Blackstar Theory - The Last Works of David Bowie - an audio visual presentation by author Leah Kardos
SUNday Jan 15th - Whelans. 3.30pm. Adm: Free
Blackstar Theory author Leah Kardos takes a close look at David Bowie’s ambitious last works: his surprise ‘comeback’ project The Next Day (2013), the off-Broadway musical Lazarus (2015) and the album that preceded the artist’s death in 2016 by two days, Blackstar, over the course of her acclaimed audio visual presentation.
Her superb book explores the swirl of themes that orbit and entangle these projects from a starting point in musical analysis and features new interviews with key collaborators from the period: producer Tony Visconti, graphic designer Jonathan Barnbrook, musical director Henry Hey, saxophonist Donny McCaslin and assistant sound engineer Erin Tonkon. These works tackle the biggest of ideas: identity, creativity, chaos, transience and immortality. They enact a process of individuation for the Bowie meta-persona and invite us to consider what happens when a star dies.
Leah Kardos is an Australian music creator, writer and academic who splits her time between music making, writing and academia. She is currently employed by Kingston University as a senior lecturer in music, and is the Project Leader of the Visconti Studio, a recording and research facility co-founded with legendary producer Tony Visconti. In 2019 she started the Kingston University Stylophone Orchestra, the only ensemble of its kind in the world. Their debut album, Stylophonika, co-produced with Tony Visconti, was released in January 2022 on Spun Out of Control records. She publishes music with Bigo & Twigetti, contributes music reviews and criticism to The Wire.