Neil Cooper

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

Quietly insistent solidity and strength to Hugonin’s minimalism

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

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

(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

(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

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

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

(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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(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

(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

(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

‘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

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

(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

(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)

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

(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…

Davy Henderson - three albums that bridge the pop/art matrix

The Sexual Objects - Cucumber, The Nectarine No. 9 - Saint Jack, Win - Freaky Trigger

The Sexual Objects - Cucumber (Aktion und Spass) The Nectarine No. 9 - Saint Jack (We Can Still Picnic) Win - Freaky Trigger (RPM) From Fire Engines onwards, Davy Henderson has bridged the pop/art matrix with singularly maverick aplomb. The…