Pic by Karl Randay
There’s an installation at Moor St Station. It’s been there for a couple of weeks now but I only just heard about it. Just in time as it ends tomorrow.
More details on the Plus International Design Festival site and New Generation Arts.
Update: Stef of 3form has more info and linkage and says the piece will be appearing elsewhere soon.
From Garry Corbett
Photos are posted here from the Birmingham Flickr community. Click on the image for more details.
If £35 is a bit out of your league for the Supersonic Festival then you can get in for free if you work it.
We are looking for some volunteers for the festival, mainly to help unload equipment for bands and to help out in the backstage area to keep it clean and tidy. We will need you for 6 hrs work in exchange for a FREE weekend pass and Supersonic T Shirt.
You’ll need to be reliable and hard working, this is particularly suitable for people that are skint but want to come along. Please email us asap info@capsule.org.uk
Feel free to pass on this opportunity to your friends.
I’m mildly regretting buying mine now, not just for financial reasons but to see how it all works backstage…
Local potential-art-rockers (I can never be sure) Devil and Casey Jones have an new album out, Rule Intensive Care, but you don’t need to go to a shop or register with a download service. Just go their site and right-click a few times for mp3 goodness.
Here’s one of the tracks – No True Love For The Likes Of You:
[audio:http://www.dacj.com/06%20No%20True%20Love%20For%20The%20Likes%20Of%20You.mp3]
They also have a gig tonight at the Jug of Ale, Moseley which I might pop along to if it’s not too rainy for my bike as they put on a good show. Here’s some photos from last year.
Again, probably easier just to post the jpeg. I’m not going to make a habit of this though…
Probably easiest just to post the flyer for this one. Click for more details.
Rather neatly tying in with Rootsville in the Custard Factory this weekend are a couple of art events at Ikon Eastide, the off-site gallery space run by the Ikon on Heath Mill Lane in Digbeth, just down the road from the Custard Factory.
Please Excuse Our Appearance is a two week residency where “artists from Birmingham, Mexico and the Netherlands explore their ongoing concern with architecture and its impact on everyday life. Ikon Eastside functions as an active working space for the participants and a public face for theproject in which visitors can access a changing display of drawings, photographs, notes and other documentation produced by the group as part of their research process.
The project ends on Saturday 30th and there’s a summation from 3-6pm where you can see the fruits of their research, with refreshments provided. If you can’t make that it’s open for the rest of this week from 1-5pm.
Also concluding on Saturday is Jacques Nimki’s Florilegium, otherwise known as the “field in the warehouse”. It looks a little like this:
from dead.zed
Under the title of Le Déjeuner Sue L’Herbe “the artist will serve home-made flower wine as guests recline on the meadow accompanied by a romantic soundtrack. Bring fod, drink and a blanket. Smart dress required.” The picnic starts at 7.30pm, again at Health Mill Lane.
Laura’s gig listings are up. Every week the Silver Footed Gig Slut does what the local live music industry seems utterly incapable of doing and prepares a gig guide that covers all the small venues and contains links to the bands in question. And she does this off her own back for no reward. Y’all should be ashamed. The rest of us can make use of her work to see who’s playing over the next week and, critically, check out what they sound like beforehand.
For some reason I’ve been posting these on my Brumblog rather than here, which doesn’t quite make sense. So from now on they’ll go here.
I finally got around to checking out the How To Improve The World exhibition at the Gas Hall and it’s a quite wonderful thing. A little slice of Tate carefully curated and positioned in Birmingham that manages to educate and entertain without patronizing the viewer or the art itself.
The theme of the show is 60 years of British Art from the Arts Council Collection and as such there’s a bias towards the more conceptual with a fair smattering of Turner Prize nominees. That might put some people off, but I found it interesting to see these pieces without the incessant noise of Art London getting in the way. Chris Ofeli’s infanous elephant shit painting, Popcorn Shells, is actually quite touching when experienced in quiet isolation. And the humour of much of this work really shines here, unlike at Tate Modern when it’s oh so serious. Here, in the “regions”, this art can breath a bit.
Other stuff I liked included Roger Ackling’s Five Hour Cloud Drawing, made by steadily tracing a shape with a magnifying glass only burning when the sun was out; Lucy Gunning’s video piece Climbing Around My Room where she does just that, using shelves and radiators to avoid touching the floor (Acid Game, anyone?); John Wood and Paul Harrison’s Device film; and Liam Gillick’s masterful series of mock (and mocking) exhibition posters Culture Is Important In A Free Society. I’d love some scaled down repros of those.
The only criticism I can offer is the positioning of the two Gilbert and George video pieces right next to each other so the soundtracks overlap. I don’t think this is how they’re intended to be experienced and, given that Gordons Makes Us Drunk is a personal favourite of mine, this was rather annoying.
Above all, though, a very enjoyable show in one of the better spaces for Art in Birmingham. Do check it out before it ends on September 2nd.
The BM&AG site is having database issues at the moment so I’ll add linkage later.
Rich Batsford plugs the Music by Candlelight concert at St Marys Church, Moseley on Thursday 28th as part of Mozfest.
I’ll be playing a twenty minute set of my piano music, probably at the start, followed by a selection of madrigals from the all-girl medieval vocal group Stella Maris, who were a definite highlight of last year’s event.
I left the first part of the second half of the concert open for a bit hoping to pull together some other vocal stuff and its looking good. A short set is planned from a select chorus directed by longstanding Organist and Choirmaster of St Mary’s Mick Perrier, featuring unaccompanied motets from some of the masters of the Rennaissance – Thomas Tallis, William Byrd and Orlando Gibbons. If you’re not familiar with this period in musical history, I can’t recommend it highly enough.
Another short set featuring myself and two old friends singing some three part harmonies to a couple of more up to date and secular songs will follow before we turn over to the Moseley Village Band to close the evening in traditional folky style.
It’s free and there’ll be wine, not to mention music and candles.
Is it me or is it really quiet at the moment? Usually on Monday mornings I get a slew of news in my various news receiving portals but so far this week very little. If I’m not careful I’m going to have to actually seek some out, maybe even make my own. And we can’t have that.
So it’s probably time for a call for news. If you’re involved in any aspect of the arts and/or creative industries in Birmingham then you’re more than welcome to send me stuff about it, be it a carefully crafted press release or just a bunch of stuff about what you’re up to. I can’t guarantee I’m actually use it but don’t let that stop you.
The email address is peteashton {at} gmail {dot} com. Add it to your mailing lists. Don’t be shy now.
Similarly, if you fancy writing for this blog then the opportunity is there. Reviews and reports on things that are going on are particularly welcome, especially from the drama and non-rock/pop music fields. While a semblance of impartiality is desirable I’ll understand if you can’t help plugging stuff you’re involved with.
Too often with events in the city when they’re over there’s no motivation to record what happens, presumably because those involved are completely wiped out by the efforts of actually putting on the darn thing, not to mention moving on to projects new.
So it’s nice to see reports starting to trickle into the New Generation Arts website, though I suspect having the Birmingham Post as a sponsor and media partner helps with the generation of material. So far there’s a nice, if short, summary of the Big Debate and an intelligent review of the Queen’s Park Sinfonia:
“On this occasion the QPS also had the benefit of having Daniele Rosina as its conductor, himself a Conservatoire alumnus who is surely poised to achieve great things in the music world. His beat is easy and clear, movements are understated but commanding, and the musical-ity of his insights into scores uncovers details which so often pass by unnoticed.”
More to come hopefully.
From Stephen D Harper
Photos are posted here from the Birmingham Flickr community. Click on the image for more details.
From H4NUM4N
Photos are posted here from the Birmingham Flickr community. Click on the image for more details.
From andrewknowles
Photos are posted here from the Birmingham Flickr community. Click on the image for more details.
