Coffee-Table Notes

It's only too fitting that the debut release from the newly constituted VoidoidARCHIVErecords comes in a silver plastic bag. There are few artists other than the label's founder, artist Jim Lambie, after all, who have taken the Warhollian pop-art dream and used it for his own ends quite so convincingly. The label was born of activities in Lambie's Glasgow-based Poetry Club over the last three years, which has seen several generations of underground movers and shakers perform there ever since he opened it to host a show by Richard Hell in 2012. The likes of Factory superstar Gerard Malanga, poetry evangelist John Giorno and Patti Smith have all performed inside The Poetry Club's bijou confines, as have Felt frontman Lawrence, Primal Scream, Young Fathers and Teen Canteen. This double 7'' limited edition of 100 was released last month to coincide with the Club's multi-media night, Paraphernalia. Elara Caluna are the Glasgow-based duo of Benedict Salter a

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh Four stars You could have heard a pin drop when Valerie told her story midway through Amanda Gaughan's revival of Conor McPherson's brooding 1997 masterpiece. As played by Lucianne McEvoy, Valerie is the most unassuming of strangers, embraced into the fold of a west of Ireland boozer where Jack, Jim, Finbar and barman Brendan hold court. In self-imposed exile from Dublin, over the course of one dark night Valerie rubs up against the men's shared experience and peacockish attempts to impress her. The latter comes in the form of a series of whisky-fuelled supernatural yarns that conjure up an assortment of apparitions that Valerie too falls prey to in the most devastating of ways. Such a simple set-up is brought to life with exquisitely low-key power on Francis O'Connor's desolate set. At the play's start, rain batters down beside the telegraph poles beyond the pub's four walls as the sound of a solitary fiddle that

When iconic trumpeter Miles Davis released his Bitches Brew album in 1970, the record's use of electronic instruments and studio editing broke the mould for for many jazz aficionados even as it confounded others more used to the artform being primarily a live affair captured in the moment. Either way, it's notable that out of the dozen players that made up Davis' supergroup gathered for the recording, not one of them was a woman. Almost half a century on, a new night for female jazz and improv musicians has co-opted the title of Davis' of-its-time opus to correct such a gender imbalance. Co-founded in the summer of 2015 by saxophonist Sue McKenzie and double bass player Emma Smith, Bitches Brew is a bi-monthly night that takes place at the small but perfectly formed Jazz Bar on Chambers Street, across the street from the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh. The idea was to provide a platform for female players who, despite working in a more left-field free and impr

When Jenna Watt went to see Werner Herzog's film, Into The Abyss, things changed. Herzog's documentary focuses on two inmates on Death Row, and at one point, a state executioner who's just had to oversee the killing of a woman for the first time begins to to think about his life. Someone observes that on your tombstone between the words Born and Died and the year of each there is a dash which sums up everything inbetween. How you gonna live your dash, he says, is up to you. “When I heard that phrase something just clicked,” says Watt. “I'd never heard it expressed that way about how you're going to live, and whether you're going to move forward or stay where you are. All of that seemed really poignant.” Around the same time, Watt found herself drawn to the photographs of Italian artist Filippo Minelli, whose Silence/Shapes series of images used different coloured smoke bombs to illustrate everyday explosions disrupting their immediate surroundings. “I

“If you can put a little bit of yourself into the work....” So says Collette Robertson on the first track of Ali Robertson & His Conversations, the latest sonic missive from one of the brains behind the Giant Tank cottage industry, which has rattled the mainstream's bag for more than a decade now with an ever expanding series of gonzoid dispatches. Both this newish record and the fourth edition of the GT in-house zine continue an assault on culture which d ates back to the pummelling sludge-core of Giant Tank the band in the late 1990s. Since they split, the Robertson-run Giant Tank label has been based primarily around the activities of Robertson and cartoonist Malcy Duff. As Usurper, this double act of absurdist provocateurs have become key players in an outsider weirdo network that is both related to and is the antithesis of a now widespread Noise scene. Utilising a toybox of 'disabled' instruments – marbles, loose change, old springs and other detritus – alon

Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, Glasgow Three stars The big brass bed that sits at the centre of the stage has already seen plenty of action by the looks of things at the start of Emily Reutlinger's production of Shakespeare's doomed love story, performed here by a cast of eight second year BA Acting students. There's a torch on top of the covers, and Romeo and Juliet themselves are standing there with their fractured families, telling the audience what happened with a venom only the victims of a pointless feud can muster. Beginning the play at its end like this so everything that follows is in flashback is an initially disarming proposition for the audience watching from three sides of a strip-lit stage area, but it's one that's never laboured in a production that focuses on the uber-real looking interplay between the main players. Michael Abubakar in particular is a revelation as an urchin-like Romeo, who blags his way into the Capulets' big do with

1 Last Friday night, I was supposed to go to a Bowie Birthday Tribute Night. This was being held at Edinburgh's Citrus Club to celebrate both the release of Bowie's new Blackstar album and the great man's sixty-ninth birthday. As is usual with such tributes, the night would feature a compendium of Edinburgh punk/post-punk alumni doing covers of the thin white duke's finest works in their own Edinburgh punk/post-punk alumni kind of way. The attraction for me was was the head-lining act, Finger Halo. This was the new band fronted by Jo Callis, who'd been guitarist in The Rezillos and then Boots For Dancing before joining The Human League, co-writing Don't You Want Me and going to Christmas number one in 1981. This sounded great, because whenever you see film footage of Jo Callis, even when he was in The Rezillos he looked like he should've been one of Ziggy Stardust's Spiders From Mars, and he looks even more like that now. I'd suggested going t