CCA Highlights: May - June 2017
Don’t let them do it. You all know what I’m referring to. Use your voice or watch the future ground out from underneath you. Until then, to find your spirit, reconnect with what makes our vast co-operative of sapiens to species that went to space – stories over campfires, music tapped out on rocks, ash daubed on walls – and check out the wondrous roster of events at the CCA over the next few months before you line up to cast your vote.
Julie Byrne has travelled the long roads of America in the spirit of the wandering poet. It is uncertain whether she models herself on Eva Cassidy, but she channels her here on her second album Not Even Happiness, her voice an inner monologue buoyed on the delicate thermals of guitars. She speaks of love in a gentle manner, inviting an intimate saunter through her otherworldly reveries. Enjoy the aching elegance of her presence on 28 May.
The joy of listening to Yoni Wolf is his voice. It’s a sharp and wandering whine delivering offbeat and bitingly self-aware lyrics in melodies entirely separate from the rest of the instruments, which carouse like fairies from arrangement to arrangement – often several times a song. Quirky and textured, WHY? are a band that will give you something thoughtful to go away with, your bones tingling slightly at the odd menagerie you just experienced, an enervation that will be essential on 8 June.
If you want to dig deeper into the music we make on rocks then come to Sound Thought, a festival run by postgraduate students from the University of Glasgow. Explore the latest theories and hear the newest musicians at a series of concerts, screenings and performances and see not only art, but the process behind the art, and maybe find a little creativity in yourself. Researchers and artists are pouring in from all over the UK to entertain, inspire and educate you from 10-12 May.
The Name of the Game is Kill. A title so good I didn’t need to put it in a larger sentence. Unearthed after 40 years, Joe Soloman directs a taut psychological thriller about perils of hitchhiking, and not how you’d usually expect, as a man is held captive by his ride’s mother. Something Weird have given us something weird, a creepy relic of film history. Get jangled (and take the bus home) on 15 June.
No longer human? The gilt edge of technology means you are your phone and your phone is you. It’s common to have friends whose faces you have seen only in celluloid. Or faces you’ve seen only in your dreams. How you see through their lives more than you see through your own. How those you admire become your cameras on reality. Rob Churm daubs his ash on the wall and presents comics and drawings in Parasite Rex at the CCA in a new exhibition that runs from 26 May - 9 July. Come explore the bounds of obsession as seen through his meticulous frames.
Anthony Schrag divides his work into physical, institutional and social. The Scottish based artist sees participation as the key to art, and here he elucidates on the function and ethics of working with people, how social work and art can intertwine and how, as an artist, you can apprehend modern communities and not be a, in his own words, “social wanker”. He’s on at 6pm on 24 May and it’s free so come along and explore the intersection between art and life.