Live arts correspondent Bella Todd on the hottest happenings in the global cultural calendar this week, including Greek myth meets heavy metal in a theatrical girl band, and Alan Moore in a very English mash-up.
The Main Event: Supersonic featuring The Furies
Liverpool had Merseybeat. Manchester had, er, Madchester. And in 1965 a budding guitarist called Tony Iommi sliced the tips off two fingers in a sheet metal factory, stuck thimbles on his stumps so he could still attack his power chords, and by-and-by made his hometown of Birmingham into the birthplace of the distinctively industrial sounding heavy metal.
It’s the globally impactful but culturally under-celebrated Birmingham of Iommi’s own Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, Judas Priest and Napalm Death that Brummie theatre collective Kindle Theatre are celebrating in their latest piece, The Furies.
The company’s previous work includes mythically-inspired dinner parties with ‘bull-semen’ pudding and ‘coffin-dirt’ chocolate cake on the menu. This time they’re putting the tale of Clytaemnestra (revenge-ravaged Ancient Greek husband murderer, to cut a long story short) into the mouths of a raging band of classical Furies with a very contemporary taste in music.
And to strengthen this already pretty neat conceit, the resulting mythical heavy metal girl band are ‘playing’ this week as part of Supersonic, the annual Birmingham live music and arts festival whose organisers Capsule also happen to be responsible for Home Of Metal, a new project to create the first digital archive of metal music, memorabilia and fans’ stories.
Supersonic being a music festival dedicated to the alternative, the multi-sensory, the cerebrally exciting and the sonically extreme, The Furies should fit right in. Other music acts include LA band-cum-art collective Lucky Dragons (inventors of a bio-electrically charged synthesizer that creates chords via the skin-on-skin contact of audience members – they’ve christened it ‘Make a Baby’…Cult Sixties NY space-psych forerunners Silver Apples… minimalist composer, ‘dream music’ initiator and compatriot of John Cale (and the man indirectly responsible for how The Velvet Underground got their name – but that’s another story) Tony Conrad… And a band called Wolves In The Throne Room, who we have never heard and mention solely because of their excellent name.
As Wire magazine put it, Supersonic strikes ‘a delicate balance between chin-stroking and headbanging’. How lovely if Birmingham could succeed in its bid to become the first UK City of Culture in 2013 on that ground alone.
Best Of The Rest
- It’s a mash-up, I believe, in the current terminology’ says legendary graphic novelist Alan Moore of English Journey: Re-Imagined, a ‘21st century happening’ of music, readings, performance and films arriving at London’s Barbican this week. Moore is just one of the disparate group of cult artists drawing inspiration from JB Priestley’s 1930s journey through England, including filmmaker turned writer Iain Sinclair (aka East London's ‘gonzo Samuel Pepys’), folk icon Shirley Collins and musician FM Einheit (whose playing of found objects with German post-industrial, scrap-metal sensualists Einstürzende Neubauten was as much performance art as percussion).
- Art of the street, martial and circus varieties will all be on display at Kuala Lumpar’s massive multi-venue Collision Arts Asia Festival, which runs from October 21-23 and includes everything from live graffiti demos to (no doubt visually arresting if not strictly artistic) extreme sports.
Want more?
- Check out the Supersonic site
- Get some Red Bull culture
- Read previous Canned Culture blogs
- Follow Bella Todd on Twitter
Comments
Add a comment