The Yukon Assignment tracks a 500-mile canoe journey along a remote river in Canada taken by a British adventurer and his father.
It may be mean to say, but it seems sadness agrees with Tim Hecker. The Canadian has been a mainstay of the global experimental music world almost since the turn of the millennium, sitting somewhere between neo-classical, shoegaze, ambient and abstract noise. His tracks are always delicate, always poised, sometimes veering a little into harsh distortion though rarely if ever enough to scare the horses; and they seem to be at their best when they're at their sparsest and most desolate.
Launched just last year to celebrate the country’s 150th anniversary, CanadaHub has quickly become one of the Edinburgh Fringe’s most exciting and intriguing venues, presenting a small but richly provocative programme of work from across that vast country. Here are just three of its offerings this year.
Daughter ★★★★
QCC isn’t the name of a new football club, nor some higher qualification for those toiling at the Bar, but stands for "Queen’s Commonwealth Canopy". Had you heard of it? On the eve of the Commonwealth conference, along came Jane Treays's gently hilarious, and finally rather tender film to fill in the gaps.
The Stones do it. U2 too. It takes immense and lordly clout for a touring band to breeze into town and each night summon a major recording artist to step onstage for some party fun. For Arcade Fire’s first night at Wembley Arena it was Chrissie Hynde. For the second, Jarvis Cocker lolloped up in a cream twin-breast linen suit to deliver that radio-friendly anthem, “Cunts Are Still Running the World”.
Accepted wisdom seemed to be that in the animal world rats and cockroaches were the most adaptable and the most widely geographically distributed, followed by those pesky humans. But think again: the premise in this new three-part series is that the big cats have also done a terrific job of spreading worldwide, each a different species within the genus.
That ages-old dictum "write what you know" has given rise to the intriguingly titled My Mum's a Twat, in which the Royal Court's delightful head of press, Anoushka Warden, here turns first-time playwright, much as the Hampstead Theatre's then-press rep, Charlotte Eilenberg, did back in 2002.
Chaconne - Sofya Gulyak (piano) (Champs Hill Records)
“The Babysitter” tells the story of a Scottish spy embedded with the Nazis during World War Two who has come home. His sister tells him that Unity Mitford is convalescing at a nearby cottage. Visiting, he finds that it’s a maternity home. The details are not revealed, but our spy duly becomes a full-time baby sitter: “The world is safe from an English orphan Hitler,” sings Mathias Kom of The Burning Hell. Mitford, real-life Nazi sympathiser and chum of Hitler, had in this tale been preparing to give birth to the Führer's child.
Canadian trio The Burning Hell’s eighth album is a collection of song-stories ranging from an account of an emergency room doctor who instantly falls in love with the blood-spattered victim of police brutality to a word game demonstrating how the armed forces recruit through pop culture allusions. That Kom delivers his smart, succinct and droll lyrics with an enviable straightforwardness would make Revival Beach notable enough, but the album’s 13 tracks are songs as such: toe-tappers which can be hummed.
There are nods to klezmer on the impressionistic clarinet-led instrumental “Race to Revival Beach” among the tracks focussing on Kom's musical partner Ariel Sharrat. There's psychedelia on the hilariously dry “Canadian Wine”. But the main musical hallmark is a fondness for a third/fourth album Velvet Underground. When Cass McCombs was so inclined, he was a musical kindred spirit.
The Burning Hell’s fundamental driver is that there is no shame in being clever. Revival Beach is inspired by the sense that fears of the impending apocalypse are no longer limited to religious zealots or survivalists. We are, as Kom persuasively argues, all in it together.
Overleaf: Watch the video for “The River (Never Freezes Anymore)” from Revival Beach
On paper this was a fairly austere piece of programming. No variety in composer, genre or style, just four Bach Partitas in a row, works of similar approach, length and technique. And yet in performance, in the hands of Angela Hewitt, there was sufficient variety, not to mention poetry, humanity and wit, to make for a completely satisfying recital.