Oliver Arditi

Blog archive

  • Saturday Summary 017

    Saturday Summary 017

    This week, Myspace gets humiliated again, and lots of people have thoughts about new models for the music business. http://blancomusic.wordpress.com/2011/02/03/whats-all-this-about-spotify-again/ An enlightening perspective from an independent label on Spotify’s business practices. While there is an undeniable parallel with radio, and presence on streaming services may be of real promotional value to some of the smaller… Read more

  • Another Dead Hero – Children Of The Witch (metal)

    Another Dead Hero – Children Of The Witch (metal)

    Ominous, dissonant, powerful, and employing a vocabulary that predates any form of extreme metal, it would be easy to class Another Dead Hero’s music as epic doom, for its atmosphere and for its approach, but it’s not so easily pigeonholed stylistically. It sounds like Another Dead Hero, which is to say that it doesn’t sound… Read more

  • Drowner – E.P. (shoegaze/ dream pop)

    Drowner – E.P. (shoegaze/ dream pop)

    Listen hard, listen through the surface textures of Drowner’s debut release, and you will find a lot of the music is punchy and kinetic: that’s not how it presents itself, however, because they are punching through a big fluffy pillow of sonic goose down. This is music that is as much about its textures as… Read more

  • Simon Little – The Knowledge Of Things To Come (solo bass/ ambient)

    Simon Little – The Knowledge Of Things To Come (solo bass/ ambient)

    Simon Little’s EP Rejectamenta, ostensibly composed of material rejected for inclusion on this album, was an interesting recording in its own right, and implied certain promises about the creative direction in which Little might be moving. I’m glad to say, he’s as good as his word. Before I even start to address the compositional and… Read more

  • Galapagos Now! – The Beards Of London (garage/ roots rock)

    Galapagos Now! – The Beards Of London (garage/ roots rock)

    Lyrics slam meanings across one another in collisions of imagery that are sometimes poetic and profound, but always imbued with acid sarcasm and sour humour. Galapagos Now! are not all about the words however: the arrangements of their songs take on the shapes of their meanings, borrowing vocabulary from garage rock, jazz, folk and other… Read more

  • Monday Musings: Technique and Creativity

    Monday Musings: Technique and Creativity

    There are some really skilled musicians around with very little to say: there are also some players with a very rudimentary technique who are able to stretch it into work of huge creative ambition. There are many more whose artistic strategies are too dependent on their technical aptitude to permit them to range very widely,… Read more