PrettyInScarlett

Quite a long-time fan of Ólafur Arnalds, I was pretty excited to get tickets for his 11th March concert at the Barbican Centre with the Britten Sinfonia . Definitely worth the convoluted travel plan (driving to Oxford to get the train - First Great Western seem to think people at the Vale of Evesham/Malvern end of the line don't go out at night...)! Ólafur Arnalds Something of a culture clash early on once the sold out crowd had sat down. Greg Haines , last night's support act, came onstage pretty prompt and after a quick hello to the audience, sat down and proceeded to play for 30 minutes straight. He received fabulous applause, but there was a small amount of coughing and fidgeting going on... A great atmosphere with the auditorium completely dark except for Greg's spotlights (cue reminiscences of Frank Horvat and Timber Timbre ) - for most of the 30 minutes I was lost in his soundscape. He started with very ambient-minimalist piano sounds and gradually worked ...

Timber Timbre have been described (by Ottawa Xpress amongst others) as folk/blues/gothic, i.e. hard to label music, and by themselves as writing music 'with chilling authenticity' (quoted from their website ). Timber Timbre consists of Taylor Kirk (who released his self-titled Timber Timbre in 2009) along with fellow multi-instrumentalists Mika Posen and Simon Trottier. Making waves as far as the Polaris long list, plus the playlists of BBC 6 Music and British online music magazine The Line Of Best Fit , the combined package was too enticing to refuse. Hence M and I headed to another new (for us) venue, First Baptist Church, for the album launch on 9th April. The church is pretty reasonable for a venue, dry again but this time for obvious reasons. A sizeable crowd turned up for the evening's entertainment which commenced with duo Tasseomancy - again quite hard to define, but maybe new/alt folk is a good place to start. Formerly known as Ghost Bees, the duo of Sary and R...

A busy week! A mixture of events centred around music and talk. Firstly, M and I went to the National Arts Centre (NAC) on Sunday 13th to see/hear Alex Ross 's lecture 'Chacona, Lamento, Walking Blues'. The talk is based on a chapter of his current book Listen to This. He 'talked with music': a playlist of tracks to illustrate his thesis. It was very interesting to hear the samples rather than just read their titles or description; almost the 'book with soundtrack' although not quite in the same vein as Vikram Seth's An Equal Music . A sell out, too. From there we headed to University of Ottawa's Freiman Hall (Perez Hall) for the flip side: 'music with talk'. This was courtesy of Ottawa-born pianist Frank Horvat , who was visiting as part of his Green Keys tour. Horvat is an eco-friendly musician and uses his shows (which are free, as the Green Keys tour is sponsored by eco-friendly businesses) to promote sustainability. Horvat explained t...