The Berkeley Suite, Glasgow Sunday June 17th 4 stars Simple Minds as proto techno pioneers? Probably not, but there’s more than a patina of future pomp stadiumistas early instrumental Theme for Great Cities in the opening few minutes of American electronicist and sometime half of the Skaters James Ferraro’s show. With Ferraro hunched over an old Korg synth, the martial rhythms that pulse his first of two extended pieces on this Braw/Cry Parrot/Shaddaz co-promoted show are a long way from the sublime jauntification of last year’s ‘Far Side Virtual’ album. This is a denser, harder sound, awash with glacial keyboard squiggles and Morriconeish chorales conjuring up a wave of analog nostalgia only for it to be pummelled into submission without mercy. Accompanied by The Bodyguard, who appears to be a dreadlocked technician enabling further sonic adventures, Ferraro goes quiet after thirty minutes, almost losing his audience to incessant chit-chat during the longeurs, before bouncing back with an abstract dub affair more akin to to his recent 'Inhale C-4 $$$$$' mixtape delivered in his Bebetune$ guise. The grandiose clatter it morphs into stretches every which way in a bouncing display of old school classicism. The List, June 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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