Oliver Arditi

Blog archive

  • Mouse Drawn Cart – Mouse Drawn Cart (experimental rock)

    Mouse Drawn Cart – Mouse Drawn Cart (experimental rock)

    At the instrumental level Mouse Drawn Cart is not massively transgressive. There are some heavy guitars, chainsaw distorted bass, some metal riffing, some industrial-lite beats reminiscent of Nine Inch Nails (‘I’m Not Scared Of You’); there is a very dark and sophisticated approach to texture, and its arrangement into a narrative structure; and there’s some… Read more

  • Tall Poppies – All The Rave (indie-pop)

    Tall Poppies – All The Rave (indie-pop)

    I’ll call these pop songs, largely because they’re not rock songs, or folk songs, or Balinese wedding songs, but that doesn’t really cover it. These are literate, witty, intelligent and playful songs, and they are pop songs in the same way that Art Spiegelman’s Maus (to pick an utterly inappropriate example at lazy random) is… Read more

  • Saturday Summary 020

    Saturday Summary 020

    The big news this week is the return of the legendary Oliver Arditi to the world of regular music news posting. Okay, that’s bollocks. I don’t know what the big news is, because I haven’t been paying much attention, but here’s some links I found what you might find interesting. Read more

  • Paragaté – Stillness In The Mirror (experimental/ ambient)

    Paragaté – Stillness In The Mirror (experimental/ ambient)

    Stillness In The Mirror is an album that effectively fuses a mechanical, or automatic sonic sensibility with a very organic, human one. That’s an interesting strategy in and of itself, but I don’t get the impression that this conceptual framework is the point of the music: the sounds on this album signify in a complex… Read more

  • Paul Littlewood – Butterfly House (singer songwriter)

    Paul Littlewood – Butterfly House (singer songwriter)

    Paul Littlewood has a signature arrangement style, a way of doing songs. Simple, syncopated guitar parts are layered with glitchy electronic percussion, combinations of short repeated phrases accumulating into complex textures. There are dynamic variations, but over a limited range, for the most part, textural density is proportional to emotional intensity, and that’s about it.… Read more

  • Sargasso Trio – Get To Grips (alternative dance)

    Sargasso Trio – Get To Grips (alternative dance)

    Some songwriters tell it how it is, laying their raw emotion directly on the line with simple language and an impassioned delivery; others burnish their lyrics with so much metaphor and wordplay that we feel an ironic distance from their subjects, irrespective of the ostensible pathos they may describe; some give every impression of writing… Read more