Nancy elizabeth review for Fact

Nancy Elizabeth
Battle and Victory
Leaf

Nancy Elizabeth sounds like the most extraordinary hit-your-head-off-your-desk, whimpering-like–a-demented-man-child minimal folk that comes out of nowhere, like ghosts from the battle of Hastings playing samurai harps made from widow’s hair, and it’s awesome, till you realize she’s on Leaf. When you’re share a label with Murcof, Colleen, Susuma Yakota and Efterklang, that’s kind of taken as given. Still, it’s a damn good album, with the kind of imaginative folk that is giving the north-west (she’s a Wigan las) such a good name at the moment.

What strikes you about Nancy’s music is how spectacularly poised and still it sounds – unlike Seth Lakeman, to whom she is oft compared, nothing is rushed. ‘Hey Son’s’ swirling harps are played almost Satie-slow, with her voice – a soft yet throaty howl not a million miles away from Beth Orton or Joni Mitchell – ripping the fuck out of the chorus with the supreme, practiced gravitas. ‘Coriander’ is another revelation – though the key instrument is hand-plucked Thai Khim, and other instruments on Battle and Victory have similarly alien tones, from Appalachian dulcimers to Celtic harps, her music is refreshingly grounded in the music of our Scepter’d Isle. This album was recorded entirely in a stone cottage in Wales, and Christ does it show – if, like me, you occasionally like to pretend to be a medieval Welsh freedom-fighter escaping with your ragged band through the valleys while running for the tube, this is the album for you.

Arthur Russell doc piece for Dazed

A news piece in Dazed and Confused’s October 2007 issue

“Another Thought: The Arthur Russell Revival Peaks With New Documentary”

Arthur Russell has always cried out for a biography. An obscenely gifted classical cellist, singer and disco producer, he was a student of north Indian music in Buddhist communes who moved East to NY when disco was bubbling under and collaborated with everyone from Phillip Glass to Larry Levan In eighties New York, he perfected his mix of outsider pop and spectral, mutant disco until his tragic, AIDs related death in 1992. While Soul Jazz and Rough Trade’s superb compilations, and Jens Lekman’s recent EP of Russell covers have brought him out of the cold, much of the man behind the music remains obscured by myth. A new film is set to change all that with a documentary about his life and times. “I wanted to take a fairly experimental approach to Arthur’s music. What I ended up doing is closer to a documentary with a full story told by Arthur’s friends and family, one that’s saturated with lots of visual material and archival clips,” says director Matt Wolf. “Arthur’s story is about more than just his experience as an individual—it’s about a particularly fertile period in downtown New York’s cultural history, it’s about the experience of being gay and living with AIDS, and also it’s about the cathartic process of making art and pursuing popular success at a time when those two things seemed possible and within reach. Arthur could certainly be perceived as an eccentric figure—but I was also really drawn to the ordinary moments in his life: watching the Muppets Show with his boyfriend on the couch.”

www.arthurrussellmovie.com/
The film will be released in early 2008.

[ends]

Radio review, ThreeWeeks

A theatre review, published in ThreeWeeks, Edinburgh, August 2006:

Radio - Kandinsky
When I was 6 my dad told me that the gold sheet around the lunar module that sent those to the moon in 1968 was thinner than the plastic film round his packet of B&H. For some reason I remembered that halfway through 'Radio': the idea that something so everday and simple could be trusted to perform that beautiful and dangerous action. 'Radio' does not walk that fine line between lightness and depth as fly ten thousand miles above it: it is a one-man play about radio, love, family, duty, space travel, dreams, youth, the 60's, America. A colossal talent has arrived in Al Smith: this is such an elegantly written, acted and directed piece of theatre that it transcends theatre itself. Remember this play: Radio defies gravity.
Smirnoff Underbelly, 3-27 Aug, 4.30pm (5.15pm), prices vary, fpp200
tw 5/5 [cj]

Taher Deghayes, Insight

Taher Deghayes’ brother Omar was illegally held in Guantánamo Bay for five years by the US military, and I drank tea with him on the day on after Omar's release, in his Saltdean living room while his brother slept upstairs in his bed for the first time in half a decade. One of the most surreal and, I'm almost ashamed to say, moving interview's I've ever done. Insight, March issue:


Community
For the last six years, our lives have been Omar. He has framed every family debate we have had. Our mother is the centre of the family and there has not been a night that she has not thought of Omar. However, it’s made us stronger as a family, because we have stuck together throughout all of this. The sense of community has been incredible – I never realised how many caring people there are around you, until this happened. I would always look at those people who handed out the Socialist Worker and I would think that they were nutters, but it’s these nutters who have been ensuring that our democracy is safeguarded that our basic values and human rights are observed. The sancity of human life and the appreciation of our fundamental rights and values is what makes us civilized in the so-called West. It’s the best system that I believe to exist, is this thing – above anything else – that makes me proud to be British.

Moral strength
As a family, we were always brought up to differ, to disagree, to hold different opinions. In Guantánamo Bay, it was the members of al-Qaeda who were released one year in, because they knew how to keep their head down and not anger the guards, they knew what to do in prison, but my brother, because of how he was raised, and because of the fact he was English and held a law degree, would not bow his head, he kept on criticizing the guards and pointing out abuse where he saw it. This is why they did not let him go. When I saw him, I was so worried that they would have broken his spirit – I mean, there were days when I thought that I could not cope with it – but when I saw him in court yesterday [we spoke to Taher the day after Omar was granted bail], and I saw that he standing proud with so much to say, I knew that they could not break him.

Faith
What has kept us going? Three things: our faith, our community and our belief in the rule of law. It is destiny. It is hard to explain, but if you believe in your destiny and accept it – not in a complacent way – then you can keep waking up in the morning. It is like when you have a bad day and nothing is going well, what keeps you going is the knowledge that one day things will be better. The community that the campaign has brought together, our friends, and the friends we never met [has been incredible]. I feel proud to have been a part of this.

Family celebration
We had a bottle of wine and a family meal last night. A bottle of champagne – non-alchoholic champagne!

The moment we saw him
Really, really good.

Cosmic architecture for insight

A quick chat with one of the most foremost architecture professors of his generation back in February 2008:

If you’re looking for insight into the world around you, you could do worse than speak to John McKean. After a lifetime teaching, practising and writing about architecture, the Brighton University professor was chosen for a once-in-a-generation job: to rewrite the architecture student’s bible, Banister Fletcher. He took time out of his busy schedule to speak to Charlie Jones about pyramids, the cosmos and why Brighton needs civic space.

What issues are shaping architecture in 2008?
Money. Money is incredibly important. That may have always been the case, but it is more obvious than it has ever been. The gap between rich and poor is massive and growing, but there is a huge quantity of money to be spent—this is a very affluent society, which means that the headline-grabbing buildings become more iconic, more extraordinary. But at the same time the cheap housing being built now is immeasurably sloppy. We really are building the slums of the future—there is no interest in the public realm.

So, what do you think of architecture in Brighton?
Brighton is a continually missed opportunity. It tries to be flash above being good. Places of value and quality get turned down, and shoddy, shoddy buildings are made in their place. There is a huge amount of attention paid to one-off “projects”, but the way that people actually interact with the space around them is made is largely oblivious to these set-pieces. The seafront, the traffic, the North Laine, The Level: these are the things that make up our environment and our experience of an urban space, and they are all handled very badly. The i360 is a perfect example of this—I don’t doubt that it will be quite fun if it ever gets built, but it stands right above a dreadfully dilapidated stretch of the seafront, and it is this—more than any single attraction—that makes up our experience of a city. Most cities develop from a very real geographic imperative—a harbour, a river and so on—but Brighton has none of this: we are a city largely by accident. We are now officially a city but we have no public space to enact public rituals, which is something that every city has. And needs. That isn’t to say that you can’t make big gestures—you should make no small plans, as Daniel Burnham said—but these have to be big, not hollow gestures.

At your lecture you spoke about the way that architecture’s purpose is to frame man in the cosmos. Could you expand on that idea?
Architecture was almost always seen as a setting for a ritual of human life, much the same as it is now the setting for our own social and secular rituals. What is important is that they serve as a setting for our required behaviours, which more often than not is concerned with locating us in the cosmos, understanding the world around us and negotiating what it means to be human. And it is architecture that can physically locate us in the cosmos—it’s common knowledge, but the pyramids were built in strict alignment to the stars, and the vast majority of Hindu churches are built with the door facing east, as are Christian churches, so morning light will flood into the space. This thirst for symbolism continues, albeit in a rather crude form.

Quick question to finish off: how can the ordinary person “read” a building, and can you explain the beauty of architecture?
How does one read a building? I suppose that looking around would be a start. Architecture is pleasurable and beautiful, but it has a communicative, historical and social element that no other art form has. A building will hopefully survive for many, many lifetimes, but at the same time it has to be viewed and used—the Victorian architect Pugin said that the history of architecture is the history of the world, and I believe that. It is how we communicate, with our ancestors, the people around us, and future generations. And that is beautiful.

Reviews: Crystal Castles, Sebastian Tellier, Big Dada Comp

Here's a few assorted reviews from the last year. All Fact Magazine, would you believe:

Crystal Castles
Crystal Castles
(Last Gang)

Though their 2007 credentials stand – Klaxons and Uffie remixes, a ne’er-more-oblique myspace yelling “murder, blank looks on girls, knives” as influences and are fond of saying “taxidermy” in interviews – Crystal Castles’ debut sounds so unashamedly electroclash it’s astounding there’s no DJ Hell hidden track. Which is lovely to be reminded of: grabbing the music of the last seven years, forgetting about the real shit and running for August 2001 like there’s no tomorrow is A-OK with us. Crystal Castles is tender, escapist ragtime for an economic downswing and a seven-year-old war on terror. What makes this LP special isn’t the “sonic invasion” they push, but its control and compassion. ‘Crimewave (Crystal Castles vs HEALTH)’ is a hard-edged song, but its graceful keyboard loop is malleable rather than mayhem-lead and ‘Vanished’s sparking hi-hats and reverb-laden construction owes as much to Suicide’s plaintive thuds as CC’s aesthetic owes to Vega and Rev. When the sonic destruction-as-creation their shows promise lets rip, as it does on ‘Xxzxcuzx Me’ and ‘Love and Caring’, it’s more of a refreshing hint than a full Glasgow kiss towards noise, and while their remixes and PRs press the “8-bit chaos” button, the tone general of this eponymous debut, with its concept-driven, sexually platonic tidy electro, is closer to Fisherspooner than Venetian Snares. And nicely done it is too: Ethin and Alice could easily slip into the undergrowth, but don’t brush over them – this is a don’t-sleep album for people who need more sleep.

Various
Well Deep: Ten Years Of Big Dada
Big Dada

Thankfully, for a hip-hop label based in the UK, this greatest hits and misses retrospective, is free from the mundane aggro that makes UKHH the sick man of music. Where the Low Life stable celebrate the parochial and the insular, Big Dada’s abstract eccentricity trots the globe – French farce-core jams from TTC, King Geodorah’s DC Comics raps and Diplo’s baile funk are represented here. Of course, the two discs are full of English national anthems – Roots Manuva's 'Witness (1 Hope)' still sounds as oh-my-days heavy as it did six years ago, and Wiley’s '50/50' makes you miss him about 500 times more than listening to Playtime Is Over in full did. It’s the humour, stupid: while Jehst’s peers look like they’ve never seen an episode of Allo Allo in their lives, Roots Manuva’s legendarily self-deprecating sports day video on the accompanying DVD is a joy.
A little more weight would be welcome, though. cLOUDDEAD – the band that launched a thousand blogs – sound far easier to explain than actually, you know, enjoy, though the magnificent Boards of Canada mix of Dead Dogs is a suitably majestic piece of the British pastoral. The astonishing thing about this collection is how bleeding edge almost every song on this record sounds – New Flesh’s 'Stick And Move' sounds as much like the future as it did five years ago, which can have a strangely merciless bent cumulatively. That quibble aside, Big Dada have spent a decade proving that anti-pop hip-hop doesn’t have to neglect the party principle – for most rappers here, MC means move the crowd. These are the anthems, so get your damn hands up.

Sebastian Tellier
Sexuality
Lucky Number

There are many “one moment of genius, 60 minutes of mediocrity” musicians in the world, but few are eccentric French Christ look-alikes with Air, Mr Ozio, SebAstian, and Daft Punk on their facebook, fewer who theme albums around issues of the human heart and are studio wizards with doom-prog dads. Fewer still have penned a track as “whimper like a manchild” as ‘La Ritournelle’. If Sexuality were made up of twenty-second samples, this would be as much of an instant classic as La Rit. But while none of these 11 slabs of spacey Eurosoul is without its own “wow” moment, many simply disappear away into their own faultless shimmer. It’s not until ‘Sexual Sportswear’ arrives in all its galloping, cosmic glory that Tellier does anything more than announce his unbearable relevance of being—he actually proves exciting and exhilarating for the full sweat-drenched length of a track. Much of the remaining 10 songs disappear into a vodocoder’d cosmic disco haze — an immaculately filthy bassline here, graceful chord structure there, but too often something feels missing from too many songs. This said, there is understated yet stately presence at work here, and when it a songs blasts, it fucking blasts — like on ‘Elle’s shift from cheese stomp to elegant rubber soul or on album closer and masterpiece ‘L’Amor Et La Violence’. Its heartbreaking, whispered words ebb over a sobbing, tailored synth line that builds and breaks over 5 minutes and 22 seconds of sumptuous beauty — it’s so moving that you forget to care that Seb may well have his tongue firmly between his molars. Tellier is musician to love and follow — his Sessions and Universe collections, and the multitude of remixes kicking about prove his unerring genius for style, eccentricity and melody. One day, Tellier will drop the album he has been promising for te best part of a decade. It pains me to say so, but Sexuality doesn’t feel like it.

Monkey, Don’t!
Gubbins
Manna Records

Gubbins is about getting high in a seaside town. Though Mark Robson (the wistfully troubled mind behind Monkey, Don’t!) is now settled in London Town, you get the feeling he’ll never leave his sleepy Hampshire roots. Not that that’s anything to be ashamed of: some of best recent British oddball music of the last decade (Beta Band, Super Furry Animals, Gorky’s, Field Music) has come out of toe-kicking suburban life. Coiled tedium, blissful mindlessness, stupid jokes – this’s Monkey, Don’t!’s territory. The songs drift into on another – this is an album of restless, parochial, eccentric invention. Street Of Sound has Acid House beat-throbs mixed into the Kinks’ guitars and Lalo Schriffin’s breaks – a combination that sound as natural as it would if they were all bought in a three for £12 bin at Woolies. The twee is never more than two steps away from this record, but its brilliantly clever arrangements provide enough to keep you from wanting to listen to Black Flag dead loud. Metaphor alert: like your home town, this is an album that is wonderful in its own, implacable way, and though you’ll be unbearably annoyed if you stay more than two hours, you’ll get strangely defensive should anyone take the mickey out of it.

Doing fine for Insight

An art feature on the growth of fine illustration in street art, printed in Insight under the title: Doing Fine: OContemporary favours finesse this month

If Olivia Connelly, gallery director at OContemporary is right, then what could loosely be described as urban art is the most globally significant movement since Pop. And, seeing as her new exhibition of delicate illustration and fine graphic art from three artists, a Brazilian, a Frenchman and a Brit, is set to sell out, we believe her. It’s this truly international aspect that gives art outside the academy its form – but this is often left off the walls: “Much of the fluff from the UK at the moment is loud, brash and big. Like any fluff, it will be forgotten. I’m concerned about curating works that will stand the test of time, and this is a quality all three artists this month have.”
It’s this timelessness and universality that marks the work on show out from the madding crowd. Banksy and his band of his imitators’ glory comes from their ability to point to one moment in time – when gay policemen became a badge of civic pride, when we started to feel uneasy about that CCTV camera on the corner, and so on. On the other hand though, Thais Beltrame’s work is quintessentially Brazilian, it can be enjoyed in any time or place. A trained illustrator who runs with the São Paulo art família Em Foco, she depicts child-like figures with intimate simplicity, and in one series of miniature pencil etchings she maps the childhoods of her friends, those day-to-day experiences that mark growing-up – from being scared of a dog leashed outside a shop, or loss felt when an ice cream scoop falls on the pavement. “I asked all my friends for things they remembered feeling when they were young,” she told us when she visited. “The interesting thing is that whenever anyone sees the pictures they instantly tell me that they have the same memories, that they remember the same things.”
A high level of technical skill unites the artists, though none of the three were formally educated in Fine Art – Thais studied illustration in Chicago, and San and John are trained graphic designers. John’s monotypes follows the master Goya as much as the urban artist Futura: “I worked on commission for years [for workwear brands like Carhartt] and it’s nice to have complete freedom, and to not be tied to a brief. I like ancient mythology, and when you look at people like Goya, you realise how little changes.”