Oliver Arditi

Blog archive

  • Between bodies and speakers

    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 had been collaborating extensively on… Read more

  • Nurture writing

    Nurture writing

    I read an interview with Suzanne Simard in New Scientist and it brought tears to my eyes. Her description of the realities revealed in her career as an experimental scientist gave me such a sense of validation and hope that I immediately pre-ordered the book she was plugging, Finding the Mother Tree. In fact, it… Read more

  • Hardy perennials

    Hardy perennials

    Kim Stanley Robinson is known for not writing stories about soldiers, or other stereotypically heroic figures—which in our deeply fucked-up cultures are almost always the purveyors of violence. Instead he writes about scientists, administrators, politicians, activists, engineers, labourers, artists, writers, craftspeople, and so on. The kind of characters that seem to interest him the most… Read more

  • Ordinary voices

    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 songs, in political speeches, in… Read more

  • Old school concision

    Old school concision

    Much of the development of videogames passed me by, despite my early and continuing interest, thanks to my long voluntary exile in the Apple Mac gaming ghetto. Since I finally bought myself a console about three years ago I’ve been catching up, with a particular focus on the last ten years, which has been something… Read more

  • Aesthetic symbols

    Aesthetic symbols

    Having been interested in comics for a very long time, I have of course been aware of manga. Until now, I haven’t read any, and my only knowledge of the genre has been second-hand, either through anime adaptations like Akira, or by reading what other people have written about it. It is one of the… Read more