Stadiums & Shrines

Stadiums & Shrines (est. 2007). Sound and Vision: an attempt to archive evolving taste with nuanced focus, outside the influence of industry or the confines of time. An exploration of music through language, imagery, and collaboration.

Over the past decade, S&S has taken various forms — blog, radio show, concert series, multimedia project — and remains an abstract curiosity and creative outlet, however fluid or infrequent.

Some history: S&S began on blogspot and in 2012, the site relaunched with its then-core initiative called Dreams, crossing original collages with music and prose. In 2018, S&S partnered with Cascine to release Dreams, a retrospective compilation record and gatefold book featuring contributions from 20+ artists; press included BBC Radio, The Fader, Pitchfork, Stereogum, and VICE. That year, S&S founder Dave Sutton, visual artist Nathaniel Whitcomb, and musicians Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith and Emily Sprague (Florist) hosted a panel at Moogfest in North Carolina to discuss “the value of dreaming in the present, interdisciplinary collaboration across mediums, engaging the surreal, and escaping into the ambient beyond.” S&S celebrated the release at Brooklyn’s National Sawdust with performances by Julie Byrne and Bing & Ruth.

Dave Sutton is a writer and curator based in upstate New York. He leads editorial and communications at Ghostly International, an independent record label and music & art company. He’s also helped develop the curatorial voice of Hype Machine, running the music discovery newsletter, Stack, which highlights five new songs every Friday since 2014. In his capacity at Ghostly and through occasional freelance projects, he works with musicians to shape their stories via artist biographies and album release language. Feel free to reach out: sutton.davi@gmail.com

“I’m hoping you know about Stadiums & Shrines, the soft-sounds tastemakers who’ve elevated music blogging to a higher art form more than anyone I can think of.” — The Fader

“…It was, as you might imagine, stridently uncommercial and creatively oriented—a space for people who wanted their music commentary abstruse, thoughtful, and slow. It’s antithetical to the ways that music publications have been forced to work by corporately owned platforms of distribution, but that’s what makes Stadiums & Shrines and their friends stand out—an oasis in the desert of Twitter discourse.” – VICE

“Even when you’ve realised that you cannot win the revolution anymore, you can still go and aestheticize its ruins. And that is something that Stadiums & Shrines does more elegantly than anyone else around. S&S is smarter than your blog, because it knows that no one really cares about your exclusive premiere anyway…S&S is also prettier than your blog, and it hints at the actual possibilities of that certain language which by now has become the fabric of our everyday existence. The web is not, or should not be, a plain transformation of paper to the virtual realm, a fact that we are only slowly learning, and that only now at least a few publications finally start to understand and implement. Most of all however, S&S is a musical object that deserves to be listed here because unlike all the other sources that try to gain our attention every day, the music presented on the site invariably makes sense: it is as thoughtful and contemplative as the blog’s overall concept. It is worth pausing for a second in order to take another listen. Stadiums & Shrines is still worth the effort, which is why I am grateful it exists.” — No Fear of Pop