Neil Cooper

Tim Hecker / Wounded Knee / Matthew Collings

Pilrig St Paul's Church, Edinburgh - Sat 19 May 2012

23 May 2012

Anyone au fait with Sacred Music, BBC 4's two-series trawl through the history of choral worship, from plainchant to polyphony and beyond, will be as versed in the integral relationship between music and church architecture as they are with presenter…

Scott Myles: This Production

Dundee artist and former skater reclaims DCA building’s interior

23 May 2012

It makes sense that the site of DCA used to be Scott Myles’ playground. Back then he was a skater boy and it was a bricks-and-mortar garage re-imagined as the sort of makeshift skate-park for local heroes and future high-flyers, which, under the…

Paul Thek: If you don’t like this book you don’t like me

Candid close-up of Brooklyn-born painter and sculptor

23 May 2012

‘I will now call to mind our past foulness and the carnal corruptions of my soul’ goes one missive culled from the now opened pages of almost a hundred notebooks left behind by Brooklyn-born painter and sculptor Thek, which came to light following his…

Jeremy Deller: Sacrilege

Stonehenge reimagined as a bouncy castle celebrates creative power of play

25 Apr 2012

If you’re feeling down in the dumps, there are few things more rejuvenating than jumping up and down like an idiot for a few minutes. If you can do so without bursting out laughing like an even bigger loon, chances are you’re dead. As a child of the…

Folkert De Jong: The Immortals

Dutch artist references Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Margaret MacDonald Mackintosh

25 Apr 2012

A gaudily attired couple sit astride some scaffolding watching the debris-ridden legacy of the best minds of their generation. Or at least that’s the sense you get of Dutch artist Folkert De Jong’s site-specific sculptural intervention, which looks to…

Teresa Margolles

Photographic archive of the now decaying Mexican border town

25 Apr 2012

Life’s a riot in Teresa Margolles’ work for Glasgow Sculpture Studios’ new space in Glasgow’s old whisky bond building, which sources a photographic archive of the now decaying Mexican border town of Ciudad Juarez alongside a new piece mined from…

George Wyllie: A Life Less Ordinary

Valuable retrospective of the Whysman's work

28 Mar 2012

Environmental art may be all the rage these days, but, as with the soon to be mothballed Collins Gallery, George Wyllie was way ahead of the curve. While best known for huge public spectacles The Straw Locomotive and The Paper Boat, as well as a…

Emory Douglas - Creator of iconic imagery behind Black Panther Party

GI show from American Black Power movement linchpin

26 Mar 2012

‘In Revolution one wins, or one dies.’ When this slogan appeared aloft Emory Douglas’ image of a couple of beret-clad African-American guerrillas on a big-screen back-drop at major concert halls around the world, it was a far cry from the roots of…

Jane and Louise Wilson

Major new film installation of surveillance-related work

27 Feb 2012

Jane and Louise Wilson are no strangers to going behind closed doors. In ‘Face Scripting – What Did the Building See?’, a major new film installation that forms the centrepiece of this body of surveillance-related work, they cast themselves as…

Luke Fowler (with Toshiya Tsunoda and John Haynes)

Film installation references RD Laing

17 Feb 2012

‘We are actors in a play... whose plot we don’t know... and whose end I dare not imagine.’ These words, delivered by iconoclastic Glasgow-born ‘anti-psychiatrist’ RD Laing, not only form the opening gambit of ‘All Divided Selves’, Luke Fowler’s latest…

Steve Strange and the Detroit Starrzz - Citrus Club, Edinburgh, Fri 3 Feb 2012

Disappointing gig from the New Romantic

8 Feb 2012

When 80s tribute band, and tonight's support act Party Fears Three dedicate their bombastically unsubtle cover of David Bowie's 'Ashes To Ashes' to Steve Strange,…

Raydale Dower - Cryptic Nights at CCA, Glasgow, Thu 2 Feb 2012

Experimental but playful sound installation

8 Feb 2012

The title of Raydale Dower's new 'spatial sound composition' speaks volumes about the former Uncle John & Whitelock bassist and current Tut Vu Vu clarinettist and sonic architect's methodology.…

Steven Severin: Vampyr - Cameo Cinema, Edinburgh, Thu 12 Jan

Ex-Banshees bassist delivers brooding live score to 1930s horror classic

1 Feb 2012

The man with the flowing white hair walks towards a small table and chair to one side of the Cameo’s big screen. Sporting a long black winter coat and carrying a glass of red wine, the man looks as if he’s stepped in from another, altogether darker age…

Allan Sekula: Ship of Fools

Large-scale images explore shipping industry’s role in exploitation of labour

1 Feb 2012

Now that capitalism is a sinking ship with assorted captains scrambling for the lifeboats, Allan Sekula’s ongoing photographic exploration of globalisation in motion is the perfect metaphor for a world all at sea. This most recent series by the…

Michael Nyman - Michael Nyman

Handsomely packaged re-release of early scores by minimalist composer

1 Feb 2012

(MN Records) Long before his soundtrack for Jane Campion’s The Piano, Michael Nyman’s very English form of baroque minimalism had impeccable art school credentials. Following his debut on Brian Eno’s Obscure label, this 1981 follow-up five years…

GFF 2012 - Silver Apples set for Glasgow Music and Film Festival

Live set from the cult 60s space rock pioneers

27 Jan 2012

When Simeon Coxe III took a 1940s vintage oscillator onstage with him to liven up the psych-rock band he fronted, sparks flew to the extent that half the band left, and, with only drummer Danny Taylor in tow, Silver Apples were born. With their name…

What Presence! – The Rock Photography of Harry Papadopoulos

Stunning exhibition of post-punk music photography

19 Dec 2011

Harry Papadopoulos is the great unsung documenter of post-punk, who, between 1978 and 1984, captured a crucial era in pop history in all its geeky glory. Having started out taking snaps for Bobby Bluebell’s fanzine, The Ten Commandments, and orbiting…

Andrew Kerr – So Ensconced

Over 70 new paintings in this debut solo exhibition from the Glasgow-based artist

19 Dec 2011

Absence makes the heart grow fonder in Andrew Kerr’s first major solo show in Scotland. Almost 70 new paintings discreetly dominate both floors, only interrupted by the odd smattering of drawings or sculptural intervention. Most of the mainly…

The Hot 100 2011 - No. 7: Martin Boyce on winning the Turner Prize

The Glasgow artist on Glasgow School of Art, fame and the future

16 Dec 2011

Unlike his work, Martin Boyce doesn’t appear to have any angles. Two days before scooping the 2011 Turner Prize for A Library of Leaves, his 2010 show at Zurich’s Galerie Eva Presenhuber, the Hamilton-born, Glasgow School of Art-trained maker of…

Beholder

Gloriously disparate jumbled-up wonderland of art for art’s sake that’s a joy to wander through

9 Dec 2011

‘Beauty’, according to that man David Hume, whose tercentenary year is almost up, ‘is no quality in things themselves: it exists merely in the mind which contemplates them.’ So it goes in this bumper grab bag of some 50 works, each subjectively…

Torsten Lauschmann: Startle Reaction

Explores tangled-up mess of interconnectivity

9 Dec 2011

You don’t immediately notice the quieter, more domestic pieces in Torsten Lauschmann’s biggest box of tricks to date. The subverted digital clock above the DCA box office and the wired-up chandelier that hangs in Gallery One, where two of Lauschmann’s…

Bill Wells' National Jazz Trio of Scotland to appear at Tracer Trails' Christmas Party

Another engagement for the ubiquitous collaborator and jazzman

9 Dec 2011

The National Jazz Trio of Scotland has never really been a trio. Nor has Bill Wells’ cheekily-monickered combo ever played jazz in the conventional sense. With a first album of original material – the waggishly christened Standards Volume Two…

Fordell Research Unit - The Illusion of Movement

Edinburgh noise auteurs' exercise in metal machine minimalism

7 Dec 2011

(At War With False Noise/Braw Music) Following the textured nuances of his Pjorn 72 label’s Songs For Dying compilation, Edinburgh noise auteur Fraser Burnett joins forces with Muscletusk’s Grant Smith for a relentless exercise in metal machine…

FareWell Poetry / Matthew Collings / Hiva Oa / Opul, The Third Door, Edinburgh, Mon 14 Nov

Carefully crafted multi-media, poetry-meets-noise and guitar assaults

18 Nov 2011

Salsa class is cancelled tonight, according to the blackboard outside what used to be after-hours hippy student dive Medina, but which now looks intent on filling the DIY boho gap that the Roxy Arthouse and The Forest once occupied so randomly. The…

Various artists - Songs For Dying

Vibrant collection of tunes exploring noise genres from techno to metal

16 Nov 2011

(Pjorn 72) The local Noiserati and associates’ recent reclaiming of their techno and/or metal roots helped their clan avoid a nihilistic dead end. As this bumper fifteen track compendium of clings, clangs, sci-fi slapstick, sepulchral drones…

Bill Bollinger

The contemporary of Bruce Nauman, Eva Hesse et al gets his own well-deserved retrospective

15 Nov 2011

Onscreen in black and white, a man is attempting to stand a log upright of its own volition. Time and again the man methodically lifts the log off the ground, moving it from horizontal to vertical before it topples as though felled with some invisible…

Twin Sister - Sneaky Pete's, Edinburgh, Thu 10 Nov 2011

Infectiously prettified melodies threaten to become dance-floor dream

15 Nov 2011

In her geek-girl specs and floppy Annie Hall hat, Twin Sister chanteuse Andrea Estella appears as quintessentially kooky a New Yorker as any afficionado of 1970s me-generation peak era Woody Allen movies could wish for. The check-shirted quartet of…

Rob St John - Weald

Forceful mix of melancholy and otherworldly rapture

10 Nov 2011

(Song, by Toad) Forget the much misused ‘F-word’. Rob St John is miles better than that, and putting a full electric band behind his whey-faced Lancastrian intonations has put muscle and guts on his musings. Yet for all the low-key chorales…

Viv Albertine - Henry’s Cellar Bar, Edinburgh, Saturday 5 Nov

Musically and emotionally raw 'secret' show from former Slits guitarist

8 Nov 2011

“Penis!” Former Slits guitarist Viv Albertine may only be checking her sound levels, but her one word opening gambit sets out her store for the artistic splurge that’s to follow. Within seconds Albertine is relating how she thinks about sex all…

The Writing On Your Wall

Rob Tufnell-curated group show chronicling the history of radical print

28 Oct 2011

When Jeremy Deller put Rupert Murdoch’s walnut face on a sky-blue ‘Vote Conservative’ poster to raise funds for the Labour Party, it looked like satire. Given the ongoing phone-hacking saga, it now feels like prophecy. The ‘Murdoch Doesn’t Give A XXX…

Minimal: Glass at 75 - Programme highlights

Glasgow festival features, Scottish Ensemble, Bang On A Can and composer himself

19 Oct 2011

How fragile is Glass? And how shattering? Audiences have had plenty of time of late to ponder the cause and effect of veteran New York composer Philip Glass’ considerable body of work. Glass himself appeared with his Ensemble to perform the dizzying…

Koreless - Sneaky Pete’s, Edinburgh, Sun 9 Oct 2011

The youthful, bright-eyed dubstepper takes centre-stage at Sneaky's

19 Oct 2011

Lewis Roberts may only be just about old enough to attend a club, but judging by this appearance he certainly understands what’s required to keep the customers satisfied. Still in his teens, this Glasgow-based Welshman has patented a form of lazy…

John Foxx & The Maths - Interplay

Cold synth masterpiece from the electro-pop pioneer

12 Oct 2011

(Metamatic Records) Now a real-life silver Foxx, the pushing-60 electro-pop/clash pioneer and former vocalist with Ultravox before Midge Ure made them rubbish might just have found his time. This retro-future compendium of detached, dystopian…

The Wild Swans - The Coldest Winter For A Hundred Years

Paul Simpson’s band of reignited pop classicists plus guests

10 Aug 2011

(Occultation) After 30 years of hurt, Paul Simpson’s band of reignited pop classicists are on a mission. Featuring a supergroup of musical crusaders recruited from the ranks of Echo and the Bunnymen, Spiritualised and Brian Jonestown Massacre, this…

Lineage: Michael Craig-Martin, Ian Davenport and Julian Opie

Edinburgh Art Festival 2010 - Printmaking, but not as we know it

5 Aug 2011

Drip, drip, drip go the variations on a theme that form the quartet of works culled from Ian Davenport’s ‘Etched Puddle’ series, in which assorted rainbow-arrayed, candy-striped, multi-coloured streams trickle down into a similarly hued liquid carpet at…

Robert Rauschenberg: Botanical Vaudeville

Sparkling post-industrial dance on gleaming surfaces

3 Aug 2011

Inverleith House has long carved a niche for itself as a champion of late 20th century American icons, and for the gallery’s British Art Show contribution has gathered up a grab-bag of 37 works made between 1982 and 1998 by Abstract Expressionism’s…

The Northern Renaissance: Dürer to Holbein

Compendium of works inspired by the Renaissance innovator

3 Aug 2011

There’s something of an inky-fingered Dürer overload in the ‘burgh just now. Following on from Dürer’s Fame over at the National Galleries, this 16th century compendium of more than 100 works uses his output as a springboard for the burgeoning of…

The Pineapple Chunks - A Dog Walked In

Gloriously messy pop rock from Edinburgh scuzz merchants

3 Aug 2011

(self-released) Smoother than they once were, Edinburgh’s premier lo-fi power-popsters nervertheless come on like some unreconstructed missing link between Swell Maps and Pavement, their urgently scuzzed-up melodies bouncing along with an unashamed…

Dürer’s Fame

Tribute to the German woodcut and engravings master Albrecht Durer

21 Jul 2011

German handball star Pascal Hens gazes out from a black-and-white poster, his torso naked, gaze serious, his pose one of self-deification. This is enhanced further by a tattoo on his stomach of two disembodied hands clasped together as if in prayer.

Gravity's Rainbow

Pynchon-inspired group show explores different representations of colour

21 Jul 2011

The acid house smiley face on the sunny yellow ball of Peter Liversidge’s shelf-load of single-hued detritus speaks volumes about this colour-focused group show of eight artists that takes its title from Thomas Pynchon’s baroque noir. It begins with a…

Fake Eyelashes - A Little Bit of Bread and No Cheese

Melancholic laidback affair fronted by Katy Lironi

13 Jul 2011

(Creeping Bent) Katy Lironi’s pedigree as a chanteuse dates back to C-86 swoonsters Fizzbombs followed by a stint fronting bubblegum stompers The Secret Goldfish. This latest vehicle for Ms L’s sublime cooing is an infinitely more laidback affair.

The Blue Aeroplanes - Anti Gravity

Dense art-rock epic chiming with wisdom and experience

13 Jul 2011

(Art Star/Albino Two) Long before REM lost their edge, Bristol’s Blue Aeroplanes were their English counterparts, ploughing an urgent furrow of spikily jangular folk-rock with multiple guitars zinging about every which way to backdrop lead auteur…

Qatsi trilogy with Philip Glass live score highlight of Edinburgh International Festival

EIF 2011 screening of Koyaanisqatsi, Powaqqatsi and Naqoyqatsi

5 Jul 2011

One of the earliest Edinburgh screenings of Koyaanisqatsi, the first of Godfrey Reggio’s remarkable trilogy of films scored by minimalist composer Philip Glass, was in an old porn cinema opposite what is now the Festival Theatre, then a bingo hall.

Nina Rhode: Friendly Fire / Cara Tolmie: Read Thou Art And Read Thou Shalt Remain

Mixed media from Glasgow and Berlin

23 Jun 2011

If the world is a circle without a beginning and nobody knows where it really ends (‘laa-la-laaa-la’), as a zenned-out Hal David once wrote to a Burt Bacharach choon, then both Nina Rhode and Cara Tolmie’s worlds seem to be on a permanent loop in these…

Wounded Knee - Anicca

Drew Wright’s ongoing adventure in ethno-celtic vocal loops

21 Jun 2011

(Krapp Tapes) This latest excursion in Drew Wright’s ongoing adventure in ethno-celtic vocal loops marries two extended pieces back-to-back on a cassette that comes in a plain brown, hand-stamped envelope and wrapped in an offcut of Harris…

Thomas Houseago: The Beat of the Show

Sculptures that 'suggest a society getting back to basics'

14 Jun 2011

The relationship between the title of the first museum-based show by Leeds-born sculptor Houseago and the work itself may not be immediately apparent. It’s taken from Transmission, the urgent post-punk anthem released in 1979 by Joy Division, who…

The Wild Swans - Captain's Rest, Glasgow, Tue 7 Jun, 2011

Reignited version of iconic Liverpool post-punk group

14 Jun 2011

Heroism comes in many forms, but Paul Simpson's ongoing awfully big adventure fronting his reconstituted, reconfigured and on this showing on the first date of a short UK tour thoroughly reignited Wild Swans nom de plume is a sublime experience that…

Nina Rhode: Friendly Fire / Cara Tolmie: Read thou Art And Read Thou Shalt Remain

Two art films from a Berliner and a Glasweigan

14 Jun 2011

If the world is a circle without a beginning and nobody knows where it really ends (‘laa-la-laaa-la’), as a zenned-out Hal David once wrote to a Burt Bacharach choon, then both Nina Rhode and Cara Tolmie’s worlds seem to be on a permanent loop in these…

White Heath - Take No Thought For Tomorrow

Edinburgh five-piece pop-rock collection latest fruits from Stow College

14 Jun 2011

(Electric Honey) The latest graduate of Stow College’s music industry course’s in-house record label is this Edinburgh five-piece’s collection of epic soundtracks to vocalist Sean Watson’s heartfelt lyrical concerns. Delivered in an opaque vocal…

The legacy of Scottish arts institutions ECA and GSA

An examination as degree shows and 2011 Turner Prize approach

27 May 2011

When David Shrigley spoke in 2010 about how the arts institutions in Glasgow were crucial to his creative development, he may have been bemoaning the impending threat of arts cuts, but his intervention nonetheless speaks volumes about where art…

The Nightingales - Sneaky Pete's, Edinburgh, Mon 23 May 2011

Skewed meat n' two veg avant-garage from alt-punk stalwarts

27 May 2011

The Nightingales are what happens to 1970s-sired latch-key kids if you leave them alone with a CD of Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica, a DVD of The Wheeltappers and Shunters Social Club and the Bumper Book of Existentialism For Boys. After more…

Exposure - Tenniscoats

Japanese duo/couple Saya and Ueno Takashi who have released eight albums

24 May 2011

Who are Tenniscoats? They’re a charming Japanese duo made up of real life couple Saya and Ueno Takashi, who, over the last decade, have released eight albums of their prolific songsmithery as well as playing with fellow traveller Maher Shalal Hash…

Jacob Yates and the Pearly Gate Lock Pickers – Luck (Re:Peater)

20 May 2011

Hallelujah! The ghost of Uncle John & Whitelock, Glasgow's seriously demented purveyors of their self-styled horror r n' b, is reborn and delivered here in the still possessed shape of Jabob Yates (nee Lovatt), former howler of that parish. Lovatt and…

Golden Grrrls - 2011 Tour cassette

8-track cassette of breakneck, spindly, indie guitar fuzz by Glasgow trio

20 May 2011

(self-released) Now how DIY is this? An eight-track cassette of breakneck, spindly, indie guitar fuzz by Glasgow girl/boy trio featuring former Park Attack drummer turned singer/guitarist Lorna Gilfedder that has no name and no label and is available…

She’s Hit - Pleasure

'Like The Stooges giving the Jesus and Mary Chain what for'

19 May 2011

(Re:Peater) Named after a suitably scuzzed-up epistle by Nick Cave’s former breeding ground/alma mater The Birthday Party, but judging by the band photos too young to shave, this Glasgow quintet take their forebears’ primitive voodoo trash aesthetic…

British Art Show 2011 - Karla Black interview

Scottish artist with work at BAS7 and the upcoming Venice Biennale

11 May 2011

Representing a cross-section of the best of the nation's contemporary artists (including a sizeable chunk of Scottish talent), the British Art Show is touring to Glasgow for the first time in 21 years. Neil Cooper talks to Karla Black whose work will…

Fovea Hex - Here Is Where We Used To Sing

10 May 2011

(Janet Records) The hidden past of Fovea Hex vocalist and focal point Clodagh Simonds is almost as colourful as her present on this beguilingly mysterious album of new songs supported by an ensemble – neither the words 'band' nor 'group' lend the…

Paul Vickers and The Leg, Andy Brown, Zed Penguin

Sneaky Pete's, Edinburgh, Thu 24 Apr 2011

4 May 2011

Edinburgh eccentrica in exelcis is the order of the day for this triple bill based around the unveiling of Paul Vickers and The Leg's forthcoming third album of wacked-out Beefhearian music-hall blart. Opening proceedings, however, is Zed Penguin, aka…

Kommissar Hjuler & Mama Baer / Ninni Morgia & Silvia Kastel

The Banshee Labyrinth, Edinburgh, Mon 18 Apr 2011

28 Apr 2011

Two couples stand side by side in a projected snapshot at the back of the stage. The fashions are retro, the pose casually studied somewhere between a 1970s terrorist cell and the anti-Abba. In the flesh, a blonde woman is slumped on all fours on the…

Jonathan Owen's print and sculpture exhibition is a beguiling game of hide and seek

20 Apr 2011

The nutcracker suite of small carved figures that form the modest centrepiece of Jonathan Owen’s discreet boudoir of a show appear to be hiding from themselves. The top half of one’s head is a fragile cage with a perfectly centred nut where the brain…

The Leopards - Never Been the Same

Garage rock revival from Mick Slaven that's lost none of the original charm

20 Apr 2011

(Creeping Bent) Glaswegian Mick Slaven’s troupe of garage guitar growlers return after a 14 year hiatus, but still sound like they’ve been hanging out with the Cramps at the rock’n’roll diner at the end of the world. The end result is a very personal…

Flesh - Sick Electricity

Disco-pop debut masterminded by Stephen Lironi and Douglas MacIntyre, featuring Sharon Martin

20 Apr 2011

(Creeping Bent) The brainchild of producer Stephen Lironi and label boss Douglas MacIntyre, Flesh is based around the ice-cool voice of Sharon Martin and aspires to an electro-squelch, dancefloor melange of Chic-styled gloss and the avant-disco diva…

Marcus Adams: Royal Photographer

Handsomely displayed archive is stately, regal and beautifully shot

21 Mar 2011

The best Royal portrait ever was a line drawing gracing the cover of post-punk zine City Fun in 1981 to commemorate the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Di. A classic image of the happy couple was waggishly reconfigured so the…

Claude Cahun / Sue Tompkins

Female artists bridge last two centuries in contrasting but complementary shows

21 Mar 2011

Two female artists bridge the last two centuries in these contrasting but complementary shows. Cahun’s all-angles black and white photographs on the top floor of the gallery captures the artist’s striking singularity via a series of portraits that look…

Non-Stick Erratic Carvery - Inverleith House, Edinburgh, Sun 13 Feb 2011

Day-long experimental event featuring Jazzfinger, Duncan Harrison, Usurper and more

3 Mar 2011

Lazy Sunday afternoons in the Botanics will never be the same again after this all-day extravaganza of nine acts culled from Edinburgh’s fecund experimental hiss-and-mist scene, set in the ornate upstairs gallery of Inverleith House. Headlined by…

Benni Hemm Hemm - Skot

Gloriously jaunty piano, horn and string arrangements

1 Mar 2011

(Kimi) From the opening jangles of this latest magnum opus by Icelandic ex-pat turned Edinburgh resident Benedikt H Hermannsson, one could be forgiven for thinking this was the missing link between the fey-pop joie de vivre of early Orange Juice and…

Jeremy Millar on new exhibition Resemblances, Sympathies and Other Acts

Celebrated artist on how the past informs his new exhibition

24 Feb 2011

Jeremy Millar has just been listening to PJ Harvey’s new album prior to talking about his forthcoming show at the CCA in Glasgow. Somehow the other-worldly, transcendent qualities of this most hypnotic of singer-songwriters fits in with Millar’s…

Craig Murray-Orr documents self-imposed exile in the wilderness

New Zealand-born artist captures magnificent isolation

18 Feb 2011

There’s a sense of magnificent isolation as you go walkabout in New Zealand-born Craig Murray-Orr’s first show for a decade, that says much about self-imposed exile in the wilderness. Both Henry David Thoreau’s novel Walden and the sprawl of Jack…

Fruitmarket fêted Jean-Marc Bustamante exhibition Dead Calm

Documentary snapshots of back roads and deserted Ballardian swimming pools

16 Feb 2011

As a large-scale exhibition of his work comes to the Fruitmarket fêted artist Jean-Marc Bustamante talks to Neil Cooper about his need to get out of the studio You won’t find many people in Jean-Marc Bustamante’s work. If you can see the wood for the…

Listen to sound art underwater at Glasgow's Wet Sounds installation

Swimming pool listening part of Glasgow Music and FIlm Festival

16 Feb 2011

The last time Wet Sounds floated into view was in Leith Baths in Edinburgh, where a non-stop electronic pulse added momentum as well as meditation to the daily work-out. This time around, curator Joel Cahan has enlisted the skills of site-specific…

New Territories festival centres on work by Black Market International

Performance art festival in Glasgow and Aberdeen

11 Feb 2011

One thing the annual New Territories festival has never done is stand still. This year, the longstanding National Review of Live Art may have vanished, but the newly branded This Is Performance Art strand has risen from its ashes with an ambitious…

Wire - Cabaret Voltaire, Edinburgh - Tue 8 Feb 2011,

Art rock unit leaner, more urgent, yet more conventional than ever

11 Feb 2011

The young lady ID’d on the door says much about the Wire demographic. Especially as she’s escorted by her mum and dad. The original art school punks may be well into their third decade, but their influence on the last couple of generations of Brit-pop…

Conquering Animal Sound launch debut album of ethereal electronica

Edinburgh duo combine hushed looped vocals and understated electronics

28 Jan 2011

The first time you chance upon a Conquering Animal Sound live affair, you might well be forgiven for tip-toeing back outside again. As the Edinburgh sired duo’s just released debut album, Kammerspiel should indicate at its Edinburgh launch, the CAS…

Seeing Ian Hamilton Finlay's work indoors proves claustrophobic

Exhibition of work by polymath behind Little Sparta garden is hymn to nature

26 Jan 2011

There’s something slightly claustrophobic about seeing Ian Hamilton Finlay’s work indoors. As anyone who’s basked in the glories of the radical polymath’s Little Sparta garden in Dunsyre near Edinburgh will be aware, Hamilton Finlay was so at one with…

John Cooper Clarke lines up Glasgow Arches date

Bard of Salford continues public rehabilitation after celebrity endorsements

19 Jan 2011

When John Cooper Clarke declaimed an epigrammatic ‘why struggle?’ at the opening of his final 2010 Edinburgh Festival Fringe show in his trademark deadpan northern twang, the statement was a typically double-edged mix of the philosophical and the…

Jonathan Horowitz: Minimalist Works from the Holocaust Museum

Colourful response that lends a quietly inclusive wit to its world-changing intent

14 Jan 2011

Don’t be fooled by the apparent dryness of the title of this major solo show by one of the most provocative American artists of the last 20 years. Rather than mimic the worthy but dull, opaque works that populate the United States Holocaust Museum…

Borders-based artist James Hugonin's network of coloured grids

Quietly insistent solidity and strength to Hugonin’s minimalism

12 Jan 2011

Music and movement is at the heart of this display of eight works by the Borders-based artist to mark his 60th birthday. Identical in scale and scope, each canvas painstakingly maps out an interlocking network of coloured brick-shaped grids that dance…

Sophie Macpherson solo show at Sorcha Dallas

The artist on her fascination with live performance

3 Jan 2011

You get the impression Sophie Macpherson likes to keep moving, both creatively and personally. This certainly seems to be the motivation behind the Aylesbury-born GSA-trained artist’s forthcoming solo show of texts, posters, a video and a 16-mm film at…

Various - After Twilight

15 Dec 2010

(LTM) Six former residents of uber-chic Belgian label Les Disques du Crépuscule re-record greatest should’ve-been-early-80s-hits alongside more recent material in a project conceptualised and curated by Isabella Antenna, who coos continentally…

CKDH/Scrim - Summer Trance/Squubble and Beak

Electronic squall from major players on Edinburgh’s noise scene

15 Dec 2010

(Total Vermin) Two cassettes of electronic squall from major players on Edinburgh’s fecund post-noise diaspora released on Manchester’s prolific DIY label. One half of Hockyfrilla, CKDH, aka Rhian Thompson, gets back to nature with a chirruping…

Scars, TV 21 and Malcolm Ross set for Edinburgh date

HMV Picturehouse bill unites luminaries of Edinburgh post-punk scene

10 Dec 2010

When twinkly electronic pranksters Lemon Jelly played Edinburgh’s Usher Hall a few years ago to promote their new 64-95 album, some younger audience members may have been puzzled. At the end of the set, a trio of guitar, bass and drum-wielding gents of…

Ali Robertson’s Ludd Quest / Usurper and Sticky Foster / Brittle Hammer Trio

Edinburgh avant-auteur Ali Robertson deliver three albums

30 Nov 2010

Three slices of Edinburgh avant-auteur and one half of vocal slapstick duo Usurper Ali Robertson’s collaborative pursuits finds a self-titled soundclash with A-Band absurdist Foster mixing live splutter with soundfiles recorded in Bogota and Edinburgh.

Spectorbullets - Spectorbullets

30 Nov 2010

(Mayakovsky Produkts) The brainchild of New York-dwelling Swedish singer-songwriter Gustaf Heden and former Fire Engines/Win/Piefinger drummer/sonic magician Russell Burn, Spectorbullets mix of stripped-down anti-folk and strung-out, rock‘n’roll…

Godspeed You! Black Emperor embark on UK and US tour

Montreal post-rock collective back from hiatus for tour and All Tomorrow's Parties slot

23 Nov 2010

When Montreal collective Godspeed You! Black Emperor played their second ever UK show in Edinburgh’s tiny Stills Gallery in November 1998, it was a suitably low-key setting for a fiercely private-minded group who, with the rise of pre-millennial…

Giant Tank Remedial Social

SunBear Gallery, Edinburgh, Mon 1 Nov 2010

19 Nov 2010

The idea behind this new venture from Edinburgh’s longest serving promoters of experimental sounds, Giant Tank, is to provide an informal, semi-regular speakeasy for the burgeoning low-key scene that’s somewhere between a bar, a gig and a ‘happening’.

Revealing the Invisible: The Art of Stansfield / Hooykaas from Different Perspectives

Exhibition represents spiritual homecoming for Dutch artist Madelon Hooykaas

15 Nov 2010

When Revealing the Invisible opens at Glasgow’s CCA and Street Level, it will be a spiritual homecoming for Madelon Hooykaas. While the CCA may be unrecognisable from its origins as all-purpose arts lab the Third Eye Centre, it was here in 1974 that the…

Simon Starling’s Project for a Masquerade

Complex sculptural meditation features a star-studded cast

3 Nov 2010

The pan-global plot of Simon Starling’s latest work is as labyrinthine as a Cold War spy thriller. The quiet elegance of the GSA-trained 2005 Turner Prize winner’s Project for a Masquerade (Hiroshima) / Mirror Room similarly references both real and…

Tommy Grace, Ged Quinn and Tony Swain: Restore Us and Regain

3 Nov 2010

Taking its title from John Milton’s Paradise Lost, a warped and windswept romanticism pervades this triple bill of work. With four works apiece from Grace and Swain – both already established in these parts – and three from Quinn, each artist creates…

George Barber: The Long Commute/Jaygo Bloom: Arcade

Joint DCA show references video games, club culture and scratch video scene

3 Nov 2010

Club culture is the ultimate creative hub. Beyond – but probably because of – its dazed and confused hedonism, the dance-floor and chill-out room are inspirational eye- and ear-openers. Both artists in these parallel shows are direct descendents of such…

Glasgow experimental music festival Instal makes 10th outing

Bill includes MattFlorian Hecker, guitarist Neil Davidson and French improviser Matthieu Saladin

2 Nov 2010

Seekers of easy listening music, turn away now. Instal’s exploration of ‘brave, new music’ aims to stimulate your brain, and your ears. Neil Cooper explains further

Lichens - Sneaky Pete’s, Edinburgh, Mon 25 Oct, 2010

All-encompassing hypnotic wash is utterly beguiling

2 Nov 2010

Topping a meticulously chosen bill, the Chicago-based bassist with 90 Day Men and Kranky Records artist, Robert AA Lowe, aka Lichens, can captivate just by putting up his homespun stage set. It’s a similarly precise precursor to the ever-pulsating…

Muscletusk - Ask The Universe

2 Nov 2010

(Braw Records) Tripping straight out of Leith, Muscletusk have been honing their at times terrifying aural assault course across an array of tapes and CDRs for some time now. The seven cuts on this vinyl-only release run together to create a…

Orange Juice - Coals to Newcastle

1 Nov 2010

(Domino) A small review isn’t nearly enough to express the wonders of this six CD and one DVD box set by the Edwyn Collins’ fronted floppy-fringed dandies who effectively invented indie-pop as we know it. Recorded over a startling four years from…

Vic Godard and Subway Sect - We Come As Aliens

1 Nov 2010

(Overground) Without South London’s existentially inclined postman, the history of Scottish pop from Orange Juice and Fire Engines onwards would’ve sounded a whole lot less jangular. Godard’s latest incarnation of Subway Sect produce a glorious…

Babette Mangolte: Yvonne Rainer – Testimony to Improvisation 1972–75

27 Oct 2010

‘Improvisation Time in the Rehearsal Room’, a caustic poem by the late Adrian Mitchell, appeared in the 1981 edition of New Departures, Michael Horowitz’s organ for 1960s counter-culture’s literary survivors. In eight short lines, which depict the…

Raydale Dower: On Memory and Chance

27 Oct 2010

Raydale Dower’s ad hoc art-cabaret speakeasy, Le Drapeau Noir, played with space at this year’s Glasgow International via a restless sonic excitability developed during his stint with post-Captain Beefheart hollerers Uncle John and Whitelock. His…

A Band Called Quinn - The Beggar’s Opera

26 Oct 2010

(Tromolo) Theatre and pop music can often make embarrassingly naff bedfellows, but when Louise Quinn and co appeared onstage in Vanishing Point’s audacious sci-fi reimagining of John Gay’s 18th century satire, their live score was vital to the…

Bill Wells and Stefan Schneider - Pianotapes

26 Oct 2010

(Karaoke Kalk) This second collaboration between Falkirk’s answer to Thelonious Monk and one third of German electronicists To Rococo Rot is a languid marriage between top of the range chamber piano sketches and low-end analogue equipment. Recorded…

Section 25 - Retrofit (LTM)

6 Oct 2010

Like Little Boots’ switched-on grandparents, the formerly doom-laden Blackpool-sired runts of the Factory Records litter turned electro-dancefloor auteurs have produced an infectious swirl of post-modernist motorik. Recorded before the death of founding…

Wounded Knee - House Music

15 Sep 2010

(Krapp Tapes) With cassettes and CDRs being churned out by below-radar experimentalists and available online and at gigs, Edinburgh’s premier progenitor of looped vocal rounds Drew Wright is joining in. Here, he serves up a bumper-sized C-60ish…