Soon: Le Thug
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]