Month: July 2011
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ELIKA – Snuggle Bunnies (shoegaze/ dreampop)
Shoegaze and dreampop are genres that, because they are so sonically mediated, offer artists an opportunity to work in a way that is conceptually or semantically layered without seeming inaccessible. Because they offer an established language which is both amenable to manipulation, and widely understood, they lend themselves to very…
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Mittimus & Nix Pickler – Devices (free improvisation)
Free improvisers take a lot of different routes to a lot of different destinations, or to put it another way, improvisation can be free in a lot of different ways. When it first burst into the world it was as an avant-garde practice within jazz (although most became aware of…
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Ed Ache presents The Vogon Poetry Sessions – Work For Tesco Or Die (punk/ acoustic)
Brace yourself. Ed Ache plays punk songs of such finely honed, cutting sarcasm that he’ll make your brain bleed; often very funny, always witty, usually politically targeted, his songs have catchy melodies that drive home their meanings and convince you of their truth as they get you singing along. They…
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Tom Slatter – Iron Bark (progressive rock/ steampunk)
It’s rare that something truly original comes my way, something that I can’t really put in a box with anything else. Tom Slatter presents me with music for which I can find some comparisons, certainly: there’s a nuanced, psychedelic experimentalism to his compositions, reminiscent of some twentieth century classical music,…
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Monday Musings: Cataclysmic Events In The History Of Music
Every so often in the history of music, something big happens. Beethoven comes along and suddenly everyone views artists (not just in music) in a new, heroic light. Punk explodes like a thermonuclear device, and suddenly popular music is a politicised site of struggle and revolution. Miles Davis releases Kind…
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Chattabox & Rick Fury – Masta Blasta (hip-hop)
I’ve had a lot of fun listening to this album. I’m still having a lot of fun, and I expect to be listening to it for a good while yet. There’s little of the overt social commentary found on Dialect releases (or other releases this duo can be heard on),…
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Hawk Horses – FALL (avant-folk)
Folk music, as a widely shared conceptual category, is largely defined by a sense of authenticity: it is culturally specific music, and it is valued by many (or most) of its fans for its truthfulness to a particular sort of shared experience. This is not usually the personal experience of…
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Ed Muirhead – Cage For The Clouds (roots rock)
The songs collected on this album are personal, individuated reflections: often concerned with love, their perspectives are firmly located behind the eyes of well imagined characters, and even when there is celebration in them (as in ‘Paradise’), there is insecurity and doubt as well. There is a tendency in popular…
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Music Basti – Monkey On The Roof (world music/ children’s)
Monkey On The Roof is a document of, and a promotional, fundraising project for, an Indian charity called Music Basti. The charity brings music activities and education to street children in Delhi, in an organised, workshop based structure: their aim is to help give those children some hope for the…
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Monday Musing: Art, Folk, Pop And The Taxonomy Of Musical Culture
There’s a broad classification of musical types that has some common currency, in artistic, marketing and academic circles. I want to briefly consider what it is, where it draws the lines between musics, whether it holds water, and what use it might be to those of us that think about…
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Saturday Summary 019
The big news this week is Spotify’s North American launch, but there’s really nothing to say about that so far. It will have some kind of an impact, but exactly how much of one remains to be seen. I don’t know what the end user deal looks like at launch,…
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CS Gray – Shoot Out The Star (roots rock)
I have one major criticism of Shoot Out The Star: the title is written a bit too close to the bottom of the artwork. Some readers may be surprised, given my taste for the experimental and oppositional, that I could be that excited about a straightahead roots rock album. Perhaps…
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Juana Ghani – Budmo! (gypsy/ folk)
Juana Ghani play central European gypsy music (as far as I can tell, I’m no expert). They are a large band, incorporating a variety of instruments, some plucked, some struck, some blown and some squeezed. The songs collected here are driven along by a tightly and propulsively played brass bass…
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Various Artists – You Got Your Punk in My Garage – The Best of the GaragePunk Hideout, Vol. 3 (punk/ garage)
This album is for sale through all the usual big online retailers, but it’s also available as a freebie to active members of the garage music fan community linked to above. It’s the third in an ongoing series, and let me tell you: if you are a fan of this…
Oliver Arditi 