Dead Academic
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Run The Jewels – RTJ4 (Review)
There is a cliché in the music industry that states you have your whole life to prepare for the first album, and only a year to prepare for the second. Longevity is a hard game, and many artists who happen… Continue reading
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Division and Reconciliation in Darren McGarvey’s Poverty Safari
Back in the early 1980s, my Dad, still a schoolboy, was taken on a school trip to Glasgow. The trip was part of his Higher Modern Studies programme, an opportunity to see first-hand the redevelopment projects taking place in the… Continue reading
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Emily A. Sprague – Water Memory (Review)
Emily A. Sprague is a modular synthesist and sound designer who, as a solo artist, is known for creating impressionistic soundscapes that evoke the natural world. Over the past few years, Sprague – also known for her work as guitarist… Continue reading
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Flowers For Algernon: When Knowing Is Not Enough
A few months back, when such luxuries were still possible, a friend and I spent a weekday evening drinking at a pub near Queen’s Park. With the closing bell having already rung, and wishing to postpone the cold walk home… Continue reading
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Covid-19 Is Laying Bare the Fantasy of Individualism
For much of the past forty years we have lived in a society that has doubted its own existence. Thatcher made it clear: There is no society, only a collection of atomized individuals seeking prosperity for themselves and their families.… Continue reading
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Encounters: William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops
It was mid-summer, and the evening sky was a deep cerulean blue despite the late hour. From the living room of my old Glasgow flat, I looked down on the Maryhill Road as it ran towards St George’s Cross subway… Continue reading
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Deli Girls – I Don’t Know How to Be Happy (Review)
“Remind them that they will never be as angry as the rest of us.” So screams Danny Orlowski on ‘Here We Go Again’, a track appearing three-quarters of the way through Deli Girls’ second album, I Don’t Know How to… Continue reading
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Caterina Barbieri – Ecstatic Computation (Review)
Two eyes, superimposed on a cold metallic surface. At first glance the image appears depthless, the lifeless gaze of a clay sculpture, flat and unseeing. Only with closer inspection does the landscape appear: snow-tipped mountains; light breaking through a watery… Continue reading
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Molly Nilsson – 2020 (Review)
Encountering Molly Nilsson’s back-catalogue for the first time can be a daunting experience. With nine albums in as many years, each bearing analogous black-and-white cover designs, it is hard to know exactly where to start. Indeed, the uniform aesthetic of… Continue reading
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Special Request – Bedroom Tapes (Review)
With four albums scheduled for release this year alone, Paul Woolford, aka. Special Request, can perhaps be forgiven for returning to some early demos on his latest release, Bedroom Tapes. Selected from lost cassettes rediscovered during a house-move, the compiled… Continue reading
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