Mouse @ The Art School

...there was a lady and she was dressed up like a dog... well I don't mean a full suit of hair or anything just a collar because she was like doing this burlesque thing... and it is three days later and I am still wiping bits of dog food from my clothes...

...she was racing about to some heavy electronic music... I think it was drum and bass and it skittered with an excess of energy... she jumped down from her platform and found some things... a bowl, like a dog would eat from, a washing bowl, some sparklers and a big tin of dog food...

So, at this point, the inevitable questions arise. Is this a statement of feminist intent, parodying the control fantasies of pornography and patriarchy, challenging with casual nudity...

...it was not what I would call casual nudity as she was racing around the room... water spouted outwards, then she threw the dog food at the audience and then she pulled out a t-shirt from a place where I would rather not say...

The sense of danger was palpable - not in any abstract sense but quite literally when she waved burning sparklings across her body and squirted water from her bottom onto the audience. And a large chunk of dog food hit me on the shoulder with some force...

Does Mouse adapt the burlesque comfort with nudity and weaponise it? Does talking about a naked woman necessarily have to consider feminism?

GSA Fire II

Live Blog from New Projects Weekend (4)

Mack makes a delicate start - almost Spanish flamenco style on an electric guitar, with added echo and now a drone. Notes emerging from the hum and buzz of the sound system, until the crackle drowns and submerges the melody. The crack of cables echoes the rattle of castanets. He’s very Spanish in his mood, running melancholy scales up and down the fret board and tumbling into clusters of low notes.

It’s gentler than Caries. The sustain and feedback hovers, threatening to destroy the fragile picking. He’s applying an acoustic method to the electric, moody and melancholic again. Or am I slightly sad and applying this to every piece?

The sound of a guitar in the distance: Mack’s playing seems to come from the other end of a tunnel, or through a weak radio signal. The sound system is simply obscuring the clear, firm pizzicato. These are transmissions from another world, another cliché.

Certainly, his actual playing is accomplished and precise. He’s problematising the performance. The electricity has been made audible – thanks to some fiddling with wires. It’s a battle for a thing of beauty to survive.

Eric talked about a message. Old school music journalists weren’t afraid of overdoing it. This musical monologue tells a story about life. Life, represented by the guitar, is delicate yet beautiful. Rich in emotion and evocative of tales that are barely comprehensible in their complexity and detail, life tries to survive against a hostile universe – here represented by the feedback, the nasty crackle of the speakers.

This is an opera for solo guitar that contains the basic narrative of existence. It’s mysterious, frail, frightening. I’m loath to call the universe of noise that tries to subjugate the melody godless (the guitarist might be God, anyway), but it is in some sort of conflict with the guitar’s life.

However, the sources of the sounds that threaten are also the reasons that the guitar is audible. The universe may sound tough, but it is also sustaining. The music is a duet between guitar and PA.

The actual melody has traces of heavy metal exhibitionism and folk refrains. This might well be the most beautiful thing I have ever heard. And I bet I would have called it doodling if I were not trying to write about it.

I was not expecting music to need as music thought as performance.  

Damn. Eric noticed that the style was very blues. He has beaten me. That is what this is: not delta blues, but the blues of the universe, which makes the noise that eventually will destroy it. 

Top Five out of my Inbox

Frankly, it can all get a bit much. I mean, I love sitting here, watching my in-box fill up with press releases: it reminds me that I am fortunate enough to live in a country where the arts are thriving. However, I have to make hard decisions: Black T-Shirt Collection at Tramway tonight, or Philip Jeck at Pulse: Touch 30? In the meantime, here's my latest collection of happenings across Scotland.

The RSNO have just received the Diapason d'Or de l’Année for their recording of Debussy with former musical director Stéphane Denève. 

Before Denève left in May 2012, he had made the orchestra into a veritable machine for Debussy - the conductor has a real love for the composer, and his work is beautifully pitched between modernist brevity and having a good tune. 

Hopefully, he'll come back and conduct a few shows in celebration: if not, the album is entitled Stéphane Denève Conducts Debussy and is on the Chandos label.

Still on the recording tip, Radio Hour favourites A Band Called Quinn are releasing their new album on Monday. Unfortunately, they've decided to launch it at Glasgow Loves Christmas which means I can't invite their singer onto the show and flirt pathetically with her. 

ABCQ have had a busy year: when they are not reinventing the rock gig as a theatrical performance, featuring the legendary Diane Torr as a nasty business man, singer Louise has been recording with Kid Loco or they are off supporting The Beat around Scotland. Having survived the machinations of the music industry - their Biding Time (remix) chronicled the fun they had being twisted into generic glamour fodder - ABCQ have made the jump into performance art, maintaining their smart new wave sound and sly pop sensibility. 

Over on the east coast, Cobweb Theatre Company present A Night of Fairy Tales in The Black Box at Queen Margaret University on the 7th of December. It's hard enough to make the major events these days, and now student companies are plugging into my fascination with dark fantasy and cabaret style theatre. They are including a "wonky, music based adaptation of Peer Gynt" - recently a smash hit for the NTS - and choreography featuring an intoxicating women in red and a snatch from Snow White's post-adventure marital disfunction. Now that pantomime is taking over the theatres, I'm always looking for a hit of more perplexing pleasures.

If I can get to Inverness - which isn't that likely - I wouldn't mind catching Georg-ina Porteous' Over Egging the Pudding. The result of her residency in Berlin, it is described as a durational blancmange demonstration. Failing that, there is someone blowing up lots of black, star-shaped balloons in the Briggait at the moment - I'll go and find out whether it's an exhibition or just a party for Goth children after I finish this.

Closer to home, but looking towards Christmas, the Art School is hosting an outing to SWG3. It is going to take me far too long to write a sensible preview for this - I have to remember that I am trying to empty my in-box and use my blog to make up a working timetable for my non-stop life of art action. It's one of those multi-art events that young people love so much. I'll have to send Eric, I suppose.