23 Feb 2009
ACR set for Motel Mozaïque 2009 
A Certain Ratio are set to play the Motel Mozaïque 2009 Festival on Saturday 11 April 2009. The music, performance and art festival takes place at various music, theatre and art venues in the city centre of Rotterdam, The Netherlands.

The rest of the music line-up includes Röyksopp and ... And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead and 2manydjs and a host of other acts.

With belated thanks to Berb on the Cerysmatic Factory Message Board. Also, another gig scheduled for the week before in Tilburg [in Dutch] has been cancelled. Cheers to Up North (and sorry we missed announcing it was even on!) on the same thread.

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22 Feb 2009
ACRMCR blog 
There's a brand new A Certain Ratio blog at acrmcr.wordpress.com.

At the moment there's just the video for I Feel Light, taken from the new album Mind Made Up.

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Philharmonic Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark 
From the Wirral Globe:

"ORCHESTRAL Manoeuvres In The Dark will share the stage with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra later this year.

"The group's Wirral-born founding members Andy McCluskey and Paul Humphreys will perform their greatest hits and their music and video installation, The Energy Suite, during the show at the Liverpool Philharmonic Hall on Saturday, June 20. Conducting the orchestra will be Clark Rundell.

"Looking ahead to the show, Andy told the Globe: “It's a big screen with a 75-piece orchestra and a wonderful opportunity to perform at the Philharmonic Hall.

"Playing with the Liverpool Phil is something that is so far removed from where we started out and it’s a terribly exciting prospect."
20 Feb 2009
Réification Part 2 
The Manchester Evening News announces the sequel to the Tony Wilson Experience:

"TWENTY-four hours of 'binge thinking' and 'chain chatting' will honour the memory of Tony Wilson once again this year, the M.E.N. can reveal today, on what would have been his 59th birthday.

"After the success of last year's pilot, which brought together artistic luminaries with the bright young things of the future, organisers have set up a company which will stage the event for the next three years.

"'Reification, The Tony Wilson Experience Part 2' will take place on the weekend of June 20."

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19 Feb 2009
After Twilight 
Many thanks to curator Oliver Tepel for the following English translation of the complete story of the current exhibition at the Kölnischer Kunstverein in Köln, Germany:

Après Crépuscule - Na Schemering - After Twilight - Nach Dämmerung
in the archives series (the crucial point)
curated by Oliver Tepel
7 February - 5 April 2009

With contributions by J.Louis Again, Michael Bracewell, Enrico David, Devine & Griffiths, Christian Flamm, Julian Goethe, Benoit Hennebert, Julia Horstmann, Linder, Lucy McKenzie, Claus Richter, Hanna Schwarz, Claude Stassart, Lawrence Weiner, Detlef Weinrich, Denyse Willem

Der springende Punkt

When you love music, you want everything related to it, closely or not, to be beautiful too.

Benoît Hennebert, December 1984.

The Belgian record label Les Disques du Crépuscule has created one of the most influencing yet in a systematic way hardly developed cultural phenomenon in-between pop and High Art.

Starting in the 1980s in the course of the emerging New Wave, the record label formed its identity on the basis of current music, covertexts and a nonpareil visual appearance. Based on the interplay of ideas from early Modernism, old commercial graphics and a comic style named "Ligne Claire", head designer Benoit Hennebert and his colleagues developed a flittering style. An enticingly sophisticated as well as complex parallel world originated, in the centre of which Les Disques du Crépuscule acted as show object and as a means of identification. The label presented itself as a coffeetable-book, where one could every now and then cut his fingers when turning the pages.

However, the label's oeuvre achieved only in Japan a musical impact that reached beyond limited art scenes. While artists such as Lawrence Weiner, Linder or Denyse Willem worked for Les Disques du Crépuscule, there was no close link to the gallery scene of Brussels in the 1980s. Merely for the last years artists like Enrico David, Christian Flamm, Julia Horstmann, Lucy McKenzie, Claus Richter, Hanna Schwarz or Detlef Weinrich have referred directly to the label, its music and graphics.

Therefore, it is all the more important to look into this enthralling, instantaneous but often clandestine effective history The exhibition consists of two parts: The exhibition hall shows historic works of Linder, Lawrence Weiner, Benoit Hennebert et al., resulting from the active time of the label, and shows exhibits of young international artists, who deal with the label from a modern perspective. The seminar room on the third floor of the building shows historic documents, archive materials, drafts, records and posters that mirror the method of operation and the environment of Crépuscule. This part of the exhibition will be open to the public over a period of about five months, and will give an opportunity for an examination.

Après Crépuscule places particular focus on the principle of "What if ...", which is based on the idea of using an undogmatic assembly of artefacts of Modernism in order to create a new, not only aesthetically effective reality. In this reality, the boundaries between design and art are not blurred but form an "alternative space" of historical reference, open for happenings.

This exhibition shows an exemplary mediation between pop and art, far away from known stereotypes and from mutual demands. It covers a time when even renowned artists acted far away from the all-star glamorous ways of our days, and delivers insight into sources that are far from being depleted; it also shows how an aesthetic training from the end of the 20th century onwards really works.

In the form of an annually changing exhibition, Der springende Punkt (the crucial point) provides an insight into the archives of institutions or individuals forming important points of reference for the work of the Kölnischer Kunstverein because of their experimental character and special curator's hand. The exhibition will be designed in close cooperation with an artist or a curator, in this case with Oliver Tepel. The artist/curator is invited to screen archive material and develop an adequate form of presentation for it. It is a matter of selecting a certain moment in history, a moment with personal relevance to the exhibitors, rather than presenting an entire archive.

The series started in 2007 with Marcel Odenbach's archive project for the exhibition , Kölnischer Kunstverein 1970, and continued in 2008 with a project by Olivier Foulon on Marcel Proust. is the third project of this series.

Since 1992, guest curator Oliver Tepel has written about music, art and other cultural phenomena; in particular for newspapers and magazines like Spex, Tagesspiegel, Frankfurter Rundschau, Texte zur Kunst, Mode Depesche and Artnet, as well as for diverse art publications and catalogues. He works as lecturer (for the Städelschule, the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and the Kunsthochschule Dresden among others) and as curator. Tepel is about to start his own art journal named Organdy, for which he was granted a studio scholarship of the Kölnischer Kunstverein in 2008.

Guided tours on every Friday at 5 pm.

Side-event of the lit.Cologne:

20 March 2009 at 8.30 pm – Michael Bracewell and Devine & Griffiths
Reading and concert

Cultural novelist Michael Bracewell (*1958, London) explores in his book the stylized aesthetics of Bryan Ferry, Brian Eno and their band Roxy Music. He will relate Roxy's concept of pop to the exhibition. In the 1980s, Ian Devine and his band Ludus and Alison Statton created an elegant Chamber pop for "Les Disques du Crépuscule". Ian Devine’s latest project, will perform during the reading.

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17 Feb 2009
Pottsy Party 
Alexandre announces a party in Paris tomorrow night, Mercredi 18 Fevrier:

I am running a party named From Manchester with Love with David Potts (Revenge/Monaco) spinning records from 22 PM until 5 AM.

It will happen at Truskel, 12 rue Feydeau 75005 Paris.

It is a free party.

Here is the link to facebook event : http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=54845225909&ref=nf

Unfortunately, a deliberate lack of any MySecondFacebookTwitterSpaceLife presence prevents me from giving further detail, but here's hoping Pottsy raids his Simple Minds collection (suggestion: I Travel).

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16 Feb 2009
H top ten 
UK readers of freesheet Shortlist ("for men with more than one thing on their minds") were this week treated to Hooky's 10 essential biographies.

Alongside the obvious Touching From A Distance and 1 Top Class Manager are the less obvious Lemmy, Gary Barlow, Belushi and Tracy Emin biogs.

On Keith Allen's Grow Up: "In New Order's most hedonistic years, Keith terrorised London's Groucho Club with us....and Keith's book neatly sums up the whole scene."

On Alex James's Bit Of A Blur: "Alex, Keith Allen and I plagued The Groucho for years, but he seems to have left all of that out."

Perhaps that's what living in a house, a very big house in the country does for you.

No mention of Factory Boy favourites No One Here Gets Out Alive nor Monty, and no mention of, arguably, the best rock biog of them all: Julian Cope's Head On (in which, incidentally, the actual owner of the very big house in the country features heavily).

This posting appears to have been sponsored by Amazon (but wasn't).

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9 Feb 2009
We're all doomed 
Kevin Hewick releases his long-lost 2003 album Doomcloud free of charge as exclusive downloads from his kevinhewick.co.uk website.

The downloads will available from 14 February 2009 (as a kind-of antidote to Valentines Day).

Kevin describes Doomcloud as "My dogme album. Very bare, very honest". It features raw recordings made between 2000 and 2003 with Robbie Murphy at Woodland Studios in Leicester.

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7 Feb 2009
Dour and droll 
Control debuts on Sky Movies Premiere all week for UK satellite viewers. The first screening is at 11.55 tonight.

The Guardian Guide says the "beautifully shot, tragic tale plays out like a particularly dour and droll Ken Loach film."
6 Feb 2009
F*ck Em 
According to the Bookseller, the forthcoming Paul Morley book about Tony Wilson will be published by Faber and is called 'F*ck Em: The Complete Truth and Other Lies about Anthony­ H Wilson by Everyone Who Knew Him and a Few People Who Didn't'.

Not clear at this stage whether the actual full title is censored or not. Let's hope not.

The book is slated for Autumn 2010.

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4 Feb 2009
Love in the Time of Recession 
The new album by The Durutti Column, Love in the Time of Recession went on eBay pre-sale via the Fullfill eBay Store priced 9.99 GBP + p&p today.

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1 Feb 2009
The Durutti Column live at The Met 
Thanks to Cerysmatic conspirator and resident songwriter for his pics at The Durutti Column's gig at The Met in Bury last night.

Full details to follow but it would appear that at least Steve had a fine time.

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