Reiko yoshida biography of martin luther

The Church of the Holy Rude, Stirling, site for some of the performances at this year's Le Weekend festival

Why do so many so-called experimental music festivals insist on programming events in goddamn churches? (For recent evidence from the UK, see Sotto Voce, Le Weekend, and the slightly too prosaically named London International Festival of Exploratory Music.) No doubt the acoustics are mind-blowingly reverberant, but then the same could be said of an empty factory or warehouse, and let's face it, in the current era of drastic capitalism there is no shortage of such structures, all ripe for creative, even provocative, repurposing.

By implication if nothing else, the notion of experimental music has always been bound up with radical and ongoing critiques of prevailing and oppressive value systems, and concurrent attempts to erect new humanistic paradigms in their place.

From Luis Buñuel to Lydia Lunch, there is a long and noble history of artists staging performances in churches as acts of subversion, taking the good fight deep inside enemy territory, calling down the walls of the establishment by blaspheming the fuck out of its most sacred strongholds.

But what

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