Tuesday, December 1, 2015

Welsh, Random and Frost

Day 4. More focus on the business of publishing, but also lots of academic and science talks today. It's hard to keep track of them all. Our daily press conference amusingly combined our own Elizabeth Shepherd (ELT specialist) and Irvine Welsh (sex & drugs & rock & roll specialist), but she held her own. 
The latter was later in conversation with his Mexican equivalent, Guillermo Fadanelli, who sat behind the panel wearing shades and fedora, punctuating his drawl with pauses so long you wondered whether he'd fallen asleep. It was all very rock & roll. Welsh currently lives in Chicago (summer) and Miami (winter) and before that was in Amsterdam and Dublin, but thankfully it hasn't lessened his Scottish burr.  
The evening's show was probably the most challenging of the nine: Wayne McGregor / Random Dance's FAR, but we needn't have worried. It was another very big audience and went down really well. Emily Winfield, Random's touring manager, said it was the best performance she's seen of it. Ben Frost composed the music, so we thought we'd invite him to do a solo electronica set straight afterwards (influenced by the fact that by a weird coincidence he happened to be in Mexico this week anyway). It was incredibly intense, a cross-between Jon Hopkins and Biosphere, but harsher, more brutal, and cleared half the crowd. Which still left 1,000 or so brave souls, including all the Random dancers who swayed and shimmied with me down the front. Frost is a Reykjavik-based Aussie, but does tons of work in London so what the hell...
Getting very tired

No comments:

Post a Comment