Berlin
CD: Admiral Black – PhantasmagoricThursday, 17 November 2011
You’ve got to love the “I Can Only Give You Everything” riff. Admiral Black do and base their “Got Love if You Want It” around an inverted version on their debut album. Cheese-wire fuzz guitar pulses, Bo Diddley drums bash and a wheezy organ, well,... Read more... |
CD: Radio Slave - Works! Selected Remixes 2006-2010Monday, 14 November 2011
If there's one electronic sub-genre that is not worth approaching blind it's “tech-house”. Since the late Nineties, it has tended to be the most functional and generic of club soundtracks, a steady, decadent plod, all clean lines and predictable... Read more... |
Imagine - U2: From the Sky Down, BBC OneMonday, 10 October 2011
Never knowingly under-mythologised, U2 have chosen to mark the 20th anniversary of their album Achtung Baby with this sizeable documentary about the making of the record and the traumatic soul-searching that went into it. It dovetails neatly... Read more... |
Graffiti Gallery: Crack & Shine InternationalFriday, 19 August 2011
It’s not the first time we have showcased the work of Will Robson-Scott. Nearly two years ago we published a set of images from Crack & Shine, a portfolio which documented the nocturnal habits of a set of London street artists. Crack & Shine... Read more... |
Don McCullin, Tate BritainTuesday, 16 August 2011
Photography isn’t looking, it’s feeling. If you can’t feel what you’re looking at, then you’re never going to get others to feel anything when they look at your pictures. Thus Don McCullin, quoted on the information board of a new display at Tate... Read more... |
Tannhäuser, Bayreuth FestivalTuesday, 02 August 2011
In 1981, when I last came to Bayreuth, the festival still seemed to be a battleground between the German Left and Right, between the blame faction and the guilt faction, between the commie East and the fat-cat West. Plus ça change. Without quite... Read more... |
A SeparationMonday, 27 June 2011
Asghar Farhadi’s new film unostentatiously suggests that Iran has many of the same things we have: cars, cash machines, schools, sex, divorce, Alzheimer’s. It doesn’t, we gather, have modern law. Before howls of protest erupt over so banal and... Read more... |
DVD: Taxi Zum KloThursday, 26 May 2011
Frank is a primary school teacher in Berlin. His pupils love him as he treats them as individuals rather than little pegs for fitting into holes. What they don’t know - and what Frank doesn’t advertise - is that he is gay. Their dictation homework... Read more... |
CD: Planningtorock – WSaturday, 14 May 2011
The video for W’s opening cut “Doorway” is unforgettable. Janine Rostron – who is Planningtorock – is seen face on. The music is tense, yet sepulchral. The voice is treated, neither male nor female. With her prosthetic nose, she looks alien but not... Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: Conductor Andrew LittonFriday, 22 April 2011
We’re talking in Berlin for two reasons: Andrew Litton has just renewed his contract with the Bergen Philharmonic – he’ll see out at least 12 years as the Norwegian orchestra’s principal conductor – and they’ve now reached the holiest of holies on... Read more... |
How I Ended This SummerMonday, 18 April 2011
If ever there’s a film where the landscape itself seems to become a main character, it’s Alexei Popogrebsky’s How I Ended This Summer. Action, such as it is, unfolds in the remotest Arctic regions of Russia’s Far East, where the personal conflict... Read more... |
Classical CDs Weekly: Berg, Bruckner, SpolianskyFriday, 15 April 2011
This weekend's classical highlights comprise an eloquent tribute to a 20th-century master, entertaining cabaret songs from Weimar-era Berlin and some sublime Bruckner choral music recorded by an Edinburgh choir.Music of Tribute: Alban Berg Ieva... Read more... |
