“Despite its confrontational and cathartic aesthetics, Moor Mother’s music does not hold any immediate revolutionary promise. It rather makes us hear the impasse we’re in while also struggling not to be of it”
Category: Music
[Review] Tongue of blade ‡ Ears of mud (Cap Records) — Josh Mcloughlin
“The collection’s great achievement lies in framing conceptual questions and theoretical topoi in aesthetic terms, thus affording a critical alternative to scientific and linguistic approaches to enduring problems surrounding the relationship between language and music.”
[Essay] Goya’s Greyhounds — Michael McGinley-Hughes
“The cover of Blur’s ‘Parklife’ shows us how far the greyhound has travelled: from the palaces of Pharaohs and the forests of Hapsburg kings to the humble English dog track.”
[Essay] Like a Ghost Touched Your Heart: Burial’s Sonic Hauntology — Edward Campbell-Rowntree
“The sounding relationships between the samples of Burial’s world and the those of the hardcore continuum express many things: a sense of distance and removal from the ‘real’ world; a feeling of loneliness and melancholia inspired by urban life; a malaise at the death of rave.”
[Essay] Breaking Urns: From Ingmar Bergman to Yo La Tengo — John Talbird
“The atrocities of World War II and then all the post-war proxy-wars, most especially Vietnam, ossified and then shattered narrative wholes, all those well-wrought urns.”
[Review] Oeuvre as Palimpsest: Holy Roman’s ‘Let Manchester Shake’ — Josh Mcloughlin
“Bowers’s is an ongoing, concerted project, anchored in the basic technique of exploring ideas by rewriting over songs and themes but retaining traces and echoes.”
[Essay] Luciano Berio and Fragmentary Composition — Jack Sheen
“Music’s ontological status has always been ambiguous due its lack of materiality, in contrast to physical artworks such as paintings, sculptures, and to some extent, films, whose unique, material appearance and existence differentiates them from other artworks and copies.”
[Essay] Lost in Chinatown: Confusion, Music, more Confusion — Jacob Cunningham
“Throughout the film, the music continues to mix elements influenced by the classic Hollywood string sound and jazz of the 1930s with movements that evince how Goldsmith pointedly relates his work to the contemporary musical world surrounding him in 1974.”
New Critique 