For the past thirty years American artist Bill Fontana has created installations throughout the world using sound as a sculptural medium to interact with and transform perceptions of visual and architectural spaces. He has installed public artworks at iconic locations in many of the world’s great cities, including London’s Big Ben, San Francisco’s Golden Gate…
‘Disappearer’ (2001–4), taking its title from a Sonic Youth song, re-appeared repeatedly in Eva Rothschild’s early shows. I came across it for the first time at The Showroom Gallery in 2001 where it hung from an invisible wire in mid air. The ‘sculpture’ is a spiky sphere formed from an arrangement of coloured incense sticks,…
For too long relegated to the footnotes of UK cultural history, Daphne Oram and Tristram Cary were unlikely, yet significant, mid-twentieth century pioneers of electronic music. Author and musician Mark Brend traces the technical epiphanies and thwarted ambitions of two very British workers in sound. A background hum of missed opportunity sounds through Oram’s later…
Part Four of Jamie Holman’s warts-and-all rumination on starting up and running a nobudget indie record label. While the world continues to turn its back, Jamie’s faith in the fledgling Winterbird remains heroically intact, so much so that he’s even signed himself to the label. While he dreams of glory there’s a gig at Blackburn…
Nowadays synonymous with dim Guy Ritchie adventures, the uncertain James Bond series and mawkish Richard Curtis romcoms, the British film industry has also been a repository of great art and stilettosharp social commentary. Peter Wix, author of A&M’s regular Continental Film Night blog, offers his personal selection of under-heralded British cinematic gems. Lists measuring the…
With the twenty-first century’s second decade stretching before us, a controversial new government making its presence felt and the halcyon days of Britart and Britpop an increasingly hazy memory, we felt a root and branch look at contemporary creative Britain was in order. Just who, or what, is making Blighty mighty right now? James Johnston…
Not knowing exactly what to expect from an artist who is known primarily as an avant-garde composer, this show of John Cage’s visual work proved a great eye-opener. John Cage (1912- 1992) started painting and printing after an invitation from the Crown Point Press print workshop in San Francisco when he was 65 years old.…
Christian Marclay The Clock White Cube Mason’s Yard 15 October–13 November 2010 Christian Marclay studied art in New York and Boston in the late 1970s, while also performing music. He is cited as one of the first musicians to use a turntable as an instrument in itself, manipulating vinyl records (just as the same techniques…
The thick ivy of legend, rumour and fantasy has grown around the story of Roger ‘Syd’ Barrett to such an extent that it’s easy to overlook the human being at the centre of the myth-making. While his misbegotten life adhered to a paradigm of the doomed Romantic artist, Barrett’s writing deserves to be appreciated for…
The current formula for creating bands seems to be to find a sound that is at once edgy and original but familiar enough to slot easily into everyone’s iTunes. How many times have you read about a new band that’s kind of like band A meets band B with a bit of C thrown in?…