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SOUND LAB AUTUMN SEASON MacGillivray curates autumn concert series of ‘Scottish stormscapes’
‘Shattered chandelier glass, bad sunbed neon, Freudian trees and wolf carcasses . . . ’ Welcome to the world of Highland poet, performance artist and musician MacGillivray, aka Kirsten Norrie. She opens sound lab’s autumn season, the weekly concert series showcasing Scotland’s experimental, improvised and electronic music scene. Recorded with Nico collaborator James Young, MacGillivray’s latest album Once Upon a Dirty Ear submerges dark pop and folk in abyssal reverb and grainy noise. The result, she says, is ‘something you can’t quite hear unless it’s from a place of tender disquiet’. For sound lab, Norrie will be ‘cooking up Scottish stormscapes’ with percussionist Toby Mottershead of the Black Diamond Express and Ben Chatwin of Talvihorros on electronics (Wed 30 Sep). Her concerts, she
says, are ‘a different kind of altercation’ to her performan ce art, with health and safety a consideration on a stage full of live wires. ‘I long ago realised electrics are unforgiving in terms of saliva, tears, glasses of raw egg, urine or water, so all the tension of what might be performative in terms of live art becomes concentrated in voice.’ Support comes from Gayle Brogan’s lo-fi
psych-pop project Pefkin. Subsequent sound labs feature collaborations between experimental guitarist Matthew Collings and folk singer Esther Swift plus Lives as omens (Wed 7 Oct), and saxophonist Raymond MacDonald and Danish pianist Helle Lund (Wed 4 Nov). There’s also the return of electronic duo Integra TV (Wed 14 Oct) and Electroscope’s Hallowe’en spooktacular (Wed 21 Oct). (Stewart Smith) ■ City Halls, Glasgow, various dates.
3 Sep–5 Nov 2015 THE LIST 69