Oliver Arditi

Blog archive

  • 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

  • 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