avant-garde
ARK: United States V by Laurie Anderson, Aviva Studios, Manchester review - a vessel for the thoughts and imaginings of a lifetimeSaturday, 16 November 2024
Picture this: framing the stage are two pearlescent clouds which, throughout the performance, gently pulsate with flickering light. Behind them on a giant screen is a spinning globe, its seas twinkling like a million stars.Suddenly, this magical... Read more... |
Jon Fosse: Morning and Evening review - after thoughtsTuesday, 19 November 2024
Jon Fosse talks a lot about thinking. He also thinks – hard – about talking. His prolific and award-winning career in poetry, prose, and drama, might be said, in fact, to unfold a digressive single thought, uttered always in a characteristically... Read more... |
Album: Ded Hyatt - GlossyWednesday, 09 October 2024
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... Read more... |
10 Questions for Black String’s Youn Jeong HeoThursday, 03 October 2024
The first K-Music festival landed in London for than a decade ago, and has brought an eclectic range of bands and musicians from Korea to the stages of the capital, whether that’s the sorrowful storytelling tradition of Pansori, the sonic attack of... Read more... |
Art, Theatre Royal Bath review - Yasmina Reza's smash hit back on tour 30 years after Paris premiereFriday, 06 September 2024
For men, navigating through life whilst maintaining strong friendships is not easy (I’m sure the same can be said for women, but Yasmina Reza’s multi-award winning play, revived on its 30th anniversary, is most definitely about men). What brings... Read more... |
Album: Laurie Anderson - AmeliaMonday, 02 September 2024
Laurie Anderson is what Leonardo da Vinci would have hailed as una donna universale: inspired by science and technology, she's wide-ranging artist, a writer, film-maker, and explorer. She has a remarkable gift for story-telling, and her latest... Read more... |
We Out Here Festival 2024 review - generations of weirdness and wonderSunday, 25 August 2024
I won’t give it loads about the atmosphere and attendees at We Out Here – suffice to say that in its fifth edition, it has maintained all the strengths I mentioned last year, with the added benefit of slicker-operating infrastructure having ironed... Read more... |
The Birthday Party, Ustinov Studio, Theatre Royal Bath review - Pinter still packs a punchSaturday, 17 August 2024
Before a word is spoken, a pause held, we hear the seagulls squawking outside, see the (let’s say brown) walls that remind you of the H-Block protests of the 1980s, witness the pitifully small portions for breakfast. If you were in any doubt that we... Read more... |
Album: Isabell Gustafsson-Ny - RosenhagtornFriday, 26 July 2024
In a discussion recently a friend compared generative AI to self-driving cars back in 2017: the makers were convinced, perhaps rightly, that they had solved 99.9% of the problem, and therefore would have a viable product within the year. The problem... Read more... |
Album: Kim Gordon - The CollectiveThursday, 14 March 2024
Some icons sit back and bask. Kim Gordon does not. She has occasionally intimated that her New York cool and relentless work rate may be down to a smidgeon of imposter syndrome, even after all her years on the frontline. Whatever the truth of it,... Read more... |
Sheila Heti: Alphabetical Diaries review - an A-Z of inner lifeTuesday, 20 February 2024
After a first read of the blurb for Sheila Heti’s Alphabetical Diaries, you might be forgiven for assuming that this is merely a gimmick.The book does what it says on the tin: each "chapter" begins with the next letter of the alphabet, with the... Read more... |
John Francis Flynn, The Dome review - new trad and taped tin whistlesFriday, 02 February 2024
The Dome, as the opening act, Clara Mann noted, is a normally a heavy metal venue (black or dark purple tour bus parked outside, a long queue of piercings and mohawks). It was a lovely confounding of expectations, therefore, to stage Mann’s own... Read more... |
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