Outro // “Another Year Passes: Seven things that we liked in 2013”

“But we never see things changing/ We only see them ending…” (Ani DiFranco)

2013 was for many a bad year. But for others it was a good year. For others it was an equal measure. The fact remains that we wish all of those people a Happy New Year! The above quote may seem extremely untraditional, but it really isn’t. Life can never be perfect – and every ending is merely a new door opening into change for the better.

It was a mixed year for sure in all areas of life but if we always look on the dark side (As we did to varying degrees in December’s Dark Season sub theme of features) we’ll get nothing but darkness. Positivity is always the better side of the coin to fall on and that’s just what we’ll do here! Here we go with seven things that we liked in 2013…

#1: Music. Music was everywhere in 2013 – with essential releases from artists coming all year round. We enjoyed music from David Bowie, Novella, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Death Grips, Prince and much more besides. For our picks of the year check out the #essential2013 features for more (but not all) of what we enjoyed…

#2: Art. We’ve been inspired by many artists this year – dead and alive. Salvador Dali helped us with coffee. Giger helped us out with dark eroticism. Frank Kozik inspired us with his smoking’ Labbits. Jonathan Barnbrook made us reconsider simplicity in design with his iconic cover art for Bowie’s The Next Day. And, of course, our friend Love ArtUK inspired us with his exhibition in February and the collaborative work that followed on some of #srcz’s other projects.

3: Coffee. With our second Coffee Culture season we explored (over various forms of the devils beverage) its connection to art, creativity and life and it went down very well indeed. (Double meaning very intentional!) You could say that we had the best time with coffee ever…

4. Cassettes. We had Record Store Day and then we had Cassette Store Day. Some of our picks of the year were released exclusively (in the physical format, at least) on cassette and we rediscovered our love for them as a result.

#5. Collaboration. Our events arm took a few more steps out of the darkness with some low key but excellent event collaborations in the second half of the year. This resulted in collaboration – a very potent thing indeed! It also greatly enriched our content both in front of and behind the scenes of #srcz. But most of all, our (ongoing) partnership with Liverpool’s excellent Threshold Festival was as enjoyable as ever. We look forward to more multi-arts adventures in 2014 for the festival very much!

#6.Television. We’re pretty sure you’ll agree when we say that we were spoiled by a lot of good television this year. You can check our picks of the year in our #essential2013 series but our favourite shows were on throughout the year including Borgen’s final season, the 50th anniversary run of Doctor Who, some excellent documentaries on the (we think) under appreciated BBC4 and probably a lot more besides depending on your television package. We even headed down to the excellent Nordicana in London to see a celebration of Nordic Noir drama’s such as Borgen, Arne Dahl, The Bridge and more – joining a packed audience for Borgen star Sidse Babett Knudsen’s illuminating Q and A session. Fun?! We’ll see you next year!

7. People. At the heart of all of the above is the essential ingredient of people. To all the people we met, worked with, hated, loved, embraced and encountered – may 2014 be as good as 2013!

See you in 2014!

From all at #srcz!