Oliver Arditi

Blog archive

  • Outside in the Village

    Outside in the Village

    A musician’s life is usually precarious, especially if you’re attempting to work as a featured artist. Llewyn Davis, as played by Oscar Isaac, is no exception to this rule. He has no home, no stable relationships, no money, few gigs, and no recording contract. He does have a large stack of remaindered albums, a guitar, Read more

  • A museum of Tom Kaczynski

    Behind their classically laid-out, commercially styled covers (complete with old-school colophons to tickle the collector’s fancy), the first two… Read more

  • A ritual of world-building

    A ritual of world-building

    A rich, deep evocation of… Well, it’s something of a cliché to say ‘the movement of the earth’, or ‘geology’, since the founding act of drone metal is called Earth, but the slow, heavy movements of Asva’s Futurists Against The Ocean produce an affect which is reminiscent of little else. Perhaps the clue is in Read more

  • A bleak disturbance

    A bleak disturbance

    Humphrey Bogart reputedly occupied something of a lonely place among his Hollywood peers—although he had his good friends, Louise Brooks, in a 1967 essay, wrote of his ‘isolation among people’. In fact, she suggested that the part he played in Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place was close to his own character—a selfish devotion to Read more

  • Full marks

    Full marks

    I hesitate to say too much about Karl Marx or Marxism in response to a book written by someone who could list their profession as ‘Marxist theorist’, but I do need to point out that I don’t consider myself a Marxist, and that I don’t believe that Marx or Marxism has a monopoly on progressive Read more

  • Staring back

    Staring back

    Darkness, an absence of light, is an obvious, unavoidable presence in the visual realm. We live in a world of light, so when it’s removed we see its lack. It’s the most visible form of negative space. But darkness is a rich and diverse idea/feeling/aesthetic/domain. In music darkness exists by inference: it is often associated Read more