Features
Guy Oddy
Michael Gira (born 19/2/54) is an American singer-songwriter, composer, author and artist. He founded Swans, a band in which he sings and plays guitar, in New York during the late 1970s. Since that time, Gira and Swans have been a major influence in the experimental rock scene and in the 1980s were lorded as the “loudest band on the planet”. Not ones to sit still, however, they evolved continuously, taking on new sounds and influences until grinding to a halt in the late 1990s. Swans reformed and returned as elder statesmen of underground rock music in 2010 and have continued to create music Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Pink Floyd’s “Echoes”, the ineffable progressive rock epic that occupies side two of 1971’s Meddle, is having a moment. Nick Mason’s Saucerful of Secrets released a sensational one-sided 12-inch vinyl version of the track on Record Store Day, April 12. Recorded at the Centennial Hall in Frankfurt last August, the 23.04-minutes single – which plays from the centre outwards – reached number six in the vinyl chart, dropped, and is rising again. It’ll be on Radio One next, jostling for air time with Taylor, Sabrina, and Ed.Then there’s the new Pompeii version. At the ruined Italian city’s re- Read more ...
Zlatomir Fung
My new album, Fantasies, recorded with pianist Richard Fu, is the culmination of my years-long fascination with the wonderful genre of instrumental opera fantasies. I first fell in love with opera fantasies while attending summer music camps as a teenager. Franz Waxman and Pablo De Sarasate’s fantasies on Bizet’s Carmen were staples of the summer festival repertory of my violin-playing peers, and they were my first exposure to this sub-genre.As an ambitious young cellist, I couldn’t help but feel envious. Something about the virtuosic nature of the music – like a daring, high-wire circus act Read more ...
Amelia Coburn
“Sandra” is one of my favourite tracks from my album Between The Moon and the Milkman which was released last year. While living in Paris a few years ago I shared a flat with an older French lady. We loved to chat every night when I came home from work, but one time she told me a story that stayed with me about her late husband, who was an abusive alcoholic. When he died, his only final wishes were to be buried. So of course, she had him cremated.I couldn’t stop thinking about her story, and knew that one day I wanted to write a song about it. A few months later, in Mexico, I had quite Read more ...
First Person: St John's College choral conductor Christopher Gray on recording 'Lament & Liberation'
Christopher Gray
When I arrived at St John’s College, Cambridge, in April 2023, it was a daunting prospect to be taking over the reins of a choir with such a distinguished recording heritage: there have been more than 100 albums since the 1950s on some of the UK’s top labels. As a teenager, growing up in Northern Ireland in the 1990s, I could often be found in the small number of specialist classical CD sections in Belfast shops such as HMV. The choral selection in such shops back then was dominated by a tiny number of pioneering groups that included St John’s College Choir under George Guest. Like many Read more ...
David Gray
Occasionally, when I pass my own reflection, out of the corner of my eye I catch a glimpse of the likeness of my father, shining out through the bones in my face. In this way his ghost walks with me. Sometimes the making process can feel like that, a matter of training our peripheral vision to retrieve the images and ideas that are flickering at the edge of our field of view, existing in the same dimly lit space as dreams, primal impulses and hazy memories. It’s obvious that a lot of songs are written in response to events, either in our own lives or in the lives of those around us Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Amid these troubling times, can we not all live in the world of the 2025 Oscars' runaway success story, an ever-smiling Sean Baker? That thought increasingly crossed my mind as the 97th Academy Awards crawled towards its close, a promise early on from host Conan O'Brien not to "waste time" abandoned more or less as soon as it had been spoken.But even as one wondered about a peculiarly timed James Bond tribute – in far from cheering news, the rights to 007 were recently purchased by Amazon – or any number of lame comedy sequences (a poorly dressed Adam Sandler fleeing the auditorium Read more ...
Lauren Mooney
It started with a Guardian long-read. I’m ashamed to admit it since so many shows could say the same, but that was the beginning.It was the summer of 2022, and James [Yeatman] and I had just finished making two shows back-to-back with our company, Kandinsky. It was a pretty brutal return to making work after the doldrums of lockdown, with first The Winston Machine at New Diorama Theatre (NDT), then SHTF at the Schauspielhaus in Vienna, beset by the Omicron wave of Covid. We’d had two rehearsal processes blown apart by illness, were totally exhausted, and felt like maybe we’d never have Read more ...
Nick Hasted
David Lynch’s final two features mapped a haunted Hollywood of curdled innocence and back-alley eeriness. Mulholland Drive (2001) seemed the ultimate LA noir, till Inland Empire (2006) dug into deepest Lynch. The eighteen fallow big-screen years preceding his death this week show the loneliness of his vision in his medium’s conformist capital, which he nevertheless adored. “It’s kind of a trick in the light [that] is magical,” he said of his adopted hometown’s allure. “It gives you the indication that anything is possible. It’s critical for me to feel that light.”Mulholland Drive’s opening Read more ...
theartsdesk
Billie Holiday sings again, Olivia Laing tends to her garden, and Biran Klaas takes a chance: our reviewers discuss their favourite reads of 2024.Joe Boyd’s And the Roots of Rhythm Remain (Faber & Faber, £30) delivers handsomely on the promise of its subtitle: a journey through global music. The veteran producer and promoter has been soaking up the varied music of many cultures since long before that problematic term “world music” was invented. I was hooked on his border-hopping conspectus of much of the most interesting music of the last century from the opening long chapter on South Read more ...
theartsdesk
Saskia BaronAnoraBetween the TemplesIo CapitanoDahomeyEmilia PerezGreen BorderIo CapitanoMonsterA Normal ManSoundtrack to a Coup d’EtatThe usual perverse list unfolds. Two beautifully made and thought-provoking films about emigration, an intermittently brilliant exploration of attitudes to disfigurement, a helter-skelter drama about a sex worker, a Jewish romance that everyone I recommended it to hated, two post-colonial documentaries made with extraordinary skill, a heart-stopping childhood drama. and the first opera to be made about a trans drug baron. Sorry to leave out Hit Man, Read more ...
Matthew Barley
For many thousands of years, humans have turned to art to tell stories about themselves and others because it feels good. It feels good because we sense that it helps us to understand ourselves, and the sharing of these uniquely human stories brings us closer together, and then this bonding, amongst many benefits, increases the safety of our community – humans were quick to realise that we are stronger together.The very act of finding the right notes, colours, words to express something from deep inside that cannot seem to come out in any other way, has a magical effect – if you think about Read more ...