An Isolated Post

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 […]

Repetition

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 […]

Close

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 […]

Soon: Fotoform and The Homesick

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 […]

Untitled, 2017

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 […]

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 […]