Coffee-Table Notes

Jazz Bar, Edinburgh, Thu Oct 2nd 2008 4 stars Opening a demanding thirty minute suite that runs the gamut of contemporary jazz styles with a sample of a disgruntled ansaphone message from a colleague isn’t the normal way to open the second set of your first major tour. But then, 24 year old Doncaster born pianist John Escreet is no ordinary player. Returning to the UK after two years study in New York, Escreet has brought with him an equally dynamic four-piece band to give vent to an intense and exhilarating experience. Sax player David Binney and trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire make up the frontline for an at times fierce series of musical back-flips that take things to their pounding limit before framing things with crisp grooves and some smooth solo-ing from Binney. Too often young bucks who decamp stateside make their prodigal’s return with all of their wannabe chops absorbed by rote, but Escreet and co don’t sound even remotely derivative. On the aforementioned Suite Of Consequen...

Dundee Contemporary Arts until January 4 2009 3 stars A little fluffy cloud made of translucent plastic filters hangs low, back-lit by a line-up of fluorescent tubes recreating the summer afternoon light of Emily Dickinson’s home town of Amherst, Massachusetts. Blue may be the saddest of colours, but there’s little chance of seasonally affected disorder kicking into Spencer Finch’s re-aligning of natural light in this collection of five installations inspired by David Hume and other enlightened philosophers. Alongside ‘Night Sky (Over The Painted Desert, Arizona, January 11, 2004),’ which recreates the after-hours view from a motel parking lot using light fixtures and lamps, the aforementioned ‘Sunlight In An Empty Room (Passing Cloud For Emily Dickinson, Amherst, MA, August 28, 2004)’ is the oldest work on show. The specificity of each title evokes a sense of time, place and of little moments of every-day history being made and preserved before they float or fade away. ‘Sky (Ove...

The Gentle Invasion@Henry’s Cellar Bar, Edinburgh Saturday September 6 Two young women in full-length angel-white Victorian frocks flank a bearded young man in a tank top sitting on a stool. As he clutches his acoustic guitar for dear life, the dark-haired woman on his right puts her bow to her viola while the accordion the ringlet-curled woman holds slowly wheezes into life. Led by the young man and blanketed by the spare, elongated and gothic (but not Gothick) arrangements, all three give voice to a slow-burning funeral parlour entertainment that threatens to break down in tears any second. This is Euchrid Eucrow, the precious Brighton trio named after the mute narrator of near neighbour Nick Cave’s 1988 bible-black novel, And The Ass Saw The Angel. Abi Fry (viola) and Carline Weeks (accordion) may be kindred spirit collaborators of Bat For Lashes and British Sea Power, but the woozily desolate airs they produce are more in tune with an east European wake than anything resembling...

Until June 24 2008 Information overload, autonomy, inquiry, provocation and dissent. Not themes as such, but rather loose strands in the wilfully disparate expanse that makes up this class of 2008 show-and-tell. Information overload: How many umpteen million seconds make up a lifetime? Brian Hewitt projects every single one, his intimations of mortality flashing onto two walls, getting bigger by the minute. Elsewhere, virtual worlds collide. Autonomy: There are alliances, as with Ausgang, a group show within a show, set in a pink-painted room to call their own. Spaces are created, physically, mentally and psychogeographically. Georgina Scott Angless finds out who she can be in ‘Freedom.’ Elsewhere, there are at least two huts, and much getting back to nature, as if yearning after some old-fashioned idyll of home. Like Susie Goodwin says, ‘…looking back, it was always about the daisies…’ Inquiry: Minutiae matters. As in Bridget Steed’s ’37 Inverleith Place’, set inside pull-out ...

GOMA until 2010 3 stars ‘My paintings are a song to colour,’ writes John McLean (not the artist and ex Beta Band member also of that name), whose ‘Hunter’ forms part of this group show designed to show off some of the best abstract art (whatever that means these days) culled from Glasgow’s own collection alongside one or two significant loans. The fluidity of music pulses through much of the work in a show whose title is talked up along the lines of ‘Some of the works on display echo reality, while others transcend it.’ Which is fine, especially in Alan Davie’s clearly of its time 1960 piece, ‘Cornucopia,’ with its conscious references to Jazz and Zen, its colours mixing and matching free-form solo improvisations ad nauseum. Elsewhere, Op art queen Bridget Riley’s large-scale candy-striped constructions flank the gallery’s central boulevard, while Eduardo Paolozzi’s Japanese-inspired sculpture, ‘Hamlet In The Japanese Manner,’ is a riot of adventure playground climbing frame colo...

University of Edinburgh Informatics Forum Sat 15-Sun 16 November 2008 The interior of Edinburgh University’s just-built Informatics Forum on the site of the old Bristo Square car park is a retro-futurist delight resembling the set of some minimally uber-cool science-fiction movie. Perfect, then, for the very 21st century Happening that typified the best of this year’s Dialogues festival of new electronic music. The main events in the venue’s large room were Michael Edwards’ ‘Electric Cowboy Cacophony’ project on the Friday, and Christoph Ogiermann’s far more full-on ‘Exhautions!’ on the Saturday, though what was billed as a side-stage curated by Lin Zhang of local noise promoters Grind Sight Open Eye served up equally maverick fare. The night opened with Zhang’s own group, Diva Abrasiva. Last time a version of this combo made up of assorted particle physicists played Edinburgh they really did bring the kitchen-sink. This time out thy teamed up with electronicist Owen Green for a se...

Out Of The Blue Drill Hall, Edinburgh Wed 12 November 2008 Midway through the second set of this collaboration between Scotland’s equivalent of The Penguin Café Orchestra and Norwegian percussionist Thomas Strønen, an ebullient bike instructor comes up onstage to demonstrate how to change a puncture. His record’s four minutes flat, though here, as he’s brought the wrong equipment with him, we can forgive him the extra mile. There’s a total community vibe in a hall made up of saddled-up cycle enthusiasts, here to talk two-wheelers for the cycle fair preceding this very special concert, and a healthy smattering of Mr McFall’s groupies who delight in everything they do. You can see why, as they settle into a series of charmingly erudite renditions of works composed largely by Stronen for string quartet, percussion and electronics, and based around a lateral idea of cycles both in terms of forward motion and life forces. Unsurprisingly there’s much repetition at play over the two sets,...