Montreal post-rock is usually explained as a sound. It is better explained as real estate: an Anglo exodus, a loft above a garage, 500 hand-glued LPs, and two venues opened by a bass player. How Mile End built the infrastructure first.
The story of the Monks is almost always told as a costume. Five American GIs stationed at Gelnhausen, two German design graduates, shaved tonsures, black habits, a manifesto. It is a great story and it is also the least interesting thing about the record they made. What produced Black Monk Time was not an art […]
The story sells itself, which is the first reason to distrust it. Five boys at St Gregory’s College in Obalende, Lagos, borrow instruments, get signed by EMI, and cut a psychedelic rock album while still in school uniform. Try and Love came out on EMI Nigeria in 1973, catalogue NEMI (LP) 0032, with a parallel […]
Sanremo Rock was born in 1987 in a separate building, with its own presenter and a satellite link back to the theatre. It took 31 years to get inside the Ariston.
Fifty years after The Saints pressed 500 copies of (I'm) Stranded in Brisbane, the details show that almost everything later read as punk ideology was a practical workaround.
Davey Graham built DADGAD to chase an oud around Morocco. Jimmy Page renamed it after three continents and used it on Kashmir. A tuning is the most portable idea in guitar music.
British music writers spent the mid-1990s selling a war. On one side, shoegaze: introverted, effects-drunk, staring at the floor. On the other, Britpop: chins up, choruses out, Union Jack on the amp. The story needed enemies, and it got them. What it conveniently ignored was that one guitarist quietly held a passport to both sides. [&he
In February 1978, a 22-year-old on Van Halen’s debut album spent one minute and 42 seconds rewriting what a guitar was allowed to sound like. “Eruption” landed like a piece of alien technology, and for a generation of players the two-hand tapping that powered it became synonymous with one name. The problem with origin
A two minute instrumental with no words, improvised at a 1957 Virginia sock hop, gave heavy guitar its two founding techniques. The lineage of Link Wray's Rumble.
