Coffee-Table Notes

Voodoo Rooms, Edinburgh, Sun 13 April 2008 4 stars Almost thirty years after Josef K split up, the return of the band’s singer in his first full live solo show for nineteen years is a major event. With Haig’s old band finally acknowledged as a major influence on a new generation of artfully inclined guitar acts, it’s a chance too to see how the original songs have survived. Following recent guest slots with Nouvelle Vague, there remains a worry that Haig might be upstaged by the indie disco that precedes him. As it is, the flamboyant salute he opens this first leg of a mini tour that takes in Glasgow and Dunfermline next month with is a healthy sign of nerves and dry self-deprecation. Wielding a fire engine red guitar and sporting tinted shades and the skinniest jeans this side of Kate Moss, Haig and the band who accompanied him on last year’s Cathode Ray project launch into the punk funk of Trouble Maker, opening track of the just-released Go Out Tonight album. In a set split fift...

The tour guide at Verdant Works is doing the rounds. The weather outside Dundee’s old jute mill turned heritage centre may be inclement, but, immaculately turned out in top hat, tails and elegantly groomed silver moustache, he looks ready for anything. Leading his party Pied Piper-like through the museum’s tea and gift shop, the guide’s outfit lends him the authoritative air of a nineteenth century industrialist. The show-room dummies posed in various shades of grey who line his route concur. Inside Verdant Works itself, makeshift catwalks are being contrived among equally off-limits looms that once span with life, but which are now educational ornaments to remind visitors of their former function. Across in the court-yard, with the Sun shining down past where the roof used to be, Grid Iron theatre company are rehearsing Yarn, their latest site-specific show. Music is playing, and, as the six actors gingerly parade their way around the space, navigating the puddles as they go, a low-ke...

Edinburgh’s premiere promoters of aktionist noise happenings commemorate a decade of cottage industry chunder with three bloody Sundays of non-Fringe-based hissy fits. Five reasons for their essentialness follow. 1 It’s not music. It’s just noise And there is nothing like it. The events feature Wire magazine-approved acts from Paris, Brighton and Leeds, including several you may or may not have ever heard of. Do Ashtray Navigations, Ocelocelot, Shareholder, Towering Breaker, Made Out Of Wool, Eye Shaking Kingdom, Blue Sabbath Black Fiji, Muscletusk or Playground Meltdown ring any bells? 2 Its not big. Or clever But at various times it promises a stomach-churning, vomit-inducing, spiteful, ugly and puerile racket. All of which are to be encouraged. 3 It repeats itself Usurper play three times, though you won’t always hear them. The GT house band scritch, scratch, bubble and squeak as the quietest unplugged act ever. 4 It’s got the best merchandise stall on the planet An array of hand-cr...

Spies In The Wires@Cabaret Voltaire, Edinburgh, Thu June 14 2007 4 stars The whiff of freshly heated maize that accompanies Sellotape’s vocal version of Hot Butter’s 1972 electro-disco hit, Popcorn (the first ever totally synthesiser-based single to chart, pop-pickers), may take its subject matter literally, but it’s still a lot more subtle than Crazy Frog’s pummelling desecration of one of the catchiest ditties in pop history. Fronted by uber-bobbed girl about town and PVC-panted mein hostess of the Girlelectro night at super student hang-out The Southern, Viki Sellotape, Sellotape the band do that Rough Trade circa 1978 Ladbroke Grove squat rock shamble. Making their live debut, they go hell for, um, leather with an energetic and unstudied bounce through the DIY post-punk messthetics handbook. Think Kleenex or the Delta Five, with an in-built ramshackleness tempered by a vocal style betraying a smidgen of Siouxsie Sioux. It’s the contents of the popcorn making machine, though, which ...

The Subway, Edinburgh, Mon 11 Sep 2006 3 stars What to do with a sparse audience on a soggy Monday night? If you’re electro-saccharine noise terrorists Gay Against You, you drag all 20-odd onstage with you, thus immediately quelling the venue’s structural awkwardness. In G.A.Y.’s world of playground chalkboard subversion, audience participation has never been so much fun. Clad in micro-shorts and 118 118 running vests, these two little boys hurl themselves into their routine with a recklessly scattershot abandon that might fall apart any second. More than mere comedy gabba, this is how Prince would’ve sounded if he’d been born a hyperactive Gameboy addicted runt, soaked in sugar, and spewed up the vilest tones a Casio can conjure. The List, issue 560, 2 Oct 2006 ends

The Arches, Glasgow, Fri 15-Sun 17 Feb 2008 Instal’s three day festival of left-field sound has consistently revisited ideas explored by the avant-garde half a century ago. This year they focus particularly on attempted subversions of bog-standard us-n’them gig protocol in a multitude of ways. 1 Personal Space – You’ll have missed Edinburgh minimalists Usurper performing in a skip beside cartoonist Bud Neill’s Lobey Dosser statue of cartoonist in Glasgow’s west end, but if you’re quick you’ll still catch Blood Stereo’s pilgrimage to the Blackburn community hall they grew up beside. 2 Self-Cancellation – In which founder of auto-destructive art Gustav Metzger co-opts musicians such as John Butcher and Rhodri Davis to negate the creative act itself. Tubas will be filled with sand. Ice will melt. 3 Translation – Sound poetry and sound art snuggle up via poet Kenneth Goldsmith, text-based artist Simon Morris and others rewiring the word. 4 Energy Births Form – A wig-out by any other name, ...

The Arches, Glasgow, Fri 13-Sun 15 Oct 2006 Instal, the annual festival of experimental music in Glasgow, has attracted equal amounts of flack and praise in its six year existence. Critic Neil Cooper and Instal curator Barry Esson go head to head to debate its pros and cons in a virtual dialogue. Neil Cooper Instal’s now in its sixth year, and has grown considerably since it started. I’m not convinced, though, that bigger is necessarily better. Barry Esson If you’re into this kind of music already, then of course you’ll be happy to see more of it. If you don’t know much about it and fancy trying to find out more, then if there are more acts, over a wider range of styles then hopefully you’ve got an even better chance of finding something you love. NC When Instal started, Le Weekend in Stirling and Free RadiCCAls at the CCA were running. Now, there’s Kill Your Timid Notion, Subcurrent and Dialogues. That’s a very crowded arena for what’s essentially a small marketplace for ‘left field m...