Oliver Arditi

Blog archive

  • Heidi Harris – Underneath The Grass And Clover (folk)

    Heidi Harris – Underneath The Grass And Clover (folk)

    Heidi Harris works with a palette of folk and Americana pigments, but she doesn’t paint quite the pictures you might expect. Folk music is a collective aurality, the sonic expression of an orally transmitted tradition, and as such, it daubs its canvases with the colours of communal experience: even when it trades in specificities, perhaps… Read more

  • Monday Musings: The Myth Of Popular Music

    Monday Musings: The Myth Of Popular Music

    Myths are everywhere, wrapped around common currency ideas, giving shape to our cultural narratives, and putting filters on the lenses of our minds. There’s a ‘myth’ about myths: it says that a myth is wrong. The term ‘urban myth’ perpetuates this usage, but that kind of a myth, the erroneous legend, is just a part… Read more

  • Saturday Summary 017

    Saturday Summary 017

    This week, Myspace gets humiliated again, and lots of people have thoughts about new models for the music business. http://blancomusic.wordpress.com/2011/02/03/whats-all-this-about-spotify-again/ An enlightening perspective from an independent label on Spotify’s business practices. While there is an undeniable parallel with radio, and presence on streaming services may be of real promotional value to some of the smaller… Read more

  • Another Dead Hero – Children Of The Witch (metal)

    Another Dead Hero – Children Of The Witch (metal)

    Ominous, dissonant, powerful, and employing a vocabulary that predates any form of extreme metal, it would be easy to class Another Dead Hero’s music as epic doom, for its atmosphere and for its approach, but it’s not so easily pigeonholed stylistically. It sounds like Another Dead Hero, which is to say that it doesn’t sound… Read more

  • Drowner – E.P. (shoegaze/ dream pop)

    Drowner – E.P. (shoegaze/ dream pop)

    Listen hard, listen through the surface textures of Drowner’s debut release, and you will find a lot of the music is punchy and kinetic: that’s not how it presents itself, however, because they are punching through a big fluffy pillow of sonic goose down. This is music that is as much about its textures as… Read more

  • Simon Little – The Knowledge Of Things To Come (solo bass/ ambient)

    Simon Little – The Knowledge Of Things To Come (solo bass/ ambient)

    Simon Little’s EP Rejectamenta, ostensibly composed of material rejected for inclusion on this album, was an interesting recording in its own right, and implied certain promises about the creative direction in which Little might be moving. I’m glad to say, he’s as good as his word. Before I even start to address the compositional and… Read more