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There’s just something about Valentine’s Day that stirs me to share music steeped in that feeling. If you know me, you know I love “love songs.” I firmly believe that the hardest songs to write are those that touch on love (in its myriad meanings). It’s what led me this time around to cut to…
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One of my favorite things to discover and hear in music is how ideas translate across genres and borders. Listening to Midori’s Vortex Symphony, I get the sense that they share a similar spirit of discovery. Yes, this is “dream pop,” but it isn’t the dream pop we usually imagine – it’s the kind that…
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Maybe it’s something about myself, but I tend to feel inspired by the music of those who aren’t necessarily solely inspired by music itself. As I listen to Yasushi Egami’s Arcars – The Surface of Muclique, I get the sense that something deeper is at play–just how important texture is to any artform.
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I can’t help but smile a little when I hear how brazenly Yuji Sugiyama begins what would become his sole release under the name Logik Freaks. On 1995’s Temptations of Logik Freaks – One Fine Day, the opening track, “Tekno Prisoner/Preacher,” starts as a hypnotic piece of Japanese ambient techno before being yanked out of…
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Sometimes you hear the future and you fear it. Yet, sometimes you fear the future and you hear… what exactly? Change.
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The more I curate mixes or tumble down that wormhole called “discovering new music,” the more I find myself questioning how we categorize things. For me, it’s all circling back to how one listens to music.
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Much like many of you, the more time one spends in nature, the more one begins to hear a certain musicality in the earth itself. Whether it’s in the rustle of fallen leaves, the whistle of wind through branches, or the faint bird calls that seem to drift from nowhere, one is never truly alone…
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Don’t you just love listening to something that isn’t easily categorized? When I listen to Mikihiko Matsumiya’s 1994 debut, Mu-Myou (無明), I spend a moment trying to figure out what kind of music I’d like it to be, only to find that music has a right to remain mysterious and this haunting, lovely, album is…
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It’s not often I revisit works from artists I’ve already written about, but when I do, it’s because these other works shed light on a new dimension of their creativity. In today’s case, few artists reveal as many fantastic—and drastic—sides as Naoko Kawai through her work as The Gentle Wind.
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If there’s one thing I’ve learned from a recent trip to Japan, it’s this: I might be too ahead of the curve. And no, not in the way you might think. It’s in turning my recent focus towards music lost in the shuffle of the CD era.
ambient art pop art rock balearic brazilian electro-acoustic england environmental music experimental fourth world Funk fusion japan jazz minimalist mpb neo-folk neoclassical new age walearic