Among the multitude of underground micro-genres that have grown like bacilli these past few years, one of the most refined is ‘Modern Classical’. Ostensibly, much of the music that is sold under this pretext is a kind of evolved ambience, with compositional pretensions: a tidy hybrid of Gavin Bryars, Brian Eno and Erik Satie that is almost invariably pleasant, but which often seems to affect substance without actually delivering it.
A new Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy album often prompts me to visit a remarkable resource called The Royal Stable, a website dedicated to thoroughly cataloguing and cross-referencing this most fiendishly complicated of musical careers.
