post-modernism
Bernard Hughes
Anyone who has been on a British train in the last ten years will have been irritated to distraction by the inane and ubiquitous “See it, say it, sorted” announcement that punctuates every journey, but only Jonathan Coe has channelled that annoyance into literary form.A satire on contemporary Britain, an analysis of the political tectonics of the last 40 years, a thoughtful meditation on why writers write – The Proof of My Innocence is all these things, but its starting point is a howl of rage about the fact we can’t just enjoy a quiet train journey any more.Coe operates partly through Read more ...
joe.muggs
This record keeps you guessing. It starts off with “Hybrid Romance”, an ambient piece that’s very pretty but has swooping glassy synths that crack and fracture and could easily be about to break into some super jagged Berlin deconstructed club music at any minute.But less than two minutes later and we’re into “Chlorine”, a song in the modern country-inflected pop style which wouldn’t sound out of place on most daytime radio channels, and you could easily imagine the Californian Ded Hyatt performing as a support act for Taylor Swift or Harry Styles.The thing is, though, “Chlorine” has lots of Read more ...
joe.muggs
One of the greatest things a musical artist can achieve is world building. That is, creating a distinctive type of environment, language and coordinates for everything they do such that the listener is forced to come into the musical world, and to engage with it on its own terms rather than by comparison. It’s something that musicians as diverse as Prince, Kate Bush and Wu-Tang Clan achieve have achieved, likewise plenty of more underground creators too.Belgian polymath Marc Hollander has achieved this in particularly special way. Over more than 45 years, he’s built his sonic world not only Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
The giraffe still baffles me. This model beast appeared stage right at the Royal Albert Hall during Jennifer Walshe’s The Site of an Investigation, only to be loudly wrapped by a pair of percussionists and then removed. A critique of mindless consumerism, a satire on the destructive domination of nature (both among this work’s sprawl of themes), or a little absurdist interlude of the kind Walshe evidently enjoys? Never mind: we soon moved on to another mind-scrambling stunt in the genre-busting performance for voice and orchestra that the Irish composer staged for the Proms with the BBC Read more ...
aleks.sierz
What is the shelf life of a theatre gimmick? In April, the Royal Court announced that they were going to stage a debut play by an unknown writer, Dave Davidson, who has worked for decades in the security industry. His drama was hyped up, helped by Time Out magazine, and by fellow playwrights Simon Stephens and Dennis Kelly.Hooray! – this new writing venue had discovered an unknown talent. Not. In fact, if you buy a ticket you will not see That Is Not Who I Am by Davidson (who doesn’t exist), but instead you will experience Rapture by Lucy Kirkwood, who is an established playwright. It’s a Read more ...
Daniel Baksi
In his 1985 essay “Not-Knowing”, the American writer Donald Barthelme describes a fictional situation in which an unknown “someone” is writing a story.“From the world of conventional signs,” Barthelme writes, laying out for the reader this story being written, “he takes an azalea bush, plants it in a pleasant park. He takes a gold pocket watch from the world of conventional signs and places it under the azalea bush. He takes from the same rich source a handsome thief and a chastity belt, places the thief in the chastity belt and lays him tenderly under the azalea, not neglecting to wind the Read more ...
stephen.walsh
It’s easy enough to see the difficulty Madam Butterfly places your thinking director in. I share her pain. What the whirring brain will quickly see as a penetrating, or at least surface scratching, study of a whole repertoire of modern obsessions – cultural appropriation, colonialisation, child abuse, sexual predation – turns out to be merely Puccini’s latest bout of sublimated girl-bashing, accompanied by some of his most sadistically beautiful music.For Lindy Hume, the director of WNO’s new production, Butterfly is no longer the fragile, accidental victim of a horrid American Read more ...
Robert Beale
Manchester’s Psappha have been proudly flying the flag of new and radical music right through the year of lockdown, and last night’s livestream, with two-and-a-half world premieres, one of them by Mark-Anthony Turnage, showed they haven’t given up making waves.Engaging many of Manchester’s most distinguished solo musicians – and performing in ensembles whose numbers would daunt many another music-making organization right now – their enterprise and dedication are breathtaking. This live-streamed event brought together, as scene-setter Tom McKinney put it, “21 musicians, safely distanced’ at Read more ...
Nick Hasted
I’m Thinking of Ending Things ends in a giddying gusher of weirdness, the steady drip of earlier oddness finally bursting its narrative banks, till a horror scene becomes a Gene Kelly ballet, and an Oklahoma! tune is sung in bitter valediction by a male lead now resembling elderly Charles Foster Kane. It’s a Charlie Kaufman overdose, trashing convention to alienating effect. And yet this also stays his simplest chamber piece, about a young couple driving to meet the boyfriend’s parents in the country one snowy night.Later, you forget the first sight of Lucy (Jessie Buckley) as she lets a Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
As in other countries born out of 19th-century uprisings against imperial power, the literary roots of the Philippines run deep. Executed by the Spanish in 1896, the novelist, poet and physician José Rizal remains the adored hero of his archipelago’s struggle for independence. Yet this legacy of authored nationhood has not helped Filipino writers much in their quest to have their stories heard abroad. Later subjection to the United States – overtly colonial rule from 1901 to 1946, followed by military, economic and cultural hegemony – has meant that the few works that do reach an Read more ...
joe.muggs
Billie Eilish is a vaudevillian. Crack that and everything else falls into place. Her impossible precociousness (at 17, she's a superstar and has been in the public eye for four years) and voraciousness (her and her brother Finneas's writing swerves from torch songs to trap beats, far-out electronica to glam-goth) should by all rights be an annoying mess, but absorb this album like a hallucinatory gothic cabaret show and it all makes sense. The gender ambiguities and gallows humour make sense. Even the manic pixie dream girl filtered via Resident Evil persona makes sense. Dammit, even the Read more ...
David Kettle
There’s a Big Reveal that comes right at the end of this new indie movie from first-time writer/producer/directors Scott Elliott and Sid Sadowskyj (whose names, in retrospect, should have given the game away right from the start). For (complete spoiler alert!) this is Elliott and Sadowskyj’s own story, dramatised and put up on the big screen, with two young newcomers playing them as the movie’s leads. The film escorts us through their journey from York sixth-formers to successful young entrepreneurs, guided by a list of dreams they plan to pursue. One of which is – you guessed it – to make a Read more ...