Oliver Arditi

Blog archive

  • Oozing style and charm

    Oozing style and charm

    In our trawl through Humphrey Bogart’s oeuvre we’ve been sticking to the best known movies—he acted in over seventy films. The African Queen is one of the most famous. It is relatively exceptional in several ways. For one thing it was shot largely on location in Africa, an unusual choice at the time—and the shoot… Read more

  • Spending time

    Spending time

    The experience of playing a narrative-focussed AAA game is getting progressively closer to the experience of watching a movie or a TV series, in terms of both visual fidelity, and of dramatic sophistication. Actors and writers who also work on film and TV are now routinely employed, and rather than recording a series of voice-over… Read more

  • Joyous celebration

    Joyous celebration

    People whose names appear on albums are often not ‘professional musicians’ in the sense of someone who has honed their skills and technique in the exacting and instrumental way that implies. They are more often people whose primary drive could be summarised with a term like ‘self-expression’, or ‘creative fulfilment’—singers, songwriters or bands performing their… Read more

  • 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