Music and David Pollock

Summer Festivals 2012: Music

T in the Park, Wickerman and Belladrum among the music fests pleasing your ears this summer

25 May 2012

T in the Park Basics: Balado by Kinross, Fri 6–Sun 8 Jul, tinthepark.com Price: Weekend: £179 (campsite tickets available separately). Day: £70–£77.50. Line-up: The Stone Roses, Snow Patrol, Kasabian, New Order, Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds…

Summer Festivals 2012: Here We Go Magic - interview

The band's Luke Temple gets ready for their slot at T in the Park

25 May 2012

‘I’m kind of a late bloomer, really,’ testifies Luke Temple, singer and songwriter in chief with Brooklynite indie-pop contenders Here We Go Magic. ‘I didn’t start writing songs until 2000, until I was about 25, and up ‘til then I’d only listened to…

Crate Digging: Rebecca Vasmant

The young Glaswegian DJ is set to play Ministry of Sound & Mixmag's Warehouse Party

22 May 2012

I love jazz music, and as much as I love house music too, I don’t think it has the same timelessness. My first choice is one I got about a year ago, it’s PE Hewitt Winter Winds (Now-Again), a three-LP box set of material self-recorded by a 16-year-old…

Miaoux Miaoux UK dates ahead of album Light of the North

Glasgow-based electronic musician also has live band set

22 May 2012

Julian Corrie sighs when you mention a certain fashionable designer drug that people used to swear was ‘plant food’. Come on, counters The List, don’t tell us the name isn’t a reference to mephedrone. ‘Not at all,’ he says, aghast. ‘This project started…

Auntie Flo - Sneaky Pete’s, Edinburgh, Sun 13 May

Club-friendly house beats with a world music undercurrent

22 May 2012

It’s a foul Sunday night and getting late, with the hour moving near to midnight when Glasgow duo Auntie Flo take their place behind a pod of trestle tables loaded down with kit and cables. The flickering projection behind them bears the legend ‘Night…

Sigur Rós - Valtari

A typically dazzling record from the Icelandic cosmic folk-pop outfit

22 May 2012

The rumours of an ‘indefinite hiatus’ might have left us thinking that was it for Sigur Rós, but the four years since their previous album have amounted to little more than a bit of creative refreshment time. Valtari (the infinitely less satisfying to…

Can - The Lost Tapes

An essential Can album with unheard versions of familiar tracks and some never-heard-before material

21 May 2012

Not lost at all, but just forgotten about in Can’s cluttered studio until archived by the classic German psych-rock explorers’ Irmin Schmidt recently, this three-disc dump of material is unfeasibly good considering it managed to avoid the light of day…

Interview with New Order drummer Stephen Morris and guitarist Phil Cunningham

The reunited music icons on playing live and the importance of arguing

26 Apr 2012

New Order are back, and it’s as if they never went away. Are you enjoying it Stephen Morris, drummer and longest continuously-serving member alongside Bernard Sumner? ‘Yeah, it’s been great,’ he says from his house/studio just outside Macclesfield…

Five reasons to go and see Tim Hecker

The electronica artist is appearing at church venues in Edinburgh and Glasgow in May

23 Apr 2012

1. Celebrate the death of rave At least according to Hecker’s new album: the wonderfully-titled Ravedeath, 1972, a lush assembly of droning, dream-like electronic soundscapes which builds upon the work he’s been creating for the last two decades, both…

Madonna - MDNA

Album with producers Benny Benassi, Martin Solveig and William Orbit

18 Apr 2012

Kudos to 53-year-old Auntie Madge not for delivering a classic album, but for having the sheer brass she-balls to turn out a record that’s as clubby, sexy and designed for the dancefloor after midnight as any she’s produced. A nod and a wink to naughty…

Auntie Flo - Future Rhythm Machine

Highlife's Brian d’Souza delivers debut album of electronic music

18 Apr 2012

(Huntleys + Palmer) He coyly describes this as not being a full-length debut album and points to the fact it predates his debut singles ‘Highlife’ and ‘Oh My Days’, but as one of Glasgow’s foremost new electronic producers Auntie Flo (the recorded alias…

The Scottish Album of the Year Award, and why it's worth taking seriously

FOUND, Mogwai, Rustie and more longlisted for inaugural award

12 Apr 2012

It isn’t the punchiest tagline to slap on your press release, but the Scottish Music Industry Association’s assertion that the recently-announced Scottish Album of the Year (SAY) Award will be ‘a qualitative arts prize for music which is discerning…

5 reasons to go and see OFWGKTA

Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All set to play O2 ABC gig

27 Mar 2012

1. We might find out what they are Are they an ironic comedy hip hop troupe? Or are they a wilfully nasty, relentlessly violent, misogynistic and homophobic throwback whose goofy nonsense just happens to distil the finest styles of rap created in the…

Blanck Mass - School of Art, Glasgow, Sun 18 Mar

Fuck Buttons' Benjamin John Power's intense ambient electronica

27 Mar 2012

In comparison to Fuck Buttons, his and Andrew Hung’s punishing drone-techno crucible, Benjamin John Power’s solo project Blanck Mass makes music that manages to recreate the elegia and emotional power of club-ready electronic music with none of the…

Dean Blunt & Inga Copeland - Black is Beautiful

Debut from Hype Williams pair is striking and boundary-crashing

26 Mar 2012

(Hyperdub) Can Tupac and Kanye West-lensing promo director Hype Williams finally have gotten wise to the ridiculously inventive London duo using his name? Is that why the pair are using their own names for this debut album on Kode9’s Hyperdub? The…

New Edinburgh venue The Third Door launches mini-festival Qabalala

26 Mar 2012

In the past month it’s seemed there’s been precious little to get excited about on Edinburgh’s clubbing and live scene, but let’s put the hand-wringing to one side for a few paragraphs and remember that people are still out there trying to get things…

Carter Tutti Void - Transverse

Throbbing Gristle's Chris & Cosey collaborate with Factory Floor

26 Mar 2012

(Mute) Fans of doom-laden industrial machine music might find their clockwork hearts oiled slightly by the release of this most definitive of collaborations, as Carter Tutti (Throbbing Gristle’s Chris Carter and Cosey Fanni Tutti, nee Chris & Cosey…

Graham Coxon - A+E

Latest lo-fi gem from Blur guitarist delivers arch and ugly meditations

26 Mar 2012

(Parlophone) What need for Blur these days? While their will-they-won’t-they recorded reunion is a brand of comeback cock-teasery perfectly suited to the age of stone-bleeding revivalism, what will their eventual decision to just get on with it offer…

The Twilight Sad to play final Pinup Nights

Malcolm Middleton, Miaoux Miaoux, Emma Pollock and Sonny Marvello also set to say farewell

21 Mar 2012

Has there ever been an indie night that’s worked as hard as Pinup Nights? Perhaps, but none have managed to alchemise the same mix of cannily chosen guest DJs, intelligently-curated young bands, painstaking theme nights and frankly dedicated gimmickry…

Tom McClung of Wu Lyf - interview

The Manchester epic indie rockers eschew traditional approaches to getting their music heard

28 Feb 2012

Manchester quartet Wu Lyf’s unwillingness to play the conventional pop game has been a breath of fresh air. Now they’re preparing to stop talking and start delivering. ‘At the start we didn’t want to be a band for the sake of it,’ says Tom McClung of…

Psyche and Wounded Knee share Single of the Month title

Also featuring Martin Creed, Ladyhawke and Estelle

28 Feb 2012

What this world needs is more high-concept ephemera created by actual, proper artists like Martin Creed, who create minute-long folk ditties like ‘Where You Go’ (Telephone) ●●● amidst light switch-flicking their way to the Turner Prize and Scotsman…

Summer Camp set for UK tour

Bitter-hearted take girl groups of 50s and 60s

28 Feb 2012

Summer Camp: a duo so in tune with one another they respond to The List’s email questions as one entity. ‘How did you get together’, we ask them. ‘We’d known each other for ages,’ Jeremy Warmsley and Elizabeth Sankey tell us in stereo. Then Elizabeth…

Spector - King Tut’s, Glasgow, Wed 15 Feb

Blending the anthemic and the generic to pleasing effect

28 Feb 2012

‘What a pleasure,’ notes Fred Macpherson. ‘I thought Newcastle on Tuesday was something, but this...’ Wearing his hair gelled to one side and a pair of thick-framed black glasses, the suited singer recalls Buddy Holly or Crispin Glover as Marty’s dad in…

Tanlines - Mixed Emotions

Brooklynite art-pop duo embrace the sound of 1980s pop on debut

22 Feb 2012

(Matador) Brooklynite art-pop duo Tanlines, aka Jesse Cohen and Eric Emm, are contemporaries of Yeasayer and Health, and perhaps some positive pre-judging on that basis is required. After a batch of singles, splits and remixes, the pair fully embrace…

Trailer Trash Tracys - Captain’s Rest, Glasgow, Sun 15 Jan 2012

Effects-laden shoegaze fog heavy on the exquisite melodrama

27 Jan 2012

Not, as you might have expected from the name, a clan of bad-mouthin’, whisky-swillin’ Midwestern girls battering badly-tuned guitars and trying to resurrect the lost souls of L7 or The Distillers, Trailer Trash Tracys are instead three guys and a girl…