mon 04/11/2024

avant-garde

Blu-ray: The Velvet Underground

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...

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Album: John Cale - Mercy

John Cale has always walked a cutting-edge. At 80, he is still making music that stretches the mind. He is accompanied on his most recent album by a number of talented and original ground-breakers from both sides of the pond – from the eccentric and...

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Album: Camilla Pisani - Phant[as]

Want an antidote so forced seasonal cheer and the catchiness of Christmas pop? How about some almost entirely atonal drone, clatter and throb with titles like “Fish Death”, “Tales for Violent Days” and “Dissonance Émancipee”?Music presented as a “...

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Album: Christeene - Midnite Fukk Train

Christeene is not so much a musical entity, as a performative assault, an artist who pushes drag somewhere visceral, caustic, wilfully edgy and defiantly unpolished. The creation of New York-based, Louisiana-raised Paul Soileau, her videos and shows...

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Album: Hudson Mohawke - Cry Sugar

The journey of Ross “Hudson Mohawke” Birchard has been truly one of the most extraordinary in modern music. From teenage scratch DJ champion and happy hardcore raver in some of Glasgow’s more feral club environments, in the late Noughties he quickly...

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Album: Melt Yourself Down - Pray For Me I Don't Fit In

Melt Yourself Down’s last one, 100% Yes, was the most ballistically exciting album of 2020. The band are unique, a six-piece mutation who, as their album title indicates, don’t fit in anywhere. The good news is that they’ve not tempered what they’re...

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Album: Boris - W

This is just boggling. The Japanese rock trio Boris have been together in the same lineup for over a quarter of a century – and it’s longer still since their original formation – but they’re outdoing themselves record by record. Their last record,...

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theartsdesk on Vinyl 67: Squid, The Beatles, Beach Riot, Black Sabbath, Quantic, Heiko Maile and more

The first of two December round-ups from theartsdesk on Vinyl runs the gamut from folk-tronic oddness to Seventies heavy rock to avant-jazz to The Beatles, as well as much else. All musical life is here... except the crap stuff. So dive in!VINYL OF...

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Footfalls & Rockaby, Jermyn Street Theatre review - Beckett up close and personal

Like all great art, Samuel Beckett's works find a way to speak to you as an individual, stretching from page to stage and on, on, on into our psyches. This happens not through sentimental manipulation or cheap sensationalism, but through the accrual...

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Album: Amon Tobin - How Do You Live

Amon Tobin is hard to pin down. His music has mutated over the years. He initially fitted in with Ninja Tune’s late-Nineties/early-Noughties roster of post-hip hop stoner breaks, heavily jazzed. But in more recent years, he’s wandered into an area...

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Album: Scotch Rolex - TEWARI

Ask someone in the early 2000s to predict which cities were going to be influential in electronic music in coming years, and it’s unlikely many would have picked Kampala, Uganda. But here we are. Across African countries, vernacular electronic forms...

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Points of Departure, Brighton Festival 2021 review - Ray Lee's harbour-based sound art impresses

They stand in a row, nine of them, in a long, strange corridor between rows of stacked, palleted, planked wood and the red brick wall of an endless warehouse. Nine tripods, each two humans high, with a spinning helicopter head, double-ended by...

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