Coffee-Table Notes

Life During Lockdown Amongst the mountain of paper on my desk, some of it   has acquired a ghostly air since the Coronavirus-enforced lockdown in March. Here, gathering dust at the top of the pile, are flyers for theatre productions that were supposed to open last month, but which didn’t make it to the rehearsal room. Next to them are more DIY style leaflets picked up at assorted late-night dives for gigs by bands I’ve barely heard of who never got to play. Like the increasingly tattered and long out of date posters for theatres and concert halls that adorn walls around town, the flyers and brochures on my desk look like monuments commemorating another time, when you could still have a good night out without putting your life at risk. Perhaps most poignant of all is a black covered brochure that contains details of Edinburgh International Festival 2020, set to take place in August, but necessarily cancelled in the wake of the pandemic. Where the blackness once had a sleek ...

St Cecilia’s Hall, Edinburgh St Cecilia was the patron saint of church music whose executioner took three attempts to chop off her head. Often, this two day event seemed to similarly lack an edge. With all performances unamplified, Three Blows aimed to explore the acoustics of the oldest purpose built concert hall in Scotland, oval shaped interior, domed ceiling and all, but this was only really achieved by the most experienced artists on show, Keith Rowe and Red Krayola mainstay Mayo Thompson, who headlined a night apiece.  Elsewhere, most of what followed was appealing enough, but given that the bulk of the acts come from a radical visual arts scene based around Glasgow’s Modern Institute, it was surprising how readily most clung to conventional performance set-ups. Saturday’s For The Voice session opened with Tattie Toes, a junkshop Brechtian quartet framed around Basque singer Nerea Bello, whose undulating wail was upstaged slightly by the incorporation of a spinning top i...

Tolbooth / Various venues, Stirling The longest running leftfield music festival in Scotland now styles itself as ‘Stirling’s No Limits Music Festival’. This year it spread its wings not only throughout the Tolbooth’s multi-tiered interior, but offsite to spaces ancient and modern, from the Church of the Holy Rude next door to a concrete underpass on the edge of town. The biggest presence over the course of the three days was Bill Wells, whose prolific output as pianist, bassist and composer has made him a quietly powerful force, both as a sideman and in his own right. Wells introduced the weekend with a teatime set by his self-styled National Jazz Trio of Scotland, their classically elegant originals setting a wistful tone for a Friday night of understated pop.  Swedish trio Tape led the quiet charge, their mix of harmonium, guitar patterns and electronics a prettified and gentle display that sounded like Roy Budd scoring for State River Widening. Taken by Trees, led by fo...

The Arches / Glasgow School of Art, Glasgow When Gustav Metzger talks about the doomed 1937 flight of the Hindenburg in the same terms as the jet planes which crashed into the Twin Towers on 11 September 2001, it puts his ideas of auto-destructive art into an explicitly political context which advocates creativity beyond catastrophe. Metzger’s quietly gnomic presence at the Self-Cancellation strand of 2008’s Instal festival gave things a sense of historical countercultural kudos not seen in Glasgow since he was invited to take part in a 30th anniversary discussion of the Destruction In Art Symposium in 1996.  Also present at both events was novelist/agitator Stewart Home, whose early 90s Art Strike took inspiration from Metzger’s 1970s model. Home pointed to how the nihilism of punk was born from a brief time in the mid-1970s when, with industrial unrest crippling Britain’s industries, there was the possibility of a real revolutionary situation. Metzger himself observed at Sa...

The Arches, Glasgow The fertile noise scene on Instal’s own doorstep has made this offshoot festival a welcome addition. 11 acts are on show in two late night slots following the main Instal festival, and added a speakeasy frisson to proceedings. Positioning them in The Arches public bar, awash with pop-eyed clubbers, makes for an at times uneasily tense mix. The abysmal sound on the first night doesn’t help matters, though neither does opening with the scratchy phutterings of Edinburgh duo Usurper, whose barely audible exercise with ‘disabled’ instruments are pretty much lost to the babble.  There’s no danger of that with Jazzfinger’s martial slabs of sound, and any subtleties inherent in the primitive analogue wail of female duo Hockyfrilla (it’s Swedish for mullet) are stampeded over by their collaboration with Muscletusk’s relentlessly pounding sludge. Squeezed into 20 minute slots, there’s an ad hoc urgency to such collaborations, and pairing Wounded Knee’s vocal loops w...

Mitchell Library, Glasgow, Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art The idea of Patti Smith performing in a library is perfect. At this intimate solo show to launch an exhibition of drawings, paintings and photographs originally seen as part of Strange Messenger, her 2002 Andy Warhol Museum retrospective, here appended with new work, this most bookish of artists (rock star, poet, whatever) is herself a walking fan-girl encyclopaedia of absorbed literacy. The glasses Smith sports while reading from her poetry collection, Auguries Of Innocence, add to the overall air of bohemian cool. Tonight, having forgotten to bring her own copy of her book and with a seriously out of tune guitar, Smith comes on like a dotty but hip favourite aunt to Glasgow’s art crowd sitting cross-legged on the floor. Yet, for all her good-natured humility, death pervades Smith’s set. From the bird flu and “hoof and mouth” disease she dedicates poems to, to her own coming to terms with grief on My Blakeia...

Tolbooth, Stirling Almost midway between Glasgow and Edinburgh, Stirling is the ideal east meets west no man’s land for a festival like Le Weekend. Imbued with a loose-knit vibe, unlike the twin metropolises it satellites, it has no chips on its shoulder or sniffy airs and graces, simply because it’s neither here nor there. For seven years, such wonderful geographical incongruity has allowed Le Weekend space enough to breathe, and this year it stretched itself to four days. This wasn’t enough, however, for Oval’s Markus Popp. Scheduled to perform with vocalist Eriko Toyoda as So at a fringe exhibition in the neighbouring Changing Room gallery, with flights booked, Popp got to the departure lounge but turned around at the 11th hour and duly went home. Such pique doesn’t discourage Thursday’s opening act, The Hamid Drake Trio, a spit ’n’ sawdust free collaboration between the Chicago percussionist, veteran saxophonist Paul Dunmall and bassist Paul Rogers. Drake may have been bill...