For me 2019 was not a particularly memorable year for music. I found pleasure in some old favorites but made no significant new discoveries.
Mostly, female artists struck the strongest chords with me. Billie Eilish’s debut ‘When We Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go’ and Lana Del Ray’s ‘Norman Fucking Rockwell’ were rightly rated highly in many ‘best of’ lists.
I wrote around 10 reviews a month for Whisperin’ & Hollerin’ , about half of my output from the previous year. Continue reading
Tag Archive: Thom Yorke
Why We Sleep: the New Science of Sleep and Dreams by Matthew Walker(Penguin Books, 2018)
This might just be the perfect book for the bedside table if the contents were not so damned scary.
The list of what lack of sleep causes is vast and should be a concern for those who, up to now, have regarded the daily hours of shut-eye as a waste of time.
The facts and discoveries from decades of scientific research prove that sleeping makes you healthier, wealthier and wiser. It can also make you more attractive and slimmer.
“Sleep fixes what is upset by wake” states Walker. As director of University College Berkeley’s Sleep and Neuroimaging Lab, the results of his long research carry a genuine authority. The title of the book is not framed as a question (Why do we sleep?) since the science gives us the answers. Ignore the findings at your peril. Continue reading
It might seem an odd notion to base a dance performance on three novels by Virginia Woolf, but Wayne McGregor is a choreographer who makes his own rules. He proves that great prose can inspire and captivate in the same way that the rhythmic flow of lyrical poetry can.
Woolf Works was premiered to huge acclaim in 2015 and is divided into three sections: ‘I Now, I Then’ is based on the themes in Mrs Dalloway; ‘Becomings’ takes its cues from the surreal wit & vitality of Orlando and ‘Tuesday’ is inspired by The Waves, Woolf’s most experimental novel.
This final section is also named after the heading to the suicide note Woolf left for her husband. This letter, which begins “I feel certain that I’m going mad again”, is beautifully read by Gillian Anderson as a preface to the profoundly moving conclusion.
The revival of these pieces was a hot ticket at The Royal Opera House but has now reached a wider audience thanks to a live worldwide broadcast in over 1,500 cinemas and more than 35 countries on February 8th 2017. Continue reading
If you have seen Thom Yorke’s spazzy dance to Lotus Flower or the fight sequences in Harry Potter’s Goblets of Fire then you already know something of the choreography of Wayne McGregor.
The weirdness of the Yorke video is what first directed me to McGregor and hence to his Random Dance company. I am now officially a big fan after seeing an hour-long performance by ten Random dancers as part of this year’s Ravenna Festival.
Entity is a marvellously inventive piece of action theatre and the ideas that lie behind the work are equally fascinating.
The project evolved from McGregor’s interest in cognitive science and its relationship with “the technology of the body”.
Specifically he consulted scientists to try to gain a deeper understanding what happens in the brain during the non verbal communication that lies at the heart of creating a new dance work. In other words, he wanted to understand the process of choreography more fully from a cognitive perspective.
In his short essay ‘The Beauty In Science’ (which was published in the programme for the show at Ravenna) McGregor wrote of the popular “myth that creativity is a magic alchemy and the very nature of understanding it, especially scientifically, will ultimately inhibit its fragile spell”.
This romantic belief of the creative process as something purely instinctive is why people are drawn to the stream of consciousness approach to art, be it improvised music, dance or writing. This leads to a misguided notion that we can somehow trick the brain to function independently, spontaneously and without inhibition.
It’s interesting that McGregor counters these ideas with a quote from Stravinsky who argued that it is actually by imposing constraints on our thoughts and actions that we free the self. This reminded me of what D.H. Lawrence wrote about the paradox of freedom: “Men are not free when they are doing just what they like. The moment you can do just what you like, there is nothing you care about doing”.
In translating these ideas into creating a piece of dance theatre, McGregor seems intent of challenging conventional ideas of beauty in movement. He ‘re-wires’ the neurological impulses of his dancers to encourage a radically different approach to the way they use their bodies and interact with others.
In Entity, the five males and five females show breathtaking flexibility, strength and agility. There is nothing of the graceful perfection you expect from classical works but there is still a grace and a perfection about the jerky, at times almost awkward movements.
The fluidity of the interactions are mesmerizing and it is the unpredictability which gives the work its dynamism. The combinations of the dancers are not stereotypical – the man-on-man sequences are particularly charged and erotic without being overtly sexual, far removed from crude dry humping you see on the majority of MTV dance videos.
The performance begins and ends with film of a greyhound running, part of Eadweard Muybridge’s film archive on the study of animal locomotion from the early 20th century and the spectacle is enhanced by two superb instrumental musical scores that offer contrasting yet complimentary styles.
Joby Talbot is more classical in origin, using loops of cello refrains while Jon Hopkins’ Insides is a harder work that moves from elegant electro-ambience to thrusting techno.
Everything works for a kind of harmonious disharmony.
Related link:
The Beauty in Science by Wayne McGregor (Peak Performances.org)
The high quality of Thom Yorke’s song writing for Radiohead tempts many artists to try their own versions but more often than not these fail to capture the magic of the original.
Peter Gabriel’s orchestral guitar-free revamp of Street Spirit (Fade Out) on his Scratch My Back album last year is practically unrecognisable from the stirring anthem-esque version on The Bends. It’s as if he is acknowledging the impossibility of the task and a few plaintive moans don’t carry the emotional weight he strives for. A brave attempt but a failure in my book.
Two covers that do work are both interpretations that translate the indie-rock into the genre of acoustic folk.
The stripped back makeover of Black Star performed live in 2005 by Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings does what any great cover song should and makes you rethink the original completely. I hadn’t really fully appreciated the lyrics to this song about a relationship hitting crisis point before I heard this, but Gillian Welch delivers “the troubled words of a troubled mind” with a precision that captures the mood of quiet desperation perfectly.
Not quite in the same league, but impressive in its own way is Patrick Joseph and Lucas Martinez’ bold beats-free remodelling of Idioteque, one of the standout tracks from Kid A. Joseph is a young singer songwriter from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania now based in LA, who has just self-released his debut album Antiques. Martinez is a guitarist from Pasadena, California. The track has not yet been released but according to Martinez’ Life Tracked In Sound blog, it will be out on an EP called Stranger’s Shoes this summer.
