Sonic Cathedral

He was perhaps the world’s first shoegazer. Like his fellow noisemakers, he wrote his best material in the late eighties and early nineties. Only it wasn’t  the 1990s; it was the 1890s. And he was a classical composer: his name was Anton Bruckner. Bruckner grew up in the Austrian countryside, where he later worked as […]

Sharing Secrets in the Future Tense

The release of an excellent new album by Polvo, a band who was mainly active in the years 1990-1998, took me back to that golden age of leftfield American guitar music, when bands such as Polvo, Fugazi, Slint, Unwound, Lync, Codeine and Come formed and recorded their classic albums. These bands’ post-hardcore music was based […]

Exceptions Committee

The Israeli Blogger Ido Shacham has asked in a recent post: could Hebrew be the next Icelandic? He was referring to the enthusiastic international media coverage given to the debut album of Vaadat Charigim (Exceptions Committee), an exciting new Israeli shoegaze band who sing exclusively in Hebrew, and to some media attention given to my […]

Shoegazers of the World Unite

To mark the publication of Morrissey’s Autobiography, I wanted to go back to the Smiths and look at them from a shoegazing angle. The Smiths meant so much to me at some point, that until today, when I hear the first notes of their albums Meat Is Murder or The Queen Is Dead, I’m immediately […]

Rainy Grey

“I like the indefinite, the boundless. I like continual uncertainty” – Gerhard Richter Continuing my exploration of shoegaze painting, I’d like to write about some thoughts I had on seeing Gerhard Richter’s exhibition “Panorama” at the Centre Pompidou in Paris last year. The connection between Richter’s painting and shoegaze/post-punk music had first been intriguingly suggested […]

Still Life

I just finished reading a book by the art historian Norman Bryson called Looking at the Overlooked, a book about still life painting which inspired me into some new thoughts about the music this blog is about. I bet when Bryson wrote in this book about the 18th-century French painter Chardin, he didn’t know he […]