Oliver Arditi

Blog archive

  • Karda Estra – Strange Relations (avant-rock)

    Karda Estra – Strange Relations (avant-rock)

    The Karda Estra brand has been built on continued invention and creativity: across the preceding eleven albums composer Richard Wileman has consistently and rigorously poked around at the fault-lines of his practice, finding ways to surprise the listener that nevertheless cleave to an established and instantly recognisable aesthetic. Although Karda Estra’s discography features very high… Read more

  • Adrian May – The Comedy of Masculinity (poetry/ singer-songwriter)

    Adrian May – The Comedy of Masculinity (poetry/ singer-songwriter)

    This is a review of a CD and a book, although there’s no particular reason to stop there. Adrian May is a performer, and although it says ‘songs and poems’ on the cover of his book, it’s pretty hard to draw a hard and fast distinction between them; poetry, music and performance in both modes… Read more

  • Various Artists – Album Roundup

    Various Artists – Album Roundup

    Golden Diskó Ship drop the listener immediately into a vast reverberant space, in which percussion thuds like a carpenter’s mallet and sweet vocal melodies drift tentatively into scene… Thus begins ‘These thoughts will never take shape’, and indeed there is barely time for the music’s forms to register in the ear before they shift into… Read more

  • The Domestics – Routine and Ritual (punk)

    The Domestics – Routine and Ritual (punk)

    This is not music that’s meant to be engaged with as a text. It’s physical music, an onslaught of experience, that invites your participation or your absence. If its material impact has a politics, it’s a politics of action, a politics of fury, of atavistic solidarity and unmediated resistance. It’s music to enable the forging… Read more

  • Rhys Marsh – Sentiment (progressive rock)

    Rhys Marsh – Sentiment (progressive rock)

    The sweet clarity of Rhys Marsh’s voice unifies his album with a luminous, melancholy calm, effortlessly bridging the steepest dynamic gradients in arrangements that can swing rapidly from finger-picked acoustic guitar to weighty chunks of rock. The instrumental textures on Sentiment are dramatic and powerful, but there is never any doubt in which strand’s service… Read more

  • Reagan’s Polyp re-releases (satirical anti-rock)

    Reagan’s Polyp re-releases (satirical anti-rock)

    When I’m asked to review a fistful of reissues I might ordinarily feel a moment or two of guilt at never having listened to the band before (which is usually the case, given my perversely idiosyncratic listening habits). Not so with Reagan’s Polyp, an obscure and wilfully unappetising band from Little Rock, Arkansas. Rather than… Read more