avant-garde
Tim Cumming
A great wall of noise greets the audience as it settles in to the Royal Festival Hall - the sound of some heavy outer planet’s radio frequency, a subtly oscillating drone that recalls NASA’s recordings of radio emissions from Saturn made by the Cassini spacecraft. Lou Reed’s work station for the night is set centre-stage, behind a rack of electronic machinery, a row of guitars awaiting their signal stacked behind him, but for 20 minutes or so there’s just that continuum of noise – in fact the sound of three guitars leant up against a stack of live amps. Is this to soften up the audience’s Read more ...
howard.male
With Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Trio landing on these shores this weekend, I found myself remembering one of the most memorable listening experiences of my life; the first time I heard Reed’s 1975 album Metal Machine Music. How do you get your bearings in music that comes at you like amplified tinnitus, neither anchored by rhythm nor pulled into focus by vocals? Metal Machine Music is the authority that you must either surrender to, or flee the room from. Back in the Eighties, a friend of mine would listen to it almost ritualistically, so I felt obliged to approach it with similar reverence. Read more ...
david.cheal
“I want to tell you a story. About a story.” Thus spake Laurie Anderson at the beginning of her new show, Delusion, which is running for four nights as part of the Barbican’s Bite season. It was a typically cryptic, teasing prologue from a woman who, for more than 30 years, has created her own unique brand of performance art from a combination of music, poetry, stories, visual effects and electronic sounds.Here she was accompanied by two musicians, on sax and violin, who spent most of the evening silhouetted behind two screens; by her own electric violin; by pre-recorded and sampled sounds; Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Sarah Kane’s last play is the stuff of legend. Since its first production some 18 months after her suicide in 1999, it’s become a favourite with black-attired drama students, nostalgic in-yer-face drama buffs and mainstream theatres all over mainland Europe. But it is rarely performed in big spaces in this country – apparently because artistic directors feel it would empty their venues. So this version, directed by Grzegorz Jarzyna of Poland’s TR Warszawa on the Barbican's main stage, is a good chance to see what we’ve been missing. Or is it?Okay, it’s not the easiest play to watch. As the Read more ...
Russ Coffey
A self-styled “string quartet comprising a guitar, fiddle, mandolin and accordion” - welcome to the topsy–turvy world of Spiro. A world where nothing is quite what it seems. A world where up is down, black is white, and folk is, well, kind of avant-garde.The four-piece band started off in Bristol in the early '90s as “The Famous Five”. Two of them were classically trained and the other two were raised in the hard-knock world of punk. So they decided to form a folk band. Except they wouldn’t play folk It was to be more folk mixed with classical, warapped in a contemporary coat. If Steve Reich Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
George Crumb (b.1929) is one of the great American experimental composers of the 20th century. His delicate scores are characterised by a child-like sense of wonder and an array of instrumentation that appears to have hitched a ride from outer space. Crumb first came to the fore in the 1960s with Songs, Drones and Refrains of Death (1968), Night of the Four Moons (1969), inspired by and composed during the Apollo 11 space flight, the savage string quartet Black Angels (1970) and Ancient Voices of Children (1970). In 1968 he won a Pulitzer for Echoes of Time and the Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The radical modern choreographer William Forsythe (b 1950) was celebrated in a week of events in London’s stages this year, marking his transition from mouldbreaking neo-classical ballet to a more collaborative, theatre mode.These transcripts come from 1997, before Artangel’s staging at London’s Roundhouse of what became instantly known as the white bouncy castle, Tight Roaring Circle, 2001 before the showing of two full-length ballet productions, Artifact and Eidos:Telos by his Ballett Frankfurt, then his company, and 2003, on the closing down by conservative civic authorities of Ballett Read more ...