Age? Mid-late 1980s. 

Shoe what? The name comes from the characteristically apathetic performance style: staring at one’s feet. 

Sounds pretty miserable. Not really. If anything, it’s typified by lots of guitar effects, with a heavy use of feedback.

Who likes it? Err. Other shoegazers, mostly – hence the name ‘the scene that celebrates itself.’ And, increasingly, clubs of cool kids captivated by M83’s French take on the genre.

Check out our selection of five bona fide bangers:

‘Just Like Honey’ – Jesus and Mary Chain

‘You Don’t Know Her Name’ – Maps

‘Cherry-coloured Funk’ – Cocteau Twins

‘Only Shallow’ – My Bloody Valentine

‘Dead Sound’ – The Raveonettes

Hear all these tracks, and more, on the accompanying Spotify playlist.

Ital is certainly versatile. The chameleon producer has played guitar in a high energy post-hardcore band, provided vocals for a weirdly funked up punk group, and is now a solo producer under various monikers. But a word of caution before we continue; this is without a doubt a house album, and as such it’s full merit is somewhat difficult to appreciate on a bright weekday afternoon sitting in my bedroom.

Right from the off, Ital (or Daniel Martin-McCormick) showcases his funky heritage with a syncopated number that features a chopped up vocal sample and sci-fi synth lines. To its detriment however, it lasts almost eight minutes, and once the initial curiosity fades, it just drags. Indeed the weakness of this five track EP is its length; three tracks, each over ten minutes long is not only excessive, but also difficult to pull off. McCormick only vaguely manages it, and it’s telling that my favourite track ‘Floridian Void’ is the shortest.

Now on to one of those ten minute tunes. ‘Privacy Settings’ lifts the mood with a classic house approach reminiscent of MJ Cole’s funkier moments. Its midsection even executes a dubstep-ish bass drop briefly. And to be honest, the closer is just too similar to the previous tracks to justify another ten minutes of listening time. Ultimately, the cons outweigh the pros here. Diverse, slick, and conceptually sound versus long, repetitive, lacklustre … and repetitive again. 

The sound of Kilsyth trio The Twilight Sad has always been strikingly distinctive from their contemporaries. Acclaimed debut Fourteen Autumns & Fifteen Winters and follow-up Forget the Night Ahead matched the desperate cries of frontman James Graham with the swirling, enveloping guitars of shoegaze pedigree. But the swooping, cathartic crescendos of the Twilight Sad’s early releases and the heart-on-sleeve directness of Graham’s lyricism set their work apart.

Despite this obstinate idiosyncrasy, however, long-time listeners were understandably shocked when the group announced their intention to retire their distinctive haze altogether with the recording of third studio album No One Can Ever Know. It is the aesthetic and instrumentation, rather, which has undergone complete reinvention. ‘I don’t see it as a big direction change,’ Graham told me in an interview this December. Still, the shift is impressive.

No One surges along with mechanistic, sinister momentum. The sound is harsh and often outright malevolent, but remains true to The Twilight Sad’s roots, often burying Graham amidst competing vintage Russian-bought synths and industrial guitars. There is a perceptible shift in Graham’s lyrics: the pain is inflicted here, just as it was received in albums past. This is mirrored starkly in the instrumentation, and consequently No One is at its most impressive in its discordant pinnacles, particularly opener ‘Alphabet’ or closer ‘Kill it in the Morning’. But the more subdued ‘Nil’ and single ‘Sick’ are also striking in their brooding, melodic beauty. No One is decidedly a lurch forward for The Twilight Sad, but without a single misstep.

4 STARS

Late one night in January 1975, the pianist Keith Jarrett sat down at the Cologne Opera House’s Bösendorfer piano and improvised an unbroken thread of music that absorbed everything from country to gospel, smeared through with French impressionism. The recording, The Köln Concert, marked a classic milestone in 1970s jazz and the vinyl carried three significant letters, ‘ECM’. Editions of Contemporary Music had been founded in Munich five years previously by Manfred Eicher, initially to record exiled American musicians in Europe. Through its sophisticated sleeve art, exquisite resonance and pioneering artists, ECM would become an enduring influence on contemporary music.

Few record companies have achieved such an aesthetic reputation. Of course Eicher is guarded about pinning down an ECM aesthetic, ‘that’s a job for the critic, but whether it’s useful is an open question.’ He dislikes the idea that ECM has ever pushed a minimalist aesthetic. ‘We aim to focus upon essentials but that rather translates into clarity.’ Eicher is instead keen to stress the freedom that his label maintains, within a congested industry. ‘We are freer because we don’t speculate on trends and possible reception while documenting the music. It’s a purely artistic process.’ Yet there has always been an incredible sense of vision. The label’s early slogan was famously ‘the most beautiful sound next to silence’: ‘That was our leitmotif for a while, intended playfully, since John Cage had already proven that silence cannot really exist. It was a challenging guideline at the beginning.’

ECM’s luminous ambience, a texture in itself, changed the face of jazz. How has ECM managed, then and now, to produce such a sound? Eicher’s absolute immersion in the production process is key. ‘The approach has always been to capture the music as faithfully as possible. But the needs of the music change constantly,’ Eicher observes. ‘You cannot step into the same production twice; the resonance will always be different. As producer, I am attempting to illuminate the potential of a musical performance.’ The idea of location is also an integral part of the process. ‘A room has to inspire the musician either by its resonance, its architecture or at best by a certain spirit.’

The label’s legacy lies in its geographical expansion of jazz — the haunting sound of Norwegian saxophonist Jan Garbarek, the extended virtuosity of American guitarist Pat Metheny and the colour shifts of Polish trumpeter Tomasz Stánko have all become ECM trademarks as much as Jarrett’s solo concerts. ‘One way or another we’re interested in the places where the rivers meet. Usually the most interesting things happen at the edges of the traditions, idioms and geographical regions.’ One obsession of ECM, in its exploration of the margins, has been in documenting free improvisation, from the fierce intensity of The Art Ensemble of Chicago through to the more cerebral projects of the British saxophonist Evan Parker. Since so much of the beauty is in the moment, how does Eicher hope to capture this on record? ‘The more you listen, the more clearly the music’s freely created structure will become,’ Eicher explains. ‘For the most part the free improvisers we have recorded consider improvisation to be a ‘compositional’ work method.’

ECM’s forays into composed music are particularly interesting. In 1984 Eicher founded ECM New Series for composers. The first release on the new imprint, Tabula Rasa, embraced the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt, a proponent of the ‘New Simplicity’, the late 20th century spiritual Minimalism that emerged from the former Soviet bloc. Eicher disagrees over this term. ‘I heard Pärt as a completely independent composer, not as a representative of any movement.’ But the ways in which Pärt crafts the timbres of organs, bells and voices into a concentrated resonance, sit very comfortably with the label’s underlying melancholy.

Critics of Eicher’s label often highlight the way ECM crafted a sophisticated, even cultish identity for itself amidst the confusion of 70s jazz. And in many ways ECM is a considerable marketing success. Eicher remains insistent that the label’s catalogue itself defies ideology. Despite criticisms of ECM’s Northern European ethos, this is certainly a truly remarkable aspect of ECM’s output. Perhaps the beauty of Eicher’s project lies in its ability to marry adventurous art with commercial performance. What is important, Eicher stresses, is his devotion to production values that defy mass consumption. ‘We carry on, one album at a time.’

Milja Fenger never intended to come to Oxford. Born in a small town in Holland, she came to England for the first time when she was eighteen to take part in a two week directing course at East 15 drama school, famous for its unusual rehearsal methods, many of which Fenger has adapted for her own rehearsals.

I ask about a technique she uses called laughter runs.  ‘Laughing is actually really hard – we need to laugh more. I thought that if people had giggle fits together, then they wouldn’t be ashamed of opening up in front of each other. English people are often quite guarded – they’re scared of doing something wrong so I make them do something crazy.

‘I don’t think good acting is about being slick or witty, it’s about emotion and freeing your own imagination.’

To date Fenger has written over fifteen plays, and with her second full-length play, I Am Green, she was accepted onto the Royal Court’s Young Writers Program. Her first screenplay – The Road Home, about an Indian boy brought up in England who is forced to return to India – has toured over 50 festivals world-wide as well as winning the Jury Award at the Palm Springs Festival and shortlisted for the Best Short Film Oscar for 2012.

I ask a little more about Mephisto, the play she is directing at the Oxford Playhouse in 6th week. Based on the autobiographical novel by Klaus Mann, Mephisto tells the true story of the rise and fall of a radical cabaret troupe during Hitler’s rise to power. Fenger is hesitant to give too much away; ‘Mephisto is an incredible story: it’s about sexuality and race and politics and moral compromise. And it’s about the power and responsibility of theatre – most of the play takes place in various dingy theatres with the actors playing actors and performing to another audience: its very ‘meta’.’

Moving on, I mention something about student drama ultimately being about having fun. She chuckles, ‘I didn’t do it for fun. I did it for a challenge and because I think it’s an incredible story and a brilliant cast. At the moment I don’t have a life, I just have rehearsals – about 40 hours a week. I don’t even see my own boyfriend!’

Why, then, does Fenger do it? ‘It’s important to think about how other people live. Living is hard and it’s not easy to make decisions. This is where theatre can help us – at its best theatre can be extraordinarily powerful – and I love that. If there is anything that I do well it’s just because I am curious about the world and about human nature.’

Finally, I couldn’t help but ask what was coming up next for such an accomplished and up-and-coming director. Again she is hesitant to give too much away, ‘I have been commissioned to write a feature film. I can’t say for whom because you will know what the film is about. All I can say is that it’s set in Columbia…’

I try my luck to find out some details. ‘I’m sorry – confidentiality contract! As for theatre, I’ve said in the past that Mephisto would be my last play in Oxford as I should really get back to studying – I love my course- but actually I might do just one more…’

Despite his best efforts, Chekhov’s works are often more tragic than funny.  Director Jessie Norman, in this production of seven of his short plays, intends to offer an antithesis to this common perception. From the pun-inspired posters to the physical comedy and absurdist humour, these plays promise to be light, finely-tuned and about as far from The Seagull as it is possible to get.

The excerpt I was shown consisted of two ten minute plays, The Alien Corn and The Sneeze. The first was an exchange between a brash Russian landowner, Kamyshev, and  a timid French tutor, Champugne, who has stayed on the Russian man’s estate despite the fact that all the children have grown up and left home. Chekhov, being Chekhov, uses the mild xenophobia of the landowner to reveal something of his loneliness, and the interplay between the narrator’s introduction and the sketch itself is what brings the piece out of the realm of pure comedy.

The Sneeze, while also very light on the surface, equally drew out the terror of a junior official at the prospect of offending his superior. The actors will all take on several roles across the seven plays, and even in the two shorts I saw showed an admirable versatility – special mention should go to Ed Barr-Sim for his leap from morose servitude as a footman to panicky fervour as the minor official in the second play.

Although I did not see set or costumes, the plans sound interesting and innovative. The scene changes, Norman tells me, will be effected by the actors themselves without the use of blackouts, to give a parlour or music-hall air to proceedings.

The most exciting aspect of the set promises to be a live string quartet, with music composed specifically for the production. The Sneeze used the string music to add to the physical comedy, and the music will also be used to choreograph the scene changes.

If all goes to plan, this promises to be both a fun and polished production. The short pieces I saw were well rehearsed and, for the most part, trod the line between comedy and farce well. The Sneeze veered a little into over-hammed comedy, as much must be communicated by face and gesture, but this will probably be tempered by the first night.

Overall, I was impressed by the strong cast of versatile actors and some excellent and innovative direction. 

4 stars

‘I just wanted great art’ is how Howard Hodgkin, famous print-maker and painter, explains the rationale behind his collection of Indian paintings. His collection, exhibited in full for the first time at the Ashmolean this spring, is an eclectic medley of sketches, portraits, marblings, large-scale paintings and mini-scenes. Although the Ashmolean has sought to group the pieces into regional sections (the Mughal, the Daccani, the Pahari etc.), this grouping is only superficially successful. The paintings are so soaked in the culture of the nation that they form a cohesive representation of the various styles of national art than they do of regional styles. 

The exhibition opens with a simple statement from Hodgkin: ‘These pictures were chosen because I thought they were beautiful … and not for any scholarly purposes.’

In the first room, Moghul, the paintings are a riot of colourfully clashing hunters and leopards; mythological lady archers, and doped up dervishes, mixed in with sober portraits of elephants, maharajas, and yet more elephants. There’s even one named ‘Lord of happiness’, who is decorated with enough bells to adorn the feet of a dozen dancers. 

These sedate elephant portraits are beautiful, but the next rooms celebrate a different side of these powerful animals. In one stunning mixed media picture an elephant crashes in from the left side of the composition, splaying a shrieking Guernica-like horse beneath it. The animals are rendered in simple brush drawing but it is the background which makes the picture: a whirligig of vibrant and abstract marbling which dramatises the conflict, swirling around and about the clashing beasts in a pulsating, technicolour roar of expressive pattern. 

Violence is countered with very different kinds of paintings. Only a little further on, in an architecturally mapped-out courtyard, a nobleman sporting a pair of pink slippers gazes ruminatively at a goose. In the next room, in a three scene composition, a nobleman is entertained by the ladies of his court. He is shown watching a dancer perform, bathing in a pool, and helping the women to gather blossoms which hover and float about the scene, as though the figures have stumbled into a snowstorm of pink petals.

It is a very eclectic mix of paintings. There is certainly no ‘scholarly purpose,’ as Hodgkin puts it, but it is a beautiful selection, built up and honed over a lifetime. Even if the 115 paintings that we can see have little relation to each other, they are each individually beautiful.