Four Lamps

A merger between the International Lighting Review and Lamps & Gear magazine took place in 2008 of which Luminous is a relatively new magazine. The magazine revolves around four main topics: great lighting projects in the world, development and trends in lighting, challenges in lighting design and technology and introduction to major architectural lighting solutions.

This Brief documents the life, discoveries and inventions of the chemist Carl Auer von Welsbach. Particular attention is given to his pioneering work on the rare earth elements, including the discovery of four new elements, which allowed him to develop new materials, to invent new useful devices and to establish major industries.

The Dadaist provocation of the cover, announcing dog but showing cat, speaks volumes about the quartet’s musical aesthetics: if humour is one of their ways of standing back, it is not the only one. The group assume head-on the tragical and operatic accents of the themes that pass through Dieu m’a brossé les dents (God has brushed my teeth): dirges and dying voices. But from the first notes of the introduction, where the zither duplicates and bypasses the remote ringing of the piano, the drama takes on a layer of fantasy. Sitting on the edge of the mirror, we are surrounded by roaming ghosts and floating shadows. By freeing the themes from their gravity, this aesthetic choice defuses a pathos that is close at regular intervals.

The imagined sounds of mass protest run through composer Emily Howard’s and poet Michael Symmons Roberts’s The Anvil, commissioned by BBC Radio 3 and the Manchester International Festival to mark the bicentenary of the 1819 Peterloo massacre, in which crowds protesting for universal suffrage in St Peter’s Fields, Manchester, were brutally crushed.