Patrick Clarke

1 week ago | thequietus.com | Daryl Worthington |Patrick Clarke

“I don’t have the words for it,” says Richard Dawson. “I almost want to cry telling you about it. What they’ve achieved, and what they do, is so important. It’s really precious.” Dawson is speaking tenderly about a place that means a lot to him. Where he has spent hours sat in darkness, in contemplative silence, as images and sounds play out on a screen over the quiet hum of the city’s metro that runs beneath it. The Tyneside cinema in Newcastle is “an absolute beacon”, he says.

1 week ago | thequietus.com | Rory Gibb |Patrick Clarke

It’s impossible to disentangle Tremor Festival from the island on which it takes place, São Miguel, the largest of The Azores. Just as the programming of the festival puts an impetus on adventurousness and the dissolving of arbitrary boundaries, purposefully fostering disorientation in a number of different ways, so too does flux feel innate to the island. Historically, it’s been a place of comings and goings rather than settlings, thanks to its location in the middle of the Atlantic.

1 week ago | thequietus.com | Patrick Clarke |Harry Sword

“It was in darkest Russia. This place called Voronya close to the Ukrainian border. I handed over all these rubles… it felt like some kind of Cold War transaction. I met this guy in the middle of a shopping arcade…”Dawn Terry laughs as she remembers sourcing the Ukrainian lira – the imposing hurdy-gurdy adjacent instrument – that has (alongside the accordion) been a sonic hallmark of her solo music over the past few years.

1 week ago | thequietus.com | Patrick Clarke

In 1957, Daphne Oram departed the prestigious BBC Radiophonic Workshop, to start working alone on a machine that would soon revolutionise how music could be composed. She created ‘Oramics’ – a system that allows you to literally draw compositions, transforming lines, curves, and shapes marked onto 35mm film into sound, through the way the shapes manipulate the light received by photocells. Oramics was not only pioneering, but visionary.

1 week ago | thequietus.com | Patrick Clarke |Lesley Chow

In 1995, Stephen Malkmus told Rolling Stone that Wowee Zowee was designed to be listened to with tracks randomly shuffled. His idea, presumably, was that the frayed ends of one song would dovetail into the beginnings of the next, forming fresh links each time. Whether or not Malkmus was serious, it’s a concept that works for this great and idiosyncratic album.