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 […]

Three Incendiary Boys

Deeper is a band from Chicago, Illinois. On their debut album Deeper (2018), this compact-sounding then-quartet took tightness to an extreme, achieving an almost digital feel. Intricate showers of guitar notes and metallic, razor-thin chords created a kind of aural pointillism brimming with melodies. At the time they reminded me of Bloc Party, in their […]

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 […]

Trying to Reach You

Protomartyr’s stunning new album is the perfect antidote to our age of brands and corporations, built on the wisdom of crowds, the narrowing of variation, the killing of privacy and the flattening of experience. It opens up an amazingly rich scope of textures and depths, layers and surfaces, patterns and flow, all channelled through a […]

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 […]