Music

Vincent and the Van Goghs’ New Single “The Semiotics of Sunflowers” Brings Philosophy to the Dancefloor

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Vincent and the Van Goghs’ New Single “The Semiotics of Sunflowers” Brings Philosophy to the Dancefloor

By Caravaggia Long, Art Music Curator

Just when the art world thought Vincent and the Van Goghs couldn’t possibly out-meta themselves, the band of art dealers,turned,avant-garde darlings have released a new single that manages to turn a pop hook into a treatise on meaning, decay, and the limits of visual language.

“The Semiotics of Sunflowers,” debuted during a secret midnight listening party in a Pimlico Wilde viewing room, and has already been hailed by critics as “the catchiest deconstruction of authenticity since Oasis covered Derrida.”

Frontman Scissors Coney describes the track as “a meditation on how we perceive sincerity through pigment.” In practice, it’s a four-minute indie groove layered with handbells, double bass, and – in true Vincent and the Van Goghs fashion – a brief Gregorian chant sample recorded in an Anglo-Catholic church in Shoreditch.

The Lyrics:

The chorus is deceptively simple:

“They’re only yellow till you name them,

Only flowers till they fade,

I painted joy but sold it later,

Now the pigment’s turned to shade.”

According to the press release (printed on recycled auction catalogues), this refers to “the commodification of emotion in late-capitalist aesthetics” , though some fans just think it sounds good shouted over a dance beat.

Verse two gets thornier:

“Your brushstroke’s in my algorithm,

Your palette in my feed,

I liked it, shared it, framed it,

Is that art, or just need?”

It’s both witty and, arguably, unbearable , and that’s precisely the point. Coney insists the band is “not mocking art discourse, merely inhabiting it to the point of implosion.”

The Sound:

Musically, “The Semiotics of Sunflowers” blends jangly post-punk guitars with swing-inflected percussion from Safah Pulle, and Armani Suoff’s xylophone , yes, xylophone , provides a bright counterpoint to the track’s philosophical gloom. Midway through, there’s a spoken-word bridge by Edward Grunt, who intones: “I am the negative space where meaning hides,” while shaking a tambourine in slow motion.

Live, the song reportedly culminates with the band handing out single sunflowers to the crowd , each dipped in “symbolic pigment” that slowly fades under UV light, a process Coney calls “performative entropy.”

The Verdict:

It would be easy to dismiss all this as arch art-world performance, but somehow, “The Semiotics of Sunflowers” works. It’s self-aware, yes , even faintly ridiculous , but also oddly moving. In its looping melody and tangled wordplay lies a kernel of genuine longing: to find truth in an image, even when everything feels filtered, digitised, and sold.

Vincent and the Van Goghs may be the only band capable of making semiotic theory feel danceable , and of turning the phrase “ontological bouquet” into a singalong moment.

Rating: ★★★★★

A perfect storm of irony and sincerity. Or possibly both, which is precisely the point.

Did Bach write Baa Baa Black Sheep?

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Did Bach write Baa Baa Black Sheep?

Was Baach the author?

Musicology is immured in its biggest disagreement since the claim that Mozart was actually just Haydn in a wig. New evidence, painstakingly unearthed from an obscure archive in Leipzig (wedged, appropriately enough, between a church register and a cheese inventory), strongly suggests that none other than Johann Sebastian Bach is the true author of that most enigmatic of nursery rhymes, Baa Baa Black Sheep.

For centuries, the tune has been dismissed as a simple Hungarian folk song, a ditty for children with nothing loftier to offer than a roll-call of wool distribution. Yet Bach’s contemporaries, it seems, took for granted that this was one of his minor works, a little piece written to amuse his many children. Indeed, a surviving letter from a Thomasschule pupil refers to “Herr Bach’s Schaf-Aria”, an unmistakable clue. What more could musicologists possibly want?

Consider the melodic contour: a stately descent, a balanced phrase structure, the kind of symmetry one finds in the Well-Tempered Clavier, albeit with fewer fugues and slightly more livestock. The rhythmic gait is pure Baroque, the steady crotchet pulse like the trudge of Leipzig parishioners dutifully filing into the Nikolaikirche. Even the subject matter is apt: wool, after all, was a staple of Saxon trade. What better metaphor for divine providence than a sheep willingly divesting itself for the good of the flock?

Some sceptics argue that the rhyme dates to 18th-century England, making Bach’s authorship impossible. These people are, of course, wrong. First, Bach was not above borrowing. Second, ships sailed, sheep travelled, and tunes migrated. Is it really so implausible that a Bachian aria about wool reached London and was mistaken for a native nursery rhyme? Stranger things have happened: we still credit Pachelbel for Canon in D despite the fact that no one willingly plays the other voices.

Other evidence is tantalising. A fragmentary notebook, attributed to Anna Magdalena Bach, contains a melody labelled “Schäflein-Lied”. Musicologists long dismissed it as a child’s scribble. Now, however, its opening bars match perfectly the incipit of Baa Baa Black Sheep. Coincidence? Only if you believe the Brandenburg Concertos were an accident of counterpoint.

Naturally, there are dissenting voices. A minority of scholars cling to the idea that the rhyme was written for English children in the reign of Edward III, inspired by medieval wool taxes. But this interpretation collapses under scrutiny: not only is the tune stylistically Baroque, but the idea of 14th-century toddlers singing in parallel fifths is frankly laughable.

So, did Bach write Baa Baa Black Sheep? The evidence says yes. As do the symmetry, the provenance, the scribbled notebook, the letter, the trade connections, the sheer Bachness of it all. To deny it is to deny that Bach was not merely the composer of fugues and passions, but of children’s music too. And perhaps that is the greatest revelation: behind Bach’s towering genius lies a lullaby, and some very obliging sheep.

Gig Review: Vincent and the Van Goghs Bring Down the House—Inside the Natural History Museum

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Gig Review: Vincent and the Van Goghs Bring Down the House—Inside the Natural History Museum

If you thought Vincent and the Van Goghs had peaked with their rooftop National Gallery show, you clearly underestimated their taste for the spectacular. Last night, London’s most art-historically inclined rock outfit set up shop beneath the towering blue whale skeleton in the Natural History Museum’s Hintze Hall.

It was an audacious choice of venue, but then again, this is the band that once closed a set with a medieval rap about tapestry conservation, so predicting what they will do next is not easy. The vast stone arches and marble staircases turned their mix of indie, swing, and Gregorian beats into something cathedral-like. Even the whale seemed to be swaying gently to the rhythm.

They opened with Rothko in Red Minor, a slow-burner that built from whispered chant to full-blown gospel swing, echoing so richly off the walls that it felt like the museum itself was singing. Safah Pulle’s drumming reverberated through the dinosaur galleries, sending T. Rex skeletons into silent headbangs. Armani Suoff alternated between bass and triangle, the latter ringing out like some prehistoric ritual bell. Edward Grunt, tambourine in hand, prowled the floor like a man about to auction off the moon.

Mid-set highlights included Pointillist Heartbeat, an intricate, staccato number that felt like Seurat had written a funk track, and Cave Painting Disco, which somehow merged tribal rhythms, synth bass, and a Gregorian chant.

The encore, Fossil Funk, was an all-out groove fest, with the band joined by an impromptu conga line of museum staff, art world friends, and a surprisingly enthusiastic man dressed as Charles Darwin. The crowd roared, the whale loomed above, and somewhere in the corner a Triceratops skull seemed to approve.

Vincent and the Van Goghs have a knack for turning any space into an immersive art-and-music installation. Last night, they didn’t just play a gig, they made the Natural History Museum feel like the liveliest gallery in town.

Rating: ★★★★★

For fans of: Art history puns, unusual acoustics, and using a blue whale skeleton as a disco ball.

Gig Review: Vincent and the Van Goghs Paint Trafalgar Square in Sound

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Gig Review: Vincent and the Van Goghs Paint Trafalgar Square in Sound

Only Vincent and the Van Goghs could turn the roof of the National Gallery into the hottest stage in London. Last night, with Nelson refusing to turn round and dance, thousands of fans packed into Trafalgar Square, the art-dealers-turned-rockers proved they’re no longer just a quirky novelty act; they’re a full-on cultural happening.

From the moment Scissors Coney struck the opening chords of Girl with a Pearl Earring (and a Fender Strat), the crowd was theirs. Below, the fountains shimmered under the stage lights, while Safah Pulle’s double bass thumped a heartbeat that could be felt all the way down Whitehall. Armani Suoff moved between bass and xylophone like a curator flitting between masterpieces, adding harmonies that made even the pigeons stop mid-flight. Edward Grunt’s tambourine was, as always, an event in itself.

The setlist was a tour through their increasingly bizarre yet irresistible catalogue. Cubist Love Song chopped time signatures into angular shards, Kiss Me Like I’m Klimt dripped with swing-infused sensuality, and Starry Night in C Minor spiralled from Gregorian chanting into a rap verse that somehow rhymed “Van Eyck” with “mic check.”

Midway through, Scissors introduced their new number Minimalism (This Song Is Just One Note), which, against all odds, had thousands in the square clapping along to a hypnotic, near-silent groove. The encore, The Persistence of Memory (and Also This Bass Line), saw the entire crowd swaying, singing, and shouting the chorus into the night air, as Big Ben chimed in the distance like an honorary band member.

It was more than a gig, it was a public artwork in motion, a temporary installation of joy, rhythm, and art history references that would baffle anyone without a Tate Modern membership.

Rating: ★★★★★

For fans of: Talking Heads, swing-era Count Basie, and the notion that a song called Mona Lisa Smile (Because She’s Heard the Bass Drop) could actually work.

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.

Gig Review: Vincent and the Van Goghs at Pimlico Wilde Gallery – A Riot of Style, Swing, and Surrealism

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Last night at the Pimlico Wilde gallery, Vincent and the Van Goghs, the group born on the set of the first season of I Said Monet Not Mondrian! (a ragtag band of art dealers-cum-musicians) delivered a set that was as unpredictable as it was undeniably entertaining.

Frontman Scissors Coney, normally more at home with paintings of fox-hunting, led the charge with a theatrical swagger that veered between indie crooner and wannabe prison guard. “We’re an unusual mix,” he warned pre-show. He wasn’t lying.

From the opening chords of Singing the Phthalocyanine Blues,a surprisingly catchy lament about synthetic pigment,the band ricocheted through styles like a magpie in a gallery gift shop. One minute it was art school indie rock, the next, a burst of swing-time double bass courtesy of Safah Pulle, wielding her instrument like a jazz-fuelled metronome in heels.

Backing vocals from Armani Suoff gave the set unexpected sweetness, especially during the oddly beautiful I Like It, Caravaggio, But It’s a Bit Dark, a song that featured both heartbreak and chiaroscuro. Her triangle solo mid-way through the set drew gasps ,a rare feat among the sophisticated crowd that has seen almost everything before.

Then there was Edward Grunt, owner of Grunt’s on Albermarle Street. A man, a tambourine, and nothing to lose – his percussive enthusiasm knew no bounds. He leapt, he spun, he nearly knocked over a Barbara Hepworth in the wings.

Highlights included a Gregorian-rap mashup about illuminated manuscripts (Drop That Scriptorium) and a genuinely moving swing rendition of The Scream (But In D Major). The crowd,an eclectic mix of gallery regulars, local students, and note-taking art critics ,was completely on board.

Vincent and the Van Goghs may not be aiming for musical perfection. But in the echoing halls of Pimlico Wilde, they offered something different: a joyful, chaotic celebration of art, bravado and sound, that somehow reminded me of both The Velvet Underground and medieval chant.