Description
Following his blissfully abstract, pianobased collaborations with Harold Budd and Ruben Garcia over the last 20 years, The Arcades Project is John Foxx039s first solo piano album.This latest work has a fresh sense of wonder, as if returning to the instrument after the raging analogue noise of his last major work, 2020s Howl by John Foxx And The Maths necessitated a further retreat into quiet, minimal music.The halflight, atmospheric flow of the album recalls the artists own series of short stories, The Quiet Man published by Essential Works in 2020. However, as Foxx writes in an essay to accompany the album, theres another text by Walter Benjamin that provides some of the inspiration, as well as the title for the new record. Foxx explains how he first came across the book, when I was at art school, in the mid 1960s a number of obscure books were discussed and dogeared copies often circulated. Among these The Arcades Project, by Walter Benjamin, was especially tantalising. It was often referred to, but its existence seemed no more than a rumour. In those days before the internet, you could never find a copy. Of course, all that elusiveness and mystery lent the book a legendary status.He continues The book itself is a sort of stroll through new ideas emerging from the city life of Paris in the 19th and early 20th century. It was also concerned with what the French poet Baudelaire had termed flneurism. The flneur enjoys walking randomly, drifting with the tides on the streets, taking great pleasure in a dreamlike state of coincidentalism being open to all the unfolding daily events of a great modern city.The glassroofed Parisian arcades that are described in Benjamins The Arcades Project, offered its citizens a chance to meander, dream, gather impressions through the rows of shops and elegant apartments. Foxx in turn with the piano and the help of some old electronics set out to create immediate, often imperfect, gestural fragments of music and atmosphere that might allude to some momentary experience a chance meeting, a glimpse into a garden, a coincidence, a life behind a window revealed at twilight, someone indistinct. And it all comes from walking.
