“You're going to Norway?” they all gasped with barely concealed incredulity. “Ooh, it's awfully expensive there!” - they added with a sharp intake of breath. Moreover, I’d heard this reaction so often prior to departure from Edinburgh that I began to have night sweats worrying I’d be bankrupted by my trip to the land of… Continue reading Oslo On a Budget – Making Your Kroner Go Further in the Norwegian Capital
The Guardian newspaper's testament that ‘comment is free’ only holds so much water when you consider that we are already awash with so much ephemeral, ill-informed, and unsolicited opinion that it is eating up our valuable time and pushing it 'into the red'. This is possibly because there are more far too many commentators and… Continue reading A Creative Surge – Music Writing (2012-2017) by Michael Stephen Clark
There is at Mo I Rana in northern Norway the most extraordinary facility built into the mountainside overlooking this modest, regional town. It looks like something James Bond might break into, only to get caught within two minutes of breaching its impressive exterior. Yet, even 007 could enter freely by appointment and everyone would tell… Continue reading Real to Reel – Two Different Approaches to Sound Archiving from Scotland and Norway
“Listen, Time passes”, wrote Dylan Thomas in his famous play for voices, Under Milk Wood, inviting his audience to sit and observe past lives at a comfortable remove from personal involvement in their affairs. Dundee Rep Ensemble’s production of Anne Downie’s The Yellow on the Broom, is an affectionate tale of travelling folk in 1930’s… Continue reading Couthy and Canty – ‘The Yellow on the Broom’ at Dundee Rep
It’s often blithely said that if you can remember the 1960’s then you probably weren’t there. Quite frankly, I have frequently found myself misplacing memories in the wrong sector of the time-space continuum, and it’s not a recent thing either. It’s gotten to the point where the most reliable touchstones for a particular era are… Continue reading The Death of the Decade
