. The scenes at night in the Jacobi house are as intriguing and mysterious as any I have seen, quiet and dreamy, and then disturbing when the mad Ismael calmly and sweetly shows Alexander how everything will be resolved.The movie is astonishingly beautiful. The cinematography is by Bergman's longtime collaborator, who surrounds the Ekdahls with color and warmth, and bleeds all of the life out of the bishop's household.The enormous cast centers on Helena, the grandmother, played by (in a role once intended for ). Wallgren is full-lipped, warm and sexy, and her affection for Isak is life-giving; she was the best thing in the film, Bergman believed.Emilie is the most conflicted character in the story; she marries the bishop for love, is tragically mistaken about what kind of man he is, thinks she can protect her children, and cannot.

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Her visit to Helena is heartbreaking. The marriage of Gustav (Jarl Kulle) and Alma (Mona Malm) is open enough to permit an extraordinary scene in which Gustav discusses his affair with his wife and Emilie, and they all try to decide what would be best for the maid. The bishop is a tragic and evil man, strict because he is fearful and insecure, cruel because he cannot stop himself, in agony because, he confesses to Emilie, he thought everyone admired him, and he realizes he is hated.This is a long film, at 188 minutes plus an intermission. But the version Bergman prefers is longer still, the 312-minute version he made for Swedish television.

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Both are available on a Criterion DVD, which includes Bergman's feature-length documentary on the making of the film.