News, comment, links and observations

TV Cops and Killers

We can't get enough of murder most foul, ghoulish and macabre on TV

If you can’t play a cop or a mass murderer, steer clear of the acting profession. That would be the logical inference from the swarms of cops’n’killers series cramming the TV schedules. You’d think we’d have had enough, what with Luther, all the CSI franchises, and simultaneous home-grown and American versions of Law & Order squabbling for attention, but they just keep on coming.

'Things' Ain't What They Used To Be

The public works for free. That is the founding principal of modern broadcasting culture. It phones radio stations with its air-filling thoughts on this and that. It monopolises Saturday nights on primetime in singing and dancing and plate-spinning. Until recently, it would sit in a house for weeks on end while we (in decreasing numbers) watched. But the public as museum curators? That’s a new one.

The cuts are coming. So what now?

Members of the artistic communities have been campaigning for weeks now against the imminent cuts in the subsidies given to the arts (see David Shrigley’s clever video here). All arts organisations have been told, in the latest money-saving initiative, to rewrite their budgets with a 10 per cent cut in their Arts Council grant. These are the lucky ones – the Arts Council has indicated that some bodies will have their entire grant removed.

Techno for Concert Ensemble

Where techno and modern classical meet

Parallels have occasionally been drawn between techno and modern classical music, most especially dissonant movements such as minimalism, serialism and the broader avant garde. The purest techno has a stark, almost barren simplicity and those involved with it, notably Detroit techno original Jeff Mills, are keen to build bridges with the orchestral community, taking techno into concert halls and hoping to add a certain intellectual kudos. Such ventures are a mixed blessing - often losing the sheer energetic fun of the music along the way - but a new German outfit called Brandt Brauer Frick bridge the gap in a fascinating manner, throwing in a hint of jazz along the way.

From the Ballets Russes, BFI

Extraordinary finds from the lost world of dance

This is the second part of a series that has passed a little too quietly for comfort. The V&A’s grand Diaghilev show has received all the noise in the press – “fabulous”, “sumptuous”, “exotic” – in fact, all the words that were used at the time to describe Diaghilev’s company. The only word that isn’t being used is “dancer” – we get relatively little chance to think about movement in South Kensington. However, Jane Pritchard, curator of that show, has now redressed the balance on the South Bank with a remarkable collection of films.

New Generation at Maida Vale

Eleven years is a long time when you're launching young talent on the world. Since 1999, BBC Radio 3's New Generation Artists have gone forth and multiplied. All the "graduates" have outstanding careers, and among them some of the names which will be most familiar with music lovers include trumpeter Alison Balsom, mezzo-soprano Alice Coote, Macedonian pianist Simon Trpčeski and three of the world's most successful string quartets (Belcea, Jerusalem and Pavel Haas).

Dubstep: what lies beyond?

How do you go beyond a genre without boundaries?

Dubstep is everywhere – and if you will excuse a little self-promotion I have, in my small way, helped this state of affairs come about. The bass-heavy, rhythmically exploratory and very British electronic dance music genre has now – via Magnetic Man and Katy B – proved it can produce bona fide top-10 hits, and it has become the de facto sound of every summer festival to boot, while still keeping both feet in the underground clubs from whence it emerged.

Von Ribbentrop in St Ives

Two contrasting shows provide different views of Cornwall's artistic status

As Tate St Ives gears itself up for a major exhibition on the iconic Cornish painter Peter Lanyon – a show that will reinforce St Ives’s claims as a modern art Mecca – the artist’s son is responding with an exhibition that gently sends up the whole St Ives art mythology, while revealing a fascinating, but little known aspect of the town’s history.

Outer India - subcontinental grooves residency

This evening sees the first of an OUTERINDIA residency at Rich Mix in Shoreditch which will take place on the last Tuesday of each month. OUTERINDIA will, they say,  “weave a web of intense links between London, the Subcontinent and the world, showcasing visionary artists in the musical, visual and written arts". It may well be, as they claim, both radical and magical.

London Philharmonic launches concert streaming

For those of us who can't hear Vladimir Jurowski's intriguing LPO programme on Saturday night live - Gergiev calls over at the Barbican, in a typically frustrating London clash - all is not lost. We'll be able to hear it from 4 October streamed via the London Philharmonic website or the LPO iPhone application. Six more concerts can be heard this way throughout the season.