england

Virginia Astley: From Gardens Where We Feel Secure (1983)

2016/10/24

NOTE: Today, I’m digging back into the A-Track, A-Day archives for a gorgeous piece of autumnal music, Virginia Astley’s From Gardens Where We Feel Secure, one that still remains too criminally hard to find. No matter, it’s my sonic balm for you, today. You can find a lot of what I said then below, but what do I think about…
Talk Talk: I Believe In You (1988)

2015/03/06

Talk Talk – 1988 Sometimes, things are better left unsaid. In 1988, Tim Pope and Mark Hollis set out to create a video for an edited down version of “I Believe In You”. By then, so much of Talk Talk’s history had been suddenly rewritten and torn asunder. In this last bit of acquiescence, Mark…
The Blue Nile: Over the Hillside (1989)

2015/03/03

Paul Buchanan from The Blue Nile I’m a firm believer in art seen through movements. Although movements might have disparate artists within them, they tend to share a certain philosophy. There was something genuinely different that was brewing underneath Britain in the late ’80s. In music especially so, maybe as a reaction to all the…
David Sylvian: Orpheus (1987)

2015/02/27

David Sylvian -1986 There’s something peculiar about working or experiencing art with black and white colors. Gone are visual signifiers and reference points that you can use to inform your emotions. By restricting your colors to two poles, the audience has to engage with your work by basing it on something else. The ideas of…
David Sylvian: Upon This Earth (1986) and Talk Talk: April 5th (1986)

2015/02/25

David Sylvian – 1986 Sometimes meaningful excursions can lead to so much. Let’s take one, and follow the lead of two budding artists just at the cusp of realizing their full potential. In 1986, David Sylvian of Japan and Mark Hollis of Talk Talk were running parallel paths and somehow spearheading shifts into truly forgotten…
Big Country: In A Big Country (1983)

2015/02/16

Big Country I’ll ask for forgiveness on this account. Sometimes in the journey to get somewhere, you lose track of time. In this instance, I completely misplaced my timeline for one supremely important neo-folk band. Perhaps one of the best, and last of a dying breed, the true quintessential Scottish folk-rock band: Big Country. If,…
The Waterboys: This is the Sea (1985)

2015/02/12

Mike Scott and the Waterboys Have you heard the Big Music? You probably already have. Its the music seemingly heard everywhere now, but not quite. Larger than life, its music that aims for the most tired of tropes: the epic song. It does so, be it by layering gigantic amounts of instruments and production tricks,…
Cocteau Twins: Donimo (1984)

2015/02/10

The Cocteau Twins I’m going to introduce you to a word you’ve probably never heard before: glossolalia. This word means speaking in tongues. A very recent creation, dating to late 1800s, it was a word invented by linguists to understand why vocabulary which we normally understand, can sound so incomprehensible or unrecognizable when spoken or…
Virginia Astley: A Summer Long Since Passed (1983)

2015/02/06

Here’s to another unheralded and quite forgotten one. In the summer of 1983, a humble, charming bit of pastoral neo-folk music was released. Mixing field recordings, piano, guitar, flute, and, very sparingly, voice, a young woman presented a breathtaking idea of how a certain English feeling can reveal itself to you. Back then, Virginia opened…
Richard and Linda Thompson: Wall of Death (1982)

2015/02/04

Richard and Linda Thompson – 1980 In the same year as Kate Bush was heralding a new apex for neo-folk music, one of its original visionaries was turning off all the lights from its prior impetus. You see, in 1982, Richard and Linda Thompson released probably one of your parents or cool elder’s favorite English…