The Bulletin: Arts & Culture News | 27 November

NEW ALBUM FROM DAWN MCCARTHY & BONNIE 'PRINCE' BILLY
We've been trying to deny it, trying to put it off – but there's no avoiding it. Whether you call it Winterval, the Holiday Season, Jul, Xmas, or just plain old Christmas, the dreaded annual festival celebrating the apotheosis of capitalist values in an orgy of unwarranted spending is nigh. Luckily, we've got something to distract you from the overdraft-sapping horror and frantic exhortations to spend, spend, spend – a festive single from alt.country legend Bonnie 'Prince' Billy (aka Will Oldham) and Dawn McCarthy (aka Faun Fables). Taken from a forthcoming album, What The Brothers Sang, due out in February 2013, the song is a cover of a track by The Everly Brothers, who were childhood favourites of the duo, and shaped both of their respective outputs with their exquisite harmonies and epic, sweeping songs of love and loss. The double A-side single is out now on Domino – perhaps unlikely to reach the hallowed Xmas number one spot, but you never know... Go play it to your Granny and grab yersel' a mince pie.

LAST CHANCE TO GRAB EARLYBIRD TICKETS FOR WEE DUB HOGMANAY
December's Skinny contains a guide to all of the many and splendorous events taking place on Hogmanay this year, but here's one of the Badger's top tips – why not forget the cold, the sleet and the jingling bells, and indulge in a  slice of ital Jamaican culture with Wee Dub Hogmanay. You've got until 1 Dec to grab yourself an earlybird ticket for the bash, which features performances from international reggae stars such as Radikal Guru and El Fatta, alongside veterans of the Scottish reggae and roots scene, such as Riddim Tuffa, Big Toe's Hifi and DJ Astroboy. For a flavour of what's on offer, watch the clip below, from last year's Wee Dub Festival, and check out the stellar lineup for their 2013 bash, taking place in February.

EDINBURGH GUITAR & MUSIC FESTIVAL ANNOUNCED
Just announced, the first annual Edinburgh Guitar and Music Festival will take place in May 2013. Featuring performances, workshops and demonstrations. There will be performances by the likes of acoustic guitar virtuoso Peter Finger from Germany, Italian fingerstyle guitarist Daniele Bazzani, swing jazz guitarist Anth Purdy and Scotland’s jazz virtuoso Nigel Clark, and workshops on Guitar Looping (Haftoe Medboe), Rock 2 Jazz (Pete Sklaroff), Altered Tuning (Peter Finger), Slide Guitar (Tom Doughty), Becoming a Studio Guitarist and Getting the Right Sound (Hugh Burns). Details of the full lineup are still to be announced - but if you're a dedicated axe wielder, visit the site as soon as possible and register your interest.

PINK FLOYD'S NICK MASON TO RECEIVE HONORARY DEGREE
"We don't need no education," sang Pink Floyd on The Wall, but the band's drummer Nick Mason is marching to a different beat. Fifty years ago, Mason enrolled in an Architecture degree at Regent Street Polytechnic (now the University of Westminster). There, he met the other members of 'Floyd, and the rest is rock and roll history. Now, Mason is to be given an honorary degree by the University, as recognition of his outstanding contribution to popular music, in particular the drum fill in The Great Gig in the Sky, just before Clare Torry starts warbling. "Not only did studying architecture teach us some useful stuff, but it also gave us an opportunity to develop and put us in touch with some fantastic mentors and industry contacts that have helped us along the way,” Mason enthuses. It's often said that writing about music is like dancing about architecture - it seems that for Mason and the Floyd, studying architecture was like developing a music career. Who knew? 

VIDEO: WHY? - PAPER HEARTS
We interviewed Yoni Wolf, aka WHY?, back in September, when he released his latest album Mumps, Etc. Last week, Wolf unveiled the colourful video for Paper Hearts, one of the standout tracks from the album, which sees Wolkf returning to the hip-hop roots that eventually flowered into the genre-straddling WHY? Check out the video below, and read our review of the album here.

WHY? - "Paper Hearts" from anticon. on Vimeo.

ORIGINAL PIRATE MATERIAL: CREATIVE LAB AT THE CCA
This week sees the opening of a new sound-based exhibition at Glasgow's CCA, from artists Leila Peacock and Nicolas Puyajon, as part of their Creative Lab series. The artists will be building a pirate radio transmitter inside the building, and broadcasting "a litany of aburdist fragments" to any radios that pass within 100m of the venue. Inspired by Numbers Stations - encoded Cold War-era broadcasts of sequences and loops of numbers, chanted over the airwaves, whose meanings have been lost to history – and Samuel Beckett's experiments with radio and recorded speech during WWII. It offers listeners the chance to tune in and decode a puzzle made of hidden meanings and encrypted fragments of chatter, unfolding a narrative which challenges and satirises modern forms of communication. The antenna will be transmitting from 1 Dec until 15 Dec. Get your tranny out and head down!

STAR WARS XVII AUDITION TAPES
These 'audition tapes' for Star Wars Episode XVII have been doing the rounds online – originally broadcast as short segments on the Conan O'Brien Show, they feature a host of minor-league American comics and Saturday Night Live alumni performing scenes from the Greatest Of All Trilogies, in the style of famous Hollywood auteurs. The videos can all be easily searched for online – we recommend checking out the Woody Allen, Kevin Smith and Michael Moore vids here. The funniest is the Wes Anderson audition tape, which recreates the cult 'Han shot first' moment from A New Hope.