The Xtra Diary - Norwegian cool! Terje Isungset's Ice Music comes to Somerset House

Published: 7 January, 2011

AFTER one of the coldest Decembers for a while, there must be plenty of people sick to death of snow and ice.

But this weekend in the Strand, musicians will be making good use of frozen water by using it to create delicate, otherworldly sounds.

Ice Music, a style that originated in Scandinavia (where else?), was pioneered by Norwegian composer and percussionist Terje Isungset.

It features musical instruments that have been hand sculpted from pure sheets of ice, some from ancient glaciers.

At various times from today (Friday) until Sunday, instruments including the ice horn, iceophone and ice percussion instruments will be played in an “igloo” on the Somerset House River Terrace against the backdrop of an instillation evoking frozen Arctic landscapes.

Isungset’s playing will be accompanied by singer Lena Nymark’s haunting vocals.

• Performances daily from January 7-9 at 1pm, 3.30pm and 6.30pm, River Terrace, Somerset House, WC2. Tickets £7.50/£5. Admission to the installation only is free. 

A return for the first-class Scamp 

THIS painting, appar­ently only recently discovered, is a rare por­trait of Roland Camberton, whose novel Scamp has just been re-published after being unavailable for half a century.

Camberton mysteri­ously vanished shortly after publishing the novel, which scooped the Somer­set Maugham Award and is set in bohemian Bloomsbury, Fitzrovia and Soho of the 1950s.

It tells the story of Ivan Ginsberg, a writer and dreamer who wants to put out his own magazine. Along the 

way he meets London oddballs including exhausted journalist Bert Flogcrobber and an oleaginous “demi-millionaire” of indeter­minate Eastern origin.

Camberton, whose real name was Henry Cohen, followed up Scamp with Rain on Pavements, a coming-of-age tale about the orthodox East End Jewish community in which he was raised. But he was “composing his own obituary,” according to the writer Iain Sinclair, and promptly disap­peared from public life. 

In the new edition of Scamp, Sinclair has written an introduction called “Man In A Macintosh: Roland Camberton, the Great Invisible of English Fiction”.

Camberton remains mysterious, but at least a new generation of readers will now be able to access his evocative work.

• Scamp is published by New London Editions, priced £9.99

Council the cowboys of wild Westminster?

YOU’VE got to hand it to No To Mob – the group of bikers dedicated to warning road users about “confusing” signs in Westminster to save them from being hit with fines.

If nothing else, the two-wheelers know how to make an apparently tedious subject fun. Their latest video, released on YouTube over the festive ­holiday period, is inspired by a ­Cowboys and ­Indians flick. 

It shows a biker on the trail of two of City Hall’s camera cars and the opening credits proclaim: “Featuring Westminster’s Highway Robbery Department.” 

The video shows the council’s CCTV cars ­parking in Soho’s Golden Square – or “Golden ‘Goose’ Square” as the bikers have nicknamed it.

The No To Mob carry out “hunts” of camera cars on most weekends. They claim City Hall is “making a killing” by fining motorists who drive where it is not permitted at the junction of Lower James Street, Brewer Street and Sherwood Street.

Westminster City Council claim road signage is visible and easy for motorists to understand.

Many of the ­bikers wear masks from the film V for Vendetta, which is about an uprising against a totalitarian authority (to which they compare ­Westminster City Council).