June 6, 2013
Brooke Sharkey – One Dress (folk)
It can be quite hard to find your place as a singer-songwriter; it’s an idiom whose audience mainly appreciates acoustic music, and mainly doesn’t appreciate anything too weird. Its audience also has a seemingly inexhaustible appetite for frankly indistinguishable assemblages of strummed steel-string guitar and predictable vocal melodies; it’s asking an awful lot of vocal timbre and lyrical conceit to make them the sole repositories of individuality and personality, and it is conversely very easy to go with the flow, knowing that if you can spin your simple songs out with enough polish in the delivery there is probably an audience out there for you, one that will be in awe of your talent simply because you’re able to get through a song without …
Guapo – History Of The Visitation (avant-rock)
May 16, 2013
Guapo is a band with some form; since 1995 they have released a fistful of EPs and nine albums, and although the line-up and sound have changed considerably over that time, the name has been attached to music that shows a consistent and determined belief in the value of creative exploration. This music is progressive; it is also rock music, but if I were to juxtapose those terms too closely you’d likely jump to certain erroneous conclusions about the character of the sound. Although it has to be said that the prog-rock fraternity is a pretty broad church these days, and a noticeable proportion of its listening public would probably be eager to claim Guapo for their own; because what Guapo demonstrate emphatically is that there is room …
Monday Musing: If Property Is Theft, Who Stole Our Music?
May 13, 2013
Meaningful utterances can be represented in physical form: a spoken sentence may be represented symbolically by writing, or mimetically, by an audio recording. Such representations may be reproduced indefinitely, whether by a symbolic process (someone reads the words and writes them down again) or a mimetic one (someone makes a photocopy of the writing). Each time this happens, a physical object becomes the conduit for an idea, for some units of meaning. You may be able to guess where I'm going with this: I'm going to be talking about music, as is my wont, and the reproduction thereof. This has been something of a hot topic since information technology made it so easy, and it raises a number of questions that anyone with much
Oli
I'm a writer, and these are my friends.
May 23, 2013
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