tue 03/12/2024

New Music Buzz

Subject: Re: Arts Cuts (Reply All)

theartsdesk

It began with a review of 100 Years of German Song. Roused by a comment to a reader (see Igor's comment below), Fisun was moved to email Igor in support of his trenchant views on arts funding.

Read more...

Moombahton, Boombahchero and 21st-century genre meltdown

joe Muggs A suitably confusing image for a confusing sound

Some days I feel like I've woken up on the other side of some wormhole in the spacetime continuum, and the world is a subtly but definitely different place to yesterday. So it was last week when I got a slightly drunken email from a music producer in Rotterdam, with some remixes of his work, saying, “There was this dude called DJ Orion and this dude was working in his lab on his freak creation. Mixing moombahton with  footwork and guarachero at 140 bpm. He named it: boombahchero.”

Read more...

Solomon Burke, c 1940-2010

Peter Culshaw

He was the man who Jerry Wexler, co-founder of Atlantic Records, thought was the greatest soul singer of them all and "a salesman of epic proportions". Nearly 30 stone when he died, he fathered 21 children (and is reported to have had 90 grandchildren). He was born in Philadelphia in 1936, 1938 or 1940 according to differing reports and made his mark as a preacher before becoming a song-writer and performer. He also had a job as an undertaker and ran a mortuary business in Los Angeles...

Read more...

Dubstep: what lies beyond?

joe Muggs The compilation tries to traverse boundaries - but where are those boundaries?

Dubstep is everywhere – and if you will excuse a little self-promotion I have, in my small way, helped this state of affairs come about. The bass-heavy, rhythmically exploratory and very British electronic dance music genre has now – via Magnetic Man and Katy B – proved it can produce bona fide top-10 hits, and it has become the de facto sound of every summer festival to boot, while still keeping both feet in the underground clubs from whence it emerged.

Read more...

Southbank Centre hosting two-day Arvo Pärt conference

peter Quinn

Following the recent UK premiere of his Symphony No 4 ("Los Angeles") at the Proms, Arvo Pärt's 75th birthday celebrations continue with a two-day conference on 24-25 September hosted at London's Southbank Centre. Presented in collaboration with the Royal Academy of Music, with the composer in residence, academics from the UK, USA and Canada will give a total of 13 papers on various aspe

Read more...

The xx win Mercury Prize, the oOoOO next year?

Peter Culshaw

The Arts Desk has been in two minds about Mercury Award winners The xx, who picked up the £20,000 cheque last night. Joe Muggs loved them, Bruce Dessau was sceptical. Singer and bass player Oliver Sim told the audience at the Grosvenor House Hotel in...

Read more...

Unlikely soulmates: Beyoncé and Turnage hammer out that ring

David Nice

Did anyone find the aged-rocker thrash of Mark Anthony Turnage's new work at the Proms, Hammered Out  - a bit of a disappointment to Edward Seckerson - oddly familiar? This brilliant YouTube remix will tell you why. And for all the orchestral flash, which struck me too as a bit vieux jeu, give me the dazzling Beyoncé...

Read more...

You too can perform at Covent Garden...

Ismene Brown

The Royal Opera House is appealing to the public to record sounds to contribute to their three-day If-A-Tree festival in early September, curated by Joanna McGregor. Sound artist Scanner is transforming the former Floral Hall into an aural forest with a soundscape to which he wants Joe Bloggs or John Doe or indeed (thanks to technology) anyone in the entire world to contribute.

Read more...

Robert Sandall, Writer on The Arts Desk, RIP

theartsdesk

Robert Sandall, the music writer and broadcaster, and one of the first members of The Arts Desk, died this morning from prostate cancer. He was 58. His wit, easy style and energetic intelligence were seen in a number of book and concert reviews he did for this site, despite the encroachment of cancer.

Read more...

Fab Two Alert!

Jasper Rees

It wasn't memorialised in HD. But last night Ringo Starr turned 70 and welcomed Paul McCartney onstage at Radio City Music Hall in New York for a musical celebration. There was only one song they were going to perform, and a thousand mobile phone cameras were duly held aloft to capture it.

Read more...

Pages

Subscribe to theartsdesk.com

Thank you for continuing to read our work on theartsdesk.com. For unlimited access to every article in its entirety, including our archive of more than 15,000 pieces, we're asking for £5 per month or £40 per year. We feel it's a very good deal, and hope you do too.

To take a subscription now simply click here.

And if you're looking for that extra gift for a friend or family member, why not treat them to a theartsdesk.com gift subscription?

latest in today

Help to give theartsdesk a future!

It all started on 09/09/09. That memorable date, September 9 2009, marked the debut of theartsdesk.com.

It followed some...

Bach Mendelssohn Festival, Part I, Oxford Philharmonic Orche...

“I am not better than my fathers.” Cracked, pained, occasionally rasping, rising to a fearsome roar then subsiding to a throaty whisper, Sir Bryn...

theartsdesk on Vinyl 87: Roots Manuva, Bogdan Raczynski, Son...

VINYL OF THE MONTH

Blood Incantation Absolute Elsewhere (Century Media)

...

Currie, Hallé, Wong, Bridgewater Hall, Manchester review - s...

Kahchun Wong’s final concert of 2024 in the Hallé Manchester season was something of a surprise. At first sight, the sparkle in the programme...

Blu-ray: Juggernaut

That Juggernaut is as good as it is seems in hindsight to have been a happy accident. Inspired by a bomb hoax on the QE2 in 1972, the...

Rigoletto, Irish National Opera / Murrihy, Collins, NCH Dubl...

How many Rigolettos have regular operagoers among you sat through where there wasn’t some major defect, in either the production or the...

Electric Dreams: Art and Technology Before the Internet, Ta...

Last month a portrait of Alan Turing by AI robot AI-Da sold at Sotheby’s for $1.08 million – proof that, in some people’s eyes, artificial...

Album: Panelia - Nothing and All At Once

Nothing and All at Once is the debut album from New Delhi...

Music Reissues Weekly: John Cale - The Academy in Peril, Par...

The return to shops of a consecutive sequence of five of John Cale's Seventies albums through different labels is undoubtedly coincidental. All...

Blu-ray: Black Tuesday

The universal fear of dying is the theme of Black Tuesday, a terse, bleak 1954 thriller that is belatedly being recognized as a major...