Minimalism
Music Reissues Weekly: Arvo Pärt - Tabula RasaSunday, 13 October 2024In 2022, Spritualized’s Jason Pierce described his musical goal as "trying to find somewhere between Arvo Pärt and The Stooges.” Amongst the most arresting and explicitly Pärt-styled results of this quest to link the minimalist composer with Iggy... Read more... |
Art, Theatre Royal Bath review - Yasmina Reza's smash hit back on tour 30 years after Paris premiereFriday, 06 September 2024For men, navigating through life whilst maintaining strong friendships is not easy (I’m sure the same can be said for women, but Yasmina Reza’s multi-award winning play, revived on its 30th anniversary, is most definitely about men). What brings... Read more... |
Album: Isabell Gustafsson-Ny - RosenhagtornFriday, 26 July 2024In a discussion recently a friend compared generative AI to self-driving cars back in 2017: the makers were convinced, perhaps rightly, that they had solved 99.9% of the problem, and therefore would have a viable product within the year. The problem... Read more... |
Album: Jeff Mills - The EyewitnessMonday, 01 July 2024Jeff Mills has always been a musical sophisticate. Even in the early 90s when he was best known for derangedly pummelling techno DJ sets in the most insalubrious of sweat-pits, and even though his minimalist production style back then was used as a... Read more... |
Album: Anoushka Shankar - Chapter II: How Dark It Is Before DawnSaturday, 30 March 2024We’ve come a long way since 1971, when the audience at Madison Square Garden for the Concert for Bangladesh applauded when Ravi Shankar tuned up. Western audiences were first exposed to the sitar in 1965 when George Harrison played one on Rubber... Read more... |
Uproar, Rafferty, Royal Welsh College, Cardiff review - a rare spring in the new music stepSaturday, 24 February 2024It’s not often one comes out of a concert of mainly new works with a spring in one’s step. A sigh of relief is rather more usual. But this concert on Thursday by the Welsh new music ensemble Uproar was an exception, partly but by no means... Read more... |
Album: Laetitia Sadier - Rooting for LoveWednesday, 21 February 2024It must be kind of unreal living in the Stereolab universe.A band of geeky introverts, beloved of the type of hairclip-and-satchel indie ultras a friend of mine used to call “the Scooby Gang” for their tendency to resemble Shaggy and Velma, over the... Read more... |
When Forms Come Alive, Hayward Gallery review - how to reduce good art to family funFriday, 09 February 2024Under the guidance of director Ralph Rugoff, the Hayward Gallery seems hell bent on reducing art to the level of fun for all the family. And as though to prove the point, cretinous captions strip the work of all meaning beyond the banal, while press... Read more... |
Paraorchestra, Hazlewood, Southbank Centre review - re-thinking the orchestral experienceSaturday, 27 January 2024The Clore Ballroom at the Southbank Centre is usually an open-plan space within the foyer, a little ambiguous in its extent and purpose. Last night, for the first time, I saw it enclosed and separated off, ambiently lit and full of smoke, for the... Read more... |
Scottish Chamber Orchestra, Currie, Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh review - maximum minimalismSaturday, 11 November 2023Chameleon among orchestras, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra hung up its habitual classical cloak in favour of an evening of 20th and 21st century minimalism, curated, presented, and conducted by the star percussionist Colin Currie.That this was a... Read more... |
Roomful of Teeth, Milton Court review - mellifluous minimalism with a mild mannerSunday, 08 October 2023If there’s a better name for a vocal group than Roomful of Teeth I have yet to come across it. But if it conjures up images of brash, in-your-face showbiz the reality couldn’t be more different.This hip Grammy-winning American ensemble bill... Read more... |
Album: Sigur Rós - ÁTTAFriday, 16 June 2023It’s easy to take Sigur Rós’s emotive force for granted. So ubiquitous has their 2005 “Hoppípolla” been on everything from talent shows to apocalyptic environmental collapse documentaries to lyrical scenes of birds in flight that it became the... Read more... |
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