Cultural Highlights of 2024

Diamond Jubilee

Album by Cindy Lee

If the medium is the message, Cindy Lee’s Diamond Jubilee, originally available only via purchasing a zip file from a vaguely suspicious Web 1.0 Geocities site, was an invitation to start using iTunes again. Wrangling the music-as-spreadsheet file management system and correcting wrongly applied metadata to have the tracks appear in the proper order within the 2-“disc” album elicited a satisfying nostalgia for something I didn’t know I was missing. It’s a sad state of affairs when a short respite from the de-experiential effects of music streaming feels so radical, but dragging over the included cover jpeg felt like an equivalent of the tactile pleasure that vinyl collectors enjoy.

The music itself is captivating – pop music as David Lynch sees it, like a Phil Spector production from a dreamed 20th century. It’s hauntology as affect: familiar, sometimes uncanny, with burdock hooks that stick to your trousers all day. It makes me feel like Brian Wilson hearing Be My Baby for the first time.

Bag Piece

Live performance by a mother and child at the Tate Modern exhibition “Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind”

A performance of Bag Piece

Amongst the overwhelming volume of work in the Yoko Ono retrospective at the Tate was a demarcated area of the gallery floor, with a large black bag hung up on a hook. Visitors were invited to perform their own “Bag Piece”, a work originally staged by Ono herself, in which the performer or performers are fully encased in a semi-flexible opaque bag, and are free to do whatever they want.

The experience of being inside the bag was powerful and multi-faceted, with onlookers enthusiastically describing mine and Anna’s performance as “good”. But our interpretation was followed by that of a mother and child, who stole the show.

They oscillated between being identifiable as two entities of different sizes and coallescing into an amorphous power. The child could stand between the mum’s legs and disappear into her sillhouette, before emerging like a birth. For the finale, after some minimal conferring, the larger shape got down and curled up on the floor and the smaller one carefully climbed and stood on her back, victorious. Not a dry eye in the house.

The Tree Stage

Stage at Glastonbury Festival by Woodsies, curated by Lilith Piper

The Tree Stage at sunset

One of the personal effects of the spell that is Glastonbury Festival is checking in with the mood of 200,000 people, and thereby the world at large, as it exists in late June of that particular year.

Much could be said about the rise and rise in popularity of “ambient” music and how it speaks to our current moment. Indeed, the music I’ve spent most time listening to this year has been minimalist and meditative, be it as a soundtrack to work or a vehicle for transcendence. But how can such a personal exprience be enabled and elevated as something communal? It’s not giving brat.

New to Glastonbury Festival this year, the Tree Stage consists of concentric rings of speakers around an upturned dead tree. There’s space for a hundred or so people to sit or lie on the grass underneath a canopy echoing a crown-shy forest ceiling. Renaissance nepo mushroom men Merlin and Cosmo Sheldrake performed there early on, Steve Hillage and Miquette Giraudy played the whole of their 1979 Rainbow Dome Musick, and Jon Hopkins’ then unreleased transcendent album Ritual was played in full. But my festival highlight was James Burton of Warp Records’ late-night beatless mix, turning putting-on-youtube-at-the-afterparty into an artform.

Stockport Interchange

Bus station by Stockport Council and BDP

Stockport Interchange bus station and park

It’s official: Stockport is the new Stockport. 2024 saw the opening of a new bus station, connected by a huge sweeping walkway over the canal to the train station, and housing an urban park on the roof. Of the various identities I embody, one that fits very comfortably is that of “pedestrian”. And the pedestrian experience of Stockport Transport Interchange is magical.

No part of the structure is in denial about being located between the mighty A6, train tracks, canals, confluence of rivers, shady tower blocks and at the ankles of Stockport viaduct (one of the largest brick structures in the country). It invites you to take in those surroundings, without pretending they’re conventionally beautiful. It captures the town’s multi-level nature: the huge oval cutout that exposes where the buses park up looks beautiful from a train overlooking it when illuminated at night, and when approached on foot it evokes peering over the bridge by the market to look at the Underbanks.

Music for Pieces of Wood

Live performance by Colin Currie and members of the Hallé Orchestra, composed by Steve Reich

Colin Currie and members of the Hallé Orchestra perform Music for Pieces of Wood at Bridgewater Hall

It seemed almost impossible that the percussionists could keep their own time amongst the emerging ecstatic polyrhythms of Steve Reich’s Music for Pieces of Wood. But don’t worry, they know what they’re doing. The audience reaction was part of the piece as the musicians ended perfectly in time: beat, gasp, enthusiastic applause.

Leaving Bridgewater Hall, the people, bikes and trams were different. Oh, it’s about the city.

Magic Monthly

Subscription by Christian Grace

Christian Grace

Card magic is in a golden era. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean that a layperson like you is likely to see good card magic performed any time soon, IRL or otherwise. The advent of Patreon has made it financially viable to be a magician whose primary audience is other magicians. The key relationship is parasocial – live audiences need only be small groups of friends at pubs and coffee shops, whilst the trade is in the secrets themselves, not selling the performances to TV and theatres. And what secrets they are. The current cohort of London-based male magicians are absolutely next fucking level in terms of designing fooling tricks.

Some releases from this year deserving of praise include Andrew Frost’s knuckle-busting routines available via his own membership platform and various other outlets; fellow move-monkey Alex Hansford’s beautifully typeset “Missing Almost Every Thing”; Ross Tayler’s braggadocious and audacious approach to “reframing”; as well as Derren Brown’s first book for magicians in twenty years, “Notes From A Fellow Traveller”. The latter is flying the flag for public performance and offering the real Real work.

But the greatest magic content this year is within Christian Grace’s subscription-based membership platform, Magic Monthly. Grace embodies the new model of effect design, where psychology, routining and mechanics combine to counteract each other. This is often paired with a degree of preparation that is totally deceptive in itself, in that no spectator would think that anyone would be arsed. The only thing missing, we might say, is that final frontier of magic: good taste. Do these performers have anything to say? Do they have a criteria for performing tricks that goes beyond being fooling and towards something artistic?

See Shawn DeSouza-Coelho’s Magic as Medium for an excellent look at magic’s common failings from the perspective of semiotics, and how it so often fails as art. Derren Brown at least advocates for magic with a message but in the context of his overtly humanist, stoicist, atheist worldview, “meaning” is often trite or patronising. And he has much to answer for in terms of warping the public perception of what can and cannot be achieved through psychological manipulation. Even for the magician most highly thought of by other magicians, the actual strength lies firmly in the effects themselves, rather than what they communicate.

I would like to see magic presented to the public that isn’t embarrassing or artistically compromised. But for now, who cares? Maybe magic isn’t for you at the moment, it’s for me, and Christian Grace has offered me some of the most rewarding intellectual stimulation, and genuine delight, of 2024.

Honorable Mentions