The Skinny Current Issue

The days are growing longer, the outside world is slightly less actively hostile and our thoughts turn to the still-mildly-inconceivable-concept of it one day being warm enough to stand outside and watch live music. Time for a music festivals special!

Our 2024 edition opens with a deep dive into the traditional music renaissance you are (consciously or not) currently living through. We meet some of the musicians leading the charge from the Highlands, and look ahead to a few of the trad-centred festivals arriving on these shores in the coming months, from Glasgow’s The Reeling to Orkney Folk Festival.

We talk to the folk behind Edinburgh dance festival Terminal V and their longtime collaborator Fraz.ier, as they prepare to launch in Croatia. Quintessential Scottish music festival T in the Park has slipped into legend – one writer looks back at what it meant to him and considers the country’s current festival landscape. Showcase festivals are an important cog in the music industry machine – we talk to Wide Days’ Olaf Furniss to learn more about Scotland’s music convention. We’ve got a festivals calendar, featuring recommendations at home and abroad, and genre-specific picks scattered through the pages. Finally, the special closes with some words from Brian d’Souza aka Auntie Flo, whose new album features recordings of a range of mushrooms, work which started in a tent at Glastonbury.

Intersections provides a buffer between the special and other features, with a look at the burgeoning creativity of Scotland’s floristry scene. In a piece of perfect synergy, we have an article by Genevieve Jagger about local magic and queer communities centred around one magical tree in Glasgow’s Southside, alongside an interview with the very same Genevieve Jagger about her new vampire novel Fragile Animals.

Art takes a trip to rural South West Scotland to explore the Gabriella Boyd exhibition at CAMPLE LINE. And as RSA New Contemporaries returns with its most blockbuster exhibition to date, featuring the work of not one but two degree show years of graduates, we take a look at some of the artists whose work we’re looking forward to seeing in the galleries on the Mound. We also meet Rae-Yen Song 宋瑞渊 and tour life-bestowing cadaverous soooooooooooooooooooot, the artist’s multi-faceted collaborative research-based exhibition currently on show in CCA.

Film meets former dancer Franz Rogowski ahead of his latest arthouse triumph, Disco Boy. Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival returns to Hawick this month – we meet Palestinian artist Noor Abed, the subject of a retrospective in the programme, to hear more about her work, informed by growing up in an occupied nation. Clubs takes us on a journey through the evolution of sound system culture in Scotland. Theatre looks at a radical new adaptation of Sunset Song, which uses Doric and English to delve into the human experience, and Comedy looks back on ten years of dark comedy Inside No.9.

Our Design column examines the visionary work of furniture designer Nick Ross, currently on show in Custom Lane, while Food takes a trip to Glasgow for some excellent tacos. The back page features The Skinny on… Bikini Body, playing our stage at Kelburn Garden Party this July and ready to fight the Beatles en masse.

This month’s centrefold poster features some beautiful mushrooms by Jasmine Floyd, and ties together an unintentional sub-theme which emerged in the making of the magazine, linking Brian d’Souza’s mushroom music and Rae-Yen Song’s exhibition featuring more mushroom recordings, this time of a fungus tea, by Tommy Perman. April – extremely mushroomy.