Banshee Labyrinth, Edinburgh Wednesday October 24th 2012 3 stars “It will all work out fine,” murmurs Merja Kokkonen, aka Finnish electronic chanteuse and Fonal Recordings artiste Islaja, as she stands before her keyboard and assorted accoutrements. Kokkonen is sounding decidedly snuffly for her return trip to Edinburgh following her last visit in 2010. Islaja's appearance is a slightly downbeat climax to a quadruple bill of very different electronic imaginings. First up is Anak-Anak, the solo guise of Conquering Animal Sound vocalist and knob twiddler Anneke Kampman, whose looped warbles sound like a strangely penetrating and appositely spartan chorale. 'Raven 'Shuns is a Noise-scene supergroop of Rhian Thompson, aka CK Dexter Haven, Stuart Arnot and Susan Fitzpatrick, who record as Acrid Lactations for their own Total Vermin label. Combined, it's a quiet riot of toy-town scrapings that might just have discovered the true sound of string. Tomutonttu is Kokkonen's touring partner and fellow Finn, Jan Anderzen, who stands over a table-top full of FX pedals with which he conjures up an urgent science-fiction stew. Islaja herself opens with an analogue instrumental with nods to John Carpenter's early, synth-based film soundtracks before giving way to an understated set of breathily classicist ditties on which the snuffles eventually give way to low-key pleasures. Like the woman said, it worked out fine. The List, November 2012 ends
When Ron Butlin saw a man who’d just asked him the time throw himself under a train on the Paris Metro, it was a turning point in how his 1987 novel, The Sound Of My Voice, would turn out. Twenty years on, Butlin’s tale of suburban family man Morris Magellan’s existential crisis and his subsequent slide into alcoholism is regarded as a lost classic. Prime material, then, for the very intimate stage adaptation which opens in the Citizens Theatre’s tiny Stalls Studio tonight. “I had this friend in London who was an alcoholic,” Butlin recalls. “He would go off to work in the civil service in the morning looking absolutely immaculate. Then at night we’d meet, and he’s get mega-blootered, then go home and continue drinking and end up in a really bad state. I remember staying over one night, and he’d emerge from his room looking immaculate again. There was this huge contrast between what was going on outside and what was going on inside.” We’re sitting in a café on Edinburgh’s south sid
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