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Made in Shoreditch

I also contribute a weekly column to Made in Shoreditch magazine called 'Old East End/New East End', where I look at the relationship between the East End of old and new, looking at the changes and the stalwarts in landscape, residents and culture, focussing on one street or district each week. You can find it here.

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Tuesday 25 September 2012

The start of autumn is always a particularly saturated period within the arts. With those cash-rich student folk going back to University, the kids back at school and Christmas on its way (CD, DVD and book sales about to soar) it seems as if we're thrown a fuckload of cultural clutter at once. However, it is, purely by numbers, usually a period that throws up some top-notch music, film and literature.

As such, this autumn is no exception. Yeasayer have released their superb new electro-prog wonder; Fragrant World - a magical, whirlwind tour through part-Pierre Schaeffer cut-and-paste jitters, part Beatles-esque melodic realisation. As a record it works on the music-as-art level necessary for its captive hipster audience as well as finding a balancing mechanism in its approachable nature.



The art work for Yeasayer's Fragrant World


Loopers looks as if it will be a sensational film - just from the trailers alone. If it lives up to its critical billing of 'This year's The Matrix' it cannot go wrong commercially either. The Sweeney, however, may be one to miss. Upon seeing it last night, all I was left with was a feeling that I could have just watched the second half - without the love triangle nonsense - and still caught the gist of it. That said, it is watchable.

Will Self's Umbrella promises to be a psycho-geographical tour of the labyrinthine web of terror that is my home-town and residence again; London. Self pours out canon-worthy brilliance every couple of years, so never mind Fifty Shades, Umbrella is the literary event of 2012.

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