Boards of Canada
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 […]
Soon: Ought
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 […]
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 […]