avant-garde
joe.muggs
It may be mean to say, but it seems sadness agrees with Tim Hecker. The Canadian has been a mainstay of the global experimental music world almost since the turn of the millennium, sitting somewhere between neo-classical, shoegaze, ambient and abstract noise. His tracks are always delicate, always poised, sometimes veering a little into harsh distortion though rarely if ever enough to scare the horses; and they seem to be at their best when they're at their sparsest and most desolate.There's certainly plenty of sparseness and desolation in his ninth album, a series of collaborations with Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Birmingham outfit Pram achieved profile amongst alt-music connoisseurs shortly after the millennium. They’d been going for over a decade but their weird-masked presentation and spooked, abject music suddenly struck a chord. Being truly an art band, they were unmoved and gradually faded whence they came, their capacity for offbeat instruments noted for posterity, a bunch of capsules of occasionally creepy chamber pop oddness left behind. A decade on, and they’ve resurrected with a new line-up. They are still unlikely to bother the Top 10.That last sentence isn’t quite fair. It implies their Read more ...
joe.muggs
An extraordinary musical movement has been bubbling over from the far left field into the public consciousness in the last couple of years. A very loose international alliance of musicians like Elysia Crampton, GAIKA, Ziúr, Arca, Rabit, Yves Tumor, and the NON Worldwide collective of Angel-Ho, Chino Amobi and Nkisi have been making sounds that unceremoniously strip experimental electronica of its straight white male trappings, and rebuilding it from first principles as something nonconformist in every sense, shot through with a strong sense of urgency and possibility.J’Kerian Morgan aka Lotic Read more ...
joe.muggs
So the ambient revival continues apace, getting deeper and wider with each passing year. From the interstices between the classical concert hall, abstract art installations, the backroom of more insalubrious little raves and festivals, the small hours on oddball online radio stations, and the spaces into which people get lost as they defocus and absorb themselves into their headphone soundtracks on commutes seems to seep more and more sound that is textural above all.Some of it is formulaic analgesia – see the simple piano pieces that get millions upon millions of plays on the streaming Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
In just five years, what the team behind Hidden Door Festival has achieved is quite remarkable. Having sprung up in 2014, taking over a group of disused vaults behind Waverley train station, the festival’s mission to transform redundant spaces in Edinburgh has left an immovable, and much needed, creative footprint on the city. In 2017 this not-for-profit festival, which is run entirely by volunteers, re-opened the Leith Theatre, a stunning venue which had lain in disuse for almost three decades.Having breathed new life into this incredible space, which is now gradually becoming used more and Read more ...
Javi Fedrick
Although once famous for her Australian drawl and hazy jams, on her most recent album Tell Me How You Really Feel, Courtney Barnett has transformed herself into an all-singing indie star, resulting in something more assured, vulnerable, and intense than her previous work. Touring the UK with her band of Bones Sloan, Dave Mudie and Katie Harkin, her 19-song set in Albert Hall in Manchester is faultless.Barnett starts by playing Tell Me How You Really Feel in its entirety. The reflective songs sound hefty and visceral live. The delicate “Need A Little Time Out” rests on chugging guitars and Read more ...
joe.muggs
Ryuichi Sakamoto has conquered underground and mainstream with seeming ease over four decades, never dropping off in the quality of his releases. Indeed his most recent projects, following his return to public life after treatment for throat cancer in 2014-15, are among his best. The async album was rightly listed by many, including theartsdesk, as one of 2017's best; the async remodels remixes showed him absolutely keyed in to the electronica zeitgeist, and Glass, his live collaboration album with Carsten Nicolai aka Alva Noto is a worthy addition to the duo's extensive Read more ...
joe.muggs
Everything on this record changes shape. One moment in “RayCats” Far Eastern instrumentation is being glitched beyond recognition, then suddenly it sounds like something from a relaxation tape. “Same” shimmers and twists between 20th century avant-classical, Depeche Mode at their stadium peak and pure electronic sound. “The Station” sounds like Drake or Future crooning over the bassline from a 90s grunge track, but periodically dissolves into Autechre type abstraction.But that's Daniel Lopatin, aka Oneohtrix Point Never, all over. Since he emerged from the US electronic noise scene, he's Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
This weekend sees the Brighton Festival 2018 kick off. Anyone visiting the city on Saturday 5 May would find this hard to miss as the famous Children’s Parade makes its way around the streets, a joyous dash of colour and creativity. This year’s theme, in honour of Brighton Festival guest director David Shrigley, is “Paintings”. Thus every school in the area has been assigned a famous painting on which to base their parade presentation. The results are guaranteed to be an eye-boggling public showcase.After the success last year in taking the Festival to outlying areas of Brighton, Your Place Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Gob Squad is a “seven-headed” Anglo-German arts collective who specialise in multimedia performance. Beginning in Nottingham in 1994 and now based in Berlin, their work ranges from site-specific to installation and film but, more recently, mainly theatre. They major in using technology to “make connections with places outside the theatre or to create different spaces inside the theatre where we can talk to the audience in quite intimate ways”. Recent works include War and Peace and My Square Lady. For the Brighton Festival they're presenting Gob Squad’s Creation (Pictures for Dorian), based Read more ...
joe.muggs
Sometimes music reaches a point beyond which there's no point in going. Thus it is with Napalm Death who, 30 or so years ago, hit on a formula for furious noise generation, and though they've shifted line-ups many times since then, continue to make more or less the same racket to this day. OK, there are aficionados who will be furious at this allegation. Ah, they'll say, in 1997 Napalm Death almost entirely abandoned grindcore for pure death metal, and in 2003 they created an entirely new sound called “deathcrust”. But really, nothing significant has changed.And that is just fine. In fact, it Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Painted in ice-cream shades punctuated with vivid red, the series of portraits made by Picasso in the early weeks of 1932 are as dreamy as love letters. His mistress Marie-Thérèse Walther – we assume it is she – lies adrift in post-coital languor, her body spread before us as a delicious and endlessly fascinating confection. But the mood shifts from picture to picture, and she appears by turns as a wisp-like erotic reverie, an imposing, moon-faced goddess, and, in a flash of humour that teeters on the edge of cruelty, a cartoonish blob of a creature with a long, upturned snout (Pictured below Read more ...