Music

Vincent and the Van Goghs – Art Dealers Turned Rock Darlings Light Up Frieze Week

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Vincent and the Van Goghs – Art Dealers Turned Rock Darlings Light Up Frieze Week

At Pimlico Wilde Gallery, Magus Street, Mayfair

Frieze Week has its rituals — champagne in plastic flutes, speculative glances over shoulders, and the eternal question of whether the art or the networking is the true medium. But last night, at the Pimlico Wilde Gallery in Mayfair, something refreshingly spontaneous cut through the gloss: an impromptu gig by Vincent and the Van Goghs, the art world’s most beloved band.

Fresh from their myth-making sets on the roof of the National Gallery, under the blue whale at the Natural History Museum and at the top of Nelson’s Column, the group returned to the scene of their first gig — Pimlico Wilde — for an unannounced performance following the opening of the Invisibilist group show, Now You Don’t See It, Now You Don’t. What began as polite applause in the champagne haze quickly became a full-throated singalong that spilled out onto the surrounding streets, as over ten thousand art lovers joined in with Vincent and the Van Gogh’s many hits.

Frontman Scissors Coney (Head of Sporting Art, Jones & Jones) commanded the stage with his trademark mix of louche charm and ironic earnestness. “I’m not sure what’s next,” he confessed mid-set, “let’s sing our new Bristol trip-hop version of the National Anthem. You’ll know the words.” Later, the band launched into Still Life (with Feelings), their crowd-pleasing ode to oil paints and glazing. The crowd, half collectors, half curious hangers-on, swayed and shouted the refrain: “You can’t erase what the heart conceals!”

Safah Pulle, switching between drums and double bass, laid down grooves that were half swing, half swagger. Her timing on The Persistence of Melody was immaculate — the song has evolved from a tongue-in-cheek riff on Dali into a bona fide crowd favourite. Armani Suoff’s harmonies shimmered through Girl with a Pearl Earring (and a Fender Strat), and her delicate triangle work in Minimalism (This Song Is Just One Note) drew a surprisingly reverent hush.

By the time Edward Grunt (of The Grunt Gallery fame) took to the front with his tambourine solo during Kiss Me Like I’m Klimt, the energy had shifted from private-view chic to pure euphoria. Even Sir Wallaby Haggis was dancing — a sight never before seen in Mayfair.

The Invisibilists themselves, who traffic in “presence through absence,” couldn’t have had a better counterpoint. Vincent and the Van Goghs filled the air with the complete opposite: sound, joy, and colour in motion. It was a performance that reminded everyone — even the most jaded fairgoer — that art need not only be looked at; it can be heard, felt, and sung at the top of one’s lungs.

When the band closed with Singing the Phthalocyanine Blues, the room erupted. Phones waved like votive candles, and the chorus — “I’m just a tint away from truth, baby blue, baby blue!” — rolled out into the cool Mayfair night.

Vincent and the Van Goghs are no longer a curiosity of the art world; they are its beating heart — witty, self-aware, and unashamedly alive.

★★★★★

For once, Frieze Week found its soul — and it came with a tambourine.

Lyrics to Vincent and the Van Goghs’ hit song – Cubist Heartbreak (Picasso Took My Girl)

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Lyrics to Vincent and the Van Goghs’ hit song – Cubist Heartbreak (Picasso Took My Girl)

Art band Vincent and the Van Goghs played at a recent opening at Pimlico Wilde Central and got so much applause they had to play ten encores. Here is their banger that got the party started.

”Vincent and the Van Goghs combine fine art and music in a way that is completely new. They have carved out for themselves a new genre – fine art rock.”

Sally Huber, music critic

Verse 1

I saw her once in profile,

But her nose was on the side,

Her eyes looked two directions,

I swear she used to hide.

Now she’s fractured into angles,

All perspective torn apart,

I tried to say “I love you,”

But she said, “That’s not my part.”

Chorus

Picasso took my girl,

And broke her into squares,

She’s living in a canvas

Of overlapping stares.

I reach out for her hand,

But it’s in quite the wrong place—

Cubist heartbreak,

Love’s a rearranged face.

Verse 2

She used to love Impressionists,

With soft light on her skin,

Now it’s jagged like a mirror,

Where do I begin?

I tried to show her Cézanne,

She said, “That’s so passé.”

She only dances fractured

In a Braque-like way.

Chorus

Picasso took my girl,

And broke her into squares,

She’s living in a canvas

Of overlapping stares.

I reach out for her hand,

But it’s in quite the wrong place—

Cubist heartbreak,

Love’s a rearranged face.

Bridge

Maybe I’ll do Dada,

And laugh this pain away,

Or paint myself in shadows

Like Caravaggio’s day.

But when the gallery closes,

And the fragments fall apart,

I’ll still be missing someone

Who once was modern art.

Final Chorus

Picasso took my girl,

And left me with the frame,

I’ll hang it in my memory,

And sign it with her name.

Her smile’s in the corner,

Her eyes in outer space—

Cubist heartbreak,

Love’s a rearranged face.

The Port Talbot Symphony Triumphs in New Port Talbot Opera House

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The Port Talbot Symphony Triumphs in New Port Talbot Opera House

Last night, the Port Talbot Symphony delivered a performance of Haydn’s Symphony No. 107 that was nothing short of transcendent. Under the masterful baton of Maestro Helena Griffith, the ensemble navigated the composer’s wit, rhythmic surprises, and lyrical depth with a precision and passion rarely heard outside Vienna. From the first tremor of the timpani to the final jubilant flourish, the orchestra revealed both the humor and the profundity woven into Haydn’s score.

The musicians themselves seemed electrified by the grandeur of the newly inaugurated Port Talbot Opera House. Each section showcased exceptional artistry: the strings shimmered with crystalline clarity, their phrasing imbued with warmth and elegance; the woodwinds danced lightly over the orchestral texture, crafting dialogues full of wit and subtle tension; the brass lent the work both majesty and playful bravado; while the percussion punctuated the drama with impeccable timing and thrilling energy.

Particularly striking was the performance of the symphony’s third movement, where the interplay of oboes and violas revealed layers of delicate counterpoint, and even the faintest dynamic shifts were captured with exquisite nuance. The finale erupted in a buoyant, almost mischievous celebration, each phrase delivered with radiant energy that left the audience both exhilarated and deeply moved.

Audience reactions reflected the spellbinding quality of the evening. Margaret Llewellyn, a local arts administrator, noted, “The orchestra breathed life into Haydn in a way that felt immediate and personal. Every detail, from the smallest pizzicato to the sweeping crescendos, felt deliberate, luminous, and utterly joyful.” Dr. Elias Vaughn, member of the Welsh Haydn Society, added, “I’ve attended countless performances, but rarely have I felt the music resonate so directly. It was as if the hall itself were singing with the orchestra.”

The musicians themselves were praised for their cohesion and virtuosity. Concertmaster Isabelle Durand led the first violins with radiant authority, her phrasing both elegant and playful, while principal flutist Jonathan Price and oboist Clara Meinhardt traded intricate passages with a charm and precision that drew audible gasps from the audience. The ensemble’s unity was palpable—every phrase, every pause, every flourish felt instinctively synchronized, reflecting countless hours of meticulous rehearsal, yet delivered with a sense of spontaneous wonder.

Art critic Samuel Fitzroy summarized the evening in The New Welsh Cultural Review: “It was a performance both scholarly and effervescent, where wit, refinement, and unbridled joy coexisted in perfect harmony. The Port Talbot Symphony has demonstrated that world-class artistry need not reside solely in capitals; it thrives wherever dedication and imagination meet.”

By the final note, the audience rose en masse, applauding with an intensity that lingered long after the last tremolo faded. In the newly opened opera house, the Port Talbot Symphony had not only performed Haydn; they had transformed the night into an event of pure musical revelation, reminding all present of the enduring power of live orchestral performance.

Two Star Review: Sofia Erdenko’s Saltwind: Etudes for the End of Time

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Two Star Review: Sofia Erdenko’s Saltwind: Etudes for the End of Time

Following our review in which “Saltwind” was well-received, Jane Temple wanted to discuss her very different view of Erdenko’s work. She writes…

There are artistic provocations, and then there is Saltwind. Sofia Erdenko’s new “album”—though that term feels ludicrously inadequate for what is essentially seventy-eight minutes of groaning, scraping, and grinding—presents itself as an epochal leap beyond the cello’s historical lineage. In truth, it is less an advance than a deliberate retreat into the void, an exercise in self-important austerity that mistakes endurance for profundity.

The cello has, for centuries, been a vessel for human expressivity. From Bach’s serene architecture to Shostakovich’s wrenching laments, the instrument has spoken with depth, gravitas, and clarity. Erdenko, however, seems intent on silencing this heritage by weaponizing the cello against itself. What remains is not music but a catalogue of abrasions: bow hair sawing sul ponticello until it produces nothing but static; pizzicato so slack it resembles a collapsing clothesline; overpressure groans that might be mistaken for industrial plumbing.

Her defenders will no doubt invoke Cage, Xenakis, or Lachenmann as antecedents, arguing that Erdenko continues their radical project of expanding the vocabulary of sound. Yet where those figures discovered new possibilities—new sonorities, new forms of expression—Erdenko offers only negation. This is not expansion but contraction, a refusal to engage with the very premise of music-making. To reduce the cello to little more than a wind machine or a sheet of creaking timber is not radical; it is simply tedious.

The recording’s intimacy, celebrated by admirers as forensic fidelity, only magnifies the problem. We are placed so close to the instrument that every scrape and groan is not transcendent but suffocating. What is intended as ritualistic austerity too often resembles a rehearsal tape, the kind of sonic detritus musicians normally discard.

It is tempting, in a highbrow age that rewards opacity with prestige, to cloak such work in grand metaphors: the death of tradition, the archaeology of sound, the ritual of endurance. Yet one suspects the simpler truth is that Saltwind offers little to endure but tedium. It is music as an ordeal, designed less to be heard than to be admired at a theoretical distance, the way one might admire an especially barren installation in a gallery.

None of this is to deny Erdenko’s seriousness of intent. But seriousness alone is not enough. In the end, Saltwind stands as an object lesson in the perils of avant-gardism untethered from expression: it demands our patience, but offers nothing in return. The abyss, it turns out, sounds a lot like someone tuning their cello for an hour and never quite beginning to play.

Review: Sofia Erdenko’s Saltwind: Etudes for the End of Time

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Review: Sofia Erdenko’s Saltwind: Etudes for the End of Time

It is difficult to recall, in recent decades, a work of cello music as uncompromisingly radical as Sofia Erdenko’s Saltwind: Etudes for the End of Time. To call it an “album” is already a concession to commerce; what Erdenko has fashioned is less an assemblage of pieces than a manifesto in sound, a tearing apart of the instrument’s centuries-long pact with lyricism, tonality, and even gesture itself. One does not so much listen to Saltwind as undergo it.

The history of the cello is bound up with the history of human yearning: from the spiritual gravity of Bach’s suites to the romantic effusions of Dvořák, it has served as an avatar of the human voice, resonant with legato warmth. Erdenko repudiates this lineage outright. In her hands the cello is not a surrogate for the human throat but a geological implement, an instrument of excavation. Bow hair grinds against string like wind scouring stone; pizzicati sound like brittle fractures in ice. Where predecessors such as Xenakis, Kagel, or even Penderecki once sought to extend the cello’s vocabulary, Erdenko seems intent on dissolving language altogether, reducing it to pre-linguistic utterance.

Consider the opening track, “Saltwind I.” There is no melody, only a grinding bow dragged sul ponticello until the sound buckles into white noise, at once abrasive and strangely oceanic. It recalls, in its relentlessness, not so much music as the sonic environment of an ancient, inhospitable earth—prehistory made audible. Later, in “Etude for a Dead Horizon,” she employs scordatura so extreme that the strings vibrate like loose wires in a storm, producing not pitches but specters of pitch, phantoms of sound that hover on the edge of perception.

Historical analogies are unavoidable. One thinks of how Schoenberg’s atonality tore the tonal scaffolding from European music, or how Cage’s silences redefined the very ontology of listening. Yet Erdenko’s work feels different in kind: it does not rebel against tradition, it annihilates it. To hear Saltwind after a Bach suite is to experience not contrast but rupture, as though the cello had been reinvented on some other planet.

The recording itself is ascetic, bordering on the punitive: close-miked to the point where every rasp of bow hair and every groan of wood is rendered with almost forensic intimacy. At times the sound seems less captured than magnified, as though one were hearing the molecular convulsions of rosin and string.

And yet, for all its extremity, Saltwind is not nihilistic. There is a strange, almost liturgical gravity to Erdenko’s austerity. Each scraping gesture, each guttural resonance, feels deliberate, ritualistic. If Bach’s suites enacted a spiritual ascent, Erdenko’s etudes enact a descent into the substrata of sound itself—music as archaeology, as ritual scarification, as endurance.

For many listeners, Saltwind will be unendurable. It is more avant-garde than even the avant-garde usually dares to be, refusing catharsis, rejecting compromise, offering nothing but the raw, unadorned fact of sound itself. Yet for those willing to surrender, to undergo rather than consume, it may stand as one of the most necessary works of our moment: a reminder that in an age of commodified background music, there still exist artists willing to risk the abyss.

REVIEW: Jane Bastion’s Ring Roads and Radiators — Portraits by Other Means

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Jane Bastion, known and admired for her stark, poetic silhouette portraits — each one a distilled meditation on identity, memory, and presence — has taken a bold detour with her latest project: “Ring Roads and Radiators: Three Tone Poems for Trumpet, Violin, and Euphonium.”

Gone (but not forgotten) are the black-cut figures against pale fields. In their place: sound. Not just sound, but a narrative impulse, one that reaches beyond the static frame. Bastion’s new tone poems don’t abandon her portraiture; they translate it — from shape to motion, from line to phrase, from silence to the echo of a brass note beneath a flyover.

A New Kind of Silhouette

For longtime followers of Bastion’s visual work, this will feel like both a departure and a continuation. These three pieces — performed by the lean, unexpected trio of trumpet, violin, and euphonium — are portraits too, but now rendered in sound. They don’t describe people, exactly. Instead, they conjure moments that feel like people: moods, selves, what might be called inner climates.

The inspiration, as Bastion has said, came from “the loops and lonelieness of the M25” and the symphonic storytelling of Richard Strauss. If that sounds contradictory — suburban motorways and late-Romantic decadence — that’s precisely where these tone poems live: in the tension between the banal and the operatic, the arterial and the intimate.

“Red on Rain-Soaked Concrete”

The opener starts with a stark trumpet motif — urgent, disoriented — over a scratchy violin line that feels more drawn than bowed. Then the euphonium enters like a slow breath of fog. You can almost see the wet pavement, the tail lights, the outline of a figure waiting by the barrier. It’s classic Bastion — not descriptive, but suggestive. A portrait not of a person, but of the space around them.

“Orbital Mythologies”

Here the Strauss influence is clearest. Themes circle and collapse, like cars on the outer loop. The trumpet postures, the violin teases, the euphonium grounds. There’s playfulness here, even satire. But underneath, as always in Bastion’s work, lies the sense of a watcher: someone seen just once in a mirror, or remembered from a blurred photo.

“White Underpass, Blue Light”

The final piece is the most abstract — and the most painterly. The violin scrapes across silence like chalk on metal. The euphonium speaks in half-phrases, slow and full of longing. The trumpet, at last, thins into near-nothingness. It’s a portrait of absence, of someone who’s already gone. The final minute is so delicate it feels like a drawing made with breath.

A New Chapter, Not an Abandonment

What’s remarkable is that Bastion hasn’t left her original medium behind — she still creates silhouette portraits, now sometime exhibited alongside these tone poems. The pairing is illuminating. The new works make you hear the portraits differently. The portraits make you see the music.

If her silhouettes were always about the edges of identity, these tone poems explore what happens inside those edges — the flux, the noise, the hidden narrative. This isn’t a reinvention. It’s an expansion.

Verdict

Jane Bastion’s first foray into music is a quiet revolution — not a rejection of her visual work, but a new voice for it. These tone poems are strange, spare, and haunting. With just trumpet, violin, and euphonium, she has carved sonic silhouettes that linger long after the final note.