Rowley Gallery Blog
I’d intended to post this video by Alonzo Mosley last November to celebrate two years of Frames Of Reference, but I forgot! It’s in the same spirit as the earlier Frames Of Reference video posted to mark our first birthday, and according to Peter Bradshaw it’s why the internet was invented! But nevermind, now we can use it as a New Year countdown. It runs for 9 minutes and 30 seconds so don’t start until 23:50:30. Happy New Year!
There’s lots of hope around town. I’ve been noticing it for weeks as I travel the streets of London. This is Athlone Street, NW5 in Kentish Town. Continue reading “Hope Scope”
The King’s Cross Laser Christmas Tree is the first of its kind, designed to bring two joyous celebrations together – Rave and Christmas. The tree itself is created by high powered lasers shooting across Regent’s Canal from the King’s Cross Filling Station onto the Midlands Good Shed opposite, drawing a simple Christmas tree. On the hour the tree goes into Rave Mode, best viewed from KXFS where it is accompanied by a random rave track, in this instance Anthem by N-Joi. Read more here.
Our Christmas card this year at The Rowley Gallery is from a wood engraving by Howard Phipps.
I can see holly in there and ivy too so here are a couple of complementary musical offerings as well…
The first is Anonymous 4, the second is Bruce Kernow, and below are a few of the Christmas cards that were sent to us…
Continue reading “The Holly & The Ivy”
Probably one of the best gigs of the year for me was the Tedeschi Trucks Bands at the Royal Albert Hall. I’ve known Derek Trucks’s music for the past ten years; he ranges from John Coltrane, Rahsaan Roland Kirk and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan to Bob Dylan, Delaney & Bonnie and Curtis Mayfield. But recently his band has joined forces with his wife’s, Susan Tedeschi’s band and so it was this mighty eleven piece that we saw back in October. Continue reading “Mavis, Susan & Derek”
This is a trailer for my favourite film of 2013, La Grande Bellezza (The Great Beauty), a kind of modern day equivalent to Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, full of gorgeous and spectacular images together with a sublime soundtrack featuring music by David Lang, Arvo Pärt, John Tavener and many more. Continue reading “The Great Beauty”
The Forty Part Motet is a sound installation by Janet Cardiff, a 40 track recording of Spem In Alium by Thomas Tallis presented at The Cloisters in Upper Manhattan by The Metropolitan Museum of Art. I heard about it from David Byrne:
In Cardiff’s piece, the singers—all 40 of them—are recorded, each on their own mic and track. In the installation, each individual voice is played back through their own speaker. The speakers are roughly arranged in a circle at head height. One assumes this is how they were positioned during the recording. The nature of the Tallis composition is that various groups of voices come and go, sing or remain silent for a bit: if you are standing by a speaker you might hear nothing for a while then suddenly a person’s voice booms out, with absolute clarity, as if they’re right next to you. So, depending on where you’re standing in the room, you hear a completely different balance of voices. Unless you’re in the center of the installation, you will hear some voices way louder than others.
There’s a moving review in the New York Times.
This recording was made at Grace Cathedral, San Francisco in 1971 by Paul Beaver & Bernie Krause with baritone saxophonist Gerry Mulligan. It was an exploration of the cathedral’s long reverb acoustics. Mulligan wanders through the space discovering constantly changing sound perspectives.
Bernie Krause is still recording but nowadays concentrating on capturing and archiving the sounds of the natural world and finding that wild sounds are increasingly silenced by the deafening noise of mankind.
David Hockney made these videos of four seasons in Woldgate Woods by driving slowly down the lane with nine cameras on the car roof. They are now on display in A Bigger Exhibition at the de Young Museum in San Francisco. Continue reading “Woldgate Woods”
