list.co.uk/music Reviews | MUSIC
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FOLK LAURA MARLING Usher Hall, Edinburgh, Wed 25 Sep ●●●●● FOLK, EXPERIMENTAL RICHARD DAWSON Glad Café, Glasgow, Sat 21 Sep ●●●●●
Whenever anyone appears alone onstage in a hall this size to play acoustic music, there’s something otherworldly about the experience. Watching Laura Marling, it was impossible not to empathise with the frailty and emotional nakedness of the whole experience. That she could do this at only 23 years of age with a commanding determination felt as if she may be fast becoming a great musical voice of her era, even if she’s not quite there yet.
Sifting through tracks from the last five years’ four albums – and previewing snippets of next year’s fifth instalment – she alighted on songs f rom 2010’s I Speak Because I Can, including the wintry tribute ‘Goodbye England (Covered in Snow)’ and the evocative storytelling of ‘Alpha Shallows’ and the title song. Elsewhere the hippyish throes of ‘Alas I Cannot Swim’ and a cover of Townes Van Zandt’s ‘For the Sake of the Song’ were taut and confident, presenting a stark contrast between the modest, mousey-voiced young woman who apologised for all the tuning and the singer who threw her head back and roared out the coda of ‘Master Hunter’. (David Pollock)
The British folk tradition continues to be a rich source of inspiration for the experimental underground. Howie Reeve’s opening set, with its conversational snapshots and avant-punk bass runs, could have been a kind of DIY folk music. Fiddler Rafe Fitzpatrick and dada percussionist Fritz Welch, meanwhile, exploded folk forms in their superb set of clatter and saw. Bushy of beard and childlike of gait, Tyneside hero Richard Dawson played the stumblebum raconteur, rambling hilariously about the joys of wearing shorts and talking to an invisible ghost horse. There was a method to this madness, however, for his ballads of the old north, industrial and rural, were haunted by spirits. A harrowing knacker’s yard tale, ‘Poor Old Horse’, is one of Dawson’s most arresting unaccompanied songs, and his ragged, open-voiced baritone brought a palpable sense of anger and sorrow. ‘The Ghost of a Tree’ found the uncanny in a bleak winter landscape, while ‘The Brisk Lad’ told of an outlaw on the moors. Light years away from your average earnest troubadour, Dawson was an eccentric but fierce talent. (Stewart Smith)
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AV SHOW/ ELECTRONICS ONEOHTRIX POINT NEVER CCA, Glasgow, Tue 1 Oct ●●●●● CLASSIC ROCK FLEETWOOD MAC The Hydro, Glasgow, Thu 3 Oct ●●●●●
Daniel Lopatin’s new stage show is brought to a halt before it even starts as an over-eager smoke machine puts his set’s first notes in direct competition with the CCA smoke alarms. When we do get started (minus the smoke) his meticulous circuitry works in tandem with a large projection, beaming a peculiar array of gaudy sci-fi images. It’s an unnerving transmission but the production values are impeccable; it all looks grotesquely pristine. One video pairs a zebra crossing with guns and some sort of ceramic dog − it’s futuristic absurdism at its most unintelligible. His tracks are more enjoyably twisted, though, building fragmented melodies through a collage of cut-up samples that never quite fall where expected. Deep, roaring basslines are his most potent tool, shaking the room and allowing all other sounds to wash over the crowd. The setlist finds a good balance of material from new album R Plus Seven and older ambient noise-based material. Lopatin spends the entire gig huddled behind his electronics system, and his highly attentive crowd absorb the full experience, in all of its hypnotic and alienating turns. (Chris Tapley)
The Mac, version 2K13 look fresh; revitalised so much in their absence that casually jumping into ‘The Chain’ two songs in looks effortless. And they’re just warming up. Though ‘Everywhere’ is notably absent in tonight’s gargantuan set, in favour of new gems from April’s Extended Play EP, our returning legends serve up a high concentration of stone cold classics, from ‘Rhiannon’ and ‘Tusk’ to the blissfully upbeat ‘Don’t Stop’ and immortal ‘Go Your Own Way’, with resident frontwoman/ ethereal spirit guide Stevie Nicks sashaying and cavorting with the crowd throughout. With Mick Fleetwood on top, eccentric form behind the kit, thumping the skins like he’s fresh out of high school, the band sound virtually unstoppable as they drive their runaway arena-filling freight train right into the hearts of 12000 screaming,adoring fans. But it’s perhaps the back to back ‘solo’ set pieces of Big Love – the still baby-faced Lindsay Buckingham commands the vast stage with frantic fingerpicking and searing howls – and Stevie Nicks’ trademark tearjerker Landslide that truly reduce The Hydro to a bittersweet emotional mess. (Ryan Drever)
CLASSICAL ELECTRONICA LIVE_TRANSMISSON: JOY DIVISION REWORKED Usher Hall, Edinburgh, Tue 1 Oct ●●●●●
On the screens all around us, the cover image of Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures explodes into three-dimensional life. Peter Saville’s mountainous monochrome representations of the radio waves from a distant pulsar are an iconic visualisation of the Manchester band’s stark yet expansive sound. But here – multiplied, layered on top of one another, in frantic motion – the almost tired sight of them as a reappropriated signifier of old-fashioned punk cool from the days of analogue is given new life.
Premiered early in 2012 as a Brighton
Festival commission, this multimedia, cross- genre hijacking of the band is no respecter of reputations or expectations. It was dreamt up by sound artist Scanner in conjunction with the wilful experimentalists of the Heritage Orchestra under conductor Jules Buckley, and the large ensemble is completed by a three- piece band incorporating guitarist Matt Calvert and drummer Adam Betts from Three Trapped Tigers alongside bassist John Calvert from Ghostpoet’s band. Over 80 minutes, it tears the conventional
sound of Joy Division to shreds and rebuilds it around the familiar, melancholy spine of particularly urban fatalism that the band dealt in. Amid the sit-down formalism of a classical concert, the music is often abrasive and always loud, even when the arrangements are minimal. Fittingly, there is no sense of politeness or undue reverence to tracks like ‘Transmission’, ‘Digital’ or ‘Dead Souls’, as the simplest of instrumental figures are requisitioned in service of monumental symphonies married with a sometimes cathartically punishing electronic machine grind. In tandem with the music’s greatness in a project that could have been derailed by the slightest tonal miscalculation, those visuals by Matt Watkins – creative director of the Gorillaz project for Jamie Hewlett – are key. Projected both onto the back of the stage and upon a gauze hanging between the musicians and the audience, they match the expansive ambition of its audio element. Yet the finale is resonantly understated compared with the powerfully textured array of sounds that has gone before − just a light orchestral figure overshadowed by a delicate, twinkling light-show, and the disembodied voice of Ian Curtis crooning an ever-haunting ‘Love Wi ll Tear Us Apart’. (Paul Little)
17 Oct–14 Nov 2013 THE LIST 83