{"id":9792,"date":"2015-12-08T11:31:13","date_gmt":"2015-12-08T14:31:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/culturedarm.com\/?p=9792"},"modified":"2015-12-08T11:31:13","modified_gmt":"2015-12-08T14:31:13","slug":"cultureteca-29-11-15","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/culturedarm.com\/staging\/5793\/cultureteca-29-11-15\/","title":{"rendered":"Cultureteca 29.11.15"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Cultureteca<\/a><\/p>\n

On Cultureteca this week, David Bowie announces Blackstar<\/em> for the date of his sixty-ninth birthday; NASA’s\u00a0Curiosity rover relays the first images of active sand dunes on Mars; Raspberry Pi unveils a single-board computer for just $5; the 2015 Davis Cup in tennis reaches a climax, with Great Britain against\u00a0Belgium; and Leicester City’s Jamie Vardy breaks a Premier League record for goals scored in consecutive games.<\/p>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

David Bowie Confirms Blackstar<\/strong><\/p>\n

David Bowie took Friday to confirm the upcoming release of Blackstar<\/em><\/a>, his twenty-fifth studio album. The record will be out on 8 January 2016, the date of Bowie’s sixty-ninth birthday.<\/p>\n

The title track, a ten-minute dark jewel,\u00a0was released as the first single from the album on 20 November. An\u00a0excerpt serves as the theme tune for the six-part crime drama series The Last Panthers<\/em>, created by Jack Thorne, directed by Johan Renck, and starring Samantha Morton, John Hurt, and Tahar Rahim. The Last Panthers<\/em> premiered\u00a0on Canal+ in France on 26 October, and on Sky Atlantic in the UK, Ireland, Italy, Germany, and Austria on 12 November. A US premiere is scheduled for spring 2016 on SundanceTV.<\/p>\n

Other than the lead single, there is so far fairly little to go on regarding the content of the album. A reported seven-song, forty-five-minute tracklist, with titles such as ”Tis a Pity She Was a Whore’, ‘Dollar Days’, and ‘I Can’t Give Everything Away’; rumours of recording sessions with jazz musicians at the Magic Shop in New York; the purported collaboration of James Murphy, founder of LCD Soundsystem<\/a>;\u00a0and suggestions that the new album will combine Gregorian chants with Kraftwerk<\/a> – all of this has been\u00a0questioned by Bowie’s team, who have cited ‘inaccurate reporting’.<\/p>\n

A smattering of early reviews in MOJO<\/em>, Classic Pop<\/em>, and Q<\/em> have depicted ‘a genre-hopping return to his experimental prime’ and ‘Headgame-playing art-rock Sinatra’, with Q<\/em>\u00a0positing ‘There are layers upon layers here which will go on revealing themselves, play after play’.<\/p>\n

Bowie was similarly surreptitious in the build up to his previous album, 2013’s The Next Day<\/em>. The record – his first in ten years – was announced on his sixty-sixth\u00a0birthday,\u00a0accompanied by the surprise release of the single ‘Where Are We Now?’<\/a>. In the meantime\u00a0Bowie has co-written Lazarus<\/em> with the Tony-winning Irish playwright Enda Walsh. The production is based on The Man Who Fell to Earth<\/em>, Walter Tevis’s 1963 sci-fi novel and the film adaptation of 1976, which was directed by Nicolas Roeg and starred Bowie as the alien who arrives on Earth in search of\u00a0water to save his home planet.<\/p>\n

Lazarus<\/em>\u00a0is directed by Ivo van Hove and stars\u00a0Michael C. Hall. It features reworked music from Bowie’s catalogue alongside new compositions – although the artist has confirmed\u00a0that ‘Blackstar’ will play no part in the process. Lazarus<\/em> will open at the New York Theatre Workshop on 7 December<\/a>.<\/p>\n