Category: Recorded music
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Both sides of the street
Songs can be many things. In written literature there are names for them, but songs, we seem to think, are all first and foremost songs. They can be collections of images, the sort of things we call poems when they’re printed. They can be short narratives, stories as they are…
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An unforgetting shout
I’m not very familiar with the music of Kevin Martin, also known as The Bug, despite his prolific output, and his reputation as one of the most interesting electronic music producers around (collaborations with the likes of Napalm Death’s Justin Broadrick and general avant-garde legend John Zorn). However, if Fire…
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Get it while you can
Vanguard Street Art is an exhibition charting the development of street art in Bristol from the 1980s, when American hip-hop culture landed there, up to… well, I don’t know when, as I haven’t actually seen the show. What I have done is listen to the accompanying album, which I heard…
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Have you heard the news?
Since the 1940s, when big bands were last big business, few of them have had any longevity. The orchestras of global stars like Count Basie, Duke Ellington or Glen Miller continued to perform (and in those cases still exist today, long after the deaths of their founders), but today they…
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Simply present
Having taken a total break from playing music at the onset of the pandemic, I’ve been gradually coming back to it, starting with the ukulele, and more recently picking up a bass again. I’ve found myself enjoying the total absence of any demands, in terms of gigs to play or…
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Party in the temple
I spent a while back there in the early noughties thinking that all the fusions had been tried, and that whatever new forms were going to emerge in music would be so outlandish I might find it hard to grasp them. Actually, it turns out there’s a lot of mileage…
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Risks and growth
There are a few bands or musical artists of whom it’s possible to say that ‘their first album is the best’. It can happen that the first chance that someone gets to record, they do so with a combination of energy and creative clarity that they will not match again—and…
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Smart roots
I’ve been following the work of James Beaudreau since he sent me a trio of beautifully packaged CD albums for review around ten years ago. Those records contained experimental acoustic guitar music, driven by an interest in the presence and specificity of musical utterances—often signifying as much in terms of…
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Specifically dense
Michael Woodman is a lover of words. On his most recent album in particular, his lyrics display an affinity for extremely specific and little used terms such as petrichor, the scent raised by rain falling after a long spell of warm, dry conditions, and psithurism, the sound of rustling leaves.…
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Between bodies and speakers
Sampling became one of the most significant new techniques in record production during the 1980s, and although its influence on subsequent uses made of samples is debated, My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts was probably the first album to make them a central plank. David Byrne and Brian Eno…
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Ordinary voices
Ordinary voices get so little time and exposure that we tend to forget what they sound like, despite the fact that, by definition, they’re the voices that we hear every day. Somehow it comes to seem that the kind of speech we hear in TV dramas, in the lyrics of…
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Mumbling in the pocket
On the last day of last year, the death was announced of one of the most enigmatic and under-recorded figures in alternative hip-hop, which had occurred two months earlier. MF Doom reached his greatest commercial success, and most would say his creative peak, in collaboration with Madlib, with whom he…
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Open worlds
Aladdin Sane was my first Bowie album. Not the first Bowie I heard, and not even the first of his albums I listened to, but the first one I lived with until I learned it. It was among a collection of albums that had belonged to my dad, that his…
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A joy
One of the leading South American festivals of electronic and experimental music, I gather, is Novas Frequências, held somewhere in Brazil (the website for the 10th edition, held last year, doesn’t seem to specify!) The festival’s curator, Chico Dub, also curated a series of compilations between 2013 and 2016, ten…
Oliver Arditi 