Oliver Arditi

Blog archive

  • Saturday Summary 022

    Saturday Summary 022

    This week your intrepid investigative correspondent has conducted a great deal of painstaking and potentially dangerous research, to discover that the main story around the new music industries is the f8 Facebook conference. Frankly I find the whole thing rather tedious, as my personal interest is in the varied, individuated, customized and hackable, rather than… Read more

  • Various Artists – Singles & EPs

    Various Artists – Singles & EPs

    It takes a musical education to do what Matt Winkworth does, and it takes some skills to keep up with him as The Winkworthers Originals do (their grandfathers’ delicious butter candy notwithstanding). It’s a jazz-operatic, literary, nonsensical, funny, serious, harmonically sophisticated, melodramatic oom-pah sort of a thing, delivered with lashings of vaudevillian relish. As you… Read more

  • TYLS – Pest-O-Flash (ambient/ noise)

    TYLS – Pest-O-Flash (ambient/ noise)

    This wetpussyallstars side project release is an experimental album, one which reinvigorates the musically abstract with a sense of the narrative and the representational, simultaneously blurring the distinction between electronic artist and electrician. Sounds that are abstract in a musical sense may at the same time, as here, be sonically concrete, and although it is… Read more

  • The Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players – Lost And Found (anti-folk/ art-pop)

    The Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players – Lost And Found (anti-folk/ art-pop)

    Hot zowee! This long player is really a gas, boys and girls! If the family that plays together stays together, then The Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players are one fantabulous bundle of cosmic togetherness: these three way-out cats are as groovy as a corduroy overcoat and as hip as a coxa (that’s Latin for hip). The… Read more

  • Monday Musings: Riot Grrls, Teddy Boys, Subculture, Music and Gender

    Monday Musings: Riot Grrls, Teddy Boys, Subculture, Music and Gender

    I don’t usually narrow my analyses of musical sounds and genres to ‘single-issue’ terms, but looking at what I usually say, there’s only an occasional engagement with gender as an active discourse, so I thought I’d have a think about it. Because the central reason I don’t pay much conscious attention is that I’m a… Read more

  • Saturday Summary 021

    Saturday Summary 021

    As far as I’m concerned, extending the copyright in sound recordings to seventy years is a depressingly retrograde step. The argument usually advanced is that royalties on recordings represent an important income source for aging session musicians who failed to make any provision for their old age. Well, I also have failed to make any… Read more