Coffee-Table Notes

Aby Vulliamy is getting political. The now Yorkshire-based viola player and musical collaborator with the likes of Bill Wells, RM Hubbert, Hanna Tuulikki and other artists in Glasgow’s low-key musical underground is talking about her first solo album, Spin Cycle, which she launches with a show at the city’s Glad Café tonight. A deeply personal collection of songs, Spin Cycle sees Vulliamy accompanied by school assembly piano, viola, trombone and percussion. Yet for all the record’s intimacy, she sounds like its follow-up might be a lot more out-there. “I feel like I want to make quite a radge second album,” Vulliamy says. “This is the world I’ve brought my kids into, and I’ve got loads of ideas about that.” Released on the German Karaoke Kalk label, Spin Cycle mines the joyful highs and draining lows of Vulliamy’s experience as a mother of two daughters. The result is a thing of organic beauty, pulsed throughout by a quiet strength that comes from Vulliamy’s experience working...

Transmission, Glasgow until October 20 th Four stars The neon sign in Transmission’s window offers a warm welcome to Rabiya Choudhry’s world for her first solo exhibition following appearances in group shows at Tramway and Dundee Contemporary Arts. Simply called Dad (2018), the sign is a nod to both Choudhry’s own family, and to the wider Scots-Pakistani diaspora her work stems from, and whose ubiquitous local shops have become an essential part of everyday culture over the last half century or so.   There are more echoes of this inside in the array of dresses, ties and purses printed up with some of Choudhry’s distinctive cartoon-style bombs-and-black-cloud iconography from her paintings and hung here on open-all-hours market-stall rails. This makes for a playfully personal exploration of an east/west culture clash that all but bursts through the explosions of colour that free-associate their way out of the accompanying nine paintings like cartoon demons being purged. ...

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars What happens to men of war when they come home? Are they heroes, survivors or casualties? These are some of the questions posed in Anna Jones’ new play, given an adrenalin-rush of a production by the Frantic Assembly company, whose trademark fusion of fast-moving text, honed physicality and hi-tech staging accompanies their first appearance at the Traverse for some years. Jordan’s play presents three men across three different time-zones attempting to get back to Scarborough, the town they all once called home. George has just been discharged from duty in 1918 and is looking forward to a simple life with his true-love, Rose. Frankie is back from Afghanistan circa 2013 and wants to be one of the lads again down at the local boozer. Eight years into the future, meanwhile, Nat is a refugee trying to cross the sea to whatever awaits him in the thick of an English civil war. Presented in collaboration with Theatre Royal Plymouth, Neil Be...