Coffee-Table Notes

Getting   an   audience   with   Norman   MacCaig   isn‘t   easy   these   days.   At   the   grand   old   age   of   85.   though,  you   can‘t   really   blame   this   most   down-to-earth of   Scotland‘s   literary   elder   statesmen   for   not   wanting   to   be   bothered.   For   years.   he   has   put   up   with   an   endless   round   of   newspaper   profiles   and   constant   questioning   about   his   poetry   when   he‘d   much   rather   be   left   alone   to   write   it.   Nevertheless.   his   output   has   been   vast.   Some   23   volumes   have   been   filled   with   works   of   deceptive   simplicity,   through   which   shine   a   warmth   and   depth   of   feeling   that   speaks   to   all.   It‘s   easy   to   see   why   his   poetry   is   so   revered   by   both   conformists   and   literary   outlaws, influencing   generations   of   Scots   writers   who   discovered   his   work   while   probably   still   at   school.   A   volume  

Mr Pickwick’s was a Liverpool legend, even long before the handful of wet Wednesdays when it would transform into Plato’s Ballroom. A city centre chicken-in-a-basket dive beside a deserted car park no man’s land, it once aspired to supper club classiness: the kind of place that inspired Tony Hatch to write Downtown. By 1981, however, its pseudo-Dickensian interior was reduced to hosting midweek grab-a-granny nights. In the most densely populated clubland in Europe, there were a million nitespots like this – provided that insurance job fires hadn’t claimed them first. The one thing Mr Pickwick’s had going for it was its semi-circular dancefloor, the biggest in town. A raised platform around its rim allowed diners – squeezed into kiddie-size tables with fringe shaded lamps casting an unhealthy yellow hue – enough distance to focus on the stage without their mastications being disturbed. Top light entertainment for all. Even so, nobody danced. Plato’s Ballroom announced itself via a s

Asmus Tietchens and Thomas Köner’s Kontakt Der Jünglinge, Double Leopards,  Nobukazu Takemura, Norbert Moslang and Jim Sauter, Masonna, Space Machine CCA, Glasgow  Handing out earplugs at a festival designed to explore “the hidden wiring linking early experimental composition with the new wave of contemporary electronica”, as the programme notes have it, sends out some contrary signals. Then again, given that the all-seated interior of the über-minimalist CCA5 space looks somewhere between a sushi bar and a padded cell, an air of cautious formality is implied from the off. This certainly isn’t the fault of the curator, The Wire’s own David Keenan, who has enthusiastically pulled together an ambitious collection of pan-generational avatars and mavericks, many of whom are making their Scottish and, indeed, their UK debuts. But with the Glasgow date of Nobukazu Takemura’s Contemporary Music Network tour seemingly grafted onto Subcurrent by the venue’s bums-onseats sensitive manage

The Arches, Glasgow Boredoms,  Cosmos, AMM, Merzbow, Ryoji Ikeda, Whitehouse, The Paragon Ensemble  When Instal’s all day festival of “Brave New Music” was launched three years ago in the murky subterranean expanse of The Arches — a converted railway sidings and a building still resonating with the burr of past arrivals and departures — it allowed its audience to drift through multiple spaces, absorbing sounds that often bled across each other, melding into an aural mass that moved in and out of focus. This year, it opted to occupy two of the building’s largest spaces and, while more conventionally contained, it remained equally iconoclastic in form and content. The Paragon Ensemble, Scotland’s leading contemporary classical ensemble, opened proceedings with a ripped and stripped improvisation of scarified Baroque, marrying gossamer flute and cello scrapings to an impending laptop clip-clop before erupting into a gallop, obliquely referencing Gershwin and Highland drone en ro

Phonographics, Ruins, Sunburned Hand of the Man, [The User], Acid Mothers Temple, Philip Jeck, Ira Cohen Dundee Contemporary Arts  “I feel more at home here than I do in my neighbourhood in New York,” says sixty-something Beat poet, compulsive namedropper and living shamanic totem Ira Cohen, introducing a screening of his legendary Angus Maclise/La Monte Young soundtracked film, The Invasion Of Thunderbolt Pagoda. Bearing in mind that it’s a Sunday afternoon in Dundee, such a magnanimous statement, however much it’s designed to flatter, is pretty big cheese indeed. Taking up residence amid the chi-chi white cube main gallery inside one of Europe’s sexiest 21st century spaces, this provocatively named three day festival of sight and sound embraces two specific strands of thought criss-crossing each other beyond its solely aural/visual interface. On the one hand, Philip Jeck, [The User] and Phonographics offer more insular reflections that tiptoe cautiously but utterly, unremit