The Space Interpreters
In tribute to the Germany footballer Thomas Müller, winner of the Golden Boot at the last world cup and one of the leading scorers at the current one, I thought I’d look at the treatment of space in some recent shoegaze releases. When once asked to list his best attributes, Müller described himself as a Raumdeuter – […]
Music of the Future
In a suitably snowy Montreal I went to see “No Foreign Lands”, an exhibition of paintings by Peter Doig, one of contemporary art’s most shoegazy painters. Here are two of the paintings Doig made in the early 1990s, the heyday of densely blurry, snowflakily-distorted, edging-towards-abstraction and almost-at-the-point-of-dissolution guitar music: Doig’s paintings are typically based on […]
Sparsegaze
We normally, of course, associate shoegaze music with dense textures, loud volumes and an overload of aural detail. But an exhibition called Near Here by the artist Nina Canell at London’s Camden Arts Centre made me wonder whether this must always be the case. Canell makes low-key, DIY-looking sculptures that bring to poetic life the […]
Murky Moon
Thames Valley bands such as Slowdive, Ride, Chapterhouse and Swervedriver were famously key to London’s shoegaze scene in the early 1990s. But the moody river had already served as inspiration for a the invention of a shoegazy sound a lot earlier. In 1947, after a visit to the English capital, the Polish composer Andrzej Panufnik […]
Bassless
To the horror of bass players everywhere, some bands just do without one. I’m not thinking at the moment of the increasingly popular guitar-and-drums duo format, whose sound is already stripped-down and somewhat experimental to begin with, and which probably deserves a post of its own. I’m thinking rather of bands that do seem to […]
Climate Change
“If we decide to call singing the heart of music – at least of the music of the past –” writes the pianist Alfred Brendel, “what then is harmony? The third dimension, the body, the space, the mesh of nerves, the tension within the tonal order, but also the tension in the apparent no man’s […]