music
Forget Trump: ‘Everybody loves the sunshine’
A wee tribute to American musician Roy Ayers who blows the dark Trumpian clouds away with one song…
Peat Bog Soldiers: how a Scottish band contributes to a German concentration camp archive
Professor David Archibald takes a radical approach to history through ‘wild research’ which has one foot in higher education, and one foot in Glasgow’s vibrant music scene. “One aspect of this wildness is that it…
Blow winds…rage, sing, make music
there’s something comforting about listening to the music made by a different natural force over which we have no control.
Poems for the dawn
Here is truth that we need to hear and confront in this viral age. Gordon Munro finds it in new work by Ben Okri and Marianne Faithfull
You’ve changed: a playlist for life
What I love, still, more than anything, is a message from a friend saying ‘hey – you might like this’. Craig Angus shares
On the threshold: songs and poems for a Covid-safe Christmas
Covid has closed the doors at least for now. But, there’s death-defying joy in Michael Marra’s song, a lockdown escape to be played loud and long. Here’s Frida Kahlo cutting an intoxicatingly exotic dash dancing…
Voices for humanity: Max Richter’s quiet protest
‘If we get back to public performance in time the piece is tailor made to open next year’s Edinburgh International Festival – at its source is the same inspiration that reached out a hand to…
Songs for our time
From Scotland to Canada, four musicians and an artist came together during lockdown to create a song to raise funds for Medecins Sans Frontieres, to help the worlds most vulnerable people.
In praise of the album: #SAYAward
Why make an album now? Craig Angus celebrates the longform and the Scottish Album of the Year for upholding it.
Pop Matters – in and out of lockdown
Craig Angus explores the lines between pop, politics and using art to both escape from, and make sense of a fractured world. Meet the makers of Pop Matters workshops: Maria Sledmere and Conner Milleken
Katie Lynch: Ventures in lockdown
“The arts, like everything, have absolutely fallen victim to capitalism. The ‘product’ of artists ripped from them while people in charge decide its value.”
We’re all islanders in a pandemic
In retrospect it seems eerily prophetic. Those faces framed in small screens, distant voices interconnecting in the ether. Yet that’s not really it. What interests Giles Perring is something simpler, but more profound than a…