Loose Grains of Sonic Dust

In the early 1990s, when I was living and playing in New York City, indie bands across the country, such as Polvo, Rodan, The Lapse, Codeine and many more, shared a sound that, drawing on predecessors like Slint, Sonic Youth and Fugazi, was almost fundamentalistically guitar-based. In the last couple of years I’ve been struck […]

Deeper is a band from Chicago, Illinois. On their debut album Deeper (2018), this compact-sounding then-quartet took tightness to an extreme, achieving an almost digital feel. Intricate showers of guitar notes and metallic, razor-thin chords created a kind of aural pointillism brimming with melodies. At the time they reminded me of Bloc Party, in their […]

A playlist for our times Go to playlist if you just want to listen in sequence Dance, dance, dance, dance to the radio Here Here Here Here Here Safe in your cave / Drenched by the Wave A cloud of uncertainty 100% risk of stepping outside There’s a shape on the horizon As we’re picked […]

A couple of weeks ago I saw Prolapse play live in London. I went on a hunch, having seen them play and bought their classic debut album Pointless Walks to Dismal Places around the time it came out, but having not listened to it in many years. The show was fantastic, and gave me an […]

In Eye and Mind, an evocative essay originally published in 1964, the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty explores painting as a form of vision. The painter’s vision, he says, is not an optical relation to a flat surface of points, lines and planes. It is rather an immersion in the depth and volubility of what there […]

Protomartyr’s stunning new album is the perfect antidote to our age of brands and corporations, built on the wisdom of crowds, the narrowing of variation, the killing of privacy and the flattening of experience. It opens up an amazingly rich scope of textures and depths, layers and surfaces, patterns and flow, all channelled through a […]

Seattle’s Fotoform released their eponymous debut LP in April. The band is an incarnation of a previous act called C’est La Mort, in which several of the band members did their apprenticeship recording a promising album and a couple of fairly faithful covers of Pale Saints and Smiths songs. The new record is still firmly […]

In an article on contemporary art I came across an evocative sentence, alluding to art works that “seem to re-immerse the tangibility of memory in processes of erasure and abstraction”. The idea seemed intriguing because we often think about art as doing the exact opposite – making memory tangible by summoning and highlighting it and […]

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 […]

  My brother once gave me a mixed tape entitled “opera for people who don’t like opera”. I was reminded of that title when I heard the Montreal-based band Ought. For the diehard guitar-loving veteran indie kid, the band’s keyboardist Matt may be said to be playing “keyboards for people who don’t like keyboards”. He actually sounds […]

Here’s another outstanding contemporary post-punk record from North America. When I first heard the Calgary band Preoccupations’ eponymous second album, I was simultaneously so impressed and so bewildered that I had to do some background research. I just couldn’t understand where they were coming from, and how they managed to hold together and irradiate such […]

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 […]

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” […]

It seems fitting to stumble across Protomartyr’s The Agent Intellect way after the fact and realize it’s your missed album of the year for 2015, and then take another few months before you get around to finally writing about it. Stumbling, belatedness, near misses and wilfully waiting for the right moment seem to be what […]

Like an underwater explosion, Shojo Winter’s latest EP “Somewhere Else” sends out oddly muffled shockwaves that alter the resonant space between our ears. The record starts and ends with two beautifully abstract puddles of sound, bookending four deceptively melodic songs whose sound is refracted, reverberated, expanded and modulated. It takes time to get your bearings […]

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 […]

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 […]

Offering their own interpretation of the introspective evanescence so integral to the shoegaze mindset, Duelectrum seem to barely exist. They are from São Paulo, Brazil, and include Filipe Albuquerque on vocals and guitar, Franklin Weise on vocals and bass, Lucas Lippaus on guitar and Elson Barbosa on drums. Formed in 1999 by Albuquerque and Weise, […]

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 […]

The warm, crepuscular tones of You Walk Through Walls’ self-titled new album evoke a tender and reassuring yet somehow distant domesticity, like photos of friends and family pinned onto the fridge or letters written to loved ones back home from a mildly adventurous yet personally significant trip. The London-based band includes two former Air Formation members, […]

“Maintain Consistency,” implored the guitarist and vocalist Bryan Enas on Temporary Room, the 2012 album he recorded with his brother, drummer Doug Enas. Stagnant Pool’s debut was a highly promising affair, a richly textured yet obdurately minimalist testimony to pain sung through pursed lips. Ironically, though, while the Indiana duo’s album was graced with some […]

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 – […]

Aerofall are a band from the Russian port city of Rostov-on-Don who carve their own compelling niche on the ever-fertile line between noise experimentalism and dream pop. Their guitars are tuneful, overdriven and anarchically feedback-drenched. Their exhilarating racket sounds like a less angsty Ice Age, The Jesus and Mary Chain without the snarl, A Place to […]

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 […]

Le Thug are a 3 piece from Glasgow and the Outer Hebrides. They combine guitars with synths, samples and loops to create ambient pop-tinged drones that sound as if they started from those in-between song-snippets on MBV’s Loveless album, and gradually expanded into their full-blown, repetitively-structured, beautifully affecting own. The band consists of Clio Alexandra […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Charlottefield were a band that distinguished itself from the post-rock/post-hardcore/math-rock pack of the early 2000s by having an arresting lyrical sensibility and a phenomenal drummer. The band’s Brighton based personnel included Chris Butler till 2003 and  James Dennet  from 2003 on bass, Adam Hansford on guitar, Thomas House on guitar and vocals and Ashley Marlowe on […]

“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 […]

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 […]

I first heard Edweena’s song “Thunderboy” a few weeks ago, and immediately fell in love with its youthful, uplifting and illuminated beauty. Last week I finally listened to the Swedish band’s debut LP “Solar Days and Lunar Nights”, which came out in September, and realized they have made a whole album based on the same […]

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 […]

The formula sounds simple: “I’d fill each track with a few layers of noise, then write a song to play under the noise.” This is how Paul, The Cherry Wave’s vocalist/guitarist, describes his early song writing efforts. Nothing much seems to have changed: the typical Cherry Wave song still consists of a really melodic riff […]

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 […]

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 […]

For all I know, the Tupolev Ghost might be horrified to find themselves featured in a shoegaze-related blog. After all, their influence list includes such muscular noise propagators as Lightning Bolt, Slayer and Shellac. Though now that the band has broken up and become a genuine ghost, it might not matter so much anymore. Formed […]

“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 […]

The sound of London’s Dead Wolf Club, who release their new EP Healer tomorrow, has a vintage feel to it that comes from being so pertinently, excitingly now. It goes back to times when music was more than just another product in an infinitely downloadable world, when bands with a geeky and subcultural multi-gendered polytech […]

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 […]

“Broadcast”, Beach Volleyball’s extraordinary, elusive debut album has got the experimental edge and sheer beauty of My Bloody Valentine’s “Loveless”, but it reminds me a bit of Ride’s “Nowhere” – something about its metallic, rain-swept, ripped timbre, and the particular tenor of the songs’ poppy undercurrents. But really it’s nothing like Ride. Where “Nowhere” had […]

Welcome to my blog! I often get asked what kind of music I make, or listen to. I find it quite hard to answer this question. Not because my tastes are so eclectic, or outlandish, but because, although sharably specific, this kind of music doesn’t have a name. It’s more a combination of different aspects […]