Coffee-Table Notes

Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the wordiest of them all? So it goes with the re-ignition after a quarter of a century of the collaboration between Mayo Thompson’s The Red Krayola and Turner Prize short-listed conceptualists Art & Language. Both parties threatened this year to finally record and release long-standing operatic project, ‘Victorine’, the libretto of which was published by A&L in 1984. As it stands, with lyrics and texts by A&L scored by Thompson and impeccably played by some of Chicago’s finest, this new set is a far cry from the harsh social-realist music hall of their 1976 virgin outing, ‘Corrected Slogans’ and squat polemic on 1981’s ‘Kangaroo.’ Then as now though, Thompson’s dry drawl takes a back seat to his collaborators, though the plummy tones of A&L’s English enclave which gave way to Lora Logic have here sired new vocal foils in the shape of ‘Krayolettes’ Elisa Randazzo and Sandy Yang. Yang was drafted into RK on 1999’s ‘Fingerpainting’ wh

Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the wordiest of them all? So it goes with the re-ignition after almost a quarter of a century of a collaboration between free-thinking Texas-born musician, theorist and teacher Mayo Thompson, who’s traded under The Red Krayola name for more than forty years, and Art & Language, the 1986 Turner Prize short-listed conceptualist art collective whose dense, persistent line of critical inquiry has proved equally rigorous. Both parties had threatened this year to finally record and release Victorine, a long standing operatic project, the libretto of which, concerning a French policeman who mistakes the nude figures in paintings by Courbet and Manet for a serial killer’s victims, was published more than 20 years ago in the collective’s ‘Art-Language’ journal. As it stands, this new set, with lyrics and texts by A&L veterans Michael Baldwin and Mel Ramsden, scored by Thompson, and played impeccably by a Chicago super-group featuring Jim O’Rourke, Tom

Linder Sterling’s early collages were published in collaboration with journalist Jon Savage as The Secret Public, and she designed record sleeves for Buzzcocks, Magazine, and her own band, Ludus. She designed a menstrual egg-timer for Factory Records, and performed at the Hacienda covered in meat and wearing a strap-on dildo. In 1991 a book of photographs of Linder’s friend Morrissey was published as ‘Morrissey Shot.’ Early solo exhibitions include ‘What Did You Do In the Punk War, Mummy?’ at the Cleveland Gallery, London, and ‘The Return Of Linderland’ at Cornerhouse, Manchester. Performances include ‘The Working Class Goes To Paradise’ in Manchester and London. In 2006 a monograph edited by Lionel Bovier was published by JRP/Ringier. Linder has just shown her ‘Pretty Girls’ series at Baltic, Newcastle, shows new work at Stuart Shave/Modern Art, London, from November 16-December 21, and as part of Re-Make/Re-Model at Sorcha Dallas, Glasgow, from December 8-January 21. Yo

Thanks in part to Resonance FM, the art/noise radio station run by London Musicians Collective, and thanks in part to cheap technology, sound art is less a samizdat activity and more obviously a community-minded experience, practiced in solitude but disseminated with ease. This exquisitely packaged release from Vienna’s Nonvisualobjects label, founded in 2005 by Heribert Friedl and Raphael Moser with the aim of focussing on ‘interpretations of minimalism in sound’ is a bumper compendium of hiss and fissures, environmental ambient, deep listening rhapsodies and deconstructed noises off. Presented in a numbered edition of just 500, the 22 pieces spread across two CDs alone are an attractive enough proposition. The 96 page hard-backed book which houses them inside its lavish but minimal design tells the black and white of it even more. By way of a grab-bag of interviews, testimonies, note-book jottings, drawings and photographs, each artist is afforded space to sketch out their practice

alt.gallery, Newcastle September 5-November 10 2007 They may be selling Daniel Johnston t-shirts across the bridge in the book shop of Gateshead’s Baltic Centre, but, despite the tendency of this vast multi-story space to resemble the domed city in ‘Logan’s Run’, this first UK retrospective of the cult savant singer/songwriter would probably boil over with excitement in alt. gallery’s bijou back-room space in one of the most out-there record emporiums anywhere. Because seeing the faded customised cover for Johnston’s very first home-recorded cassette, ‘Songs Of Pain,’ even out of arm’s reach beneath glass, it’s clear how his musical exorcisms of his inner demons pre-dated and even predicted what’s on offer on the other side of the room. The row on row of hand-crafted, make-shift artefacts wrapped around the overload of primal squalls, screams and screeches contained within the uber-limited, lo-fi, DIY and undoubtedly dysfunctional recordings released on whatever primitive outlet t

Limbo@Voodoo Rooms, Edinburgh  Thursday January 3rd 2008 Dirty Summer Where they smuggled in the back way? A trio, 2 teenage boys and a school-girl; Fergus on Korg, big specs, baggy cardy, mushroom-head-hair-do; Brodie on pop-eyed lead vocal, goth-fuzz-bass as patented by The Fall, cider-n-black indie disco t-shirt; Emily, aka The Bannister, on stand-up snare and floor-tom. From Dunfermline, a hard-nut satellite town just across the Forth. Out of this spews a cock-eyed DIY maelstrom of wonky mongoloid geekery without any of the novelty-act cutesiness which usually afflicts such stuff. During the first song Fergus gets so worked up he knocks his Korg off its stand, more adolescent clumsy-clot lack of spatial awareness than punk rock frenzy. On one song Emily reclines on the floor in front of her kit to play a second keyboard. It’s the only seat she gets all night. On another, she finishes by reading from a paperback. ‘Get On Your Knees And Colour Me In’ The best bag of

Pleasance Upstairs 3 stars Wil Hodgson is now sponsored by Chippenham Athletic Football Club. For now, anyway. Because if the club’s camel-coated directors ever make the Edinburgh trek to see the pink-haired chubby-chasing punk-geek tattooed love-boy, he might end up getting a kicking. Hodgson’s latest outsider’s rant against his less than idyllic home town takes stock of how he got here, from West Country misfit to third division pro wrestler to the most dolefully deadpan of top light-entertainment machine-gun raconteurs. For an incisive and scabrous observer of a white-trash hamlet where a Roy ‘Chubby’ Brown show is a rite of passage bonding exercise with your dad, this is pretty much business as usual. Hodgson’s subsequent willingness to stand alone, possibly with Bull mastiff shit on his shoe, makes for a state of the nation address Channel 5 documentaries can only dream of. Where Hodgson goes now remains to be seen, although he really should think about reviving his wrestling