Coffee-Table Notes

Fence Club 2 @ The Caves, Edinburgh, Thu 14 June 2007 The ukelele’s place in contemporary pop is usually resigned to playing second, um, fiddle to more conventional, less novelty-inclined instrumentation. Where George Formby and Tiny Tim’s eccentric schtick was strictly Kodachrome, however, Uni And Her Ukelele, aka Heather Marie Ellison, is a day-glo riot of candy-coloured tutu, kids TV presenter tights and sparkly silver eye make-up. The San Francisco belle may be at the bottom of the bill of this latest and increasingly homogenised Fence Records love-in, but, with her uke Sally Luka in tow, she’s by far the most interesting thing on it. Because, behind the rosy-cheeked apparel, chorus girl ditziness and wonky dance moves, is a handbag full of classic 1960s girl pop that could have shimmied out of The Brill Building, loaded up on bubblegum and busked its way into your heart with would-be Wall Of Sound power-pop show-tunes pared back to one-gal-band basics. Somehow, miraculously, Uni m

Optimo@Sub Club, Glasgow, 1 April 2007 When Blurt play Optimo on April Fool’s Day, it will be vocalist/sax player Ted Milton’s first Glasgow performance since supporting the late Ian Dury at the now demolished Apollo almost 30 years ago. That was in the guise of Mr Pugh’s Velvet Glove Show, a demented Punch and Judyesque puppet act Milton fronted for 15 years prior to forming his No Wave-styled trio. Since an inspired appearance by Mr Pugh on Factory Records boss Tony Wilson’s TV show ‘So It Goes’ led to a brief tenure on the label, Blurt have released more than 20 under-the-radar albums. Highlights, including their magnificently titled debut single, ‘My Mother Was A Friend Of An Enemy Of The People,’ can be found on two essential ‘Let It Blurt’ best-ofs. It’s a long way from Milton’s original calling as a bookbinder and poet, whose work appeared in The Paris Review and seminal 1960s UK Beat compendium, Children Of Albion. Milton’s subsequent saxophonic epiphany, however, proved too f

Spies In The Wires@Cabaret Voltaire, Edinburgh Thu 10 May 2007 How smarty-pants London quintet 586’s charming concoction of shouty, dancy pop-pummelling got itself hijacked by the smattering of glow-sticks-to-the-max joke-New Rave trendies in evidence tonight is Scooby-gang mysterious. Six months back they’d have been hailed as post-punk pastichists extraordinaire. Then again, as with many of their compadres emanating from that particular cultural blip, 586’s sound is actually pre-punk, their reedy confection of mid-70s dressing-up-box dramatics and fair-ground boy/girl Dub more resembling that long-lost missing link between Glam and New Wave, Deaf School. To be applauded, then. 586’s finest moment, ‘Saying My Name,’ may be the result of drug-n’-cheese induced paranoia, but in terms of over-ripe Cheddar, Trash Fashion prove themselves as equally willing to embrace self-parody as they are in the YouTube-available mockumentary highlighting their east London antics in a manner more resemb

Tolbooth, Stirling, 25-27 May 2007 Experimental music festivals are currently so voluminous as to arguably be considered more over-ground than under. When Le Weekend first set the trend back in 1998, however, the landscape was a very different place to the one its tenth anniversary three-day wig-out now occupies. The previously strict demarcation between free jazz, electronica and a then fledgling noise scene has this year given way to an array anything-goes approach. So, just as Falkirk pianist Bill Wells introduces Teenage Fanclub’s Norman Blake to a collaboration with trombonist Annie Whitehead, To Rococo Rot’s Stefan Schneider and electronicist Barbara Morgenstern, Phantom Orchard unites harpist Zeena Parkins with Ikue Mori, once drummer with New York No Wave pioneers, DNA. Beyond such an inclusive roster are three especially exciting Le Weekend commissions. The One Ensemble Orchestra’s debut live show finds Volcano The Bear’s Daniel Padden fleshing out his low-key improvisat

Classic Anxiety Dream@The Meadow Bar, Edinburgh, Mon 18 July 2007 4 stars Last time Edinburgh hosted a weekly improv night was in the mid 1990s, when Lindsay Cooper’s Free Underground took over Monday nights at Henry’s Cellar Bar. Classic Anxiety Dream occupies similar terrain, and, judging by the amount of bodies squeezed into The Meadow Bar’s bijou upstairs function room, is filling a serious gap in the musical calendar. Nakatani is a Japanese, New York based percussionist who previously worked with Glasgow based sax player MacDonald and guitarist Davidson on the recent Aporias album. The final date of this UK tour finds the trio exploring similar percussive avenues, as Nakatani largely eschews conventional drumming in favour of bowls, gongs and rocks, while Davidson attacks his fret-board with a paint stripper and MacDonald skitters busily into his horn. For the second set, Phil Bancroft adds melodious tenor sax. Sods law, Classic Anxiety Dream moves to The Wash on The Mound f

Tremors@Stills Gallery, Edinburgh, Wed 10 January 2007 4 stars Last time Stills Gallery white-not-quite-cubed space played host to live music was in 1998, when Quebecois baroque apocalypsists Godspeed You! Black Emperor marked their low-key live UK debut before a phone box capacity audience (ignore the 8 million who claim to have been there – they’re liars) by attracting the attention of the local constabulary before blowing the gallery’s fuse-box . This is only mentioned because, 8 years on, New Zealand’s noise conjurer Campbell Kneale, on the second date of his Scottish central belt sojourn, manages to avoid both interventions, despite being twice as loud as his forbears. Not only that, the 100-plus in attendance demonstrate just how much the climate has broadened. Then again, with a slowly insistent martial pounding providing backbone and shape to the brain-bending layers of noise fizzing out from Kneale’s box of tricks, this is cheerfully old school industrial sturm-und-drang. By

The Arches, Glasgow - Tue 9-13 April 2008 Sex, violence and other-not-so cheap thrills have long provided outlets for corruptible youth in search of unknown pleasures. That's certainly the case in this double bill of work provided by this year's winners of the Arches Award for Stage Directors. These two very different rites of passage suggest a bleakly inquiring collective psyche at play. Rob Drummond's Sixteen invites us to a coming-of-age party for the absent Sara, who plans to celebrate the occasion by having sex with her older boyfriend, Tony. He sits downstairs with Sara's mum and dad, whom age has withered into a frustrated impasse of sexual dysfunction and double entendres. Played in real time in the hour leading up to midnight, the increasingly oddball exchanges reveal Drummond as a purveyor of nouveau absurdism, made all the ickier in domestic close-up. In The Severed Head of Comrade Bukhari, Daljinder Singh takes a script by Oliver Emanuel (for which she provi