Having actually included MAGNET as one of my favorite things (and I promise that’s not sucking up, I really love the publication), you can imagine how chuffed I was at the prospect of a guest editorship. Over the past, well, several years of the Sharp Things‘ existence, Eric Miller has been a friend and an advocate, even when no one else was, so I’m honored to be able to ramble on a bit about a bunch of shit that I dig, because I want everyone to know about it and, more significantly, because it makes me feel important. 😉 Over to you, me …
My good friend Hugo turned me onto this one. There’s not a lot I can say about it due to the interesting nature of the artist itself—you see, Archive X is the sublime, vocal-based canon of, well, a completely anonymous individual or group of individuals living somewhere in the continental United States (or perhaps not). All I know is that this is some mind-blowing shit. I contend, from the perspective of both a listener and a music maker, that the world does not make enough music pulling its cues or inspiration from the vast repertoire of “classical” music available to us. And while several tracks into AX’s series of EPs you realize that many of the ideas are augmented by beats and electronics, there is a unifying purpose—a sense of theme and variation, a technique I learned about in college music classes, whereby central musical ideas are built upon and altered as a progression, thus presenting not only amazing sonic results, but as a modus operandi, there are not too many artists doing this at all these days.
