Oliver Arditi

Blog archive

  • Goya – Demo (stoner metal)

    Goya – Demo (stoner metal)

    Drugs. Weed, hash, blow, smoke, tea, skunk, green, charas, gear, pollen, bud, sensemilla, kif, oil, dope, black, pot, marijuana, cannabis. I don’t wish to imply that Goya’s music is one-dimensional, but this is very clearly the central inspiration for their creative activities. So much so, that their Bandcamp page is simply addressed with the name… Read more

  • Various Artists – Singles and EPs

    Various Artists – Singles and EPs

    If you describe Tamara Parsons-Baker’s practice as a formula, it doesn’t inspire much excitement: simple, mainly diatonic guitar strums; emotive vocals; songs about unsuccessful love affairs; we have heard these elements before. However, the five songs on Lover proceed from a somewhat more warped perspective than this formula might suggest, lurking with mischief aforethought behind… Read more

  • Isamu McGregor – Live At The Baked Potato (jazz)

    Isamu McGregor – Live At The Baked Potato (jazz)

    Jazz fusion, after the initial excitement attending its arrival, organised itself into two broad sets of practices: one organised musical materials drawn from various forms of popular music, embracing new musical technologies, with the harmonic erudition of jazz, into complex, highly organised arrangements; the other really just carried on doing jazz, but did so with… Read more

  • Thumpermonkey – Sleep Furiously (progressive rock)

    Thumpermonkey – Sleep Furiously (progressive rock)

    Injunctions to sleep in a particular manner crop up from time to time as album titles. Hope & Social’s last album length release was called Sleep Sound, which is perhaps the kind of sleeping to which most of us are accustomed; either that or badly. Furiously is another matter altogether: normally, a high fever is… Read more

  • 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