Rap and the Regime
You stand naked and it’s so cold/ Daily rounds of torturing, hanging, shocking with electricity Abu-Hajar wrote these lyrics on the first few nights of his imprisonment in Tartarus prison, West Syria. Arrested for spreading political pamphlets and singing an anti-regime song on the streets of his
On This Day: Paul Simon
Anybody who, like me, spent at least one fifth of their childhood dinner-times in the welcome company of Simon & Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Water cannot have helped forming an opinion on the relative artistic merits of Art Garfunkel. For better or worse, it seems to me that Garfun
A Kiss for Syria: Tammam Azzam
In early 2011, Damascus was witnessing the rise of a revolution. The world was beginning to notice a rebirth occurring in the Syrian capital and from all corners of the globe, it was being watched with a wary eye. Art had seized the city and the force of this renaissance was reverberating far beyond
Navy bandsman Graham Jackson (1945)
There is, of course, no such thing as a ‘Perfect Photograph’, nor is there any way of truly judging such a subjective medium. And yet, if there was ever a portrait which uses the ostensible ‘Golden Ratio’ so perfectly, it’s Ed Clark’s melancholy snapshot of Navy bandsman Graham Ja
REVIEW: RxJ
It begins with Mercutio, which is right. For an adaptation of Romeo and Juliet which claims to be a ‘radical new imagining of Shakespeare’s classic,’ it seems intuitive to open with Mercutio’s dying speech, the moment the play turns to tragedy, merging with the familiar prologue. Rory Fraser
Retrospective Reviews II: Jackson C. Frank
One of the most influential folk albums of all time is shrouded in mystery. Jackson C. Frank’s life story follows a classic ‘tortured artist’ trajectory: depression, schizophrenia, a childhood accident resulting in severe and lasting burns, musical failure, and an early death at the age of 56.
Retrospective Reviews: Is This It – The Strokes
It’s 2001, and as ever, guitar bands are ‘going out of fashion’. The New York Times have run a cover featuring an electric guitar as a gravestone. The last couple of years have seen the release of Dr Dre’s 2001, Daft Punk’s Discovery, Radiohead’s electronic rebirth in the form of Kid A,
The ISIS review: Copenhagen, , Pilch Studio 19th – 22nd October MT16
Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen revolves around the meeting of Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr in September 1941, the words exchanged between them and the race for nuclear fission in the Second World War. The longstanding but now precarious relationship between the two scientists is examined by the ch