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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.
Tracklist
1/ A Formal Arrangement
2/ Floral Arithmetic
3/ Daylight Ghost
4/ In All Your Glory
5/ Last Golden Light
6/ Momentary Paris
7/ Forgotten In Manhattan
8/ The Sea Inside
9/ Lovers And Strangers
10/ Starlit Summer Night
11/ Coincidentalism
12/ This Evening