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The Guardian Culture

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‘We’re really good. I don’t mean that arrogantly’: Yard Act on bullying, imposter syndrome and their heavy new album

The Leeds group arrived in a frenzy of post-punk energy, picking at the scabs of society – then started questioning their instant success. They talk about dodging ‘the megaband treadmill’ to make their surreal new album It’s certainly a novel way to announce your comeback. On the opening song of Yard Act’s new album, over a cacophony of doomy piano chords and crashing drums, singer James Smith announces: “I’ve got absolutely nothing – absolutely nothing new to say!” And he’s not finished there. Later in the same track, Empty Pledges, Smith whips himself up into unhinged preacher mode only to declare: “Do you feel like an impostor for every new level you ascend to too? Do you have to bluff as much as I do?” Is it refreshingly honest to begin a record by saying you haven’t got a clue what you’re doing – or an act of ludicrous self-sabotage? “Well, I don’t know if anyone has anything new to say really,” says Smith with a grin when I meet him and bassist Ryan Needham in a London bar to discuss You’re Gonna Need a Little Music, the band’s forthcoming third LP. “We’re in this age where everything has to be a manifesto and a statement, but it’s mainly just a one-way conversation. Nobody wants to explore the grey areas any more.” Continue reading...

The Guardian Culture

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La Traviata review – gripping and genuinely moving staging opens Garsington’s summer season

Garsington Opera, Wormsley Louisa Muller’s richly detailed production of Verdi’s tragedy is elevated by Madison Leonard’s magnetic Violetta and Douglas Boyd’s musical direction that reinvigorates the familiar score Day breaks in Paris at the end of act one of La Traviata – and, at Garsington Opera’s theatre, half-open to the surrounding Chiltern countryside, the birds provide the dawn chorus. If that registers as a felicitous but accidental touch in Garsington’s first ever production of Verdi’s opera, there’s plenty of equally engaging detail that’s very much intentional – not only in Louisa Muller’s staging, but also in the pit, where the company’s artistic director Douglas Boyd whips the Philharmonia Orchestra through a performance that makes a familiar score feel reinvigorated. Muller’s staging is another fruit of the company’s transatlantic relationship with Santa Fe Opera, where it was first seen two summers ago. It moves the period forward to the late 1930s, with Paris as a city partying on a cliff edge – not that you’d necessarily know that, except for the blue military uniforms worn by some of the men. We follow Madison Leonard’s Violetta through the doorways, rooms and terraces of Christopher Oram’s revolving set, a world of marble, painted brickwork and wrought iron, silvery and brittle. As the daylight gives way to Marcus Doshi’s stage lighting, the surfaces can look either glitzy or distressed. The same goes for the inhabitants. During the overture we see Violetta’s ghost wander uncomprehendingly from her deathbed to her salon, where her party guests wait, frozen like pastel-coloured waxworks. Later, those same guests carouse at Flora’s in red, gold and black fancy dress – costumes by Klimt, faces by Dix – and they become increasingly robotic and drained of life as Violetta’s illness moves in to consume her. Continue reading...

The Register

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IT/기술

AWS whips out Graviton-powered Redshift instances, claims 7x speed for data warehouse

AI agents asking questions in natural language apparently issue a lot more queries than your average SQL jockey

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‘We’re really good. I don’t mean that arrogantly’: Yard Act on bullying, imposter syndrome and their heavy new album

La Traviata review – gripping and genuinely moving staging opens Garsington’s summer season

AWS whips out Graviton-powered Redshift instances, claims 7x speed for data warehouse