Oliver Arditi

Blog archive

  • Pttrns – Body Pressure (electronica)

    Pttrns – Body Pressure (electronica)

    Simon Reynolds wrote an interesting book about the recycling of culture, particularly mass- and popular culture, particularly music (it’s called Retromania if you want to read it). His central point, that culture is revived and recycled on an every decreasing cycle until it reaches the point at which no new language is possible, a sort… Read more

  • Buke And Gase – General Dome (indie rock)

    Buke And Gase – General Dome (indie rock)

    Buke And Gase armour themselves in symbols; the inquisitive listener’s eye, probing the album’s packaging for keys to the music’s meanings may find some affective affinities between its appearance and the sound (that’s a matter for their own aesthetic conscience), but its gaze will be reflected, denied admission by the obviously meaningful but unyielding glyphs… Read more

  • The Blackswords: Episode 6

    The Blackswords: Episode 6

    Amudr knew that their time in Tua was coming to an end. He was probably alone among the Blackswords in regretting it. The city was not large, but it was a cultured place, with booksellers and libraries, and good discourse to be found in its taverns. Soon he would be living on horseback again, and… Read more

  • Various Artists – Album Roundup

    Various Artists – Album Roundup

    Sufficiently independent not to sound ‘indie’, yet aesthetically straightforward enough not to sound ‘experimental’, Neurotic Wreck’s schtick is a pretty accessible art-pop stew; a predominantly electronic production mashes up trip-hop, electro, shoegaze and other downbeat sources, into a melancholy and and carefully textured soundworld, freighted with nostalgia and regret. The album is all about its… Read more

  • Aartwork – First Draft (folk)

    Aartwork – First Draft (folk)

    ‘Lo-fi’ has become an important part of the creative discourse of recorded music. Etymologically it’s nonsense: ‘fidelity’ has only ever been an ideological black-box in relation to the construction of ‘recordings’, while aesthetically the term points to a number of artistic strategies relating to the employment of specific textures rather than to any thresholds of… Read more

  • Paragaté – Spaceflight Pharmacology (ambient)

    Paragaté – Spaceflight Pharmacology (ambient)

    Possessed of a melodic simplicity that invokes naïvety, and a harmonic rhythm that deploys some erudition in the service of fairy-tale inevitability, ‘Friendship’, the brief G. Cook piano piece with which Tom DePlonty opens Spaceflight Pharmacology, is a scene setter. Quickly succeeded by a piece that might more readily be associated with Paragaté’s established interest… Read more