Coffee-Table Notes

Chris Corsano is a drummer from New England, now resident in Edinburgh. He’s played extensively with sax player Paul Flaherty, Thurston Moore’s Dream/Aktion Unit and Evan Parker. He’s also played solo with Edinburgh noise doyens, Giant Tank, and on last year’s Resonant Spaces tour. Corsano appears on Bjork’s recently released Volta album, and takes time out from her world tour to play some Scottish shows. 1How are the shows with Bjork going? Great. It’s definitely a new experience for me. You’re currently playing amphitheatres, but are racing back to Edinburgh to play with noise duo Hockyfrilla, then opening for Faust and playing Optimo. What energises you about these small shows? As either listener or musician, I prefer smaller shows, hands down. They feel more immediate. I just try to react off whoever I'm playing with. In a solo situation it’s about developing something from the ground up that will hopefully have some momentum. What first attracted you to the drums?

Limbo@The Voodoo Rooms, Edinburgh Thursday January 15th 2009 Just when you think you’ve got this Glasgow four-piece nailed as an abrasively angular, art-school by numbers outfit, the pixie-booted minx bippetty-boppettying about onstage opens her cheeky gob and takes you by surprise. Because the sound emanating from the knowingly named Stina Twee sounds like the spirit of long lost indie pin-up Harriet Wheeler of The Sundays distilled through a post Penetration Pauline Murray and gifted melodies by Morrissey that drive and soar off somewhere out of the ordinary. Musically, Boycotts provide a relentlessly taut back-drop to such bittersweet colouring, with bass notes zapping out from the perfectly sculpted guitar patterns in a manner that recalls the post-punk structures of Life Without Buildings. Here, though, Ms Twee is less free-form, more traditionally straight-ahead in vocal stylings which rise and fall across the tunes’ more urgent intentions. At their most accomplished, such a

“My father, who was plain speaking and straight talking had said, ‘Isn’t an artist a fellow who paints?’ when told by one of my teachers that his son had the nature of an artist. It seemed I’d always been chasing after something, anything that moved – a car, a bird, a blowing leaf – anything g that might lead me into some more lit place, some unknown land downriver.” When Bob Dylan wrote this in Volume One of Chronicles in 2004, he could have been referring to a multitude of creative endeavours from a back catalogue that stretches out over almost half a century now. From earnest coffee-house troubadour to electric Judas spokesman of a generation, across umpteen albums, a free-form novel, the film Renaldo and Clara and most recently as mine host of the Theme Time Radio Hour, Dylan has been forever on the move, endlessly morphing into different versions of himself to keep the devoted who hang on his every utterance guessing. With the arrival of The Drawn Blank Series, the most extens

Classic Grand, Glasgow, April 27, 7.30pm; Bongo Club, Edinburgh, April 28 2007, 7pm As national institutions go, Billy Childish deserves a medal. Over 30 years service in primitive garage beat combos from Thee Milkshakes to The Buff Medways and his current guise with The Musicians Of The British Empire, Childish has become quietly iconic. More than 100 albums, 40-odd books of poetry and several novels, including the semi-autobiographical ‘My Fault’, set to be filmed by ‘Kids’ director Larry Clark, bear Childish’s name. As a painter, he co-founded the anti-conceptualist Stuckists, inspired by a cross remark from former girlfriend Tracy Emin. Childish fans include the late Kurt Cobain and Jack White of The White Stripes. Kylie Minogue took the name of her Impossible Princess album from a volume of Childish’s poetry gifted her by Nick Cave. Last year Childish was invited to take part in Celebrity Big Brother. But, as his latest album, ‘Punk Rock At The British Legion Hall,’ makes cl

Once upon a time, before the well-oiled ogres of WWE ruled the world in day-glo spandex, The Wrestling was a national institution. Every Saturday afternoon in the 1970s and 1980s, everything stopped at four O’ clock, as end-of-the-pier Greek tragedies between leotard-clad tubs of lard with cartoon names took place. On TV screens as black and white as the struggles between good and evil they highlighted, the legends of Big Daddy, Giant Haystacks and Kendo Nagasaki were played out just before the football scores on World of Sport. It was only when Greg Dyke, then head of ITV Sport, pulled the plug in 1988 on the grounds of it being too low-brow, that The Wrestling appeared to have died. Now, for one night only, The Wrestling is back, albeit in a slightly different guise to how you might remember it. Because, the All Star Wrestling that arrives un Edinburgh as part of a 60-date tour may have its roots in old time spit-and-sawdust grunt-n’-groan. But with modern day stars such as Robbie

There’s a great big house on the banks of the Nieuwe Mass river in Rotterdam’s Delshaven district, on the city’s east side. Where all about it has been bulldozed away, leaving fresh concrete piles behind wire fencing in its wake, this former East India Company maritime warehouse, later used as a soda factory and seconded for the last two years as headquarters of the aptly named Worm organisation, offers a new take on creative urban renewal. Because, while inside the labyrinthine confines of Worm’s club/venue/bar/shop bounces with off-the-map late-night life oozing with boho underground cred, its mix of original red-brick and science fiction style fittings marks it out as the most environmentally friendly hang-out in town. Kitted out with recycled fixtures and fittings designed so nary a nail need be hammered into a wall as it may be, none of this matters much to those in search of left-field Saturday night activity. DJs playing low-level sounds in the downstairs shop beside racks o

Leith Victoria Baths, Edinburgh, 15th July 2008 Underwater, you hear things differently. This is part of the thinking behind ‘Wet Sounds,’ a knowingly named tour of sound art which takes place not in uptight white space galleries, but in ten public swimming pools between London and Nairn. With the Edinburgh leg docking at Leith’s Victoria Baths, each date will feature work by twelve artists pumped through submerged speakers and listened to in situ by passing swimmers. With sound travelling four times quicker in water than in air, the waves generated will not only be heard by the ears, but felt in the bones and the body. If such an effect sounds akin to heavy dub played in a flotation tank, curator Joel Cahen is prepared to go with the flow concerning such a comparison. “The properties of sound and water are fascinating,” says Cahen, whose Newtoy organisation is producing ‘Wet Sounds.’ “The fact that sound travels faster in water makes for an entirely different listening process. A l