Wales
Other Voices Cardigan review - a celebration of music on the cuspTuesday, 08 November 2022![]() Other Voices is, according to its founder Philip King, a festival which celebrates what’s about to happen. Indeed, artists like Hozier, Fontaines DC and Amy Winehouse cut their teeth at this unique musical event which, although it has its home in... Read more... |
Blu-ray: The Owl ServiceTuesday, 08 November 2022![]() The Owl Service is instantly unsettling, Bridget Appleby’s credit sequence cutting between flickering candles and shadow puppets while a plaintive Welsh folksong is drowned out by the sound of a motorcycle. Alan Garner’s uncompromising 1967 fantasy... Read more... |
The Feast review - slow-cooking folk-horrorSaturday, 20 August 2022![]() Lee Haven Jones’ Welsh-language folk-horror debut dissects a family’s treachery to the land in eventually apocalyptic fashion. It starts in silent, jagged style, the characters seeming as artificial as their minimalist house, abstract paintings and... Read more... |
Edinburgh Fringe 2022 reviews: Kiri Pritchard-McLean / Lou Sanders / SnortThursday, 11 August 2022![]() Kiri Pritchard-McLean, Monkey Barrel ★★★★Wearing a heavily sequinned leotard - she thought this was how we’d all dress after “living in trackies during lockdown” - Kiri Pritchard-McLean wants to address some very serious subjects, such as... Read more... |
Album: Gwenno - TresorThursday, 30 June 2022![]() “The historic, the prehistoric, the natural, architectural, geological, ornithological, or on the side of its folklore, Christian or heathen – the place teems with subject matter that is as curious as it is interesting.” So the Gothic Revival... Read more... |
Violet, Music Theatre Wales/Britten-Pears Arts review - well sung and played, but to what end?Friday, 24 June 2022![]() Best new opera in years, they said – don’t ask who – after the Aldeburgh Festival premiere of Tom Coult’s Violet. I’d have been happy in Hackney had it been as good as, say, Philip Venables’ 4.48 Psychosis or Stuart MacRae’s The Devil Inside. Alas,... Read more... |
First Person: composer Gavin Higgins on his new cantata 'The Faerie Bride'Friday, 17 June 2022![]() I was a strange child, I didn’t really fit in. I would twitch and distort my face into awkward shapes. I obsessively bit my fingers and knuckles till they bled. I collected leaflets and piled them high in neat stacks in the corner of my room. I was... Read more... |
The Corn Is Green, National Theatre review – Nicola Walker teaches a life lessonMonday, 25 April 2022![]() Let’s talk repertoire. Over the past decade the range of British plays, especially those from the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, has shrunk in state-subsidized theatres. You can no longer easily see work by Shakespeare’s contemporaries, Restoration... Read more... |
Classical CDs: Escalators, dead leaves and a sixth-century bardSaturday, 02 April 2022![]() Eric Nathan: Missing Words (New Focus Recordings)“Inspired by words from Schottenfreude by Ben Schott” reads this double album’s tagline, a high-concept project based on Schott’s 2013 lexicon of newly-invented German compound words. Words like... Read more... |
Album: MWWB - The HarvestWednesday, 23 March 2022![]() Wrexham band MWWB were known until recently as Mammoth Weed Wizard Bastard. Perhaps they changed their name because its freak-friendly quality could be mistaken for spliffed Half Man Half Biscuit-style silliness. MWWB are no bong-head novelty act.... Read more... |
Manic Street Preachers, Brighton Dome review - solid gig occasionally explodes to another levelFriday, 15 October 2021![]() There is a three song segment midway through Manic Street Preachers’ set which suddenly ramps everything up. For this brief while, the performance and response in the sold-out, nigh-on-2000-capacity venue, elevates the concert from another decent... Read more... |
K-Music 2021: striking the right note for musical fusionWednesday, 06 October 2021![]() It’s been eight years since the first K-Music landed in London, courtesy the Korean Cultural Centre UK, along with world, folk and jazz concert producers Serious. Since then it has brought an eclectic range of bands and musicians from Korea to the... Read more... |
