Oliver Arditi

Blog archive

  • Cannabis Corpse – Beneath Grow Lights Thou Shalt Rise (death metal)

    Cannabis Corpse – Beneath Grow Lights Thou Shalt Rise (death metal)

    Stoner rock, when it is unequivocally metal, is usually doom or sludge. Those styles seem somehow appropriate to the haze of disassociated impressions that characterise the world of the dope fiend, with their mushy layers of distortion, their often slow tempos, and their obliteration of detail in the sheer rumbling savagery of their sonic impact.… Read more

  • Awooga – V Column (progressive rock)

    Awooga – V Column (progressive rock)

    Long songs (by the standards of popular music) are often casually referred to as epics: obviously the idea of an epic refers to more than duration, and although such commonplace coinages pretend to nothing more than a disposable shorthand, I think it’s worth examining that idea in relation to V Column, an album the best… Read more

  • Robb Appleton – The Wood (ambient/ folktronica)

    Robb Appleton – The Wood (ambient/ folktronica)

    Robb Appleton is a harmonica player, and his diatonic harps are a prominent voice on this album, but The Wood doesn’t sound like a harmonica album. In fact, it sounds more like an album made by someone who decided to get a harp player in because they wanted that sound. Instrumentalists have to play to… Read more

  • Monday Musings: My Musical Utopia, What It Is, How We Might Get There, And Why We Won’t

    Monday Musings: My Musical Utopia, What It Is, How We Might Get There, And Why We Won’t

    Once when I was making my first, abortive attempt at getting a degree, I was sitting in a seminar discussing H.G. Wells’ The History Of Mr. Polly. It was stated, quite forcefully, by the tutor, that because it didn’t articulate a clear alternative, the book’s critique of Edwardian petit-bourgeois life was flawed and incomplete: I… Read more

  • ELIKA – Snuggle Bunnies (shoegaze/ dreampop)

    ELIKA – Snuggle Bunnies (shoegaze/ dreampop)

    Shoegaze and dreampop are genres that, because they are so sonically mediated, offer artists an opportunity to work in a way that is conceptually or semantically layered without seeming inaccessible. Because they offer an established language which is both amenable to manipulation, and widely understood, they lend themselves to very individual statements that are stylistically… Read more

  • Mittimus & Nix Pickler – Devices (free improvisation)

    Mittimus & Nix Pickler – Devices (free improvisation)

    Free improvisers take a lot of different routes to a lot of different destinations, or to put it another way, improvisation can be free in a lot of different ways. When it first burst into the world it was as an avant-garde practice within jazz (although most became aware of it when it was sufficiently… Read more