Culture Diary w/c 05-11-2018
Our pick of this week’s arts, design, film and music events from around the North of England and the rest of the UK…
Monday – Aidan Moffat & RM Hubbert 8pm @ Leaf Bold Street, Liverpool – £15
“Sex and death. Love and life. Family, fortune, faith, and fear. Guitar, voices, cello, sax, Roland, wolves. Leggings and jeggings, the multiverse and marshmallows.” So goes the blurb for the debut collaboration Here Lies the Body, by Aidan Moffat & RM Hubbert, who make a welcome stop off in Liverpool tonight. Affecting, intimate and idiosyncratic vibes await.
Prince of Darkness (1987) 8.30pm @ FACT, Liverpool – £10.40/Concs
Perhaps not in the top tier of Carpenter’s oeuvre, Prince of Darkness is nonetheless an effective weaving together of ancient evil, and – at the time of its creation – contemporary scientific theory. Carpenter, inspired by his interest in quantum mechanics, has said: “I thought it would be interesting to create some sort of ultimate evil and combine it with the notion of matter and anti-matter. I thought it would be great to have an anti-God, namely a mirror opposite of God that would be totally evil. I started from that premise and worked in various ideas.”
Tuesday – Sjón 7pm @ Manchester Central Library – £7/£5
I first encountered Sjón’s writing with the slight (it comes in at fewer than 150 pages), but no less masterful for that, Moonstone: the boy who never was. It’s a diminutive wonder of a book set in the author’s native Iceland. Here Sjón and co-editor Ted Hodgkinson discuss Nordic literary identity, in reference to short the story anthology they compiled, The Dark Blue Winter Overcoat & Other Stories from the North. The former also reads from his latest novel CoDex 1962.
Zuzu 7.30pm @ Jacaranda Records Phase 1, Liverpool – £7
Citing the likes of Grandaddy and Car Seat Headrest as inspirations, Liverpool-born Zuzu plays a hometown gig in support of EP Made On Earth By Humans, tonight. These latest tracks are of the catchy, hook-laden variety, all delivered – joyously, refreshingly – with no effort to mask the scouse accent.
Wednesday – Aesthetica Short Film Festival @ Venues Across York – Unlimited Pass £48/Two Day £30/One Day £16
The York-based celebration of short film returns to venues – grand, iconic and boutique – for its eighth year this week. Aside from the programmed 300 films, catch masterclasses from the likes of Aardman Animation, Industrial Light & Magic, Dazed and Confused and BBC Writers Room. Aspiring filmmakers can attend pitching sessions, where they can receive feedback from industry big hitters such as StudioCanal and Curzon Artificial Eye.
Thursday-Sunday – Synth Remix 8pm @ London, Manchester, Leeds, Birmingham – £10
Classical club night and concert series _Remix use “live performance and DJ sets to present the best of music from across genres”. Tonight kicks off the Synth Remix UK Tour which foregrounds and celebrates pioneering women of electronic music. Award-winning composer and performer Jo Thomas and BBC 6Music-featured audio-visual artist Olivia Louvel celebrate the legacy of composers including Delia Derbyshire and Daphne Oram. The tour continues with performances taking place on subsequent nights in Manchester, Leeds and Birmingham respectively.
Friday-Sunday – Photo North Festival @ Harrogate Convention Centre – Three Day Pass £44/Day Pass £22/Concs
The inaugural Photo North Festival is setting out its stall this week to attract and engage everyone from the aficionado to the first-timer. With 20 exhibiting artists – including Tish Murtha, Jane Hilton and Tom Oldham – Festival Director Sharon Price, said “We’ve put our heart and soul into curating unique takes on three clear themes of music, war and marginalisation to make internationally-renowned photographic art accessible to all, as well as highlighting topical issues.” With partners including IWM, Redeye and Reuters, it’s reasonable to expect something for everyone.
Preview: John Walter: CAPSID 6pm @ HOME Manchester – FREE
In 2015, artist John Walter brought Alien Sex Club to a trio of venues in Liverpool, tackling the complexities of sexual health via his artistic practice. Now he returns to the North West with CAPSID, an exhibition looking at how ideas are transmitted between people – on social media, or in politics, for example – by looking at how the HIV virus infects human cells. Expect depictions of “viral replication” across film, animation, drawing, print, painting, sculpture, installation and costume.
Saturday – Play-It-Again-Use-It-Together: Archive Hack Day 3pm @ Victoria Gallery and Museum, Liverpool – FREE
Curator Rose Lejeune’s final commission of three in her New Perspectives strand. Here, Eileen Simpson and Ben White’s project Play It Again! Use It Together, takes as its starting point the University of Liverpool’s Institute of Popular Music (IPM) archive of over 80,000 records. This weekend sees the archive opened up to the interpretation of coders, electronic musicians and producers, who are invited to dive into the public domain samples using the open source code developed for the show. Aural experimentation awaits.
Sunday – Sheffield Doc/Fest: Shakedown (2018) Plus Q&A 6.30pm @ FACT, Liverpool – £10.40/Concs
Join director Leilah Weinraub as she discusses life at the titular 1990s/early ’00s strip club in debut feature Shakedown in a post screening Q&A at FACT. The film, carefully assembled from more than four hundred hours of raw footage Weinraub shot over the years, delves into the ‘high-femme performance’ found in the African-American queer scene gravitating there.
Mike Pinnington
Images from top: still from Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness (1987); Zuzu, image courtesy the artist; poster for Synth Remix. Last image and feature image taken from John Walter’s Capsid, courtesy the artist
