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sue.steward
“Hot sweaty tight jammed in can’t breathe heart pumping centre of the universe Monday night action in town. Racing down to Bar Rumba at midnight through the blaring siren wailing darkness of south London to the tinsel town wet streeted fakeness of the West End and the That’s How it Is sessions, Gilles Peterson, James Lavelle, UFO, Patrick Forge, Roni Size spin…” [sic] Peter Williams, London, 1994.That was written by the photographer whose 70 black-and-white photographs are showing at a blink-and-you-miss-it gallery in east London until Saturday. Since the heyday of London’s New Jazz scene in Read more ...
joe.muggs
Grime music, following its emergence from (mostly) East London clubs and pirate radio stations in the very early 2000s, was archetypical music of urban disaffection. Although it produced characters like the rambunctious Jammer and the oddly melancholic Trim among its legions of young rappers, its fundamental mode is of straight-up combat and threat – of gunplay and postcode rivalries, of “slewing” (killing), “murking” (killing) and “duppying” (go on, have a guess) rivals, of fury at unspecified “haters” – and the jagged rhythms and harsh tones of the music tended to back this up.So as the Read more ...
sue.steward
Cider, bulls and a beautifully restored cathedral which hosts the annual Three Choirs Festival are probably the key elements used to brand Hereford. But for 20 years, the city has also been home to the UK’s first photography festival. This month, its anniversary is being celebrated in several venues with the focus on Twenty, an exhibition at the charmingly old-fashioned Museum and Gallery where 20 significant photographers share wall space with a gigantic stuffed pike.Hanging over the Market Square, banners printed with portraits of African women in brightly coloured robes represent the UK’s Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Scottish Ballet’s artistic director Ashley Page yesterday angrily made clear that when he leaves the company in 2012 it will be against his wishes. Last Thursday the company issued an emotionless brief statement that Page had “felt he was unable to accept” an extension to his contract, which ends after 10 years' work in 2012.Yesterday, however, Page’s agent issued a statement that he had on the contrary been eager to take a further three-to-five-year contract, but that he had felt "great disappointment" at the offer of only a single year as an interim measure while the company’s Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Last year I took my musical instrument to Tower Hamlets. The heartland of the capital’s huge Bangladeshi community is not a part of London where you expect to hear much orchestral playing. Nor are boroughs like Hackney and Newham ordinarily seen as wellsprings of classical musicians. But they all have a dedicated music services department among whose tasks it is to stimulate instrumental learning.For the last four years the council’s music services department has been teaming up with teachers to get children to take up instruments. It has been a remarkable success. Already there are 7000 Read more ...
joe.muggs
Here, we present the exclusive first showing of a new video by the Brighton/London band Belleruche. This clip for “Fuzz Face” is highly arresting, an ingenious and slightly disturbing collision of hi and low-tech, made using thousands of photocopies, and its indicative of a band who are taking some very interesting ideas into the mainstream. But more importantly from theartsdesk's point of view, Belleruche's increasing profile is indicative of a broader cultural shift in the music world.Watch the video for "Fuzz Face" by Belleruche:
Although they have brought rock and hip-hop elements into Read more ...
theartsdesk
As arts cuts announced today start to bite, few people are aware that the Royal Opera House pays its two top people more than £630,000 and nearly £400,000 each. Although Covent Garden is refusing to identify them, it is likely that they are chief executive Lord Hall and music director Antonio Pappano. But they are not likely to have to sacrifice their earnings even while smaller arts organisations fold.The salaries are revealed in Covent Garden’s most recent financial report for 2009. Recently in the news for its attempts to wrest lifetime copyright from creative artists whom it commissions, Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Sadler’s Wells launched their 2011 season this morning with a warning that the front-loading of arts cuts to the next two years will cut a swathe through the British arts landscape.Alastair Spalding said that while this year’s cut of 7 per cent was containable for the theatre - which has only a fifth of its income from public sources - the Government had ignored pleas by arts leaders to spread the 15 per cent reduction evenly over the period up to 2014 to allow organisations to re-adjust without seismic closures. Instead, the Arts Council was already having to close rather than trim arts Read more ...
theartsdesk
It began with a review of 100 Years of German Song. Roused by a comment to a reader (see Igor's comment below), Fisun was moved to email Igor in support of his trenchant views on arts funding. It wasn't long before other writers at theartsdesk got involved and an eruption of lively and passionate emails followed. Some of these views may surprise our readers, some will undoubtedly annoy. But we at theartsdesk have decided to go ahead and publish, unedited, our unrehearsed and spontaneous exchange. We hope you'll enjoy, and join in, the debate.It began with a review of 100 Years of German Song Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Frontline public funding for arts will be cut by some 15 per cent over the next four years, said the Chancellor George Osborne today, as he announced a cut of almost half in the Department of Culture, Media and Sport budget, from £1.9 billion to £1.1 billion. Arts Council England's funding will be cut by almost 30 per cent over that period, starting with a 14 per cent reduction for next year.The bulk of the DCMS figure will be met by 41 per cent savings in the department’s administration costs, and 19 quangos will be abolished or substantially reformed, including some in film, library and Read more ...
joe.muggs
Some days I feel like I've woken up on the other side of some wormhole in the spacetime continuum, and the world is a subtly but definitely different place to yesterday. So it was last week when I got a slightly drunken email from a music producer in Rotterdam, with some remixes of his work, saying, “There was this dude called DJ Orion and this dude was working in his lab on his freak creation. Mixing moombahton with footwork and guarachero at 140 bpm. He named it: boombahchero.”OK, “footwork” I know. Footwork is a rhythmically warped mutation of house music and hip hop that comes Read more ...
Ismene Brown
In a shock that will deeply upset US and UK ballet, leading young British choreographer Christopher Wheeldon has abandoned his own company, Morphoses, which he set up in the US less than three years ago as a rare example of a choreographer-led ballet troupe. His former executive director has pledged to continue the company under a series of annual guest curators from different artistic disciplines.The New York Times reports that Royal Ballet-trained Wheeldon resigned on 18 February after continuing rows between him and his executive director Lourdes Lopez. Lopez claimed Wheeldon could not Read more ...