Continental Drift
I’d read somewhere that a book called Hearing History: A Reader, edited by the promisingly Fall-esquely named Mark M. Smith, explored the distinction between “American sound” and “European sound”. This got me all excited and I chased down the book. Disappointingly, though, it turned out that the relevant chapters were not really about the similarities […]
Music of the Future
In a suitably snowy Montreal I went to see “No Foreign Lands”, an exhibition of paintings by Peter Doig, one of contemporary art’s most shoegazy painters. Here are two of the paintings Doig made in the early 1990s, the heyday of densely blurry, snowflakily-distorted, edging-towards-abstraction and almost-at-the-point-of-dissolution guitar music: Doig’s paintings are typically based on […]
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 […]
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 […]
Still Life
I just finished reading a book by the art historian Norman Bryson called Looking at the Overlooked, a book about still life painting which inspired me into some new thoughts about the music this blog is about. I bet when Bryson wrote in this book about the 18th-century French painter Chardin, he didn’t know he […]
First Contact
Welcome to my blog! I often get asked what kind of music I make, or listen to. I find it quite hard to answer this question. Not because my tastes are so eclectic, or outlandish, but because, although sharably specific, this kind of music doesn’t have a name. It’s more a combination of different aspects […]