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 […]