Coffee-Table Notes

Inverleith House, Edinburgh November 1 to January 13 2013 4 stars Scary monsters and super-creeps abound in the Berlin-based artist formerly known as Andreas Hofer's first UK museum exhibition, which features five new works among an epic forty-one on show. Seen side by side, there are moments when they resemble an outsize pulp fiction collage of pop culture ephemera swirling around Hofer's brain, over-lapping each other as they burst through the frame. Even the fact that Andy Hope 1930 has a secret identity speaks volumes about where he's coming from. Because, drawing a line between Roy Lichtenstein and Daniel Johnston, Andy Hope 1930 takes the trash aesthetic of golden age comic book iconography and invests it with a subverted mythology born of the more questioning, me-generation years. So, against a Zabriskie Point style landscape in 'Impressions d'Amerique', Batman and Robin are dressed as The Lone Ranger and Tonto, making the umbilical link b...

Banshee Labyrinth, Edinburgh Wednesday October 24th 2012 3 stars “ It will all work out fine,” murmurs Merja Kokkonen, aka Finnish electronic chanteuse and Fonal Recordings artiste Islaja, as she stands before her keyboard and assorted accoutrements. Kokkonen is sounding decidedly snuffly for her return trip to Edinburgh following her last visit in 2010. Islaja's appearance is a slightly downbeat climax to a quadruple bill of very different electronic imaginings. First up is Anak-Anak, the solo guise of Conquering Animal Sound vocalist and knob twiddler Anneke Kampman, whose looped warbles sound like a strangely penetrating and appositely spartan chorale. 'Raven 'Shuns is a Noise-scene supergroop of Rhian Thompson, aka CK Dexter Haven, Stuart Arnot and Susan Fitzpatrick, who record as Acrid Lactations for their own Total Vermin label. Combined, it's a quiet riot of toy-town scrapings that might just have discovered the true sound of string. Tomutont...

Summerhall, Edinburgh, until November 24 th 2012 4 stars The path-way from Johnny Cash to Bob Dylan is a tellingly symbolic one in the two most straightforward of seven big shows exploring the relationships between sound and vision in very different ways. The images of these two icons of popular music may be a short stroll from a dark room to the basement, but, captured at their creative peak, these two pop cultural giants mark out the co-dependent leap from blue-collar street-songs to the avant-garde. In 'A Hero of the True West, Jim Marshall's images captures the Man in Black in transit via thirty black and white shots of Cash in concert and with his family in the late 1960s. When Cash peers through the grille of a van en route to Folsom Prison, so stony-faced is he that it's as if he's in as cell of his own making. If Cash appears on the run from his own demons, the image of him with Dylan is a kind of baton-passing. Because, as captured by celebrity snapper...

When Theatre Uncut was awarded a Bank of Scotland Herald Angel Award during this year's Edinburgh Festival Fringe, it was vindication for a radical idea borne from adversity. Theatre Uncut''s three programmes of brand new plays were performed script-in-hand in the Traverse Theatre bar at ten in the morning. Many of the plays had been penned just a few days before by an array of international writers, and were performed by a top-notch cast pulled together from other Fringe shows with only a couple of hours rehearsal. The plays themselves were akin to living newspapers, responding to current events with a sense of immediacy that mattered more than any rough edges there might have been. There weren't many. Nor were the plays old-fashioned polemics, but offered up instead a more lateral set of responses which retained a very human and poetic heart amongst the seriousness of their concerns. The new works ranged from a piece by American playwright Neil LaBute that loo...

Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh 3 stars The popcorn handed out to the audience on the way in to see Made in China's two-handed dissection of happiness is as playfully deceptive as everything that follows. The black-clad young woman standing atop a platform licking an ice lolly who greets us similarly wrong-foots any implied fun and games. Over its fifty minute duration, however, Tim Cowbury's script morphs into an increasingly manic and unreliable memoir of apparently shared experience in search of meaning. The woman on the platform is Jess. The young man that slinks on sporting a Sideshow Bob hair-do is Chris. As the pair gaze out at the audience, they claim to be best friends. In-between downing cans of beer pulled from an ice-box beside Jess, the duo tell elaborate shaggy-dog stories and do dance routines to David Bowie's Rebel Rebel and Susan Cadogan's reggae take on Hurt So Good. They cover themselves in flour and tomato ketchup, putting themselves through dram...

The Old Ambulance Depot, Edinburgh 4 stars It’s the cosiness that draws you into theatre designer Kai Fischer’s moodily lit installation and performance piece. The casual listener might never guess where the words being uttered in such soothing female tones through speakers attached to a series of wooden platforms are taken from. Once you realise they are drawn verbatim from the catalogue for the Nazi-organised Degenerate Art Exhibition that took place in Munich in 1937, the piece takes on a new measure of seriousness. The exhibition, organised by Adolf Hitler and his cronies, aimed to deride and discredit anything the state could not control or understand. As the sensors that operate each speaker are triggered whenever a viewer draws close, the gentlest of cacophonies comes gradually and shockingly into focus. When performers Pauline Goldsmith and Pauline Lockhart draw the audience into what initially resembles a children’s story-telling session, the content of their si...

1 International Women’s Day March 1982 In a black-painted former city centre warehouse turned venue in Liverpool, called, oddly enough, The Warehouse, The Raincoats are singing a traditional Latin-American folk song a cappella. The song is the encore to a set honed in the wake of the all-female trio’s (plus assorted male and female drummers) previous two albums of lo-fi Ladbroke Grove squat-rock with a lyrical feminist bent, their self-named 1979 debut, which features an even more gender-bending take on The Kinks’ song Lola than the original, and its smoother, more world-beat-inclined 1981 follow-up, Odyshape. A live cassette recorded in New York, The Kitchen Tapes, will follow a year later, and a final album, Moving, in 1984, before The Raincoats fall prey to whatever things bands fall prey to. It will take more than a decade for Nirvana's Kurt Cobain to bring The Raincoats into the spotlight once more. Tonight, however, with Gina Birch, Ana Da Silva and Vicky Aspinall lined...