Avant-Garde

Dialogues Festival and Braw Gigs

Edinburgh’s experimental music scene has thrived over the last ten years, thanks to several low-level organisations who have kept the faith, from Dialogues’ annual festival of electronic sounds to Cowgate-based music and film festival…

Efterklang

Danish avant-rock in Glasgow

Efterklangsongs about farts and beer bongs. Their collaboration with the Danish National Orchestra, a retooling of their album Parades into an even more spectral and ambitious listening experience, suggests they work hard and play just as hard too.

The Threshold Houseboys Choir

AVANT GARDE Across recent decades of esoteric weirdness in music, few have stood closer to the frontline than Peter ‘Sleazy’ Christopherson. Born in Leeds in 1955, he first emerged during the 70s as a graphic artist and photographer, predominantly as…

Yann Tiersen

French avant garde musician and composer Yann Tiersen is famed for composing the score to the movie Amélie. Favouring the piano, accordion and violin, he’s also been known to have a tinkle on the typewriter when it takes his fancy. The 38-year-old has…

Instal 09

PREVIEW A church organ sounding the course of the stars, a cello being turned to dust, a sound poet voicing typewriter symbols, long stretches of almost nothing … Instal has been expanding the way we listen since its inception in 2002, building a…

Angil and Hiddntracks - Ouliposaliva

AVANT-GARDE POP Introduced to Chemikal Underground by shared acquaintance Jim Putnam of Radar Bros, Angil and Hiddntracks are a quality addition to the roster, a bizarre but still indefinably soulful combination of chamber pop and jazz. While Mickaël…

Miss Le Bomb and Wounded Knee

AVANT GARDE ELECTRO Limbo at the Voodoo Rooms, Edinburgh, Wed 20 Mar Drew Wright, aka Edinburgh’s Wounded Knee, doesn’t show off. He just sits at a desk covered with all sorts of little mechanical toys, and asks in a frighteningly reverb-heavy…

La Didone

‘I developed special software for the last couple of pieces,’ says Elizabeth LeCompte, artistic director of New York avant-garders the Wooster Group. ‘Final Cut Pro and Isadora, you know, I was the initial developer.’ Actually, she was nothing of the…