Arcades - Who's Most Lost?

Arcades’ is a song-writing collaboration between Prior and Dugal McKinnon. ‘Arcades’ owes its title to the Walter Benjamin project of the same name, signalling acknowledgement of the palimpsest of influences upon which it draws. However, rather than these influences being represented in the music by means of direct sampling, ‘Arcades’ makes use of a dense collage of sounds, all of which remain subservient to the overall gestalt: ‘Arcades’ is conceived as an ecology in which the constituent elements of a song rarely rise in significance above one-another but, rather, gain meaning from the way in which they blend and clash.

While ‘Arcades’ draws heavily on acoustic instruments, these are used more as cultural signifiers than vehicles for expressive performance. ‘Arcades’ is an acousmatic studio construction which attempts to reinterpret some of the central themes of classical ‘musique concrète’ through the lens of the pop song, with all its ‘redundant’ protocols of traditional pitch, harmony, rhythm and structure serving as sonic sign-posts to focus the listener on the fabric of the sound itself.