Name: The Arcades Project
Brand: John Foxx

Bonus disc

Bonus disc: No

Catalogue number

META75LP

Colour

Blue

Colour details

Transparent Blue

Discogs ID

Format multiplier

Download code

Download code: No

Rough Trade Exclusive

Rough Trade Exclusive: No

Extended format

Extended format: No

Format detail

Format Music GB

Limited edition

Release date

2024-02-16

Signed copies

Signed copies: No

Supplier GB

Cargo

Tax rate GB

Standard:20

UPC / Barcode

5060446127636

Total Cap

Blue LP

META75CD

2023-03-31

5060446128503

Artist

John Foxx

Genre GB

New Wave / Post Punk

Label GB

Metamatic Records

John Foxx, born Dennis Leigh in Chorley, Lancashire, England, UK on September 26th, 1948, is a renowned artist known for his contributions to various music genres. From his early days as a mod and hippie with a fascination for album covers and experimentalism, to his time with bands like Tiger Lily and Ultravox!, Foxx has continuously pushed boundaries.

After leaving Ultravox in 1979, Foxx embarked on a successful solo career. His debut album "Metamatic" in 1980 showcased his electronic style derived from synthesizers. He went on to release three more solo albums before taking a break from music in 1985 to focus on visual work.

Inspired by acid house in the '90s, Foxx made a brief return as Nation 12 alongside Tim Simenon of Bomb The Bass. However, it wasn't until a chance meeting with Louis Gordon in 1997 that he entered into a new phase of his solo career. Together they released several duo albums between 1997 and 2008.

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Following his blissfully abstract, piano-based collaborations with Harold Budd and Ruben Garcia over the last 20 years, The Arcades Project is John Foxx’s 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, 2020’s Howl (by John Foxx And The Maths) necessitated a further retreat into quiet, minimal music. The half-light, atmospheric flow of the album recalls the artist’s 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, there’s 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 dog-eared 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 flaneurism. The flaneur 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 glass-roofed Parisian arcades that are described in Benjamin’s 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.”

The Arcades Project

Music GB