the Four: January '25

to start the end ... oh and vids

Feb 09, 2025

Some housekeeping … I’ve been all-in on the interview, and here at 4ts we mean Interview kinda interviews. So check out what George Phillips, the connoisseur of hitting all 4, and artist and all-around shredder Sean Bernhardt have to say — it’s far more interesting than what I have to, anyway.

now then, a stream of consciousness for the sluts ...

i’ve been thinking about destruction – about what is destroyed, about why it is destroyed, about what should be destroyed, about who is doing the destroying … and it needs to be us … let the entire built environment of a failed experiment where everything tastes like hairspray be reduced to nothing but dead-gum colored ledges looking attacked by a pack of cookie cutter sharks whether smoked or not; let long black arcs score the walls, the signatures on the demolition order; strip the paint, leave your own, and build from blood sinew bone bondo something closer to inspiration … embrace the Philosophy of Destruction, the recognition that the system’s already broken, the land already stolen, the experiment p-hacked beyond reality for predatory ends, said ends being the choice and the cruelty the point and that the cruel see all of this in binary — something is theirs or worth ‘deleting’ —... so I say we hasten the deletion but make it ours, bc its only 4 degrees – oh, and key a fucking Tesla

the end part I and urethane logic done, so let’s get back to business as usual. Lots of shorties for the Four this past month; the quick-hitters are in vogue like it’s 2011. If you wanna know what the Four — with an all-new look for ‘25! — is about, the ‘criteria’ is kept here. Otherwise, let’s begin the year.

Four: January ‘25

ben chadourne/cyrus bennett, ‘•blackout try’

Wanna see Bennet literally break a city? Of course you fucking do, breaking infrastructure and into smiles and proving the best art in Paris is outside the Louvre. The whole thing is heavy and uncanny as a whale skull in the way so much of Cyrus’ skating is; there’s always a sense of sharpness in what he does to me, and Chadourne is a marvelous whetstone.

strangelove/village psychic, ‘quit while you’re ahead’

Idk, I don’t really have the neon for this, the buzz has escaped me for now – didn’t the desperately weird lede clue you in? But goddam if the spot selection here isn’t fucking dope, as levels are navigated with the verticality of the Erdtree.

julian agliardi, ‘pocket part’

Look, sometimes these things are going to be here purely on the skating alone. Which isn’t to say the filming, editing, music — all the mignonette and lemon juice and cocktail sauce and Tabasco by Shane Darnell and Dominik Schneider — isn’t fabulous. It’s just that Agliardi is a fucking beast, absolutely taking it to sets with more stairs than years he’s lived, as the Pocket YT cutline copy points out, and it’s fun to know you’re seeing a Next One.

bubble, ‘bubbles: bordeaux – olivier durou, amelien foures, noah mahieu, david jakinda, riot skateshop & more’

Ok now see, this is the exact opposite of the above, bc there’s something immensely satisfying in the ‘skate around a city with a homie’ genre of video, a genre which has fully bloomed with the advent of online outlets. The skating is there in little bits — and often sick; this is their home, after all — but it takes a backseat to an experience much more evocative of what are likely to be some of your fondest memories when you finally hung up on the death box one last time: place to place, sharing space, and tossing tricks for their own sake.