avant-garde
Disc of the Day 10th Anniversary: the level playing fieldFriday, 19 February 2021
Theartsdesk is a labour of love. Bloody-mindedly run as a co-operative of journalists from the beginning, our obsession with maintaining a daily-updated platform for good culture writing has caused a good few grey and lost hairs over the years. But... Read more... |
theartsdesk on Vinyl 62: Nick Mulvey, Off The Meds, Black Keys, Kreator, Oneohtrix Point Never, Sam Cooke and moreSaturday, 13 February 2021
The top-selling vinyl at independent UK record shops in 2020 was Idles' latest album (closely followed by Yungblud, which is impressive, given his only came out in December!). The Top 10 is dominated by indie, rock and retro but, actually, the... Read more... |
Albums of the Year 2020: A.G. Cook – 7GSunday, 03 January 2021
2020 marks the year when the PC Music label’s influence became undeniable. It’s easy to forget that, founded by A.G. Cook in 2013, it was once at the centre of a mini culture war. The label’s refusal to distinguish “between high and low, between... Read more... |
Album: Sigur Rós - Odin's Raven MagicMonday, 30 November 2020
Odin’s ravens Huginn (thought) and Muninn (memory) are the great Norse god’s messengers, at the heart of a myth that was borrowed in watered-down form for Game of Thrones. The myth inspired a suite of pieces by Sigur Rós and a star-studded... Read more... |
DVD/Blu-ray: BreathlessTuesday, 10 November 2020
Just as British pub and punk rock of the mid-to late 1970's ushered in an era of music that referenced the history of pop and thrived on irony, much of the French New Wave, nearly 20 years earlier, looked back as much as forward, an avant-garde... Read more... |
Michael Clark: Cosmic Dancer, Barbican Art Gallery review - mould-breaker, ground-shakerMonday, 12 October 2020
It must be tough being Michael Clark, subject of one the largest retrospectives ever dedicated to a choreographer still living. Post-punk’s poster boy is that curious thing, a creative figurehead who defined a very particular anti-establishment... Read more... |
Max Richter's Sleep review - refreshing as a good night's restSaturday, 12 September 2020
If there was ever a balm for these confusing times, then it’s Max Richter’s Sleep, a lullaby of a documentary that explores the composer’s eight-hour-plus experimental 2015 composition based on sleep cycles. Richter is a remarkable... Read more... |
CD: Soundwalk Collective with Patti Smith - PeradamSaturday, 29 August 2020
"The gateway to the invisible must be visible." So intones Patti Smith on the third and final journey in sound with Stephan Crasneanscki and Simone Merli, AKA Soundwalk Collective, musical psychogeographers and field recorders whose journey for this... Read more... |
BCMG, Heinen, Brindleyplace Birmingham review - from the concrete canyons to the starsFriday, 21 August 2020
Birmingham emerged from musical lockdown with Stockhausen. It couldn’t have been anyone else, really. There’s something about Stockhausen’s fusion of modernity and goofy intergalactic romanticism that clearly strikes a chord in the Second City... Read more... |
Album: Conrad Schnitzler & Frank Bretschneider - Con-StructThursday, 06 August 2020
When does the avant-garde become folk? Both of the participants in this album have certainly been on the very cutting edge of sound-making, on multiple occasions. Conrad Schnitzler was a student of radical artist Joseph Beuys and leading light in... Read more... |
Album: bdrmm - BedroomWednesday, 08 July 2020
Shoegaze stable Sonic Cathedral has, in truth, always been a much broader church than its name implies. From the psychedelic, sunshine pop of Gulp, to the blistering art noise of Spectres, it has consistently released music that shares a similar... Read more... |
theartsdesk on Vinyl 57: Gramme, Terry Edwards, The Orb, The Monochrome Set and much moreSaturday, 16 May 2020
After C19 delays theartsdesk on Vinyl is back. My initial policy, reckoning that new vinyl would dry up under COVID conditions, was to do regular lockdown mini-editions with the material already set aside here, until it ran out. That didn’t work out... Read more... |
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