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 […]

View to the Future

Shoegaze electronica… personally I pretty much gave up on the genre when in the noughties everyone started mentioning Ulrich Schnauss as its new messiah. To me his material sounded like glorified elevator music that took the lameness of Slowdive’s overrated output to numbing new lows. Later I also held him responsible for a lot of the […]

The Blocks of the World

left: Sean Scully ‘Landline Blue’, 2014.  Right: Sean Scully ‘Landline Grey Grey’, 2014. Oil on aluminium   “I was always looking at the horizon line”, the painter Sean Scully has said about his recent ‘Landline’ series, “– at the way the blocks of the world hug and brush up against each other, their weight, their […]

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 […]