Classical, Our Contemporary

Perhaps it is my age - and the damage caused to my ears by Japanese free-form rock - but I am increasingly attracted to classical music these days. It all started when I saw a rehearsal at Scottish Opera - sitting so close to the singers, I suddenly realised that musical muscle isn't a simple question of volume.

That said, Ben Frost is going to be very loud and very intense, and I am enthusing about the return of Swans... 

Thanks to the wise advice of my sometime co-host on the Radio Hour, Matthew Whiteside, I have a slightly deeper appreciation of contemporary composition than I used to - but I can't help being thrilled by the appearance of the minimalists on a programme. Arvo Part at the weekend - Minimal 2012 getting off to a populist start - makes good my occasional claim that religion has been responsible for much of the most emotive art and a glance across to Edinburgh, where the Calton Consort are performing at Canongate Kirk, reveals a programme that includes a Hymn to Cecilia (Benjamin Britten), Arnold Bax's tribute to the Blessed Virgin Mary and James MacMillan's Strathclyde Motets. These Motets both uphold my opinion on religious music and demonstrate how even the East Coast needs a bit more Glasgow in their lives. 

Closer to home, next Tuesday sees the premier performance of Chris Hutchings' Requiem for All Souls. It's taking place at 9pm in Glasgow University's Memorial Chapel, just across from the Subcity Office on University Avenue. Since many of my friends would, in fact, explode if they crossed the threshold of a church, I am delighted to note that Hutchings has arranged for the performance to be streamed online. 

For all my sophistication, I can't resist making a joke about how part of the score includes a cover version of a Stone Roses number. 

Following that up, I am interested to revisit Arvo Part this weekend: the two evenings tell the same story from different perspectives, an appropriate response to the Gospel's habit of examining events from diverse angles. I've always enjoyed the irony of a supposedly monolithic religion - from the way Christianity is described by both atheists and fundamentalists, you'd think it only had about three chapters, and lacked the vigorous intellectual engagement with ideas and narratives that made it so influential in the first place - having a multiplicity of versions describing key events. 

This probably isn't the place to start on my rant about the Book of Genesis having two versions of creation...


Calton Consort 
7.30pm Saturday 17 November 2012
Canongate Kirk, Edinburgh 

Chris Hutchings
9pm Tuesday 30 October 2012
Glasgow University Memorial Chapel

Arvo Part
27- 28 October
City Hall, Glasgow

Frock On, Frock Off

Frock On Frock Off might be part of Glasgay!, but it appears to have emerged from Buzzcut - like the Glasgow Cabaret Festival, it is a festival within a festival that has been a festival within its own right. Not that Buzzcut is disappearing: they had a couple of nights at The Fringe (another festival within a festival) and there are rumours of a major alliance in the New Year. 

Promoters, or curators, Laurie Brown, Rosana Cade and Nick Anderson have set up a week long... if I have to use the word festival one more time... I am going to ask them about this festival business on the Radio Hour... hang on, Eric and I need to get across to the Studio soon...

Oh, here's what FOFO are offering. The events are all in Rose and Grants, the rather lovely coffee shop/cafe around the corner from the Tron...

24th + 25th October @ Rose and Grants, 7.30pm

Foxy - Fox Solo

I think we had Foxy on the Radio Hour last year - she appeared as part of a duo with Husk. I made the inevitable joke about her being foxy and probably played Jimmy Hendrix and looked smug about my radio brilliance. 

The good news is that Foxy is going it alone this year, and the description of her show involves "drinking alone" and "trying to win your love and affection". I am going to be watching closely, since this sounds like my weekends.

However, this is part of a double bill with...

Dame Fanny Day Glow - The Angina Monologues. 

Apparently Dame Fanny has been done for tax evasion and assault, and likes a wee sip of vodka. Yep, this one sounds like me, only the Dame has better songs and wigs than I have. 

26th + 27th October @ Rose and Grants, 7.30pm

Thank God, the second double bill sounds nothing like my life.

Tom Wells - Engage

A Mancunian tries to find something to connect himself to his father. Turns out to be more difficult than he's imagined... family disconnection? Nothing like me at all, that.

Lucy Hutson - Make Do and Mend Myself

Lucy, meanwhile, is all about domestic skills. Since I live in a pit, surrounded by comic books and bits of my existential novel about a critic who can't maintain a conversation without name-dropping someone he met at a party once and now claims as a friend, her stories of the well-laid table, pompoms and good housekeeping is going to be like an essay on how I ought to live.

28th October, The Sunday Bizarre @ The Glue Factory, 3pm - late:

An assortment of performative installations, interventions, homemade hot food, discussions, debates, film screenings and dragged-up party games brought to you by artists from across Britain... and of course Tranny and Roseannah!

Vile gets grabbed By The Throat

Although my enthusiasm for music was replaced by theatre after I burst my eardrums listening to very loud Japanese drummers, there are still times when I am distracted from the well-made play by the well-made album. The new Swans album has been taking up many of my late night, alcohol-soaked self-pity sessions (at around two hours, it takes me from the first sip of Cava through to unconsciousness) and, in my research for my forthcoming interview with Swans' main-man Michael Gira, I came across this magic moment from Icelandic TV.

Apart from making me want to move to Iceland - British TV has Jools Holland and his smug dadrock fest, they have drone rock supergroups - it introduced me to Ben Frost. I pride myself on having an ear for this kind of noise, sitting between the electronic, rock and classical zones.

Then I found out Frost was coming to Glasgow. This week. Apparently, there is a new platform for electronic music, PULSE, which is promising to bring Scanner to Glasgow within two years. When I saw Scanner - rocking a team up with David Toop, I think - at The National Review of Live Art, I felt as if I had been downloaded into a satellite channel. 

I've been chasing Frost's music, discovered a free download of his live set at Unsound - that will take care of the last hour of the radio show if I run out of conversation - and have spent hours arguing about the classification of Frost's sound. Although he uses guitars, and is clearly in a similar lineage to the majestic drone rock that blighted my teenage years, the use of dynamics hints at a minimalist heritage and the mesh of sound is only possible through the advances of electronic music.

Frost is performing 2009's By the Throat  in the Old Fruitmarket - I'd usually worry about an artist performing an entire album (that nostalgia wave that The Swans so studiously avoid is best understood by the plethora of once exciting bands churning out their single successful album on a "a very special tour"), but 2009 is recent enough to make it excusable. Plus, Frost makes a big bloody noise, and there is still no market for experimental, avant-garde nostalgia.

Actually, that isn't true. There totally is a market for old school avant-garde action: once time strips away the context of art, it becomes safe enough to hit the mainstream. See tango? Strictly Come Dancing? When tango kicked off, it was seen as so sexily provocative that they made the Pope watch some, to get a ruling on whether Catholics were allowed to do it. In fact, it was so controversial that it was watered down by various teachers, to make it respectable. And less than a century later, it's on prime time TV.

That brings me back to Iceland, where Ben Frost gets on the TV. And Wayne McGregor, whom Frost has composed for. And The Fruitmarket, which is a comfortable and classy venue in which to get drowned in sound...

Ben Frost performs By the Throat

Wednesday 24 October 2012, 8pm

£10/£12

Old Fruitmarket

Vile Arts Radio Hour (22nd October)

From our secret base near the River Clyde, The Vile Arts prepares for the latest episode. Eric's in the corner, checking out music, Vile is wondering around, doing his special voice exercises, Margaret Kirk is typing up a playlist, and Producer Harry broods, silently, communicating through the magic of telepathy.

Three guests are lined up so far, making the top five events for the week easy to pick. Joining Vile at the start of the show - and then chatting to Eric, in the hope of intelligent conversation - are Tranny and Roseannah from Frock On, Frock Off. 

A new strand within Glasgow - and coming from the same stable as Buzzcut, Glasgow's own alternative performance promoters - FOFO is all about the Live Art, and is spreading across Rose and Grants with a series of idiosyncratic performance.

 Highlights include a solo from Foxy - a guest on the show last year, and currently lamenting the absence of partner Husk - and Lucy Hutson mending herself through the magic of the W.I. before ending on Sunday with an all day party at The Glue Factory.

24th + 25th October @ Rose and Grants, 7.30pm: Foxy - Fox Solo and Dame Fanny Day Glow - The Angina Monologues

26th + 27th October @ Rose and Grants, 7.30pm: Tom Wells - Engage and Lucy Hutson - Make Do and Mend Myself

28th October, The Sunday Bizarre @ The Glue Factory, 3pm - late

Following Tranny and Roseannah, Michael John McCarthy - sometime of Zoey Van Goey, and one of the two most versatile and hard-working musicians in the theatre community - pops into chat about... well, as usual, the man has plenty of projects. Expect conversatin about Grid Iron's latest play, Govanhill Baths and his limited edition online release of music for theatre

Last, but far from  least, regular co-host Matthew Whiteside gives the lowdown on classical happenings this week - the rumour is that the composer will be talking about some of his own work - an opera that deals with something a little more contemporary than Italian lovers... he will talking about a special weekend up in Aberdeen, and the connection between Scottish Opera and the mighty Said Ensemble...

A photographic journey through cabaret by Emma Fork

Photographer Emma Fork: You take better photos wearing a beret.

GKV: A cab-beret? Anyway, Eric... last words. From tonight, can you tell me what cabaret is, so that there can be too much of it?

EK: Er... I wouldn't consider myself an expert on the subject, but as far as I've seen it's about sex, entertainment and magic?

GKV: I do consider myself an expert. On everything. And the secret is you keep saying that nothing has an essential nature. I am not sure that "too cabaret" has any meaning... no surprise that my conclusion is that Gary Barlow hadn't thought about it too much..

 .
EK: I agree. Too cabaret? No such thing.

GKV: However, this leaves us with a problem. The idea was for us to work out what cabaret is, then form a double act, excise anything cabaret, then go on X-Factor and win. But if we can't define it... maybe we had better stick to Live Art.

EK: Well, we could go in reverse - work out what cabaret is not, and then proceed. But yeah, I think we're built for Live Art rather than X-Factor.

GKV: That's two cabaret and variety nights on the trot, and we have not managed to figure much out. Sex, entertainment and magic sounds like Saturday night round your house, and the opposite of every night round mine. And you ended up on stage. I know the critic is meant to immerse themselves but seriously...