There’s a great deal of immersive theatre knocking about these days: Hotel Medea and Audience at the Fringe, Green and McMaster’s The Fire Burns and Burns, Mr Criticulous’ Critical Confessions. Made fashionable by London’s Punchdrunk, and promoted by any  company that fancies a short-cut to catharsis, it’s been around long enough to be a recognisable tactic but is new enough to retain some shock value.

Although it is hardly original – ever since the Catholic Mass went interactive after Vatican II, even conservative religious traditions are using it – immersive theatre is quite the latest thing. One dance company gained notoriety by clambering naked over their audience (and spitting on a critic), and Adrian Howells took it to a logical end by bathing his audience of one. It might take courage on behalf of both actors and audience but its antecedents are in pantomime and stand-up comedy. And the best theatre has always aimed to immerse the crowd, even if only emotionally.

The contemporary fashion for immersion comes on the back of a reaction against the script and the extremity of the last great British performance movement, New Brutalism. Once Sarah Kane and Mark Ravenhill had done their nasty business of stage, and the response became jaded, there was nothing left but to shatter the fourth wall to get some kind of emotional engagement.

Immersive theatre can be gentle – Green’s use of nudity and inviting the audience into the action is frequently kind and inclusive, while Fuel have handed a collection of sheds over to artists who promptly made intimate, meditative works. It connects with the love of ritual trumpeted by contemporary performance practice, and often has overtones of spiritual or political conscience – Green again, or even Ontroerend Goed’s more vicious attacks on the traditional role of the crowd. It ticks boxes for the avant-garde, breaking down those pesky conventions of the stage that are supposedly getting in the way of immediacy and engagement. And it probably envies computer games, which really occupy the player’s consciousness.

There’s a parallel with the rash of interactive exhibits popping up in museums and art galleries: and this betrays the anxiety behind the fashion. Both museums and theatre are old, under attack from new media that offer more control and agency to the viewer. Immersive theatre become the one stop solution. Frankly, anything I am using in Critical Confessions is bound to be suspect. I lack any formal theatrical training, but give me a black box, ten minute slots and I’m Larry Olivier.

Green and Goed, and Punchdrunk and Fuel, and Howells and Hotel Medea may not lack the skills, but all this intimacy and immersion is in danger of losing the artistry that makes theatre resonant. I’ve struggled making sense of Green’s latest work – it feels too much like Secular Sunday School for me – and by homing in on a subjective experience, made meaningful not by the vision of the artist but by the engagement of the audience, immersive theatre is in danger of dropping the communal experience that makes theatre different from watching a DVD at home alone.

Of course, anything that brings theatre closer to a lap-dance is fine by me – there’s an immersive experience that achieves exactly the emotional response it aims for – but it also offers problems of interpretation. Reviews of Audience concentrated on the moral conduct of the performers and the possibility that they had plants in the crowd, rather than the message of powerlessness and manipulation that Goed were getting at. Green and McMaster’s The Fire takes on the quality of a sweat lodge, but relies heavily on the individuals finding their own experience and meaning. And, most disturbingly, whenever immersive theatre turns up, it encourages debate about the boundaries of theatre and its form. This is, for me, a major distraction from the real issues that art can discuss.

That might serve as a broader warning against any radicalism in performance style, but that’s another discussion.

Aside from its association with interactive galleries, immersive theatre is very much a product of the Live Art scene, where performers frequently question the participation of the audience. Marina Abramovitch did it that time she let the audience go to town on her body: a regular feature of The National Review was the act which involved a dialogue between performer and audience. There’s even a guy who invites people to slap him about with custard pies while he tries to read rationalist philosophy.  And Pocha Nostra did something in Tramway thatstill scares me.

It’s only when it moves out of this safe zone – Live Art is all about testing the boundaries – that it bothers me. It’s difficult to review a show like the Bystander Effect, which is more social experiment than play. This seems like a problem for the critic, unless it is recognised that the critic is often the connection between an art work and a potential audience. If the entire experience is personal, or based on a twist that needs to be kept secret, or compromises the critic, there is no way of talking about the work in public. At this point, immersion becomes seclusion.

Good immersive theatre also requires skill. I can keep it tight for ten minutes in Critical Confessions, and Green has a kindly demeanour that makes The Fire safe, despite asking something so intimate from the audience. But the cast of Hotel Medea coped very badly when I tried to join in the interaction more realistically: I was disappointed that they failed to handle my attempts to subvert their game, leaving me unimmersed for long sections of the show. By trying to be part of the action in a way not prescribed by the director, I undermined my engagement in the event. And if the actor really wants to immerse the viewer, questions of moral responsibility crop up. I realised pretty quickly that my audience had to leave my booth with a smile. That’s why they get a gift at the end.

Personally, I love being part of the fun. I even went nuts for that mad Santa thing in The Arches over Christmas. I am pretty comfortable being in the game – I can lob my shoes at actors quite happily, so long ad I have permission to play with my conventional role as viewer. I am not concerned that immersion is breaking rules, only that it has to be very good to work. If it is used as a short cut to catharsis, or a trendy excuse for a half-baked idea, or a branch of conceptualism where the artist abdicates responsibility for the audience’s experience: well, I am just bored and unimpressed. And if it reveals a lack of faith in the potential of theatrical convention – the answer might be a few better plays, not a radical restructuring of the foundations of the art  form.

Sodom if they can't take a joke...

My mother would always pretend to be nonplussed by representations of sex and violence, while being secretly offended. My own prudery takes a different form: I pretend to be gung-ho for nudity and brutality, silently insisting on a purpose to any sensational elements in theatre. So, having become bored by burlesque – as it turns out, even sexy young things stripped only engages me if it has a subtle political subtext – I turned my attention to Sodom, a post-student, late night production of Rochester’s play about buggery and moral consequences.

Rochester’s script reads like Shakespeare writing pornography: more cunts than cherubs, and the plot is a flimsy excuse for threats of male rape and women caught with the horses. There’s nothing shocking in obscenity, except when it jars with Rochester’s poetic phrasing. The cast do lend the iambics a received pronunciation, which maintains the initial surprise for a while. Unfortunately, the tricks that they employ to avoid nudity, although clever, strip the play of its serious intention to titillate.

Sadly, they never push beyond the hilarity of saying rude words in posh voices. Certainly, Rochester did not intend for Sodom to have a redeeming moral – the finale is rushed, and the descent to hell an afterthought compounded by a silly joke. Rather, the play is meant to be erotic, sharing the quality of Victorian pornography, using language to thrill. This production refuses to interpret this for a modern audience, leaving it an exercise in dramatic archaeology and never touching on the theatricality of its diverse scenes.

Master of the comic book Alan Moore recently reflected on why violence is so much more acceptable than sex as a topic for art. He promptly added his Lost Girls to the argument, enjoying the irony of throwing a work of pornography into his serious bibliography of mature graphic novels. As with burlesque, Sodom is a reminder of how sexuality is a potent ingredient when flung onto the stage: directed with an eye to the internet era, it could be a challenging hour of amoral entertainment. Yet, unlike Lost Girls, this version refuses to abandon a certain restraint. In answer to Moore’s question, it acknowledges that some things cannot be performed without authenticity: a naked performer is really naked. It’s not fair to expect a fringe show to do justice to Sodom’s sensual potential.

The Fire Burns and Burns (Peter McMaster and Nic Green) @ The Arches

I am surprised at how little I worried about being naked with a group of strangers.

Nic Green's greatest hit was Trilogy - a tentative adventure into feminism in the post-ideological age - and featured large numbers of naked dancing women. Green's enthusiasm for breaking the fourth wall had led to a finale where female audience members were invited to join in a nude rendition of Jerusalem. The Fire teams her with partner Peter McMaster and revisits many of Trilogy's themes: community, inclusion, the personal as the political and, of course, people in the scud.

Taking the format of a mini-sweat lodge, The Fire is a step beyond even immersive theatre.It's a happening, a secular ritual. Fire is a repeated motif, much in the way that the host is used in Mass. It heats the hot stones, it is a metaphor for passion, it lights the candles that represent us as a community.

My own alienation is rarely a surprise to me.

The Fire Burns and Burns is barely concerned with any of the usual conventions of theatre. The quality of the script is irrelevant - although the song that McMaster and Green use to bid us farewell has a charming ambiguity. Their performances are merely explanations of the next step in the ritual. The event itself is merely a recreation of a spiritual initiation process. If I feel nothing - who is at fault?

Although I feel no shame at being naked, or being washed by the performers - I have done this sort of thing with Adrian Howells - I feel little else. No great revelations emerge: I am not challenged, I am not presented with an idea that I have never considered. I smile at other people in the group, but I have not shared anything with them.

Green and McMaster appear to be chasing some fine ideas: the rescue of ritual from the spiritual dustbin, the development of a theatre that allows the audience to find a personal response, a celebration  of the possibility of community. But The Fire fails to ignite my own sense of connection.

My passivity is a matter of concern to me.

Coming Soon: David Hughes and Last Orders

"I feel the company has an openness to the distortions and corruptions of dance to creative ends."
Alex Rigg, performer and poster boy for Last Orders


When David Hughes Dance hit the Traverse with The Red Room at Fringe 2009, the enthusiasm of the critics was contagious. Not only did he recruit the dark lord of clowning, Al Seed, he presented a version of The Masque of the Red Death that incorporated Indian dance, a disorientating light scheme and even a joke about ballet at the French court. Perhaps taking his cue from continental companies like Les Ballet C de la B, Hughes recruited a diverse cast, and placed their technical skill and traditions at the service of Seed's fiendish vision.

Come 2011, and expectations were running high for the "sequel": Al Seed taking on the legend of Sawney Bean, Scotland's most famous cannibal. Yet the result divided critics. Some delighted in the savagery of Seed's vision; others attacked it as predictable and distasteful. It was even accused of bulletin boards of "not being theatre" - an accolade usually afforded to the most challenging work that settles down in subsequent years to become an establishment favourite, like The Rite of Spring.

Hughes' career has included time in Ballet Rambert - when, under choreographer Christopher Bruce, they were are their creative peak - and DV8, who were crucial during the introduction of physical theatre to wider audiences. His subsequent work has included solo pieces from some of the UK's finest choreographers - especially the challenging Bruce's Hurricane, set to the music of Bob Dylan and retelling the story of the unjustly imprisoned boxer in a powerfully mimetic style.

Yet unlike many other companies - including Rambert, who have remained stuck in ballet-based technique - David Hughes Dance have followed up on the promise of  freedom within "contemporary" choreography. While much so-called contemporary dance is ballet with a few ungainly additions, DHD reached out to other forms. The Red Room was an expression of confident mutation: Last Orders has taken that confidence further. Refusing to tame Bean's story for the stage, it has been accused of reveling in ugliness.

Of course, that is entirely appropriate for the story that Last Orders tells.That the show has met such harsh criticism does not reflect so much on the quality - no-one suggests that the company can't hack it - but the challenges made to the accepted ideas of what dance ought to cover. It's also a question of taste...

Eno gets Brewed

Shock Upset at City Halls as Local Boys Take Down Magisterial Soundscape artist


Music at the Brew House 4: Icebreaker 3

Brian Eno, long established as the defining artists for both ambient and electronic music, has lost out to Edinburgh's contemporary classical underdogs Stephen Deazley and Martin Parker. This long-awaited clash, pairing Edinburgh's Music at the Brewhouse against Icebreaker's recreation of Eno's Apollo, ended in upset as Deazley's collaboration with media designer  Andy McGregor emphasised an idiosyncratic story of one man's bravery over The Science Museum's 2009 commission featuring Eno's music and NASA's footage of the moon landing.

On paper, it was no contest. Eno's 1983 album Apollo, Atmospheres and Soundtracks had been scored for Icebreaker, known for their driving soundtrack to Ashley Page's seminal ballet, Cheating, Lying, Stealing. The addition of BJ Cole upfront on pedal steel, and the unseen images from Apollo's mission to the moon, seemed to ensure that Brewhouse, more frequently seen at Tramway creating multi-media musical happenings and relying only on a film of the barely known test pilot Joseph Kittinger, would provide little more than a distraction.

Brewhouse chose to bat first, offering a taut introduction. Guided by Kittinger's journey into the outer reaches of the stratosphere, and his descent, Man High made optimum use of the chamber line up: Peter Furness' clarinets summoning up the woozy splendour of the ascent, while the three violins held steady, lending a romantic swoon to the adventure. Driven by Joby Burgess' diverse percussion and David Knotts' pulsating keyboards, Brewhouse illustrated McGregor's mixing of the 1960 footage of the pilot's 32  kilometer leap.

In the second half, Icebreaker began with a solid summary of the space race's intentions. Footage of Kennedy giving it patriotic pride and the tension at Cape Canaveral soon resolved into iconic imagery of the Apollo spacecraft reaching to the moon. Because of the emphasis on new footage - no countdown to blast-off or amusing zero gravity snacking - the familiarity of the journey does not detract from the spectacular surrealism of the moon landing. By the time the astronauts finally reach the moon, Icebreaker have established both the bravery of the mission and the splendour of our species' trans-planetary ambition.

For all Brewhouse's dynamic drama, the relaxed majesty of Eno and Icebreaker looked set to triumph. Then, sometime between the landing and the larking about on the moon, Icebreaker lost the game. Cole's pedal steel adds an awkward sentimentality to the sequences after the US flag has been planted. The new footage is given the intensity of holiday film, a schmaltzy, thoughtless celebration of a couple of guys arsing about in outer space. Eno is not just an avant-garde electronic experimentalist: he is the producer of U2, and this is audible in the later half of For All Mankind. Ironically, the astronauts are brought back to earth by his sterile theft of Hawaiian and country motifs.

Of course, the real winner tonight was contemporary classical music: Deazley and Parker established themselves as accessible, forceful composers, and even Icebreaker's disappointing result linked ambient electronica to lush orchestration. A show of two halves, perhaps... but both halves demonstrated how music can reanimate obscure heroes of history and events that familiarity has rendered empty.

Mr Criticulous at The Arches

Having spent the last week in a box in The Arches' foyer - any more explanation than that tends to get complicated and loses the mystery of Critical Confessions, my solo show - I have had a great deal of time to think. Apart from being disappointed with the number of people not turning up after booking a slot, even though I give away a free gift to every punter who dares break the seal on my door, I've been excited by the experience, and can't thank LJ at The Arches enough for trusting me to do this.

Critical Confessions came out of my interest in crossing the line between performance and criticism. It's a bit like a confession booth at church, or Santa's Grotto, or a lap dance. It is unashamedly questioning and intellectual, although the latter depends more on the audience than the star turn.

Without giving out any names, two of the Glasgow performers whom I most admire came in to see me perform. That did frighten me, but this leaves a little message to the rest of the Live Art Young Team: what is keeping you away? Slots free on Tuesday.

SSh... Secret

Yes, I have an agenda.

I believe in the power of art to transform society.

In fact, I believe in art being the only possible chance for humanity to wake up from its state of somnambulance. If I postured as an anarchist in my teenage years, right up until a bunch of boys in black scarves smashed up London on a protest march and became The Daily Mail’s poster-boys for chaos, I have retained a distrust of politicians that has made the hypocrisy of the ConDem Alliance, and the platitudes of the left, no surprise.

I imagine that I am merely reinventing a romantic notion about art which lost currency in around 1848.

This isn’t the place to define what sort of art might effect that change: I am not quite ready to be that bold. Nevertheless, the idea of live performance, where people gather in public to share appreciation of an aesthetic vision, is attractive.

In diverse ways, art can be a forum where people gather to discuss alternatives, possibilities. Artists, who generally prefer having enough time, space and money to create more art than gaining  political power, are safer authorities than any number of politicians with a road-map to stability.

Forgive me for a moment if I go all school-teacher on you. Book XXIV of the Iliad, one of the earliest works of literature, concludes a narrative that has rejoiced in a violent idea of heroism with a tender meeting between a vicious, triumphant warrior and the father of his victim.

Achilles, who has been clearly set up as the biggest, baddest hero of them all, has avenged the death of his companion Patroclus. He killed Hector, who had killed his buddy, and Hector’s father, Priam, has come to beg for the return of his son’s corpse.

Unsatisfied with merely taking Hector out, Achilles has dedicated his time to abusing the dead body. Yet when he is confronted with an old man mourning, he understands his own mortality and is moved to compassion.

After twenty three chapters of blood-shed and various heroes trying to work out who is the best, usually by counting up the people they have killed or the slaves that they captured, Homer’s reveal is that compassion is what makes a hero complete. At no point does Homer explicitly claim that the Bronze Age code of hacking and eating and killing and boasting is wrong: he just throws in another possibility that has the power to undermine it.

Of course, Achilles’ compassion makes no difference: if The Iliad had continued, Troy would have fallen– it took Virgil to shine this slaughter into epic poetry for us. But that’s kinda the point. Compassion is an end in itself.

That isn’t to say compassion didn’t exist before Homer, or that this one episode led to The Glory that was Greece. But he did throw it into the mix, give an example of how important compassion is. Achilles became a role-model, not least for Alexander the Great. So, stuffed in there with his swift feet, his young death and invincible fighting skills was kindness.

Art can do things like this. It’s a slow change, but better than another riot in the street.

Next week, I’ll be back to slagging off local bands.

I am Post-Modern, Not Rubbish

As someone who has a show called The Radio Hour that last for two – at one time for five, but that was in another city and besides, the Fringe is dead – I hope that I have some sense of playful irony. My Producer Harry sometimes looks at me as if to say “Do you have any idea what is going to happen next?” and the answer is often “no.” Yet after yesterday’s VileArts Radio Hour, I realised that perhaps I’d make a properly post-modern broadcast.

Ever since The Ramones blasted out of NYC, the idea that dumb can be clever has had a hold in popular culture. Whether it is the innocent deconstruction of political dogma by Sacha Cohen when he used to be good – he undermined a fox hunter’s certainty through Ali G’s blunted questions, and Borat was a trip through cultural assumptions made alien – or the underground slang of UK hip-hop, the ancient belief that education needed to be on display in form and function has been dented. Beneath my atrocious research and random connections between guests – serious performance artist and feminist Nic Green to Sean Fae Solar playing sexist raps, anyone? – I’ve been curating a chaotic bricolage broadcast from Glasgow’s arts scene.

There have been plenty of dead-ends. Most of them come from my flirtations with Edinburgh, probably because I don’t really know what is happening there. I try to be too inclusive: yesterday, I tore out the teeth of James MacMillan’s Christus Vinctus by juxtaposing it with Peaches – and this is a piece of music that I adore because it is an unabashed celebration of religious faith.  And I have fallen far from my dream of recreating the feel of late night Radio 3, every time I fade in a blast from Ultimate Thrush, Holy Mountain or Take A Worm for a Walk Week. But I feel justified when I realise that I have just introduced Debussy into a conversation about electronic music. It is a reflection of how I experience the arts: a continuity that constantly asks questions about legacy, influence, tradition and resonance.

Psignal, a man that I am proud to call both friend and collaborator, recently characterised post-modernism as a strategy to break down the established notion of progress. The constant flittering between genre and style needn’t be a facsimile of the great contemporary lie, that gives everything equal worth and refuses to discern quality. By fracturing assumptions about what belongs together, and reviving apparently irrelevant arts, post-modernism is a comprehensive acceptance of the opportunities of global interconnectivity. Sean Fae Solar described his mixing as being like his web-surfing: distracted, intense, dispersed. Yet from this diversity comes something focussed and intense. The Radio Show is an attempt to do something similar.

There are times when I am hugely uncomfortable on air – usually when I am playing something that has explicit lyrics, or when the dynamics of a classical piece seem to have disappeared from the audible threshold. It’s only cognitive dissonance, the most creative state of the mind. When the information becomes contradictory or incomprehensible, the mind is forced to work harder. The Radio Hour tried to do that to listeners. It’s only fair I feel it myself.

And so comes to an end this week’s excuses for being shambolic.

Johnny Bites at Random, Making Love Hurt all the Sweeter

Given that their famous trilogy exploring Little Johnny's emotional and romantic adventures - culminating in the National Theatre of Scotland co-production of their Big Gay Wedding - was originally supported by Glasgay, it's no surprise that Random Accomplice have collaborated with the festival for their latest new direction. Love Hurts - a monologue that follows the dark paths of sexual awakening - is the second in RA's Random Bites series. 

"Random Bites is a relatively new umbrella for the company," explains Johhny McKnight, one of the duo that make up RA.  "Julie Brown (my better half - aka the brains of Random Accomplice!) and myself had a recent meeting where we talked about the importance of us, as artists, being able to take risks and develop ourselves further. And sometimes that means without the emotional crutch or barrier depending on what day it is, of each other." 

Rather than challenge themselves to make the same scale of shows that made their name - McKnight is the notorious director of The Macrobert pantomime, which has rewritten the rules of Scottish Christmas entertainment, while their recent successes Small Town and Promises Promises were staged in the Ton's main theatre - they evolved Random Bites as "small-scale, easy to manage and tour, projects that cost relatively little to make but give us vehicles to try out new ideas or formats."

"We did our National Theatre of Scotland Five Minute Theatre under this banner and now Love Hurts is the first true pilot exercise," McKnight continues. "It's a new project that I have written and directed on a very minuscule budget but that all the artists are doing for either the love of or because I've twisted their arm."

Random Bites is very much in the mood of the times - as is Love Hurts, with its brooding main character and sense of anxiety. In a time when the arts are under threat, sensible companies are looking for new ways to experiment, without undermining their reputation or possible funding. After a decade of growth, RA are still seeking out new possibilities.

"I think for me as a writer its probably a new step for me. Its much more a straight forward play (which I don't think I've ever really done before Smalltown) but, hopefully, still contains a sense of storytelling, comedy and excitement for an audience," he continues. "It's still, like most RA shows, got a real relationship with its audience and - hopefully - taps into those feelings of identification of the thirty- something audience. Only perhaps this show has a more melodramatic climax."

"I do feel as we start to get older at RA, there is an even more urgent and important need to throw ourselves curve balls, test out other forms, work with new artists, create work for different audiences. I think if we don't then we become stale and, even more importantly, uninteresting."

This willingness to experiment has always been a feature of RA: whether it is the zombie horror comedy of Smalltown, the serious moral meditation of The Promise or the melancholy haunted hilarity of the Big Gay Trilogy, McKnight and Brown have always demonstrated their roots in the Young Glasgow Live Art Tradition - both are graduates from the Conservatoire Formerly Known as the RSAMD - need not mean inaccessibility. It might signal a new format, but Love Hurts follows in the open, witty and searching tradition that they have developed over the past ten years. 

Lost and Found and Wounded

I've been rereading Lester Bangs' Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, part of my research into the history of criticism for the Young Critics course at Tramway. Hoping to find some kind of style guide for my vision of Radical Subjectivity, I was disappointed by Bangs' writing: it tends to the adolescent, a match for the energy of the garage rock that Bangs adored, but wearing its influences too clearly on the sleeve - Kerouac, Burroughs' more coherent passages and that's about it. 

Whether Bangs could have thrived in the era of  MTV is a moot, given his entry into the they-died-too-young pantheon of rock: such unabashed romanticism, however, would have struggled to deconstruct the corporate take-over of rock that had already happened by his death in the early 1980s.

Thanks to my Radio Hour, I have challenged myself to go beyond theatre - I am becoming a cultural critic these days. And part of this mutation is expressed in a slightly creepy fixation on "youth music". I've been standing in the corner of the disco again, watching the bright young things groove to tunes that sound like something I liked when I was a teenager.

I have recognised my own subjectivity, and so end up being generous to bands that, frankly, I really don't understand. Found have been touted by The Skinny as some sort of art-rock saviours: people I trust have told me that I'd dig their artistic associations. They certainly got some cash from Creative LandScot, and they have just released a single made out of chocolate. So, they must be artists, right?

I played them on the Hour, but can't exactly remember what the tunes sounded like. Last week, I went to see them live at the aftermath of a special showing of You Instead - filmed over 2010's T in the Park, it wastes both Gavin Mitchell and Cora Bissett by forgetting that a witty script is necessary, even for a gimmick based movie. A week later, and I still can't remember what Found sound like, only that their electronic aspect consisted of one underused keyboard, the guitar picked out a ghost version of Godspeed You Black Emperor's majestic rush and that the singer invested his lyrics with serious intent by pulling a face.

Edinburgh leaks bands like this all the time - rather than fusing diverse genres, they blur the boundaries into a bland broth - and they seem to serve a particular audience - young, hip and serious. 

The chocolate single is a typical trick. Yes, I am sure it says something about the nature of pop, disposability and consumerism. And since the idea is far more interesting than the thing itself, it ticks a few conceptual art boxes. I know that the audience are supposed to do the work these days, that it's not all about the object. But the best thing about this little trick is that even the sucker who buys it won't actually have to listen to the music.

While I am not claiming that Wounded Knee would agree with my sentiments, I am going to set him up as my antidote to Found. First of all, every time he performs, it is something unique. Whether he is singing along to his grandfather's tape recording of "dhu-wop", or encouraging the hipsters of SWG3 to join in an old walking song, Wounded Knee is fresh, fun and provocative. That his voice has the richness of an old folk singer, and the passion of a soul man, only disguises the artful intelligence beneath his restless performances. Unlike Found, who proudly proclaim their artiness.

Listening to Wounded Knee is a surface delight, but slowly reveals deeper pleasures. He can work an audience kindly, breaking that old fourth wall and reminding them how they too are part of the show. He draws the link between Scottish folk and US soul - something that once inspired Scottish rock, but was always mystifyingly oblique. His musical family tree makes sly jokes about language, influence and identity. And more than any other musician working today in Scotland, he reaches the soul.

Found dress up like gentleman fops - a look that was pulled off better by comedy rapper Mr B at the Fringe, or by Chris Eubank, who ripped it from early UK hip-hop - in a self-conscious attempt to invest their music with presence. 

Wounded Knee just gets up and sings, and  recalls Greil Marcus' meditation on The Mekons' Never Been in a Riot. Marcus called this the most punk recording ever, because it just relied on the human voice, reducing the rage to a spectral moaning.

Now, for all my moaning about Lester Bangs, I have a fair idea which artist he'd prefer. Found seem to work very hard to make a minor point; Wounded Knee busts open all sorts of ideas about rock'n'roll by just standing on stage. Maybe, had Bangs lived, Wounded Knee might have helped him become the writer he is imagined to be.

Lost and Found

I've been rereading Lester Bangs' Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, part of my research into the history of criticism for the Young Critics course at Tramway. Hoping to find some kind of style guide for my vision of Radical Subjectivity, I was disappointed by Bangs' writing: it tends to the adolescent, a match for the energy of the garage rock that Bangs adored, but wearing its influences too clearly on the sleeve - Kerouac, Burroughs' more coherent passages and that's about it. Whether Bangs could have survived to write about MTV is a moot, given his entry into the they-died-too-young pantheon of rock: such unabashed romanticism, however, would have struggled to deconstruct the corporate take-over of rock that had already happened by his death in the early 1980s.

Thanks to my Radio Hour, I have challenged myself to go beyond theatre - I am becoming a cultural critic these days. And part of this mutation is expressed in a slightly creepy fixation on "youth music". I've been standing in the corner of the disco again, watching the bright young things groove to tunes that sound like something I liked when I was a teenager.

I have recognised my own subjectivity, and so end up being generous to bands that, frankly, I really don't understand. Found have been touted by The Skinny as some sort of art-rock saviours: people I trust have told me that I'd dig their artistic associations. They certainly got some cash from Creative LandScot, and they have just released a single made out of chocolate. So, they must be artists, right?

I played them on the Hour, but can't exactly remember what the tunes sounded like. Last week, I went to see them live at the aftermath of a special showing of You Instead - filmed over 2010's T in the Park, it wastes both Gavin Mitchell and Cora Bissett by forgetting that a witty script is necessary, even for a gimmick based movie. A week later, and I still can't remember what Found sound like, only that their electronic aspect consisted of one underused keyboard, the guitar picked out a ghost version of Godspeed You Black Emperor's majestic rush and that the singer invested his lyrics with serious intent by pulling a face.

Edinburgh leaks bands like this all the time - rather than fusing diverse genres, they blur the boundaries into a bland broth - and I wouldn't mind if they weren't getting funding off LandScot. The chocolate single is a typical trick. Yes, I am sure it says something about the nature of pop, disposability and consumerism. And since the idea is far more interesting than the thing itself, it ticks a few conceptual art boxes. I know that the audience are supposed to do the work these days, that it's not all about the object. But the best thing about this little trick is that even the sucker who buys it won't have to actually listen to the music.

While I am not claiming that Wounded Knee would agree with my sentiments, I am going to set him up as my antidote to Found. First of all, every time he performs, it is something unique. Whether he is singing along to his grandfather's tape recording of "dhu-wop", or encouraging the hipsters of SWG3 to join in an old walking song, Wounded Knee is fresh, fun and provocative. That his voice has the richness of an old folk singer, and the passion of a soul man, only disguises the artful intelligence beneath his restless performances. Unlike Found, who proudly proclaim their artiness.

Listening to Wounded Knee is a surface delight, but slowly reveals deeper pleasures. He can work an audience kindly, breaking that old fourth wall and reminding them how they too are part of the show. He draws the link between Scottish folk and US soul - something that once inspired Scottish rock, but was always mystifyingly oblique. His musical family tree makes sly jokes about language, influence and identity. And more than any other musician working today in Scotland, he reaches the soul.

Found dress up like gentleman fops - a look that was pulled off better by comedy rapper Mr B at the Fringe, or by Chris Eubank, who ripped it from early UK hip-hop - in a self-conscious attempt to invest their music with presence. Wounded Knee just gets up and sings, and  recalls Greil Marcus' meditation on The Mekons' Never Been in a Riot. Marcus called this the most punk recording ever, because it just relied on the human voice, reducing the rage to a spectral moaning.

Now, for all my moaning about Lester Bangs, I have a fair idea which artist he'd prefer. Found seem to work very hard to make a minor point; Wounded Knee busts open all sorts of ideas about rock'n'roll by just standing on stage. Maybe, had Bangs lived, Wounded Knee might have helped him become the writer he is imagined to be.

Criticulous on the Video

Thom Scullion
Respect the Other
Scullion’s interactive installations have always asked questions about the way that humans use technology to communicate – whether it was the computer game marathons of his youth, or his later musings on outdated social media, Scullion discovered the hidden good in the most disreputable examples of technology.

Eschewing his usual tentative approach, Scullion places himself firmly at the centre of the action: he is a constant presence, encouraging and amusing his young charges. As the centre-piece of Birmingham’s festival of Live Art for Young People, he proves that the venue, a library that spent all its money on the architecture and forgot to buy any actual books, is not the useless white elephant of tabloid notoriety but a poignant reminder of how bad planning and nostalgia can be redeemed by artistic responses.

For Scullion himself, Respect the Other marks a transition, from cult creator to mainstream curator. The popularity of the initial run has led to requests from the Barbican – formerly a thriving performance platform but now a big fucking car park – and Glasgow’s The Arches – for further runs. Not only does he enchant his young audience, Scullion celebrates the power of the live installation as a popular and intelligent medium.