avant-garde
Mark Kidel
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 group of Icelandic friends and collaborators. Unreleased for many years, and only performed a few times, this recording from a Paris concert in 2002 will delight the band’s fans, as well as intriguing admirers of "post-rock" or contemporary classical.The band’s moody and cinematic style is very much present: wide swathes of sound, conjuring landscapes Read more ...
Mark Kidel
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 anchored like none other before in a sense of cinema history.Breathless (A bout de souffle), Jean-Luc Godard’s first feature, established the genre. The film broke the rules of conventional cinema narrative, in a manner that changed the seventh art forever: jump-cuts, non-sequiturs in the dialogue as well as in the unfolding story. The ripples from Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
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 strand in Britain’s recent history but who is virtually unknown to today’s under-40s. Michael who? was the common reponse to my own admittedly fairly narrow survey. But Clark deserves a place in the pantheon of 20th-century movers and shakers for the same reason as, say, Andy Warhol or Jean Cocteau. Like them, he operated at the intersection of many Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
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 musician and, alongside his experimental albums, has also been responsible for some of the most moving film scores of recent years, such as Dennis Villeneuve’s Arrival and James Gray’s Ad Astra. Yet Richter is far from a jobbing composer: his work is always imbued with a deeper meaning, and his passion is infectious.Five Read more ...
Tim Cumming
"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 evocation of French spiritual-surrealist writer Rene Daumal’s posthumous 1952 cult classic Mount Analog took him to the peak of Nanda Devi in the Himalayas, the former Beatle hangout of Rishikesh, India’s "spiritual capital" of Varanasi, and Upper Mustang, once known as the Kingdom of Lo, which only admitted its first foreign visitors in 1992 Read more ...
Richard Bratby
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, where the last three decades of music have been measured out in landmark Stockhausen performances: Rattle’s CBSO performances of Gruppen, Birmingham Opera Company’s astonishing 2012 world premiere of Mittwoch aus Licht, and, in 1992, a massive open-air performance of Sternklang in Cannon Hill Park, under the direction of Stockhausen himself.In Read more ...
Joe Muggs
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 the utopian thinking and radical soundmaking of 1970s West Germany as a member of Tangerine Dream and Kluster. Frank Bretschneider was, bravely, an underground musician in East Germany in the 1980s, in partnership with Olaf Bender – and, again with Bender and later with Carsten Nicolai, in unified Germany in the 1990s and on was responsible for some Read more ...
Barney Harsent
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 heritage, without putting all its pedals on the same board.Bedroom, the debut album from Leeds/Hull-based five-piece bdrmm, however, plays exquisitely to type. It channels the shoegaze sound with such purpose and resolve it’s hard to believe most of band weren’t born when My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless nearly crippled Creation.Brimming with taught Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
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. The vinyl, to my surprise, kept on coming. Global crisis be damned! A backlog grew! Thus, theartsdesk on Vinyl 57 is a catch-up on the past couple of months. Due to these factors, a few more records I’d like to have covered were missed and a couple I should have covered this time are held back until June. Also, morose and sombre sounds didn’t Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Normally we'd put a descriptor - "cellist", "film maker", "techno producer" for example - in the title of this interview, but for Irina Nalis there isn't space. Like, "10 Questions for psychologist, ministerial adviser, festival founder, architectural consultant, digital humanism activist and techno veteran Irina Nalis" wouldn't fit across the page. But that's the multidisciplinary world for you. Irina Nalis is a co-founder of the Vienna Bienniale for fine arts, has worked for the Austrian culture ministry, is currently a uni:docs fellow at the University of Vienna, and works with the Read more ...
Florence Hallett
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 tranquility, despite the many students and tourists. But so much for appearances – radicalism is the bricks and mortar of Bloomsbury’s university buildings and Georgian terraces, which in the early 20th century were home to countless figures who thrived in society's margins, among them artists and writers, academics and political thinkers.Francesca Read more ...
Joe Muggs
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, it could never be iconic like a guitar. This performance was partly inspired by that fact: as Henke explained in his preamble, he's fascinated with a time when computers were a whole lot simpler and, perhaps, cooler to look at.Looking like a funky Open University lecturer in brown suit and pointy boots, Henke explained the 1980 Commodore PET Read more ...