Oliver Arditi

Blog archive

  • Enough of a twist

    Enough of a twist

    High Georgian ceilings, above vast, perfectly proportioned sash windows, speak to me of cosy home comfort. Wherever I am, if I can look up and past my surroundings to that kind of a backdrop, I’m back in toddler-hood, lazing in that delicious torpor of the up-too-late surrounded by noisy, kindly, drunken adults. This is not… Read more

  • Having the wrong fun

    Having the wrong fun

    Although I spend much of my working life judging books by their covers, The Manchurian Candidate offers an object lesson in not judging movies by their posters. It presents itself as a kind of gritty, serious, political thriller, and is a remake of a pretty well-known 1960s film, which I haven’t seen. The names associated… Read more

  • Saccharine artillery

    Saccharine artillery

    My awareness of Squarepusher began at uni, where I studied the bass guitar. Unsurprisingly, an out-there electronic producer, who also happens to integrate a prodigious facility on bass guitar into his work, went down well among students on my course. This was relatively early in Tom Jenkinson’s career, and he came across basically as a… Read more

  • A book on the wall

    A book on the wall

    For a small, softly-spoken country, Scotland carries a large intellectual stick. Voltaire said that ‘we look to Scotland for all our ideas of civilisation’, and its influence during the Enlightenment would probably be hard to overstate. It’s difficult to find agreement on exactly what or when the Enlightenment was, but eighteenth century Scotland was well… Read more

  • Distant whispers

    Distant whispers

    Whispers sometimes reach our ears from long-silenced voices, reverberations reflected by a documentary record that has diversified over the last century-and-a-half to include photography, recorded audio, video and a still expanding palette of newer media. Tradition and transmitted recollection have been augmented by technologies with an appearance of truthfulness, which sometimes fail to preserve precisely… Read more

  • Capitalising on the dark

    Capitalising on the dark

    Darkness is an abundant resource during December in Edinburgh. To many of the city’s residents, trapped in an indoor workplace during the season’s fleeting daylight hours, this may sound like an insufferably upbeat formulation, but for anyone wishing to capitalise on festive cheer, it’s a gift. Christmas markets, cosy shop-fronts, street illuminations, the warm glow… Read more