Monday, July 13, 2015

Festival Season

We are in the full flow of festival season. Wimbledon ended yesterday, I missed Glastonbury (on the TV, god forbid I'd ever go!) as I was out of the country, and we are just over half way through the 2-week extravaganza of Manchester International Festival. I'm pleased as ever to see it in the city, but you'll probably have to go elsewhere to see how it was, as inevitably it always seems to come at a time when I'm very busy. I had the pleasure of hearing the Estonian choir singing Arvo Part in Whitworth Art Gallery on Saturday, but with some of the other shows sold out or finishing, I'm not sure I'll get to much more. I mused over this with a friend - I just don't go to much performance/theatre work - and with the highlights this year being mostly short runs in theatres and opera houses, (with much less of the Manc music that we've seen previous festivals) I guess its a classic case that you just can't do everything.

In the midst of this there's always other things going on in Manchester and I just hope that it all doesn't stop dead in a couple of weeks time, as the school's break up. That said Manchester's a massive building site at present as the tram second city crossing gets put in place - but there are also lots of roadworks, work going on the rail network, and a seemingly constant round of demolitions of sixties and seventies buildings in the city. Not since the post-bomb reconstruction after 1996 has the city been so transformed.This is of course the new economics, the state building, as the state recedes. Feels another phase of my long imagined Manchester novel.

I've managed to swerve the roadworks for a few things however. I enjoyed "Industrial soundtrack for the urban decay" at Home - a film about industrial music, a genre I've long had a fondness for, and which I was particularly into in 1983/4 when I was 16/17. (It also had a strong influence on the music I made at the time, and since.) There's a few mixtapes to listen to on the website of the film,  but good to hear from bands and artists who were almost invisible at the time. I remember how hard it was to get hold of records even though Psychic TV, Einsturzende Neubauten, Test Department and SPK were briefly being hailed as the next big thing. I never saw any of these bands live either as they tended only to play London, or maybe one or two other big cities. By the time I was at university the scene had moved back into the twilight shadows, yet it still remains an influence all these years later, and probably more well known now than then. The film's not on general release but will be issued on DVD later in the year. Worth seeking out.

I've been neglecting my reading, so not a lot of literature stuff to post. Though things carry on in the real world of course. I mean to get the new Best British Short Stories, ed. by Nicholas Royle, from Salt, reviewed here in the Guardian (and with a mention of Confingo magazine which I appeared in last year.)
 








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