Album: Róisín Murphy - Róisín Machine
Murphy and long time Sheffield comrade deliver the disco goods
This is a musical homecoming for Róisín Murphy, both geographically and figuratively. She may have been raised in Dublin and spent her gig-going adolescence in Manchester, but Sheffield is where she began her life as a clubber and performer – and it’s with Sheffield scene mainstay of almost four decades, and Murphy’s friend of quarter of a century, Richard “Parrot” Barratt that she’s collaborated here.
Album: Rui Ho - Lov3 & L1ght
Dayglo experimental pop from Chinese artist in Berlin
A new and very strange kind of pop music has bubbled up over the past half-decade plus. It’s internationalist, rooted in both underground electronics and the most populist styles, bound up with playful but sometimes terrifying ultra high definition psychedelic aesthetics, and dominated by female and non-binary musicians.
Album: Charli XCX - how i'm feeling now
Cutting edge electronics in lockdown album from the always exploratory pop star
This is an extremely impressive undertaking. how i'm feeling now was conceived, written and recorded in under two months, in isolation, with Charli XCX sourcing beats and artwork from a sprawling collective of regular collaborators and fans. The tracklist was finalised only in the last week or so, and even two days before release date, only “work in progress” promos were available, signalling that it was still in flux.
Velvet Buzzsaw review - an acerbic takedown of the LA art scene
DVD: Every Picture Tells a Story
The art films of James Scott: a very mixed anthology, dating from 1966 to 1983
James Scott’s filmography is wide-ranging, including the 1982 short film A Shocking Accident, based on the Graham Greene story, which won an Academy Award the following year, and other works on social questions.
Robert Rauschenberg, Tate Modern
Inventive and idiosyncratic: the restless genius of an American pioneer
The Good American, a Texan no less, has landed at Tate Modern in style. This posthumous retrospective of the great Robert Rauschenberg includes a paint-bespattered, fully made-up bed hung vertically on the wall, and called – you guessed – Bed,1955 (pictured below right). A huge White Painting, 1951 – latex housepaint on seven panels, glossy and smooth – is joined by a huge, swirling, all-black painting, Untitled, c.1951, and an installation of various substances resembling bubbling mud, called Mud Muse, 1968-71.
'Before punk, there was Rauschenberg'
As a major retrospective opens at Tate Modern, musician and producer Justin Adams reflects on his lifelong love of an American great
In this cut and paste world, we have become used to a multiplicity of images: screens, words and pictures from across the globe and across history flicker through our field of vision, competing for our attention with the natural world, the urban environment and our own memories, thoughts and dreams. The artist who most successfully began to express this new vision of the world was Robert Rauschenberg.
David Hockney RA: 82 Portraits and 1 Still-life, Royal Academy
An ongoing series of portraits has served as a tonic during difficult times, but its value is more personal than artistic
The opening image of this new David Hockney exhibition – a sketchily painted portrait of a seated man, slumping heavily forward, his head buried in his hands – could be a portrait of Brexit despair.
CD: Pet Shop Boys - Super
The Gilbert & George of British pop bring familiarity and – sadly - surprises
The deadpan duo of Tennant and Lowe have never been easy to suss out at the best of times: maybe their way of layering wackiness on deep seriousness, eyebrow-flickering subtlety on roaring camp, giddy frivolity on erudition, has been their way of staying fresh. The Gilbert & George of British pop, they live to perplex even into middle age and beyond.