Oliver Arditi

Blog archive

  • Various Artists – Album Roundup

    Various Artists – Album Roundup

    Given its title, its cover, and Quak’s avowed intention to make ‘dusty’ albums, we might expect a taste of nostalgia, of painful distance about this recording; it begins with thunder. This doesn’t presage any protracted exposition of sturm und drang however; it seems rather more like the thunder heard through the windows of childhood, the… Read more

  • Marius Noss Gundersen – Visual Music – Retrato Brasileiro (classical/ MPB)

    Marius Noss Gundersen – Visual Music – Retrato Brasileiro (classical/ MPB)

    Visual Music is, according to the sleeve notes, a collaboration with the photographer Tomas Moss; the ‘power of combining vision and audio’, we are informed, offers a broader experience than either would alone, and we are directed to the ‘Visual Music’ website to discover more about this idea. The music on the album is all… Read more

  • Paragaté – The World Above Us (ambient)

    Paragaté – The World Above Us (ambient)

    Paragaté do not offer a lot of detailed information regarding the manner in which they constructed these recordings. Instead they tell us who worked on which pieces: there are two of them (Tom DePlonty and Tim Risher), and they each claim sole responsibility for two tracks, the remaining five being ascribed to some degree of… Read more

  • Various Artists – Singles and EPs

    Various Artists – Singles and EPs

    This sophomore EP from The Light That Kills is less granular, more directionally narrative than the debut A Day That We Drift And Fall. This is not to say that it consists of conventional musical phrases arranged according to a nice, accessible formal grammar; that really would be weird, given Scott Crocker’s established experimental proclivities,… Read more

  • Chattabox – They Call Me (hip-hop)

    Chattabox – They Call Me (hip-hop)

    As I’ve come to expect from a Chattabox release, this one goes in hard from the start. I often go to some lengths to counter the idea that musical quality is a matter of technical skills being exploited at full stretch, but there are times when an impressive display of compositional and performance gymnastics makes… Read more

  • Various Artists – Album Roundup

    Various Artists – Album Roundup

    The five pieces collected on Elle Avait Raison Hathor take their inspiration from five female deities, from geographically disparate mythological traditions – ancient Egyptian, Japanese, Inuit and classical Greek. To exploit mythical archetypes in a way that respects the specificities of a modern subjectivity takes a deft touch and a nuanced understanding, both of the… Read more