tue 19/03/2024

festivals

Northern Winter Beat 2024 review - Julie Byrne, Alabaster DePlume, Deerhoof and Mary Ocher triumph in Denmark

You’re here. I’m so happy you’re here. You’re alive. You’re doing so well. Living is so hard. We’re alive. Have you suffered? When we’re alive, we suffer. We suffer to be alive. You must have suffered.Paraphrasing Alabaster DePlume’s on-stage...

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Trans Musicales Festival 2023 review - a smorgasbord of global sounds

FRIDAYRennes Airport Parc Expo is about three miles west of the city. It’s vast, consisting of 110,000 metres of cavernous warehouse-like hangars, and has hosted everything from Holiday on Ice to France’s hugest annual agricultural conference. Every...

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Album: The Chemical Brothers - For That Beautiful Feeling

The Chemical Brothers are unstoppable. Their live shows are a guaranteed monster good time, redolent of proper old-school rave-ups, but with visual tech from some freaky eye-boggling future. Their last album, 2019’s No Geography, was a total belter...

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Hardanger Musikkfest 2023 review - fertility, folk music and the supernatural unite along Norway’s fjords

The cows are scattered across the mountains. Without scrambling up the slopes, the only way to summon them is to call. Unni Løvlid is beckoning them. Instead of standing outdoors she is in the medieval Ullensvang Church, in the Norwegian village of...

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Supersonic Festival 2023, Birmingham review - musical eccentrics battle the odds and come out on top

You’ve got to feel for Lisa Meyer and the team behind Birmingham’s magnificent Supersonic Festival. Just as the live music scene gets to a point where the Covid pandemic is no longer a malign influence on dancing and having fun in a room full of...

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We Out Here Festival, Wimborne St Giles review: it's a family affair, and then some...

We Out Here Festival, now in its fifth year (and fourth edition, as 2020 was of course cancelled for Covid), has become an institution. Curated by jazz-centric veteran DJ Gilles Peterson and actualised by Noah Ball – best known for his role in...

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Bluedot Festival 2023 review - monsoon weather can't defeat the music'n'science extravaganza

“This wasn’t the day to wear white suede boots,” says Django Django’s singer Vincent Neff, midway through the band’s Friday evening set.He’s not kidding.Mud can be worse (Glastonbury ’97, ’98, ‘07 & ’16). Wet weather can wreck the vibe (Nova ’12...

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theartsdesk in Montreal - the world's largest jazz festival just got younger

The Festival International de Jazz de Montreal (FIJM), the largest in the world, is genuinely on a roll. The head of programming of the huge event, which takes place all around the Quartier des Spectacles in the centre of the city, says in this year...

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Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, BST Hyde Park review - Saturday in the park with Bruce

First things first. The support acts at events like this usually get completely overlooked, but it would be frankly criminal not to give a mention to a superb set by the Chicks. They dropped the “Dixie” from their original name because of its now “...

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Glastonbury Festival 2023: Down to the Paradise City

TUESDAY 27TH JUNE 2023I wake up around 11.00, get outta bed around 12.00.My carcass has been ridden over by Immortan Joe’s entire fleet of vehicles from Mad Max: Fury Road. My inner head has been scooped out like a cantaloupe. Where my brain once...

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Ligeti Day; Kolesnikov/Tsoy, Aldeburgh Festival review - 14 musicians, 16 premieres and 100 metronomes

To give the first performance of a dazzling fantasia in the context of a rangy sunny-evening-to-night concert, as pianists Pavel Kolesnikov and Samson Tsoy did in glorious Blythburgh Church, merits a gold medal in piano-duo enterprise. To premiere...

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Sinfonia of London, Wilson; Kolesnikov/Tsoy; Bozzini Quartet; Phantasm, Aldeburgh Festival review - new sounds for old

You don’t expect to visit the Britten-Pears shrine in Suffolk and come back raving about Edward Elgar. Yes, Elgar. On Sunday evening, John Wilson and his Sinfonia of London brought the composer’s Second Symphony to Snape Maltings: that marshland...

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