Diego Olivas
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Much like y’all, I’m apt to “feel the room”. And my friends, it’s awfully nice outside. I’m peering outside: the sun shining, flowers bloomin’ crazy, and life is good. So, I’m scrapping what I originally wanted to write about and feeling something else. I want to hear something upbeat, accessible, and meaningful…I want to share…
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My apologies to all those readers expecting a well-researched entry about Mélange’s Passion To Poison. It appears I might fail in myriad ways today. I say that because just like many of you, I too can get easily sidetracked when exploring certain rabbit holes. And in today’s case, it’s the way we or others feel…
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It bears repeating, well, at least serve as a reminder to myself, that: music lives best outside any kind of gatekeeping. When we’re blessed to discover music that moves us, doesn’t that blessing feel even more profound when we discover that others can partake in its existence with us? It’s what’s leading me to explore…
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How does one bridge the span between our past and an uncertain future? If you can put yourself inside the mind of one, Kazuo Uehara, perhaps you can deduce that answer. You see, it was he who had the same question. It was sometime in the ‘60s, while listening to The Beatles’s “Revolution #9”, that…
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“Wherever I’ve been and gone, wherever I have gone, the blues are all the same…”, truer words could not exist to place Lee Jung-Sun’s music somewhere under the sun. Over a decade removed from his debut, it’s what drove his most unlikely masterpiece 9집 雨 (which roughly (?) translates to: A House Rain “Rain” —…
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It’s not often you recognize “genius” straight away, yet it’s not often you get to hear such precocious brilliance of the likes seen in Yukiyo Nakamura. From her debut in 1989 to her latest work, what could have turned out as a different kind of musician, blossomed into their own kind by finding her true…
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“Now and again, we meet for tea. This is our universe: cups of tea. We have a beautiful cosmos, you and me.” It’s not often that we’re confronted with the secrets of life. It’s not often that we’re presented with such revelation (laced with equal parts comedy and profundity). A zen kōan said with a…
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First of all: thank you. I can’t thank y’all enough for all the kind thoughts you’ve all sent me since my father passed away and I had to take some time off from writing here. As I put the blog on pause during this “mental health” break, I was able to take in that space…
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Life sure is something isn’t it? I imagine, many of you who’ve experienced a great loss in their life (or are experiencing another one, as I am, at the time of this writing) can understand the course of feelings one goes through. They’re complicated. You can call it a certain numbness. Bouts of intense heartache,…
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You know, some days I’m grateful I have a platform to highlight music that others might pass on. It’s why you get to hear albums like the late, great, Chika Ueda’s いつも 2人で (Always 2 People). While others might describe it as “more adult contemporary pap”, think of it as milquetoast, and file it under…
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