“The Late Night Music evenings showed that museums can be innovative, adaptable and welcoming to all, centres of the community rather than simple tourist novelties. All it takes are some determined people with imagination. Not only does it serve to interest the disinterested (the people who feel museums aren’t for them or else visit once in a blue moon and skip to the dinosaurs) it also gives a productive, progressive outlet for the energy that would otherwise be wasted gum-bumping and foot-stamping by those who already appreciate the value a museum can hold. What better way to ensure the survival of an institute than to make it central to the lives and well-being of the people it serves?”

Well, good news! The evenings must have been a success because another has been organised for late October. Again presented by Spillers Records, three more acts have been lined-up to capture your imaginations and get you into the museum. Doors open at 7pm, giving you a chance to explore the museum at night (the clocks will have gone back by then!) before the bands start at 7:30. You can read a little more about the artists invloved below:

Alex Dingley

Alex Dingley is a songwriter from Llansteffan, west Wales, who makes indie pop along the lines of the 00’s twee bands if they were polluted/purified by the weirdness of Cats in Paris or Connan Mockasin. Check out ‘One Size Fits All’ below to see what I mean:

Mike Dennis

Fresh from his successful set last time around, Mike Dennis returns with his unique brand of classically-trained hip-hop. Back in May we described how he “utilis[ed] loops and effects pedals to build a dense tangle of sound, and as he began to recite his verses a crowd gathered, drawn by lyrics covering everything from bad bosses to the insanity of firearms”, so goodness knows what is in store this time.

Roundheels

Roundheels is a shiny new collaboration between Cardiff’s Jemma Roper (formerly of Sammo Hung and Heck) and producer Charlie Francis. Using Roper’s voice, a Mini-Moog and an array of virtual instruments, they make what can only be described as intelligent dance music – a guitarless amalgamation of The Knife, Kate Bush and Fever Ray. There’s not much to go on in terms of online presence (this will be their live début!), but check out their first single below:

You can buy tickets in advance (£5) from Ticketline or Spillers Records or pay £7 on the door.

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1st place: Signed Chalkie print, and swag bag
2nd place: 12 month subscription to the NME (subject to change, ha!)
3rd place: £25 SeeTickets Voucher
Runner up prizes: 5 contestants will receive a Chalkie swag bagBe sure to follow the correct museum Twitter and Tumblr accounts so they can contact you should you win. The closing date for entries is 21 August 2015. All further details (including Ts&Cs) can be found on the Museum Wales website. UK residents only I’m afraid.

All Photos © Chalkie Davies

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Without getting too much into politics and the mind-melting confusion of the economy, British museums… are under threat from the current climate of austerity. What better way to ensure the survival of an institute than to make it central to the lives and well-being of the people it serves?

Luckily for those in the vicinity of Cardiff, the good people at the museum are not content with what they have put on so far, with a number of events and activities coming up over the next few weeks:

Fragile? Keith Harrison in Conversation – 19th July, 13:30

First up is a Q&A with Keith Harrison, one of the artists who was commissioned to design a piece for the Fragile? exhibition. Harrison will be joined by members of the National Museum Cardiff Youth Forum to discuss his work, and members of the public (i.e. you!) are invited/urged to send questions to ensure that the talk is as informative and interesting as possible. If you can’t get to Cardiff then do not fear, the Learning department twitter account (@MuseumCdf_Learn) will be beaming all the best bits onto the world wide web. To pose a question to Harrison, simply tweet using the hashtag #mute (or #mud for welsh speakers).

Full details for the free event can be found here.

P.S. If you needed further convincing, Spillers Records will be taking over the decks in the Fragile? exhibition ahead of the annual Spillers photo shoot on the steps of the museum. So why not head to the gallery before the Q&A (or linger after it) to soak up some good art and music?

DIY Zine Workshops 

The second cool thing going on is a series of zine making workshops, where highly trained individuals (ahem) will give you “Zine 101” and help harness the subversive energy of Chalkie Davies and his subjects.

It’s pretty much scientific fact that the coolness of your zine is exponentially linked to the thought you put into it, so you are advised to wrack your brains the night before and bring a selection of suitable materials to aid your creation. Have a poem you are too scared to show your friends? Put it in your zine and pretend it’s by someone else! Have a bunch of weird old magazines lying in your attic? Bring them along to butcher in the name of art!*

Of course, the contents of your zine will be limited only by the size of your imagination. You could make one to gush about the music you love, or scathing one about music you hate, or an angry one about the government, or far-out one in support of David Icke’s world views. You could make a statement about your identity or your dog or your football team, or maybe describe your excitement for the new X-Files/Twin Peaks reboots.

Details for the free adult event (18/19th July) can be found here, and for the family sessions here (for 21-24th July) and here (28th – 31st July)

*Although be aware that overly weird magazines might be confiscated on entry.

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Fragile? hosted ‘Music is Fragile?’, a concert by Cardiff University’s School of Music written in response to the ceramics exhibition. Lisa Nelsen (flute) and Gwenllian Llŷr (harp) played a number of pieces which utilised technology alongside classical music to produce imaginative, evocative sounds, with composers Richard McReynolds, Julia E. Howell, Blair Boyd, Daniel James Ross, Jordan Hirst, Martin Humphries and John Cooney managing to create seven very different pieces. The audience, which ranged from ages seven to seventy, sat (and then stood) entranced – the connoisseurs appreciating the technique and composition, while the lay folk learned just what is possible with a harp, a flute and a gathering of experimental minds.

A quick dash across the hall led to the Chalkie Davies exhibition, the location of the music event presented by Spillers Records. Mike Dennis, wearing a rather apt Dennis The Menace shirt, kicked off proceedings with his rather unique brand of spoken word. As alluded to in the preview post, Dennis is a classically-trained violinist, so the early minutes of his set acted as a pleasant soundtrack for an audience still milling around Chalkie Davies’s photos. But this was not another traditional concert. Dennis was soon utilising loops and effects pedals to build a dense tangle of sound, and as he began to recite his verses a crowd gathered, drawn by lyrics covering everything from bad bosses to the insanity of firearms. Both violin and verses became impressively frantic and by the end of his set the the novelty of a gig in a museum gallery began to hit home.

If Dennis was the early stages of transition between exhibition and venue, then Junior Bill & the Scallies completed the switch. Peddling their brand of punky, samba-infused ska, the band had the audience packed around them, the photography forgotten, a gang of nodding heads and tapping feet punctuated with sporadic pockets of dancing from the diehards at the front.

The final act, Gwenno, changed the room again, swapping sweaty energy for something far more detached and ominous. With the aid of electronics that fell somewhere between robotic and celestial, not to mention her Welsh and Cornish lyrics, Gwenno created vivid soundscapes that were somehow desolate, clinical, post-human worlds in which love and pain are nothing but nagging, vestigial impulses buried beneath a cascade of ones and zeroes. Accompanied by Adam Curtis-style visuals projected onto the wall, the set captured the audience in a totally different way to the previous acts. Strangely, things had come full circle, the gallery-cum-club morphing into a conceptual art gallery. (FYI this is neither the time or place but I could write quite a bit more about Gwenno’s music and the ideas behind it. The album is out this July on Heavenly Recordings, so expect one of my long-winded, not-practical-for-the-internet-consumer specials in the near future).

The diverse, shape-shifting nature of the evening highlighted something very important with regards to museums in general. Without getting too much into politics and the mind-melting confusion of the economy, British museums, along with a whole host of other public services, are under threat from the current climate of austerity. This is something that causes some people to bump their gums angrily (*raises hand*), and others to shrug their shoulders in apathy at the maiming (and eventual loss) of what they see as redundant collections of old stuff. But the truth is that museums can and should be so much more than dusty halls manned by dusty men and women. The Late Night Music evenings showed that museums can be innovative, adaptable and welcoming to all, centres of the community rather than simple tourist novelties. All it takes are some determined people with imagination. Not only does it serve to interest the disinterested (the people who feel museums aren’t for them or else visit once in a blue moon and skip to the dinosaurs) it also gives a productive, progressive outlet for the energy that would otherwise be wasted gum-bumping and foot-stamping by those who already appreciate the value a museum can hold. What better way to ensure the survival of an institute than to make it central to the lives and well-being of the people it serves?

Keep up to date with future events at the National Museum Cardiff on their Website or Twitter page. Let’s hope they continue to do things like this.

P.S. The lovely musical photos are by Andrew Mackie. The amateurish Fragile? one is from us.

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