avant-garde
Francesca Wade: Square Haunting - Bloomsbury retoldThursday, 06 February 2020
These days, Bloomsbury rests in a state of elegant somnolence. The ghosts of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell linger on in the shabby gentility of Russell Square and its environs, the bookish institutions that are the bones of the place conferring... Read more... |
Robert Henke CBM 8032, Barbican - a vision of possibilities from 40 years agoSaturday, 25 January 2020
Robert Henke is to techno fans as Leo Fender and Les Paul are to rock lovers. The Ableton Live software which he co-created is every bit as influential as any guitar they built, and probably more used. However, of course, being just a piece of code... Read more... |
Haas Hommage à Bridget Riley, London Sinfonietta, Lubman, QEH review - vibrant abstractionFriday, 06 December 2019
Music and visual art, at least at the highest level, should go their own separate ways; put them together, and one form will always be subordinate to the other. A composer being inspired by an artist's work, or vice versa, is something else... Read more... |
CD: 65daysofstatic - replicr, 2019Wednesday, 25 September 2019
65daysofstatic, the instrumentals-only post-rock experimental band from Sheffield, have suffered from the obsessive need to brand every supposed sub-genre of music when, in their case, they are much more than a math rock or glitch band. They are... Read more... |
Reissue CDs Weekly: Fernando Falcão - Memória das ÁguasSunday, 04 August 2019
Memória das Águas hasn’t figured in lists of great Brazilian albums. Its creator Fernando Falcão isn’t as celebrated as fellow countryman and musical maverick Tom Zé. The reissue of this arresting yet previously obscure album should help change... Read more... |
CD: Thom Yorke - AnimaFriday, 12 July 2019
Thom Yorke is frontman of Radiohead, a festival-headlining rock band who sell out stadiums all over the globe. His artistic aspirations, however, right back to Radiohead’s Kid A album 19 years ago, often seem to lie elsewhere, in the world of... Read more... |
CD: Holly Herndon - PROTOWednesday, 08 May 2019
To consider the third album from experimental composer Holly Herndon solely as a piece of music is to miss the point. PROTO is part artwork, part research project, on which Herndon teams up with collaborators both human and inhuman to discover... Read more... |
Terry Riley & Gyan Riley, The Old Market, Hove review - gently pleasing evening of improvisationTuesday, 16 April 2019
“I don’t know if I’m going to recognise any of it,” I say to my accomplice as we drain a couple of light ales amid the sea of grey beards in The Old Market’s bar. “I don’t think they’ll play the hits,” he replies, deadpan, “but don’t worry, there... Read more... |
Van Gogh and Britain, Tate Britain review - tenuous but still persuasiveWednesday, 27 March 2019
Soon after his death, Van Gogh’s reputation as a tragic genius was secured. Little has changed in the meantime, and he has continued to be understood as fatally unbalanced, ruled by instinct not intellect. Van Gogh’s characterisation of himself as a... Read more... |
Reissue CDs Weekly: The ResidentsSunday, 10 March 2019
Writing in 1980, the musician and musical theorist Chris Cutler said that “without the support and patronage of the culture-establishment, The Residents were able to exist, continue to exist, grow, find their public, hold that public – and expand it... Read more... |
CD: Yoko Ono - WarzoneWednesday, 17 October 2018
There is no doubt that the hippies of the late Sixties and early Seventies gifted the world a horde of beautiful music before they finally slipped into a dope cloud of tedious self-satisfaction. Despite what some might claim, it’s hard to view Yoko... Read more... |
theartsdesk on Vinyl 43: Pixies, Nazareth, Yumi and the Weather, Beta Band, Northern Soul and moreFriday, 05 October 2018
There’s been a lot of conjecture over the last couple of years about HD Vinyl. It is, we’re told, a more precise and rounded analogue experience, taking record-listening to the next level. The company’s Austrian MD Guenter Loibl has explained that... Read more... |
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