John Doran
, April 13th, 2021 08:31
Carla Bley is arguably the greatest living jazz composer; John Doran talks to the woman fellow musicians have nicknamed 'Countess Bleysie' and 'Bleythoven' about foundational free jazz sessions, the magic of The Liberation Music Orchestra and her epic jazz opera, Escalator Over The Hill. Home page photograph courtesy of Tod Papageorge
Edward Said immersed himself in the final works of Beethoven, Genet and Beckett while writing his own last book. Said, who produced
On Late Style while ill with leukaemia, concluded that at the end of their lives, artists did not tend to resolve issues that had preoccupied them for their entire practice but instead produced works of unparalleled complexity and unresolved contradiction.
Stepping Into A New Age 1980–2012
Julian Marszalek
, April 13th, 2021 08:57
A boxset documenting the rise of punk-reggae supergroup New Age Steppers proves a valuable history lesson for Julian Marszalek
There was always so much more to the legacy of punk than the orthodoxy that followed in its wake. Indeed, the seeds were sown right from the early days thanks to the punk’s interface with the reggae that soundtracked the early club nights as well as the covers that followed. Even Bob Marley gave his seal of approval.
But while the less inspired purveyors that followed stuck to rigid formulas, the influence of reggae was keenly felt in the wave that immediately followed punk’s brief but seismic blast. Formed by The Slits’ Ari Up and reggae fan and producer Adrian Sherwood, New Age Steppers were a collective of sorts that included contributions from members of Aswad, The Pop Group, The Raincoats, and others who swan-dived into deep bass work-outs and dub-inflected dread to soundtrack the increasingly heavy times in which they were recorded in.
Jennifer Lucy Allan
, April 13th, 2021 10:51
tQ is in partnership with Oda, a new speaker system that allows artists including Ann Peebles and Don Bryant to broadcast directly into your home. Jennifer Lucy Allan speaks to the legendary Memphis soul couple about telling stories, singing gospel, staying together, and their biggest hit, I Can’t Stand The Rain
Ann Peebles and Don Bryant’s biggest hit ‘I Can’t Stand The Rain’ was a creative bolt of lightning in a literal downpour. It is a story that has been told and retold so many times it’s a piece of southern soul folklore.
Mycelial Echo
Amanda Farah
, April 12th, 2021 07:43
A work for choreographer Gwendolyn Gussman and an opera about trees provided the starting points for this collaboration between Lisel and Booker Stardrum. But it's on headphones that the music really comes alive for Amanda Farah
Mycelial Echo, the long-distance collaboration between Lisel and Booker Stardrum, is above all a feat of production. Though both have carved out their own corners in experimental music — Lisel (the solo project name of Eliza Bagg) as a classically trained avant garde singer-producer and Stardrum as an electronic musician and producer — their pairing has pushed each individual’s work beyond predictable progressions, beats, or vocal hooks.
Behind the dialogue
We're in a mess.
There’s a future essay to be written about COVID-19 culture – the artefacts that emerged from our plague year and what they say about where we were as a society: celebrities Zoom duets, the veneration of Sir Tom, our weekly clap for the NHS. These things were born of an instinct to find a unifying sense of positivity. Now, with a few months’ distance, it looks more like escapism, all of it masking a terror writhing beneath.
At the time there seemed to be little alternative, culturally speaking. But last year, amid what we would come to know as the UK’s first wave of the global COVID-19 pandemic, I found myself instead listening obsessively to an album which seemed to capture the public mood perfectly. That album was
Jennifer Lucy Allan
, April 6th, 2021 10:03
Jennifer Lucy Allan talks to the New Zealand born composer about love letters on quarter-inch tape, piano gardens and doll shops, and the physical effects of sound upon our bodies
Annea Lockwood portrait by Sam Green
'For Ruth' and 'Conversations '74' plus A Film About Listening make up part of the bill for this year's Counterflows At Home digital festival which runs for all of April
“Tell me everything…”
“Yes, yes, yes… love!”
This begins with a love story. New Zealand-born composer Annea Lockwood’s most recent composition ‘For Ruth’ is a reply to a love letter on tape her late partner Ruth Anderson made her in 1974, titled ‘Conversations ‘74’. In ‘For Ruth’, their affectionate conversational fragments, loving affirmations and the bubbling laughter of two people giddy for one another are embraced by field recordings of rich birdsong, grumbling frogs and passing cars, as well as resonant vocal intonations, which sound like the tintinnabulation of struck metal. The few complete sentences that surface contain an exchange that is a sort of found poetry on the feeling that the world has become whole through partnership with another person.
G_d's Pee at STATE's END!
Mike Vinti
, April 5th, 2021 09:46
As the world seems evermore grim, Godspeed You! Black Emperor are looking on the bright side of life (well, sort of…) finds Mike Vinti
It feels trite to say that the last year has felt as if much of the world has been living inside a Godspeed You! Black Emperor album. Anyone familiar with the Montreal collective’s proclivity for anarchism-inspired transmissions of doom can draw parallels between the group’s prophecies of a society wrecked by neoliberal capitalism and the chaos that fills our Twitter timelines, governments and streets on a daily basis. After a year of lockdowns, civil rights protests and attempted coups, few people need Godspeed to tell us that the future is uncertain.
John Quin
, April 3rd, 2021 09:26
John Quin admires Joan Didion’s late collection
Let Me Tell You What I Mean
Here’s Joan Didion on roving reporter mode at a Gamblers Anonymous meeting in Gardenia, the draw-poker capital of Los Angeles County. A penitent says their ideal, the aim of the programme, is “getting serenity”. Didion balks at that: she associates serenity with death. Joan doesn’t do
serenity: she’s been proven right in her anxieties for decades.
It’s 2021 and entirely appropriate to be nervous now. Didion, perhaps more than any other contemporary American writer, grasps the sadness in the deluded idea of the good life and
Nicholas Burman
, April 3rd, 2021 09:26
While Robert Crumb’s style and dedication to his generation’s underground comix artists has inspired a huge array of artists from a variety of backgrounds and of numerous identities, for decades his depictions and framing of women and his adoption of racist stereotypes have been under fire
Crumb’s World, 2021. Photo by Alex Casto. Courtesy of David Zwirner Books
In 2016 Fantagraphics, who have republished much of Crumb’s work, released a book about its own history titled
We Told You So: Comics as Art, and the appearance of Crumb’s work in the context of the art book market (
Nancy Collinge
, April 1st, 2021 08:20
The debut album by Dry Cleaning is as oblique and unsettling as Hans Holbein's skull, finds Nancy Collinge
Photo by Steve Gullick
A couple of months ago during a bout of lockdown malaise, I was in my mum’s living room eating pie and chips and peas in front of the telly. The
Flog It credits rolled and shortly afterwards, an unremarkable looking middle-aged contestant on
Pointless professed his undying love for a South London band called Dry Cleaning. “Bravo sir” my internal monologue drawled, “The reincarnated John Peel is among us… I hope they do a question on flags today.”