Coffee-Table Notes

Glasgow Film Festival The Arches, Glasgow, February 16 th , 3-11pm Science-fiction and electronic music have long co-existed in parallel universes, the assorted experimental visionaries behind them predicting the future. Detroit techno pioneer and long-term sci-fi obsessive Jeff Mills in particular has made such a symbiosis a dimension-expanding virtue. These two worlds finally collide beneath Caledonian skies when Mills beams down his live soundtrack to Viennese-born expressionist auteur Fritz Lang’s 1929 film, ‘Woman in the Moon’, as part of an all-day space invasion known as Sonic Cineplex. This meeting of minds between Mills and Lang originally came via the Cinematechque of France, who first recognised what such a space-age collaboration could contribute to a Lang retrospective. “I was aware of Lang’s other films,” Mills explains, “but ‘Woman in the Moon’ had really escaped. It was Lang’s only bona-fide science-fiction film, and was produced in two distinct parts. It’s a me

There’s a seal which has been bobbing about the Greenock waterfront for the last year or so, according to the builders working on the construction of The Beacon, Inverclyde’s brand new twenty-first century arts centre, which is finally open for business. Beacon artistic director Julie Ellen spotted it the other day as well, and the diners in the building’s bistro and restaurant are also in with a chance, given the wide-screen view the façade provides. One wonders how much too the seal has been watching the landscape change in equally dramatic fashion, as The Beacon Arts Centre gradually took shape. Set alongside a series of more traditional sandstone buildings next to Customhouse Quay and overlooking the River Clyde estuary, The Beacon more resembles a development in somewhere like Reykjavik than a town like Greenock. The Beacon is an initiative which has been a long time coming, ever since it became clear a decade or so ago that the old Greenock Arts Guild Theatre was no long

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow 4 stars When director and designer Stewart Laing comes onstage two thirds of the way through his production of Jean Genet’s elegantly brutal power play to take questions from the audience during the set change, it sums up every deconstructed moment that preceded it. Laing may have obeyed Genet’s gender-bending maxim that all parts in his flight of fancy about two maids who role-play their mistress’s decadence be played by young male actors, but he takes things much further. The noises of war open the show, as the stage curtain is painstakingly raised, lowered and moved backwards and forwards in an extravagantly choreographed performance of its own. Three seated young men rehearse a Metallica song on electric guitars, before performing it before projected footage from Vietnam. Later, against a perfect reproduction of the stage’s actual back wall, Scott Reid, Ross Mann and Samuel Keefe play songs by the Velvet Underground and David Bowie before teari

Royal Conservatoire, Glasgow 4 stars The buckets of blood the Witches pour into a dustbin are the shape of things to come at the opening of Ali de Souza’s unexpurgated take on Shakespeare’s play of corrupted ambition. As the body-count gets higher, the supernatural trio are there in the background at every crucial moment, striking a pose like a goth dance troupe on Halloween. This is all too fitting in a production performed by second year acting students in a brick-bare Chandler Studio theatre. Such set-pieces emphasise the play’s darkness, while keeping every scene intact clarifies much of its meaning. Other moments are at times a tad too over-loaded, such as the John Coltrane sound-tracked dinner party at which Brian Vernel’s Macbeth loses the plot, but even here, Vernel, Tarjei Westby as Banquo and Rebecca King as Lady Macbeth sustain a steely intensity. As Macduff and Duncan’s upper-crust son Malcolm plot out their strategies on the king, the St George’s Cross fl

4 stars At first listen, Conquering Animal Sound chanteuse Anneke Kampman's first sojourn into off-piste collaboration sounds like the straightest thing she's done. Here she is, singing proper words and everything alongside seasoned jazz guitarist Medboe and his band who here include saxophonist Konrad Wisniewski on a suite of songs that seeks to capture an environmental essence complete with twittering noises off between songs. Listen harder, and there's a spectral oddity at play throughout Kampman's coos and Medboe's dexterous and atmospheric picking that lulls one into a false sense of security before exploding into little light-and-shade storms. Recalling Trish Keenan in Broadcast or Alison Statton's post Young Marble Giants trio, Weekend, Medboe keeps the melody intact while Kampman's rich, glacial voice swoops without fear, punching out each phrase with a calculated off-kilter precision that makes for a scarifying pastoral delight in this refreshingly

Rebecca Ryan is pregnant again. At just twenty-one years old, the former star of council estate comedy drama Shameless has had more buns in the oven than most. The last time was during a two year stint on TV in Waterloo Road, in which Ryan's character, schoolgirl Vicky McDonald, became pregnant. Before that Ryan played a pregnant runaway in Laurence Wilson's stage play, Lost Monsters. Now it's the big one, as Ryan prepares to play Jo, the lippy Salford teenager in Shelagh Delaney's iconic 1958 play, A Taste of Honey, in the Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh's new production of this iconic but somewhat neglected play. Ryan struts around the rehearsal room as Jo, tearing verbal chunks out of Lucy Black, who plays Jo's slatternly mother, Helen, her cardigan stretched by the pillow-like appendage stuffed under it. Watching Ryan, it could be an older version of Debbie Gallagher, the youngest of Shameless's tempestuous Gallagher clan brought vividly to life by write

“ The word that keeps coming back to me is connectivity,” says Hanna Tuulikki, the Glasgow-based sound artist and illustrator who puts her own voice at the centre of her practice. Tuulikki is talking about Air falbh leis na h-eòin, or Away With The Birds, an ambitious ongoing project based around Gaelic song and the vocal mimesis of the birds that circulate around the island of Canna, in the Inner Hebrides, where she has just returned from an intense development week working alongside the local community. At the new work’s heart is a new vocal composition which has already been performed by Tuulikki in a three-voice version shared with Nerea Bello and Lucy Duncombe at assorted work-in-progress events. With the long-term aim of performing Air falbh leis na h-eòin / Away with the birds in a nine-voice site-specific extravaganza on Canna itself, as well as Tuulikki, Bello and Duncombe, the piece already involves sound recordist Geoff Sample, film-maker Daniel Warren, choreographer Rosalin