Iwagumi is a Japanese term that refers to the methodical arrangement of rocks in aquascaping. Usually taking on the form of bold, weighty stones resting among each other in opposition to open, airy surroundings, the distinctive art form appreciates and showcases the humble beauty of rocks. For the tenth edition of the i Light Singapore art festival in Marina Bay, art and technology studio ENESS pays homage to the creative tradition with a major installation titled Iwagumi Air Space.
Kate Carrās new album is a āsonic transectā across London. She slices the city from her Loughborough Junction home out west to Staines and east to Slade Green, travelling on public transport and recording as she goes. Her work is based around field recordings, which morph into electronic tracks, distortion emerging across the stereo spectrum from bus and train noise, and blending back into the sounds of the places she visits.
Some 1,000 years ago, a small band of Polynesians sailed thousands of miles across the Pacific to settle one of the world’s most isolated placesāa small, previously uninhabited island they named Rapa Nui. There, they erected hundreds of “moai,” or gigantic stone statues that now famously stand as emblems of a vanished civilization.
Eventually, their numbers ballooned to unsustainable levels; they chopped down all the trees, killed off the seabirds, exhausted the soils and in the end, ruined their environment.
Their population and civilization collapsed, with just a few thousand people remaining when Europeans found the island in 1722 and called it Easter Island. At least that is the longtime story, told in academic studies and popular books like Jared Diamond’s 2005 “Collapse.”
A new study challenges this narrative of ecocide, saying that Rapa Nui’s population never spiraled to unsustainable levels. Instead, the settlers found ways to cope with the island’s severe limits, and maintained a small, stable population for centuries.
Very unusually among the virtuoso composer-pianists of the 19th century, Charles-Valentin Alkan spent much of his life as an apparent recluse.
He shunned the concert platform in favour of keeping his own company, reading, studying and creating some of the most spectacularly demanding piano music ever written.
Choosing a life like this meant that rumours flourished about him during his lifetime, as they have ever since. For instance, the story that he died when reaching for a volume at the top of one of his bookshelves, which then toppled forwards and crushed him, is now known to be a fabrication.
To see the quick corruption of the revolutionary minds and the ease with which the general population accepted conformism as the way to go through the life, it was an interesting experience which shaped my feelings about reality, when I’m thinking about history, and the sociological and psychological mechanisms of people and societies.
āOne of them was called Cone of Variable Volume. It was very simple, just an exploratory film in which I tested the idea of a circle that would change its volume, by expansion and contraction. It was at four different speeds, from frenetic to so slow you could barely see it moving. To my surprise, I realised that it was doing something I had never noticed before. It was quite obviously breathing.ā
In this new quarterly column, Iām going to be getting to the heart of this resurgence in traditional and folk music, focussing particularly on those practitioners who possess a progressive energy, whether in sound or philosophy. I call it a resurgence, rather than a ārevivalā, for a reason. Just because more mainstream attention is increasingly being drawn to those performing traditional music, does not mean that they have ever been absent.
Because of its size and location, the henge would have been a prominent place in the region and provided a major site for ceremonial activity. At this time, Crowland would have been a peninsula surrounded on three sides by water and marshes, and the henge was situated on a distinctive and highly visible point projecting out into the Fens.
The henge seems then to have been deserted, perhaps for many centuries, but the significance already given to the site by the substantial prehistoric earthworksāwhich would have still been visible into the medieval periodāmeant it was probably seen by hermits like Guthlac as a unique landscape with a long and sacred past.
Scribbled numbers, wiped-away letters, word-like scrawls: all of these recur in Kikuo Saitoās paintings of the early 1990s, a selection of which form a wonderfully mystifying solo show on view now at James Fuentes gallery in New York.
I don’t know how I rate being on the review comps list for Zoharum Records, but I am not complaining. Really looking forward to getting into these this week.
70s Sci-Fi art shows off a small collection of what are probably now curiosities. Here in Britain, weekly comics (which they mostly were) did both a Summer Special issue and a big hardback Annual at Christmas. One of the things I looked forward to at Xmas as a kid was getting one or two Annuals. It was really nice to see some again. That’s a Brian Bolland cover. I was lucky enough to hit a bucket list item very early in my career – Brian Bolland did the cover for the first issue of my first monthly comics job, HELLSTORM for Marvel.
American comics sometimes did annuals – I think they went out of fashion at some point there. But British comics were anthologies, and so the summer specials annuals had really wide ranges of material. often by new or obscure artists, and were stuffed with articles. Garth Ennis and I both learned out to write comics from the printing of one page of John Wagner/Alan Grant script in a 2000AD Summer Special.
