The Space Interpreters
In tribute to the Germany footballer Thomas Müller, winner of the Golden Boot at the last world cup and one of the leading scorers at the current one, I thought I’d look at the treatment of space in some recent shoegaze releases. When once asked to list his best attributes, Müller described himself as a Raumdeuter – […]
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 […]
Sparsegaze
We normally, of course, associate shoegaze music with dense textures, loud volumes and an overload of aural detail. But an exhibition called Near Here by the artist Nina Canell at London’s Camden Arts Centre made me wonder whether this must always be the case. Canell makes low-key, DIY-looking sculptures that bring to poetic life the […]
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 […]
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 […]
Rainy Grey
“I like the indefinite, the boundless. I like continual uncertainty” – Gerhard Richter Continuing my exploration of shoegaze painting, I’d like to write about some thoughts I had on seeing Gerhard Richter’s exhibition “Panorama” at the Centre Pompidou in Paris last year. The connection between Richter’s painting and shoegaze/post-punk music had first been intriguingly suggested […]