Coffee-Table Notes

When Joe McAlinden sat on a rock beside the sea near Achiltibuie, he didn't know the end result would be the making of the short film, EDIT, which premiered at this year's Edinburgh International Film Festival. Directed by visual artists Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, the team behind 20,000 Days on Earth, the award-winning impressionistic documentary featuring Nick Cave, EDIT will be screened on New Year's Day as part of Edinburgh's Hogmanay's series of Scot:Lands events around the capital. A loop of EDIT, which follows a young woman's cross-country journey in search of her missing younger brother, will form Tide:Land at a yet to be named venue. Here, McAlinden will perform the live soundtrack that inspired Forsyth, Pollard and stage and screen writer Martin McCardie to make the half-hour film that features a remarkable performance by Kate Bracken. “Bizarrely, it was me who started it,” the former singer with the group, Superstar, says of the ro...

When the founders of children's music theatre company The Singing Kettle, Archie Trezise and Cilla Fisher, announced in October that the much-loved company was set to close following a final tour of large-scale venues around Scotland, it marked the end of an era that began an astonishing thirty-two years ago. Before children of all ages could mutter so much as a 'Spout, handle, lid of metal', however, The Singing Kettle's final line-up of Kevin McLeod, Anya Scott-Rodgers and Gary Coupland announced the arrival of a brand new company called Funbox to keep the spirit of their former employers alive. “We were having far to much fun doing what we do to stop doing it,” Funbox co-founder McLeod explains of the decision to carry on beyond the company he has worked with for the last seventeen years, “so we decided to start our own company and do something similar. We think the work that The Singing Kettle has done in terms of keeping the tradition of Scottish playground songs a...

Spiegeltent, St Andrew's Square, Edinburgh Four stars “Is everybody alright?” asks the six-foot drag-queen in his/her high-heeled pomp at the edge of the Spiegeltent catwalk after three similarly attired colleagues have taken a trio of their fellow artistes dressed as dogs for a walk. The vintage movie starlet shapes thrown by those portraying the dog-owners initially suggests a kitsch precursor to some energetic bounding from their charges. When the scene ends with a comic but no less effective simulation of coprophagia between mistress and four-legged friend, however, it makes for a more unexpected but altogether more subversive punchline. By this time the six-man team who make-up Australian troupe Briefs have thrusted, teased and bared their well-buffed behinds in a series of routines involving bananas, a yo-yo, a Rubik's Cube and increasingly less clothes. There are wigs, lip-synching, and a gymnastic routine with a suspended ring loaded with enough homo-erotic attitude as ...

When Hamish Clark went from his home in Broughty Ferry in Dundee to Edinburgh University to study English Literature, he never meant to become an actor. When he joined the student theatre company, performing, writing and putting plays together, a career on the stage began to seem like a possibility. It took a few years working in factories, shops and other jobs to get by, but Clark suddenly found himself a familiar face through appearing in a series of ads for a mobile phone company, then as a regular for seven years in Sunday night drama series, Monarch of the Glen. This week, however, Clark returns to the stage at the north London based Park Theatre in the UK premiere of American writer John Cariani's 2005 Broadway hit, Almost Maine. Cariani's play is set in a small American town in the thick of winter where over the course of one cold and frosty evening, various couples fall in and out of love at exactly the same moment in nine two-person vignettes. In contrast to it's s...

One of the many stand-out songs from the Chichester-sired duo of Katherine Blamire and Jessica Davies' eponymous fourth album begins with some far-off plainchant that ushers in the sort of gossamer-thin atmospherics not heard since the back-packer trip-scape of All Saints' Pure Shores. A low-slung guitar and a drum-beat that's part martial mediaevalism, part Spectoresque wall-of-sound, gives way to a self-reflective tale of small wonders, everyday epiphanies and fleeting moments of shared joy. Like some ancient madrigal fused with Me Generation confessional and given a discreet post-modern sheen, Waiting For Something To Begin belies any misplaced notions of kookiness the duo's name and image may imply. At the heart of its textured melancholy and cut-glass introspection is a shimmering sensuality possessed with strength and power. At moments Blamire and Davies' twin vocal recalls the equally spectral work of Deirdre and Louise Rutkowski with 4AD rec...

Three stars Like a little army of trolls marching out of the shadows, this latest opus from the Jean Herve Peron/Zappi Diermaier version of Germany's veteran kosmische hippy Dadaists creeps up on you slowly. Peron's looming bass and Diermaier's martial drums set a moody tone before exploding into the extended guitar wig-out of the album's opening assault, 'Gerubelt'. After more than forty years in the saddle, Peron and Diermaier have styled this new release as jUSt, a set of twelve semi-improvised bare-bones rhythm-driven sound sculptures designed to be rebuilt by anyone who fancies a bash at adding their own touches to it. Whether the end result will find Krautrock copycats indulging in fantasy-wish-fulfilment hero-worship or inspire something more interesting remains to be seen. What's left in the meantime is a group of miniatures far less formless than mere backing tracks. Stripped back to basics, the same rush of primal physicality best captured in Faust...

The Modern Institute, Aird's Lane, Glasgow Until January 17th 2015 Four stars 'OPTIMUM LIVING MADE EASY', the quasi-ironic legend just about declaims from the second of five large-scale paintings that make up a new cycle of work by Victoria Morton. Or at least that's what it appears to say, as the poster-size message that resembles a stencilled-in slogan is all but obscured by swirls of red camouflage as well as the image of a female figure who appears to be squirting paint into her palm. Such wilful discretion is the most tellingly talismanic image on show, even as it acts as a bridge between the explosions of colour elsewhere. At times improvised but never slap-dash, these burst forth with a self-referential life-force which flits between a blood-rush of fevered activity offset by pools of calm that trickle out beyond the oranges and lemons. As a very personal story-board, it highlights a vivid life and death swirl that points to little moments captured from everyday...