The trendy lower case and bite-sized hcmf rolls off the tongue easily, but the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival remains one of the toughest and most uncompromising of new music festivals. It isn't the sort of event where new music is stuffed away in a padding of romantic favourites: it sits loud and proud with 26 world premieres and 38 UK premieres jostling for attention over 10 days. Now 25 years old, hcmf boasts a new director, Susanna Eastburn, and a new sponsorship deal with the formidable Performing Rights Society. Featured composers include the Norwegian Per Nørgård, Irishman Gerald Barry, and from New York the relatively unknown Christian Wolff, considered by John Cage to be the most important composer of his generation. (http:/www.guardian.co.uk/arts/pickoftheweek/classical/0,12257,756355,00.html)

Groove
9 November 2002 / 6 January 2003
Huddersfield Art Gallery
Princess Alexandra Walk
Monday - Friday / 10-5 /
Saturday / 10 - 4 /

Call 01484 221962 for details (exhibition is free)

http:/www.kirklees.gov.uk/art

Huddersfield Art Gallery marks its reopening with an exhibition dedicated to the good old fashioned record - but not as we remember it. The CD may have made the LP obsolete but vinyl retains its pivotal role on the turntables of history as the disseminator of the new music in the late 20th century. Gone but not forgotten, a young generation of artists is breathing fresh life into the vinyl disc this century, imaginatively subverting it and concentrating on its particular sounds and tactile nature. The commercial devaluation of the record has focussed aesthetic and critical attention on its sculptural nature and plastic qualities - giving rise to vinyl disc culture.

Some of the artists will include:

John Cage (UK) / 33 1/3
Reconstructed for the first time in the UK, this installation is made of up 12 white plinths of varying heights, each with a turntable on top and speakers inside set alongside a plinth bearing 100 records that people can play.

Paul DeMarinis (USA) / A Flaw in the Décor
This sound sculpture, one of a series called The Edison Effect, plays (with a laser beam) discs made out of beeswax, producing sounds and music related to bees.

Susan Philipsz (Belfast) / The Internationale
The work comprises of a small Dansette-type record player, on the floor in an empty room, endlessly playing the record of The Internationale until it becomes scratchy and worn out.

Cornelia Parker (UK)
Turner Prize nominated artist Cornelia Parker contributes two works, The negative of Space, 1996 and Grooves in a record that belonged to Hitler. In keeping with Parker's continuing 'exploration of the secret lives of objects and materials, both ordinary and strange', the former is a piece made from the excess of the groove in vinyl records cut at the famed Abbey Road Studios and the latter a photographic close up literally of the grooves in a record owned by the German dictator.

Vinyl Video (Austria)
These two Austrian artists produce LPs, which project images on a screen when played like an LP.

Project Dark (London) / The Singles Club
Project Dark make playable 7-inch discs from bizarre things like sandpaper or carpet.

Alongside the exhibition Groove the artist Caroline de Lannoy has been commissioned to produce a new piece for Huddersfield Library and Art Gallery, based on the male and female voice. Caroline de Lannoy will be the first in a series of three commissions to animate the space between the library and art gallery during 2003, based on sound, text and light. It has been confirmed that the artist James Peel, who was the 2001-2 Berwick Gymnasium Fellow and recently appeared in At Sea, Tate Liverpool, will show a work based on the theme text in 2003.

Huddersfield Art Gallery has been turned into something of an art form itself with an exciting enhancement programme. The gallery has introduced a lounge space where visitors can discuss the works on show over a coffee. New signage has also been introduced to complete the new fresh look, in keeping with Huddersfield's thriving contemporary art scene.