Gig review: The Golden Hour

Published on Thursday 19 February 2009 19:38

*** FOREST CAFE, EDINBURGH

IT'S nice to get along to the Forest Caf every so often just to remind yourself that such an oddity really does exist in the heart of Edinburgh.

The meeting place for a community of artists, poets, performers, and general alternative lifestyle types, it's like a night spent in your living room – if your living room contained a few dozen people sitting around eating meat-free burritos, drinking BYO wine and admiring the gaudily stencilled walls. It's another world.

How appropriate, then, that the theme of this instalment of the Forest's regular highbrow cabaret night is Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World, in honour of this year's Unesco City of Literature One Book, One Edinburgh reading campaign. Although the story was less involved in some of the readings and musical interludes, an interpretation of the tale by Kora and the Paper Cinema was the Golden Hour's focal point this time out.

A wall projection of paper puppets that interacted by movement rather than sound, it was perhaps stretched out a little longer than necessary. Still, the part-live soundtrack of guitar and violin blurred with the dancing images to create a lovely, dream-like effect.

The other highlight was Robert Sarazin-Blake, a young American with an old-time drifter's beard and obvious previous with the Golden Hour's master of ceremonies, Edinburgh-based poet Ryan Van Winkle.

Sarazin-Blake provided an hour of gorgeous, Beat-like song-poems in the tradition of Bob Dylan and Guthrie (both father and son, Woody and Arlo), and the drunken "beard-off" between him and the host which followed put the finishing touch to an event rich in community and creativity.