David Matthews: Symphony No 9, Variations for Strings, Double Concerto for Violin and Viola Sarah Trickey (violin), Sarah-Jane Bradley (viola), English Symphony Orchestra/Kenneth Woods (Nimbus Alliance)Ninth symphonies are usually big beasts, but David Matthews’, completed in 2015, whizzes through five movements in 27 minutes. This is easy music to love, a modern expression of the English pastoral tradition which never descends into easy pastiche. Nods to Vaughan Williams, Britten and Tippett never impede the music’s flow; instead, we're beguiled at Matthews’ ability to write defiantly Read more ...

Soundwalk Collective is a multi-disciplinary audio-visual collective founded by Stephan Crasneanscki, a musical psycho-geographer and field recorder, the source material of his works drawn from specific locations: in the case of The Peyote Dance, it's the Sierra Tarahumara of Mexico, also known as "Copper Canyon", and as spectacular a wilderness as you can imagine.Here, the French Surrealist poet Antonin Artaud came in 1936 on horseback, in search of peyote, a shaman and a cure to opioid addiction. His subsequent encounters with the ceremonies of the Rarámuri Indians and the peyote shamans of Read more ...

Humans have been consuming mescaline for millennia. The hallucinogenic alkaloid occurs naturally in a variety of cacti native to South America and the southern United States, the most well known of which are the diminutive peyote and the distinctively tubular San Pedro. Dried peyote “buttons” found alongside rock art in the Shumla Caves in Texas have been carbon dated to 4000BCE, rolled cactus skins (believed to be San Pedro) have been found at the sprawling ancient littoral civilisation of Las Aldas in Peru, and a frieze from the mysterious temple complex of Chavín de Huántar depicts a part- Read more ...

It was in the early 2000s in a tiny, gritty bar that I first saw Rodrigo y Gabriela live. Camden was less pretty then – a look was close to a glare and there were more spikes and kohl – the nineties were that much closer. I was right at the front, pressed up against a rib-height stage, alarmingly close to the percussive thrum taking place inches above my head. The atmosphere was heady, their acoustic performance electric. Their hands moved like fire, catching the area’s thrash sensibility – I’d not heard anything like it.Over a decade on and the two are playing the Read more ...

She does indeed persist, that remarkable Tamara Rojo. Dismayed by the fact that, in 20 years as a dancer, she had never performed a ballet made by a woman, she mounted a triple bill called She Said, featuring only work by and about women. That 2016 conversation is resumed in English National Ballet’s current spring showing at Sadler’s Wells which revives the best of those commissions – Broken Wings, a phantasmagorical tour through the life of the artist Frida Kahlo – along with a sell-out hit from two years ago, the Pina Bausch version of The Rite of Spring. There’s a new work too, a dance Read more ...

We've all been there. The disappointing fling. The gently shattered illusions. The abortive holiday eliding languor and boredom. Teenage ennui. Revels peopled by runaways. Talking animals. Talking animals? Well, fine. Not quite.Sea Monsters is Chloe Aridjis’s third novel. It is the story of seventeen year old Luisa’s escape to the Oaxaca coast. She’s a clever girl with foreign university on the horizon and a vague sense that there’s more to life than the cycle of exams and gay goth nightclubs that characterise her existence in Mexico City.With the object of her romantic affections — Read more ...

When in 2004 Frida Kahlo’s bedroom – sealed on the command of her husband Diego Rivera for 50 years from her death – was opened, a trove of clothes and personal items was discovered. They shed new light on the life of this iconic Mexican painter and female artist, who, born in 1907 to a German father and Indian-Spanish mother, lived through the Mexican Revolution, the emergence of Communism and the accession of America to the position of world power. In the V&A’s exhibition, these personal effects act as a prism through which to understand how she placed herself within this Read more ...

The issue of immigrants being smuggled across the Mexican border into the USA is currently live and inflammatory, and this second instalment of the feds-versus-drugs cartels saga hurls us right into the centre of it. This explosive thriller is frequently shocking in its explicit violence, and its cynical view of power, crime and politics verges on the nihilistic, but it’s difficult to get its brutal imagery out of your mind.The original Sicario from 2015 had Emily Blunt on board as FBI agent Kate Macer, who provided a kind of startled audience’s-eye-view of the hardcore tactics of drug Read more ...

“Oh say, can you see, by the dawn’s early light” was a vision of the American flag, that star-spangled banner, riding proud from Francis Scott Key’s patriotic poem of 1814 based on an episode in the War of 1812. His sentiments were decades later rather improbably set to the tune of a popular drinking song from a London gentlemen’s club, metamorphosing into the official American national anthem by Act of Congress in 1931 – you couldn’t make it up.That was just one of the unexpected facts in Waldemar Januszczak’s three-part foray into the special nature, as he sees it, of American art: as in Read more ...

The brightness and colour are deceptive; at its heart, Lee Unkrich and Adrian Molina’s Coco is an affecting reflection on death, remembrance and the redemptive power of music, dressed up as a frenetic and gag-stuffed Disney comedy. I’d place it above recent hits such as Frozen and Moana; here, the music is integral to the film’s plot, and the closing scenes have an emotional impact comparable with the montage which opens Pixar’s Up. Have a box of tissues on hand, in other words, especially if you’ve had to deal with memory loss in an elderly relative.Set during the Mexican Día de los Muertos Read more ...

How many albums today feature a sorceress on the harp, an instrument more often played by winged angels? "La Bruja de Texcoco", a practising witch and healer, is one of several Mexican musicians who join Sonido Gallo Negro in their latest and very danceable exploration of Afro-American rhythms.Packaged with a handsome sleeve covered in esoteric hieroglyphics from Dr Alderete, this is music that offers healing energies to the listener. Drawing from the rich mix of traditional Indian and African influences that bathe the Caribbean, with lilting beats and a good deal of soul, the group continue Read more ...

The eel is dying. Its body flits through a series of complicated knots which become increasingly grotesque torques. Immersed in a pool of brine — concentrated salt water five times denser than seawater — it is succumbing to toxic shock. As biomatter on the sea floor of the Gulf of Mexico decomposes, brine and methane are produced, and where these saline pockets collect, nothing grows. Dead creatures drop into it; live creatures that linger in it die. In this lifeless zone their bodies float preserved, a rich and dangerous larder for scavengers such as the giant mussels fringing its edges and Read more ...