Thursday 12 December 2013

The Beat Of The Tambourine

Physicality is almost always the problem with computer music: there's little as demoralising, belittling and flat-out tedious as watching a clutch of guys stare at their laptops unless something performatively diverting is also going on. So, it was a blessed relief at Cafe Oto's Intersect mini-festival when Daichi Yoshikawa picked up a tiny tambourine and proceeded to coax some very strange reverberations out of it with a contact mic, a tin can and a very careful sense of timing.

James Dunn and Chris Weaver had the same patience from sound to sound, and percussive sound palette, but didn't seem to want to hear anything they did more than once; there could have been some brilliantly off-kilter techno in there if only they  could have stomached some repetition.   

Saturday 7 December 2013

War Is Hell


"Dirty Wars" should have been a rage-inducing festival of skulduggery and neo-imperialist arrogance. Instead, we got shot after tedious shot of the be-stubbled journalist sipping black tea in a fashionably down-at-heel cafe overlooking some war-scarred town, tapping away at his laptop and staring confusedly at a set of photos we've seen many times already, asking himself laughable cod-mystifying questions: "I found myself back in Yemen. But how could I know why?"

Serious issue; ghastly, vacant film.