Skip to main content

Burns&Beyond’s Culture Trail

Various venues, Edinburgh
Four stars

In the shadow of Luke Jerram’s installation, Museum of the Moon, which hangs over the interior of St Giles’ Cathedral, a fanfare is sounded from behind a screen. An overhead projector beams out a series of miniature cut-out models as a four-part chorale sings of ancient things. This is Disarming Reverberations, a one-night-only experience that formed part of the Burns and Beyond mini festival’s Culture Trail, which hosted events across eight city centre venues over four hours on Saturday night.

Curated by Lau’s Martin Green and featuring Alba Brass and the group Landless, Disarming Reverberations evoked a spirit of after-dark mystery which fed through the other venues. While across town Lost Map Records founder The Pictish Trail recreated the label’s Howlin’ Fling nights in the Freemason’s Hall, and the Gilded Balloon presented bite-size comedy sets at the Rose Theatre, at Greyfriars Kirk, spoken-word night Neu! Reekie! co-founder Kevin Williamson’s performed his punky take on Tam O’Shanter. This was accompanied by dancers from the Kixx Collective and guitarist Craig Lithgow. Kathryn Joseph’s series of short sets proved equally spellbinding.

At Assembly Roxy, another member of Lau, Aidan O’Rourke, reimagined Enlightenment era howf, Lucky Middlemass’s Tavern. Mrs Middlemass herself was brought to life with gallus brio by actress Nicola Roy, with potman Archie inhabited by Matthew Zajac. O’Rourke and piper Brighde Chaimbeul played short sets inbetween songs by Deacon Blue singer Ricky Ross, Alasdair Roberts, who premiered a new piece called Europe, and poems by Nadine Aisha Jassat. Ross was joined by O’Rourke on Green Grow The Rushes, while Zajac kept things contemporary with a couple of Tom Leonard poems.

Over at the Caves, The Red Rose Club programmed a superb-sounding showcase of female DJs. Sets by Nightwave, Sofay and Ribeka, plus three-woman hip-hop troupe The Honey Farm may have been more appropriate for late-night revels, but they nevertheless gave a pointer to a poetic future that can be about music as much as words.

The Herald, January 28th 2019

ends


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Losing Touch With My Mind - Psychedelia in Britain 1986-1990

DISC 1 1. THE STONE ROSES   -  Don’t Stop 2. SPACEMEN 3   -  Losing Touch With My Mind (Demo) 3. THE MODERN ART   -  Mind Train 4. 14 ICED BEARS   -  Mother Sleep 5. RED CHAIR FADEAWAY  -  Myra 6. BIFF BANG POW!   -  Five Minutes In The Life Of Greenwood Goulding 7. THE STAIRS  -  I Remember A Day 8. THE PRISONERS  -  In From The Cold 9. THE TELESCOPES   -  Everso 10. THE SEERS   -  Psych Out 11. MAGIC MUSHROOM BAND  -  You Can Be My L-S-D 12. THE HONEY SMUGGLERS  - Smokey Ice-Cream 13. THE MOONFLOWERS  -  We Dig Your Earth 14. THE SUGAR BATTLE   -  Colliding Minds 15. GOL GAPPAS   -  Albert Parker 16. PAUL ROLAND  -  In The Opium Den 17. THE THANES  -  Days Go Slowly By 18. THEE HYPNOTICS   -  Justice In Freedom (12" Version) ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Edinburgh Rocks – The Capital's Music Scene in the 1950s and Early 1960s

Edinburgh has always been a vintage city. Yet, for youngsters growing up in the shadow of World War Two as well as a pervading air of tight-lipped Calvinism, they were dreich times indeed. The founding of the Edinburgh International Festival in 1947 and the subsequent Fringe it spawned may have livened up the city for a couple of weeks in August as long as you were fans of theatre, opera and classical music, but the pubs still shut early, and on Sundays weren't open at all. But Edinburgh too has always had a flipside beyond such official channels, and, in a twitch-hipped expression of the sort of cultural duality Robert Louis Stevenson recognised in his novel, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, a vibrant dance-hall scene grew up across the city. Audiences flocked to emporiums such as the Cavendish in Tollcross, the Eldorado in Leith, The Plaza in Morningside and, most glamorous of all due to its revolving stage, the Palais in Fountainbridge. Here the likes of Joe Loss and Ted Heath broug...
2 comments
Read more

Carla Lane – The Liver Birds, Mersey Beat and Counter Cultural Performance Poetry

Last week's sad passing of TV sit-com writer Carla Lane aged 87 marks another nail in the coffin of what many regard as a golden era of TV comedy. It was an era rooted in overly-bright living room sets where everyday plays for today were acted out in front of a live audience in a way that happens differently today. If Lane had been starting out now, chances are that the middlebrow melancholy of Butterflies, in which over four series between 1978 and 1983, Wendy Craig's suburban housewife Ria flirted with the idea of committing adultery with successful businessman Leonard, would have been filmed without a laughter track and billed as a dramady. Lane's finest half-hour highlighted a confused, quietly desperate and utterly British response to the new freedoms afforded women over the previous decade as they trickled down the class system in the most genteel of ways. This may have been drawn from Lane's own not-quite free-spirited quest for adventure as she moved through h...
Post a Comment
Read more