Art brut and surrealism help defeat the boredom of repetition for Italian drummer Valentina Magaletti whose projects range from gamelan ensemble work to orchestral improv, and hauntological dream pop to dub. Photography by Amanda Hakan. Valentina Magaletti leans forward in her chair, drumsticks in hand.… Read More
Coventry Cathedral & Drapers Hall, Coventry, UK Deliaphonic celebrates the life, work and legacy of pioneering electronic musician and Coventry native Delia Derbyshire. Prior to her death in 2001, Derbyshire envisioned creating an event – along with Spacemen 3’s Peter Kember – called Multi-sensory Electronic… Read More
Barbican, London, UK The concert opens in a confrontational vein. A sharp spotlight fixes itself on the audience while a heated debate about gender roles, sampled from the BKChat LDN webseries, booms out of the PA. The atmosphere becomes increasingly disconcerting as the spotlight moves… Read More
Marcus Werner Hed & Dan Fox (Directors)Willow Glen Films 2020, 82 min COUM Transmissions was a multidisciplinary art collective whose practice evolved from carnivalesque performances on city streets to transgressive actions in art galleries. Originally commissioned by the BBC, Other, Like Me was conceived as… Read More
I found myself reading a lot this past year, picking up books old and new. Juliane Fürst’s Flowers Through Concrete: Explorations in Soviet Hippieland provided an insight into hippy subcultures of the Soviet Union; Public House: A Cultural and Social History of the London Pub… Read More
Abelian Globalabelian.org Abelian collects round the clock streams of the very low frequency (VLF) radio band. These sounds of ‘natural radio’ are characterised by a series of whistles, crackles and pops, generated by thunderstorms and lightning flashes bouncing off the Earth’s ionosphere. Currently, the site… Read More
Photo: Hippies at their summer camp in Vitrupe, Latvia, 1978 (Photo courtesy Archive G Zaitsev, The Wende Museum, Los Angeles) Ilia Rogatchevski speaks with historian Juliane Fürst about her new history of Soviet hippies and the counterculture of the former USSR. Juliane Fürst is a… Read More
Molchat Doma: (from left) Roman Komogortsev, Egor Shkutko, Pavel KozlovPhoto: Stas Kard The dark synth poetics of Belarusian group Molchat Doma transcend language barriers “Minsk is very much a post-Soviet city, with its gloomy panel highrises. It was in this atmosphere that we thought to… Read More
Various Venues, Moscow, Russia. Photo: Sasha Mademuaselle Moscow Music Week is a festival that celebrates new underground music. It has been described by Russian culture website The Village as Russia’s answer to The Great Escape and SXSW, although it doesn’t yet match the size or… Read More
Ilia Rogatchevski 