How We Stayed Individuated
An associative journey into the world of the heavy, hooky, hypnotising guitar riff. Protomartyr, “Uncle Mother’s”, from Agent Intellect, 2015 This intricate song marks the point where the Detroit band’s album metamorphoses into a weird and truly wonderful creature. Fittingly, the riff itself undergoes various transmutations, as if intent on presenting the plentiful array of […]
Side Chains
A friend of mine recently claimed that the more significant creative force in the Smiths must have been Morrissey rather than Johnny Marr, since Morrissey’s solo output has been a lot better than anything Marr has been involved in since the band’s demise. I agree that Marr’s post-Smiths musical efforts have been extremely disappointing, but I […]
Introverted Fauves
André Derain – ‘Charing Cross Bridge’ A style whose name was given to it by a critic and intended as a denigration. A loose group of artists who were devoted to materiality, tonality and strong sensory experience. No, I’m not talking about shoegaze, but about Fauvism. But swap “audio” for “painterly” and “sound” for “colour” […]
View to the Future
Shoegaze electronica… personally I pretty much gave up on the genre when in the noughties everyone started mentioning Ulrich Schnauss as its new messiah. To me his material sounded like glorified elevator music that took the lameness of Slowdive’s overrated output to numbing new lows. Later I also held him responsible for a lot of the […]
The Blocks of the World
left: Sean Scully ‘Landline Blue’, 2014. Right: Sean Scully ‘Landline Grey Grey’, 2014. Oil on aluminium “I was always looking at the horizon line”, the painter Sean Scully has said about his recent ‘Landline’ series, “– at the way the blocks of the world hug and brush up against each other, their weight, their […]
Continental Drift
I’d read somewhere that a book called Hearing History: A Reader, edited by the promisingly Fall-esquely named Mark M. Smith, explored the distinction between “American sound” and “European sound”. This got me all excited and I chased down the book. Disappointingly, though, it turned out that the relevant chapters were not really about the similarities […]