Introverted Fauves
André Derain – ‘Charing Cross Bridge’ A style whose name was given to it by a critic and intended as a denigration. A loose group of artists who were devoted to materiality, tonality and strong sensory experience. No, I’m not talking about shoegaze, but about Fauvism. But swap “audio” for “painterly” and “sound” for “colour” […]
Soon: Protomartyr
It seems fitting to stumble across Protomartyr’s The Agent Intellect way after the fact and realize it’s your missed album of the year for 2015, and then take another few months before you get around to finally writing about it. Stumbling, belatedness, near misses and wilfully waiting for the right moment seem to be what […]
Soon: Shojo Winter
Like an underwater explosion, Shojo Winter’s latest EP “Somewhere Else” sends out oddly muffled shockwaves that alter the resonant space between our ears. The record starts and ends with two beautifully abstract puddles of sound, bookending four deceptively melodic songs whose sound is refracted, reverberated, expanded and modulated. It takes time to get your bearings […]
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: Duelectrum
Offering their own interpretation of the introspective evanescence so integral to the shoegaze mindset, Duelectrum seem to barely exist. They are from São Paulo, Brazil, and include Filipe Albuquerque on vocals and guitar, Franklin Weise on vocals and bass, Lucas Lippaus on guitar and Elson Barbosa on drums. Formed in 1999 by Albuquerque and Weise, […]