Recently in Reviews Category

Half a lifetime ago I saw the Sisters of Mercy at the NEC in Birmingham. It was the biggest and loudest gig I've ever been to, a spectacle that left me unable to hear properly until I got back off the coach on the return journey. Every time the Sisters headed offshore after that I promised myself I'd go to see them again.Last Thursday (9th April 2009) I finally caught up with them at the Forum in Kentish Town. I wasn't expecting too much. London audiences have a bad reputation, the band had cancelled some gigs the week before due to illness, and reviews of the tour although very positive had complained about how quiet the mix was. But the pubs on the way to the venue from the tube were packed with fans (some wearing The Mission t-shirts, presumably to troll ;-) ) and there was a carnival atmosphere that carried over into the actual venue.I positioned myself next to the amp stack, evaluated the moshpit and the bright young things who were waiting to push to the front, and waited for the smoke machines to start. Which they did, just for a test, before starting up again as Nurse fired up the Doktor (trans: the sound man turned the drum machine on) and the packed out crowd enthusiastically welcomed the band on stage. From the sweating half-naked moshers and shoulder surfers at the front to the loligoths at the back and the fans in tour t-shirts old & new acting as a buffer zone inbetween, everyone sang along with the old songs and applauded the new.The Sisters are a tight, capable live act. The new songs are the equal of the old, and in some cases better. The new arrangements of old songs (post-industrial rather than post-punk) work well and have been polished over the course of two extensive recent tours. This was great live music. It feels strange calling a drum-machine based band "live", but that has always been part of the point.A singer, two guitarists and a drum machine all hidden in dry ice and silhouetted by a lightshow is a simple recipe but it works well. To complain that the band cannot be seen or that they aren't chatting with the crowd or that they are relying on technology too much is to miss the psychodynamics of the event for the trees. The Sisters are at core an ironization of popular music. They started by combining disco drums with indie guitars at a time when to do so would have been like mixing oil and water then stuck lyrics that aren't just boy-meets-girl over the top of them. Over the last three decades the culture industry has adopted the Sisters' technological dialectic of musical forms as its own, but entirely without the irony or lyrical ambition. The Sisters still sound good though. The book hasn't been destroyed by the cartoon version.A disagreement with their old record label means the Sisters haven't released a new album in almost twenty years, but new songs still turn up in the live shows and although those songs represent a very different musical and geopolitical world to the old ones they still have a rare power and depth. And they are good to bounce up and down to, wave your arms at, and sing along with. Which I am not going to leave as long next time until I do so again next time.

A review of FLOSS+Art (the new book I have an essay in):

As our familiarity with software deepens, the question of its cultural understanding looms. Here Tony Sampson reviews FLOSS+Art and Software Studies: A Lexicon, two recent books which attempt to open up the black box to a wider audience

see Mute magazine - Culture and politics after the net.

Sometimes, in a free society, we may read things that we not only don't agree with but that we find personally offensive. For me, Charlie Gere's "Non-Relational Aesthetics" is that book. It is the most godawful piece of shit ostensiby about art that it has ever been my misfortune to read. But rather then firebombing the publisher, as Gere defended other aggrieved critics doing recently, I'll commend Artwords Press for seeking out new voices and encouraging readers to engage with ideas that they might not otherwise encounter.If anyone wants a copy let me know in the comments and I'll send you mine, post free.

http://ghostbox.co.uk/fromanancientstar.htmThe bands signed to Ghost Box records are developing the most fully-formed musical mythology in British music since The Fields of the Nephilim (or possibly the JAMMs). With "From An Ancient Star", Ghost Box band Belbury Poly have continued to expand and integrate their range of retrofuturistic references, blending them into an intensified musical dreamtime of the historical and technological uncanny of the 1970s.This is the time (and space) of ouija boards and "Tomorrows World", synthesizers and maypole dances, standing stones and polytechnics, Eric Von Daniken and Denis Wheatley. This is the synthesis of techno-social utopia and haunted rural folk culture. Add the words "dialectic" and "simulacra" to taste. And as the album's cover strongly suggests, this is the time of the final Quatermass adventure and of "The Children Of The Stones".It's an accessible and rewarding listen. The analogue synth sounds echoing Tangerine Dream, Jean Michel Jarre, Vangelis, The BBC Radiophonic Workshop. The musical styles and found archive reodings echoing folk culture, television and film music, and public service announcements. The reslt is much more than the sum of its parts, and very contemporary. This is not nostalgia, it uses the musical past as a prism for the cultural present.A nagging voice at the back of my mind asks "what next?" Is there only so far this formula can be refined? But then the reggae rhythm starts. And it works, and works well. If you've bought any other Ghost Box releases, this is one that you have to ad to your collection. And if you haven't bought any other albums from Ghost Box this is definitely the one to start with.

When I'm at an art show I'm going to review, or as soon as possible after leaving it, I take notes. These may be taken in low-light conditions, on the last train of the night, under the influence of complimentary alcohol, or in otherwise sub-optimal conditions. But they tend to have an immediacy that the finished review replaces with more in-depth reflection. So as an experiment here are scans of the notes for my review of "Neurotic and the PVCs" at the ICA and "SwanQuake: House" at v22. Excuse my scrawl.

I have two new reviews up at Furtherfield.

FLOSS Manuals

http://www.furtherfield.org/displayreview.php?review_id=317

"Neurotic" - a performance at ICA by Fiddian Warman featuring three robots and a number of Punk bands.

http://www.furtherfield.org/displayreview.php?review_id=318

Bela Emerson's cybernetic cello performances are excellent. New album out soon!

Brad Sucks is mis-named. His college-radio-friendly Beck-ish rock wouldn't normally be my cup of tea but it's BY-SA and it grows on you.

Amanda Palmer is, fortunately, not really dead because her debut solo album is great.

And on the retro front I've been enjoying Tangerine Dream and The March Violets...

I have two new Free Culture-related reviews up at Furtherfield.Abstract HacktivismA book collecting two essays by Otto von Busch and Karl Palmas transforms the concept of "hacktivism" with well-argued historical analysis and a number of informative case studies.Big Buck Bunny"Big Buck Bunny", the second short film from the Blender Foundation, features well animated cartoon animals trying to kill each other in order to advance free software and free culture.Both of the works under review are excellent and well worth downloading and/or paying for.

Solaris - The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction: Volume 2They're not mentioning it in the publicity, but this collection contains the new Jerry Cornelius novella from Michael Moorcock, "Modem Times".I've started reading it and it's very good. Absolutely vintage Cornelius but with the quotes from Iraq now rather than Vietnam.If this blog post is threatening to mean precisely nothing to you, Wikipedia isn't much help. I will blog about Cornelius at some point, the stories are absolute classics.

furtherfield review - Addressable Memory

Michael Takeo Magruder is portraying this landscape of digital memory with its own tools, producing portraits of its inhabitants with its own palettes. In Addressable Memory the first draft of history is allegorized as a process of combining and quantizing disparate experience and telemetry. Of mashing-up and composing. The technology and aesthetics of mobile phones, Internet news feeds, video screens, computer image processing and virtual reality are all turned on themselves. At TheSpace4 in Peterborough this show takes up all three rooms. It will be touring the UK throughout 2008.

My latest review at Furtherfield.