Minimalism
Marina Vaizey
The wilder shores of contemporary visual art are now ephemeral or time-based: performance, installation, general carry-on and hubbub. But once upon a time – say, the 1960s – it was the nature of objects, pared down to essentials, and often made from real materials sourced from the streets, builders’ yards and shops, that startled: the idea made manifest without old-fashioned notions of the hand-made, craft or manual skill.The making could even be outsourced, and one critic called minimalism “ABC art”, reduced almost literally to building-block art: form or colour representing nothing but Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Despite culminating with “Orphic Hymn”, a musical setting of Ovid’s text, Jóhann Jóhannsson’s Orphée is not a literal interpretation of the Orpheus myth. Instead, the album uses retellings of the story – quoting the press release – to inspire “a meditation on beauty and the process of creation.” The result is a mutable series of 14 instrumental pieces preceding “Orphic Hymn” which describe the entire arc of Jóhannsson’s artistic character.Recognisably Jóhannsson’s work, Orphée – with its strikingly similar cover image to the 2010 ...And They Have Escaped the Weight of Darkness album by fellow Read more ...
joe.muggs
Ben Chatwin's music speaks loudly of solitude. He lives and records on the coast of the Firth of Forth, just outside Edinburgh – not exactly the most isolated of spots, but it's not hard to hear in his waves of texture and simple repeated motifs the endless grey presence of the North Sea rolling out into the distance.This is Chatwin's second album under his own name, but his ninth if you include the albums he made as Talvihorros on a number of labels, and it is much the same that he's always done: bowed strings that shimmer and pizzicato ones that echo, grainy guitar textures rising up in Read more ...
Barney Harsent
The EU referendum isn’t the only thing causing polarised opinion over European issues. The question of what constitutes Balearic Beat looms large over the music community. For some, it’s a fixed point, namely celebrated DJ Alfredo’s record box in the mid-80s. For others it’s built on more shifting sands, a sentiment DJ and author Bill Brewster summarises with trademark élan: “Balearic Beat today is the same as it was in 2011, 1999 and 1984. It’s shit pop records and brilliant EBM records. It’s everything and nothing.”International Feel record label boss and producer Mark Barrott’s take is Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Apart from festivals like the BBC Proms that do everything, the best festivals have always been the ones that cut a distinctive profile. They might not offer the best music. Those old French festivals of modern music – Royan, La Rochelle, Metz – were a nightmare of clichéd avant-gardism. But you got what was written on the tin, and if you didn’t like it, serve you right for going.Something similar is true of the Vale of Glamorgan Festival, except for the clichéd avant-gardism. John Metcalf, who founded the festival no fewer than 47 years ago when barely (perhaps not even) out of college, Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Mona Hatoum was born in Beirut of Palestinian parents. She came to London to study at the Slade School in 1975 and got stuck here when civil war broke out in Lebanon, preventing her from returning home. In effect, she has been living in exile ever since and the sense of displacement and unease induced by being far from home permeates much of her work.The video, Measures of Distance, 1988 (pictured below right) is a moving reflection on the love she feels for her mother, far away in war-torn Beirut. The screen is covered in a veil of arabic writing (her mother’s letters) Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Turn the clock back to early 2007. It’s not so long ago, but at this point Nils Frahm had issued just one album, Ólafur Arnalds was about to release his first, Jóhann Jóhannsson was one year into what would be two-album relationship with 4AD, and Max Richter had made two albums for 130701, the British offshoot of FatCat Records. Christian Wallumrød was performing solo, but still recording collaboratively. What would become a recognisable genre-breaching, minimalist, post-classical groundswell hadn’t yet been quite codified but it was clear something was in the air.Hauschka was introduced into Read more ...
Mark Sheerin
Minimalist sculpture has, for decades, been making gallery visitors self-conscious. How should you react to a metallic piece by Donald Judd which has evidently been machined rather than modelled? Can you really walk all over an arrangement of lead floor tiles by Carl Andre? And how do you look at a Robert Morris mirrored cube without seeing yourself gazing back?If you’ve ever worried about questions like these, the show at Fruitmarket could offer some relief. It promises an alternative minimalism, not from intellectual, uptight New York, but from America’s laid back West Coast. And it invites Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Last month, Ludovico Einaudi's album Elements debuted at No 12 on the UK album charts, which made it the highest-charting modern classical album since Henryk Górecki's Symphony of Sorrowful Songs reached No 6 in 1992. It was proof of the quietly burgeoning allure of Einaudi, which has been stealthily expanding around the world since his first solo release, 1988's Time Out.Subsequent albums such as Le Onde, Eden Roc and I Giorni have lodged several of his limpid and haunting compositions in the ether, whence they might descend to be played on radio, or heard in commercials or on movie Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Laraaji: Ambient 3 – Day of Radiance“If you are OK with this as being an ‘ambient’ record, then I am OK with it too,” says Laraaji in the booklet accompanying this new reissue of his first album, 1980's Day of Radiance. He goes on to explain that back then he described his music as “‘beautiful’ or ‘ethereal’ or ‘celestial’.” As for being defined as New Age, he declares: “I have always accepted it. It was a term that was very alive at the time I began exploring this direction.” Minimalism is another genre which Day of Radiance could slot into quite comfortably. Pinning down exactly what Read more ...
fisun.guner
Ai Weiwei’s first major survey in the UK is a better looking exhibition than I had anticipated, but what it gains in looks it sadly lacks in substance – backstory and information not being quite the same. It’s visually satisfying, since Ai initially impresses with the sheer scale and elegance of some of his larger pieces – a combination of readymade and crafted materials which include chandeliers incorporating wheel and bicycle frames, rusted steel rods spread out like gently lapping waves in the Royal Academy’s spacious central hall, and a grove of petrified-looking trees rising up to Read more ...
Barney Harsent
Composer, pianist, producer… Max Richter (b. 1966) is nothing if not prolific, not to mention unique. His traditional training, which included Edinburgh University, the Royal Academy as well as Florence, under composer Luciano Berio sits alongside a fascination with the otherwordly sounds of German electronica and American minimalism. As well as his solo work, which blends emotional depth and power with a refreshingly direct approach, he has collaborated on operas, ballets, theatre, film and television scores.In 2012, Richter released Recomposed by Max Richter: Vivaldi – The Four Read more ...