Minimalism
Kieron Tyler
“If shit were music, you’d be a brass band”. Bish Bosch is no easy ride and that lyric, from its 22-minute centrepiece “SDSS1416+13B (Zercon, A Flagpole Sitter)", is typically abstruse, emblematically challenging. Although the album has clear themes and becomes less impenetrable the more it is lived with, it’s never going to achieve the cosy familiarity that future cult items so often exude on early passes. If anything, Bish Bosch is an anti-cult album, one that seeks to jar, disorient and remain inscrutable.Nonetheless, emotional connections can be made. There is an anger to Bish Bosch. Read more ...
judith.flanders
Well, if De Keersmaeker made us work hard for our enlightenment earlier in the week, we more than get our reward with her triumphant, astonishing Cesena in the second part of her double-programme designed for the Avignon Festival.Both pieces are built around the form of 14th-century polyphony sung in the south, known today as the ars subtilior, the subtle art. While in En Atendant De Keersmaeker focused on the structure of the music, in Cesena she, together with Björn Schmelzer, founder of graindelavoix, a collective for musicians with an interest in physical theatre, concentrates on its Read more ...
judith.flanders
No one ever accused of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker of thinking small. Or not thinking, for that matter. Her international career began with a bang, when with only her second work she created Fase, Four Movements to the Music of Steve Reich. And Reich’s music, filled with repetitive figures, harmonic rhythm and canons, is not a million miles – even if it’s 600 years – away from the ars subtilior of Avignon, De Keersmaeker’s new musical focus.A type of 14th-century polyphony, the songs of this mannerist style are highly complex technically: difficult to perform, they are more like 20th-century Read more ...
peter.quinn
Possessing one of the most recognisable sounds in jazz, US trio The Bad Plus don’t so much subvert genre as wrap it up in a little parcel and put an incendiary device under it. Jazz, rock, pop, country and classical all get thrown into their inimitable blender, as typified by album opener “Pound for Pound”, which traces a musical journey from Satie-like simplicity to an all-out rhapsodic assault on the senses.“Seven Minute Mind” mines the trio’s characteristic embracing of minimalism, with piano and bass pounding out an aggressive, slightly crazed, ostinato before pianist Ethan Iverson peels Read more ...
Steven Gambardella
Half-way through Death in Venice, Thomas Mann's tragic hero, Aschenbach, settles down on a beach to gaze out to the sea to "take shelter from the demanding diversity of phenomena in the bosom of boundless simplicity". Aschenbach is suddenly returned to earthly complications when the horizon is intersected by the boy he desires. The passage is evoked on entering Pace’s new and enormous Chipperfield-renovated gallery as suited attendants walk among Rothko's hard-edged late paintings and Sugimoto's seascape photographs. It’s a fitting quote given not only the bisected format of all the works, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
America comes with an artist statement where Deacon says “I never felt American until I left the United States”. His third album digs into his “frustration, fear and anger towards the county and world I live in and am a part of”.The album ends with the 21-minute suite “USA”, where, over four sections titled “Is a Monster”, “The Great American Desert”, “Rail” and “Manifest”, Deacon explores the nature of his country.Baltimore’s Deacon is classically trained and has a Masters degree in electro-acoustic composition. His first album, 2007’s Spiderman Of The Rings, cast him as an electronic Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The sacred word 'om' is spoken in different ways according to its context. Elongated, it can be stretched over multiple syllables. As a musical unit, OM work with building blocks that are similarly minimal, yet drawn out for maximum effect. And like the origins of their name, their heady, psychedelic music is heavily indebted to cultures which lie to the east.California’s OM were originally vocalist/bassist Al Cisneros and drummer Chris Hakius. Both used to be in drone/metal outfit Sleep. After a late-2007 five-hour live set in Jerusalem, Hakius left and was replaced with Emil Aros. Although Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
You now have two choices when you roll down to the bottom of the Turbine Hall's slope. You can go left to the established Tate Modern collection of paintings and sculptures in white boxes, or right to a warren of performance and video art that fills two new large concrete barrel rooms - two options in gallery geometry and art practice. With the help of architects Herzog and De Meuron, Tate have incorporated the two disused oil drums into the gallery to provide a permanent platform for the immersive and interactive art forms that have come to dominate the visual arts over the past Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
From Caro at Chatsworth and now de Waal at Waddesdon, the grandest of the stately homes are invigorating their historic collections with seasonings of the contemporary. Like Chatsworth, Waddesdon also has a growing permanent collection of contemporary sculpture housed in its famous gardens, from Michael Craig-Martin to Richard Long, as well as a small group of Lucian Freud indoors, including a portrait of the current Lord Rothschild.The impulse is understandable: to enliven, enhance and underline the historically frozen displays. If the intellectual aesthetic framework complements and Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Einstein on the Beach was meant to be one of the jewels in the crown for the Cultural Olympiad. The celebrated 1970s collaboration between Philip Glass, Robert Wilson and Lucinda Childs - which Susan Sontag claimed to be one of the greatest theatrical experiences of the 20th century - was receiving its UK premiere at the Barbican Theatre last night, thirty-six years after it was first created. And what we got was a technical shambles.Pretty much everything that could go wrong technically did go wrong. Lighting cues were botched. Drop cloths rose prematurely. Stage hands wandered on from the Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Relentlessly energetic, opinionated, and never less than passionate about music-making, Ilan Volkov is a close as you get to a prodigy in the world of conducting. Appointed as Young Conductor in association with the Northern Sinfonia at just 19, at 28 Volkov became the youngest ever chief conductor of a BBC orchestra, and almost 10 years later still continues his relationship with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra as their Principal Guest Conductor. Most recently appointed as Music Director and Chief Conductor of the Iceland Symphony Orchestra, and with a growing schedule of international Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
I don't have many feelings about the Titanic (any more than I do about any tragedies of the distant past). I know few of the facts, I can remember nothing of the film and I have been left almost completely untouched by the centenary. Yet I am enormously grateful to have caught a Barbican performance of The Sinking of the Titanic, Gavin Bryars' beautiful musical meditation on the event. The reason why this hour-long rumination works so well is that it does not rely on the emotional power of the catastrophe to generate its own emotional power. The debris of sounds that Read more ...