avant-garde
DVD/Blu-ray: 23 Seconds to EternityTuesday, 14 November 2023
The KLF are endlessly fascinating. There’s never been a “pop group” like them. From the late Eighties into the early Nineties, they treated music, especially electronic dance music, as a laboratory for lunatic experiment. Unlike most avant-garde... Read more... |
10 Questions for the avant-pop icons StereolabThursday, 02 November 2023
Just over 30 years ago, avant-pop icons Stereolab released their debut album Peng! establishing the early hallmarks of the English-French band’s sound; 1960s pop harmonies, chorus-laden guitar riffs and a borderless world of analog electrics. Helmed... Read more... |
Typist Artist Pirate King review - shine on, Audrey AmissFriday, 27 October 2023
The stories told by writer-director Carol Morley are poignant reclamation projects that demonstrate empathy for lost or troubled souls but don’t flinch from difficult truths.In the documentary The Alcohol Years (2000), Morley’s subject is her... Read more... |
Album: Oneohtrix Point Never - AgainThursday, 28 September 2023
The music of Daniel Lopatin – AKA Oneohtrix Point Never – exists at the sonic/electronic vanguard. Were the likes of avant-gardists such as Iannis Xenakis, George Antheil and Edgard Varese around today, maybe even Stockhausen, they might dig... Read more... |
Warhol, Velázquez, and leaving things out: an interview with Lynne TillmanFriday, 22 September 2023
Motion Sickness (1991) is the second novel published by the writer, art collector and cultural critic Lynne Tillman. It is difficult, to her credit, to say what it is really about – what makes Tillman a formative figure for much contemporary fiction... Read more... |
theartsdesk on Vinyl 76: Elton John, Pharoah Sanders, Hellripper, Jah Wobble, T-Rex and moreWednesday, 19 April 2023
There will be two theartsdesk on Vinyls this week. The first is here, an epic 11,000 words on a multitude of new releases in every genre, from reissues of classics to spanking new strangeness. There’s something for everyone. On Thursday we’ll have a... Read more... |
Colin Herd and Maria Sledmere: Cocoa and Nothing review - arts of sinkingSaturday, 01 April 2023
In his mock-poetic manual Peri-Bathos (1728), Alexander Pope opens by describing the afflictions which beset inhabitants of the lower Parnassus. The aristocracy living further up the mountain commit burglaries, and, "taking advantage of the rising... Read more... |
Album: 100 gecs - 10,000 gecsSaturday, 18 March 2023
If popular music is dead and done and there’s nowhere left to go, rising duo 100 gecs, from St Louis, Missouri, are here to prove there’s still deranged fun to be had cannibalising the corpse. The second album from the pair, both in their late... Read more... |
Album: Aksak Maboul - Une aventure de VV (Songspiel)Thursday, 02 March 2023
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... Read more... |
Jockstrap, Heaven review - ecstasy in underground bassFriday, 17 February 2023
Jockstrap’s crowd, in the vaults of Heaven, was always going to be beautiful and effortlessly cool. Ushered in by a ticket-check clerk sporting love bites, the dreamy sounds of the warm-up act, Pablo, filled the underground space. The audience,... Read more... |
Album: Deathprod - CompositionsThursday, 26 January 2023
Ambient is everywhere now. After a quiet (lol) 2000s, when it rather disappeared into the cracks, perhaps tarred with the sense that the more cosmic sides of the Nineties rave experience were passé, beatless music steadily rose in profile through... Read more... |
Blu-ray: The Velvet UndergroundSunday, 22 January 2023
The Velvet Underground’s music is hardly heard for 45 minutes in Todd Haynes’ film on the band. The director’s debut documentary instead sinks deep into the early Sixties New York underground culture they rose from. It is as much a loving tribute to... Read more... |
