Coffee-Table Notes

3 stars The latest graduate of Stow College's music industry course's in-house record label is this Edinburgh five-piecce's collection of epic soundtracks to vocalist Sean Watson's heartfelt lyrical concerns. Delivered in an opaque vocal rasp, this is an album chock-full of widescreen ambition that at times resembles the sublime adventures of late-period Talk Talk mashed-up with Sigur Ros, with its grandiose piano, violin and bass trombone arrangements overlaying the urgent melodrama of the guitars. Watson certainly puts himself through the emotional wringer, and sometimes it all gets too much, but at its sweepingly regal best, this is grown-up heartbreak made for fractured times. The List, June 2011 ends

When a young woman has been left with two black eyes you fear the worst. When that young woman just happens to be an actress appearing in a brutal contemporary play in which power games between the sexes are brought to the fore in a disturbing and claustrophobic fashion, you could be forgiven for speculating on how life imitating art might not necessarily always be such a good thing. As it turns out, the injuries sustained by Nicola Daley, who has just finished a run of Dennis Kelly's play, After The End, in a production directed by Amanda Gaughan at the Citizens Theatre's Circle Studio in Glasgow, are nothing to do with anything that happened onstage. Rather, Daley's two shiners were acquired in an offstage stumble that nevertheless lent her performance opposite Jonathan Dunn in Amanda Gaughan's production an accidental whiff of authenticity. Just as the Citz production has been put to bed, however, another take on After The End prepares to open in Dunde

“If you believe a story’s worth telling, you’ll believe in it to the death.” So said Cora Bissett, director of Roadkill, an astonishing look at sex trafficking close to home and winner of the year’s Best production award at yesterday’s Critics Awards for Theatre in Scotland. If ever there was a sentiment that summed up the creative whirlwind of just how much theatre in Scotland is punching well above its weight, Bissett captures it perfectly. This is especially the case in the current economic climate, with cuts in arts funding as inevitable this side of the border as they were recently in England. Bissett accidentally captured the gung ho, never say die approach that makes artists create work in the face of adversity, and the CATS awards rightly celebrates this. Apart from anything else, it also shows off the full diverse range of the work made in Scotland that is a world apart from the London awards scene centred mainly around commercial west end shows. As well as Ro

Chris Watson began his tape experiments as part of pioneering electronic band Cabaret Voltaire, and later co-founded The Hafler Trio. He has recorded albums for Touch Records, created sound installations across the world, recorded nature documentaries with David Attenborough and collaborated with artists including Alec Finlay and Hanna Tuulikki. He is currently working on ‘Whispering In The Leaves’ for 2008’s AV festival in Sunderland, UK. What’s going on in the garden? I was commissioned to do a sound piece for the Winter Garden in Sunderland. It’s similar to the sorts of places I remember in Sheffield from when I was a kid. All these rich Victorian philanthropists who didn’t know what to do with their money sent out their people to collect specimens and showed them for public benefit in what were basically massive public greenhouses. As soon as I walked in it reminded me of plants from a rainforest, where you hear more than you see, except it was as if someone had provided me wi

Edinburgh, July 15th 2007 Music, by its very nature, can take you anywhere. On record, the private consumption of something designed for public dissemination is already transcendent enough. In the live arena, the communal experience makes such experiences even more pronounced. Hence the mass appeal of stadium-rock fascist rallies and the mud-bath pilgrimages of the open-air festival. Shadowed Spaces confounded expectations of both these secular desires to share…something. Or other. The Arika organisation’s follow-up to last year’s Resonant Spaces, a Scotland-wide tour which utilised the unique timbres of venues such as Hamilton Mausoleum and Smoo Cave for musicians John Butcher and Akio Suzuki to bounce off, Shadowed Spaces aimed to do likewise with urban alleyways normally hidden from view, their doors for once left ajar. Over a two week period, New York based drummer Sean Meehan, Japanese saxophonist Tamio Shiraishi and fellow countryman percussionist Ikuro Takahashi visited six s

Simon Fisher Turner is a composer and musician who recently appeared at Tramway, Glasgow, performing at Alexandre Perigot’s exhibition, Pipedream, inside a life-size recreation of Elvis Presley’s former home, Gracelands. Fisher-Turner’s first album was produced by Jonathan King, and he later worked with Derek Jarman, composing soundtracks for The Last Of England, The Garden, Edward II and Blue. He briefly played with The The, and has released a string of albums under a variety of names, including his own. He provided scores for Croupier, directed by Mike Hodges, and was nominated for an Oscar for Anna Campion’s feature, Loaded. His most recent album, Lana, Lara, Lata, was released on Mute Records in 2005 How did you get to Gracelands? I’ve worked with Alexandre for a few years. He comes up with these crazy ideas I half understand, then go and do something with them. We once did a project called Fanclubbing in a deserted arts centre in Marseille, and by the end we had a whole album.

When the original ‘Wreckers Of Civilisation’ declared that ‘The Mission Is Terminated’ in 1981, a legend was already in motion. It’s one that Genesis P-Orridge, Cosey Fanni Tutti, Chris Carter and Peter ‘Sleazy’ Christopherson had been living up to since Throbbing Gristle’s notorious 1976 debut at COUM Transmissions’ ICA exhibition led Tory roustabout Nicholas Fairburn to take the moral high-ground. TG’s provocative mix of cheap n’ nasty analogue-electro-sludge and performance art terrorism continued to turn nihilism into an art-form which Punk could only cock a rusty safety-pin at. This silver jubilee reunion fast forwards to a time where the industrial template TG set down has begat the fright-wig stadium bombast of Marilyn Manson, but which has more significantly been appropriated by today’s fertile and fanatical scuzz-house noise scene. The Endless Not is subsequently an odd and self-conscious revisiting to one-time extremities long since superseded. As with Iggy Pop’s careful