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 […]

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 […]

Candle: Charlottefield

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 […]

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 […]

Candle: The Tupolev Ghost

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 […]