21st February 2024
A history of seventy years of popular music in Scotland by Simon Frith, Martin Cloonan and John Williamson is fascinating and comprehensive in its introduction to the story , writes Sheena Macdonald in review.
29th September 2023
For Greg Thomas, the music in Kim Moore's new release with Blackford Hill is at once a physical thing which moves, an image, and a word provoking profound affect. There is something 'urgent' here, he writes.
29th September 2023
Music to galvanise and control: a sonic authoritarianism? Louise Rodgers examines how powerful groups, institutions and individuals throughout history have hitched music to their social programmes.
12th January 2023
Has there been a new discovery of the social and civic aspects of song -its historic powers? What are the sources and its outcomes of such a movement? How did it start up, where does it happen, who takes part and where is it going? Neil Cooper went to see and listen to the NVC in Perth.
26th October 2021
The loss of The Arches as a site for the eruption of anarchic creative collaborations of a generation through all forms imaginable was a shock. Did the forces of conservatism conspire to finish it off in 2015... or maybe its work was done there, and the spirit needed to move on anyway? Neil Cooper's review of Innes and Bratchpiece's history of the venue is epic and elegaic: it deserves all that and even more ...
20th November 2020
In an exceptional article for the Drouth, Neil Cooper writes to mark the release of Shadow of Fear, the first new album from Cabaret Voltaire for twenty years. The piece is exceptional in its musical profile for The Drouth, its exceptional in its extraordinary length, and also in its personal take on a rock story from Cooper.
31st May 2020
A new work commissioned from artist Susan Phillipsz was set to open at The Woodland's historic Hamilton Mansion. As the pandemic made the presentation impossible, the artist remade the work as a series of files that can be downloaded for lockdown , Neil Cooper describes the experience.
6th February 2020
It’s a quarter millennium this year since the birth of THE Romantic hero, the Thunderer himself, Beethoven, who claimed to have taken ‘fate by the throat’ and would never ‘let it bend me completely to its will’. Iain Matheson picks his way through Beethoven’s will and his work.
7th October 2019
Jasmina Cibic | An Atmosphere of Joyful Contemplation has to be one of the most powerfully expressive political artists working in Europe today. How much she owes that to her origins […]