Diego Olivas

  • If there’s one thing that I find worthwhile about sharing music with y’all, it’s that it forces me to push myself to stick my neck out. It moves me to dig a little deeper and get a fuller picture for y’all to experience. And in today’s case, it puts me in a position to do…

  • Let’s do something different today. Let’s let the music speak for itself. I say this because I’m still inspired and surprised by who tunes in to what this blog has to say. And one of its surprising readers is one, Agata Melnikova, aka Sign Libra, who discovered this blog many moons ago after listening to…

  • How does one describe Ken Muramatsu’s music? If I can compare it to anything, it’s to enjoying an apéritif on a hot summer day. Filed under the “ambient”, “jazz”, or “New Age” banner, it’s his music that never completely traffics in any of those spaces. It’s deeper, much easier, listening. Like a good Alvarinho or…

  • When I think of summer, when I think of the vibrancy of this season, I think of albums like the Ten Plants series, spearheaded by video game composers Nobuo Uematsu and Toshiyuki Sasagawa.

  • While this blog may seem like it looks backward, it is actually in service of looking forward. I firmly believe that exploring new territory sometimes requires circling back to forgotten places. Right now, I’m exploring where Japanese ambient music left off after its early, pioneering “environmental and healing” period with artists like Hiroshi Yoshimura, Toshifumi…

  • If you’re like me, sometimes all it takes is one listen to feel that a certain album or artist should have made a bigger mark. When I listen to Yow Okazaki’s Damage, with its fusion of hip-hop, techno, ambient and French Pop-influenced acid jazz, I think: now here’s music that merits a certain introduction. 

  • Trance Nature Sounds. I feel like anything I say about Hariyo Remixe’s might not do justice to the music as clearly as what you see on its album cover. 

  • There’s a fine line between background music and background music. It’s something that’s easier to hear than explain. And one way to do so, is to introduce you to the melodious environmental music of Kyoji Ohno and specifically, his, Kutsurogi (サイコジェネシス・シリーズ くつろぎ) .

  • I gotta say: some of my favorite albums are those “imperfect” ones. Although they may not contain a complete record full of highlights, all is forgiven, because of those that do exist in one album. It’s those albums like the late, great, Richenel’s Deep As Blue.

  • The chirp of crickets, a babbling brook, the melodies of a songbird, certain things trigger a sense of new life or of spring settling in. I say this because I feel the same way about Jimi Chen’s Discovering Arts Behind The Mountains 發現後山的藝術, his “character music” soundtrack for a documentary of the same name (which…

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