album of the month
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Bobby McFerrin & Jack Nicholson: How The Rhinoceros Got His Skin & How The Camel Got His Hump (1987)
This one is for the young or those young at heart. Yes, your eyes aren’t deceiving you: Bobby McFerrin and Jack Nicholson. Sometime long ago, in our weird, sometimes, just so fucked up world, the joy of our world descended upon us, bringing to us this hypnotic, decidedly sublime emotional spiritual fusion (jazz?) record dubbed…
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The Universe. It’s not often one turns on an instrument and gets presented with such a thing. Yet, the [Universe] was the sound patch introducing you to the world of Korg’s M1, the first of its kind, a music workstation that gave you what seemed like a universe of sounds in one keyboard. Korg’s M1…
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It doesn’t escape me that we restart our journey through the world of Chinese “New World” music right where the cradle of its civilization began, along the banks of the Huang He River (known elsewhere as the Yellow River). Spanning over 5,000 kilometers, nine provinces, from Qinghai to Inner Mongolia — all the way to…
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Trigger warning: “Good morning. It’s 5 o’clock, from the J-WAVE Singin’ Clock…” J-WAVE 時報コレクション My apologies to all of you who’ve grown up in Tokyo, waking up to their radio alarm blasting out J-WAVE 81.3 FM’s ultra-cozy, “singing” time call signal. However, if it wasn’t for Tokyo’s “classic hits” radio station we wouldn’t have the…
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Don’t you just love albums that immediately hook you in? From the get-go 秋月 (Music From Autumn Moon) by Tats Lau Yee-Tat is music with a palpable “it” feeling you can never quite shake. Ostensibly a soundtrack album for Clara Law’s misunderstood film, Qiu Yue, this release functions more than that, perfectly capturing the worldly…
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Don’t ask me why but I have something to literally share with you. For some reason I’ve been carrying around Aki Fukakusa’s Silk Strings Enchanting everywhere I go lately. In this weird time in my life, in between moving to a new place and getting rid of the old baggage, I packed up all my…
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Just more music for “in between seasons”. What else can you say to describe the latter-day work of, sadly, now defunct, Portuguese sophisticated pop group, Ban? As I put on their Mundo de Aventuras it’s not hard to have your mind race back to more naive times when certain love songs spoke to youthful measures…
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In light of everything that is currently happening at the time of this writing, I’d hate to add any dark energy into the world. For times like these, perhaps it’s a good occasion to revisit another work of the trailblazing Hiroki Okano. On ENN, (roughly translating to “circle”), we get to appreciate some of the…
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Before the image, before the story, before the music, before anything else, what really gets to you is that voice. In full flight, Loredana Bertè’s voice is just this guttural thing unlike anything else, searing quite anything within its range, making you stop and immediately take notice. Powerful and raw, it’s a voice just raging…
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Just something for the lovers out there: Cindy’s exceptional J-Soul heavy, Angel Touch. Perfectly distilling that gorgeous in between period of the early ‘90s r&b scene, it can’t help but be a tad dated but also more than a tad timeless and (surprisingly) au courant. For those who need a bit of comfort and joy,…
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