Oliver Arditi

Blog archive

  • Dementio 13 – El Lissitzky (electronic post-rock)

    Dementio 13 – El Lissitzky (electronic post-rock)

    Composers of electronic music, if they wish to work with a relatively accessible aesthetic, face a particular set of challenges: to avoid a sense of impersonality, to make their music feel ‘human’, to make it breathe, when it may in fact move no physical air between the moment of composition and the moment of reproduction,… Read more

  • Various Artists – Album Roundup

    Various Artists – Album Roundup

    Quietness has been an important trope in avant-garde music since the days of Minimalism I guess, but it has been articulated in many ways, within a diversity of musical practices. The near inactivity to which some free improvisors have gravitated, or John Cage’s invitation to listen to the contextual ambience for four minutes and thirty-three… Read more

  • Caution Horses – City Lights (pop-rock)

    Caution Horses – City Lights (pop-rock)

    The songs on City Lights are tightly orchestrated in guitar driven arrangements of a sort that might be attract the irritating descriptor ‘soft rock’, but sound more to me like a species of post-punk, à la Joe Jackson. A prominent, mid-rangy bass weaves sinewy counter-melodies through a weft of cleanly recorded and crisply played drums,… Read more

  • Plum Flower Embroidery – Naki Bone Jangle (psychedelic)

    Plum Flower Embroidery – Naki Bone Jangle (psychedelic)

    I did a little bit of ‘research’ (a word that used to mean research, and now means believing the first thing you see on the internet), imagining that Naki Bone Jangle would turn out to refer to a ritual noise-maker made from bones by members of a native American tribe. Well, that may be the… Read more

  • Various Artists – Singles and EPs

    Various Artists – Singles and EPs

    In recent years the avant-garde fringes of metal have become one of the most fertile sites of musical creativity and invention; while my central musical inclinations might be towards other areas, such as jazz or folk, and while those areas certainly harbour some radically creative minds globally, the majority of music produced and performed locally… Read more

  • Copywrite – God Save The King (Proper English Version) (hip-hop)

    Copywrite – God Save The King (Proper English Version) (hip-hop)

    Underground hip-hop takes distinct forms on either side of the Atlantic, to the extent that it’s arguable that ‘British underground hip-hop’ refers to a genre distinct from the American equivalent, rather than a geographically differentiated variety of the same thing. Arguable, but that doesn’t mean I think that’s necessarily the case… I do think that… Read more