Oliver Arditi

Blog archive

  • Ashley Reaks and Joe Hakim – Cultural Thrift (dub-rock poetry)

    Ashley Reaks and Joe Hakim – Cultural Thrift (dub-rock poetry)

    Ashley Reaks has a good way with lyrics himself, but there’s a strong synergy to his collaborations with spoken word artist Joe Hakim, such as ‘I Want To Get A Celebrity Pregnant’ from Before Koresh. Hakim is a social observer, a curator of experience who speaks sometimes from a lived subjectivity, and sometimes from a… Read more

  • Darts & Arrows – Altamira (avant-jazz)

    Darts & Arrows – Altamira (avant-jazz)

    Avant-garde music (and other art) is animated by a narrative of self-definition – it is the privileged marginal, the self-marking other, whose exteriority to the mainstream is established by virtue of the trailblazer’s enhanced legitimacy, rather than its exclusion from the established sites of legitimacy. But one person’s avant-garde, obviously, is another person’s outsider art,… Read more

  • Various Artists – Album Roundup

    Various Artists – Album Roundup

    This album, originally released in 1989, was for a long time the definitive answer to the question ‘what do Thinking Plague sound like?’ It was ten years before In Extremis presented a new line-up and a changing sound to the record-buying public (sans legendary founder-member Bob Drake) – and let’s face it, bands as daring… Read more

  • Karen Grace – Bitter Sweet (avant-folk)

    Karen Grace – Bitter Sweet (avant-folk)

    I’m sure that Karen Grace thinks she’s just writing songs about the things that matter to her, and recording them in the way that suits them best. There’s a whole world of acoustic singer-songwriters out there, all doing that, and a frightening number of them do it really well. Doing it really well is not… Read more

  • Die Goldenen Zitronen – Flogging A Dead Frog (art-punk)

    Die Goldenen Zitronen – Flogging A Dead Frog (art-punk)

    Formed at the inception of what would come to be known as the Hamburger Schule (from which they vehemently distance themselves), Die Goldenen Zitronen had their beginnings as an identifiably punk band, but a commitment to creative, aesthetic and political rigour has led them to a variety of stylistic positions, some quite avant-garde. Entertainment might… Read more

  • Various Artists – Album Roundup

    Various Artists – Album Roundup

    Abject and lonesome mid-fi folk, that drifts across the field of consciousness like a progession of washed-out, dusty photographs, before it becomes quite heavy and ominous towards the end of the album, and finishes with an unlikely cover of ‘Twerk’. One of Uhlich’s Bandcamp tags is ‘devotional’, and there is a sense of outsider ritual… Read more