Oliver Arditi

Blog archive

  • Tom DePlonty – Blake Pieces (experimental)

    Tom DePlonty – Blake Pieces (experimental)

    The music on this album is inspired very specifically by William Blake’s The Book of Urizen, but not in a programmatic sense. The short pieces that make up the suite ‘do not represent the content of the poem literally or symbolically’, Tom De Plonty tells us on his website, and they require or assume no… Read more

  • Various Artists – Singles and EPs

    Various Artists – Singles and EPs

    Wayne Myers, singer, songwriter and principal instrumental culprit, sent me this mini-album in early February according to my records, but it somehow slipped through the net and never got reviewed. Well, better late than never. Sleeping Beauty is pure poetry. I intend that as a value judgement, but also a literal description; Myers is a… Read more

  • Ashley Reaks – Compassion Fatigue (1-8) (avant-prog)

    Ashley Reaks – Compassion Fatigue (1-8) (avant-prog)

    ‘Concept’ albums have been a mixed blessing on the history of rock music. The idea that an album might have some connecting theme running through the various songs collected on it has been a controversial one, bitterly opposed at times by those with a strong doctrinal commitment to a particular model of popular music, and… Read more

  • Stars In Battledress – In Droplet Form (avant-folk)

    Stars In Battledress – In Droplet Form (avant-folk)

    Music needs to be comprehensible; it is, after all, a form of communication. The more readily digestible it is, however, and the more easily it slips down, the fewer hooks there are to hang any unique meanings on it. There is an inherently unstable dialectic between the familiar and the novel, and somewhere around the… Read more

  • Various Artists – Album Roundup

    Various Artists – Album Roundup

    Mark Harrison and his very capable band (whose members include the extremely talented duo Josienne Clarke and Ben Walker) play a curiously English take on American roots music. Their stylistic materials mine the cracks between country blues and old time country music, continuing a UK tradition that began with skiffle and was nourished by the… Read more

  • Arch Garrison – I Will Be A Pilgrim (avant-folk)

    Arch Garrison – I Will Be A Pilgrim (avant-folk)

    A sense of native place is a sentiment most associated, in music, with folk styles, or with the strong blood-and-soil nationalist current in black metal, for example, and such sounds have sometimes been taken up by those with particularly unpleasant political agendas. Craig Fortnam is here to remind us, through his acoustic Arch Garrison project,… Read more