Released: 31/03/23 (LP released: 23/02/24)
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.