Oliver Arditi

Blog archive

  • Deerhoof – La Isla Bonita (avant-pop)

    Deerhoof – La Isla Bonita (avant-pop)

    There are many ways to do anything. There are musicians that spend their entire career mining one small patch of stylistic territory, exhaustively plotting its possibilities, immersing themselves in its world, refining its vocabulary until their creative utterances are as idiomatic as the language of everyday life. Then there are those that reinvent themselves continually.… Read more

  • Josienne Clarke and Ben Walker – Nothing Can Bring Back the Hour (folk)

    Josienne Clarke and Ben Walker – Nothing Can Bring Back the Hour (folk)

    I come late to most notable artists, since I’m not the sort of person that avidly follows the latest developments, or that cares much one way or the other about currency. It’s pure chance that I came across this most accomplished duo on the cusp of their currently burgeoning notoriety. I was lucky enough to… Read more

  • Various Artists – Singles and EPs

    Various Artists – Singles and EPs

    There’s a gentle oddness to these songs, cradled in gleefully brutal drum machine sounds and fugal laminations of electric guitar ostinatos. The executioner of the latter is subtly ‘off’, in both pitch and articulation, contrasting the fascistic precision of the former, but colluding with it to efface the performer, along with any notion of their… Read more

  • Prescott – One Did (avant-rock)

    Prescott – One Did (avant-rock)

    There’s an openness, and a sense of ensemble solidarity, to Prescott, that puts me in mind of jazz as much as it does of the art-rock influences they own up to in their press release; much of the music is clearly arranged in detail, but it feels improvisational, and its musical meanings seem to stem… Read more

  • Monkey Puzzle Trio – The Pattern Familiar (avant-jazz)

    Monkey Puzzle Trio – The Pattern Familiar (avant-jazz)

    The musicians that make up Monkey Puzzle Trio are all confirmed experimentalists, all situated on the peripheries of, or the boundaries between, socially validated zones of practice, where the population is sparse and the musical meanings hard-won. The press release for this album situates the ensemble’s work on ‘a tightrope between song, improvisation and sound-as-sound’;… Read more

  • Various Artists – Album Roundup

    Various Artists – Album Roundup

    I wonder whether this band really wanted to call itself Leveret, but couldn’t recall the word. It’s more likely that they’re named after the 1502 watercolour by Albrecht Dürer, an early masterpiece of observational art; I’m not precisely sure why, but an air of mystery never goes amiss. The music isn’t overtly transgressive, but there’s… Read more