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I've long been fascinated by a certain type of record, where a very particular confluence of sounds and factors intersect to produce an unlikely minor masterpiece that sounds like little else around. Typically, there's some collision of the synthetic and organic involved... although sometimes one side fills in for the other. The rhythm might be … Continue reading Oil – Slight Of Hand
Crashing back to earth — so there's a way back after all — spiral strains of Wilmot echo through the valley, The Sabres Of Paradise in full flame and lost in elemental motion. Enter stage left it's “Thomas The Fib”, sauntering right out the room into the sun-glazed cascade of high noon, Trainspotting rifles and For A Few Dollars … Continue reading Rattlesnake Shake
Jungle Wonz: Kings of the Concrete Jungle There's a certain type of Chicago record that plays like the sound of the city itself, capturing the summer heat and humidity of the metropolis, stretched out in all directions and cast beneath those looming, overcast skies. If Virgo were the perfect encapsulation of the city viewed from … Continue reading Jungle Wonz
Transmitting from deep within the Arctic Circle Dwelling on Talk Talk got me thinking about back when I first dove deep into their body of workby now this would've been about twenty years ago — experiencing the sprawl of their discography's twin poles: synth-inflected new wave and freeform post rock, (with Sylvian-esque art pop of The Colour … Continue reading Greyscale
Talk Talk are Lee Harris, Mark Hollis, and Paul Webb Not much to add to what I said about them back when Mark Hollis passed away, but it felt like the right time to slip the whole crew into the old “hall of fame” right about now. Despite the fact that Hollis would easily make … Continue reading Talk Talk
Up In The Mountains and the rise of another Quiet Sun January turned out to be a particularly “ambient” month down in The Gardens, which isn't a particularly surprising thing when you're talking about time spent in the dead of Winter. It seemed like every every third record to hit the decks was some extended … Continue reading Ambient Sun
Andrea Parker: Queen of the Shadows One of the many fascinating things to emerge from the fallout of rave's initial explosion — when genres split into sub-genres and spun off into orbits of their own — was a new crop of post-everything musicians that grew to confound expectations during the second half of the decade. Typically in thrall to … Continue reading Andrea Parker
Tournesol Tournesol (R&S: 1993) Tournesol were just one among dozens of artists pushed out into the wider world by the towering edifice that was R&S Records in the early nineties, an era when the various strands of eighties-derived dance music wove together in a vibrant tapestry of sound under the aegis of a post-ecstasy dance … Continue reading Tournesol – Tournesol
I'd nearly forgotten this mini-feature I'd started on the sidewalk art that cropped up over the course of the spring and summer during the protracted Covid lockdown. Suddenly, the pavement seemed to come alive with color as I walked my usual routes, no doubt the result of a lot of folk coming to terms with … Continue reading Sidewalk Auteurs
Peter Green: Acid Blues Visionary In the annals of the British blues explosion — the fertile sonic laboratory of the 1960s that yielded myriad storied practitioners spanning from The Yardbirds to Led Zeppelin — there's many figures that spring to mind. Everyone knows Cream and Eric Clapton, while more abstract heads might mention the likes of Tony McPhee and … Continue reading Peter Green