album of the month

  • Was the world ever ready for Thomas Leer? Listening back to Thomas’s The Scale Of Ten one can hear all the potential there. It’s this theme of tweaking a recipe. Here it was to make his once abrasive, experimental blue-eyed soul into a chromed-out beast, outfitted in Fairlight CMI clothing, permeating with giant-sized hooks. In…

  • Put on your headphones. Put on and listen to this album. Spatial audio. Ambisonics. 3-D, virtual sound. There are many words to describe the technology Kohsei Morimoto’s Chaos Zone: Three Dimensional Sounds Created by Roland Sound Space System (カオス・ゾーン) or カオス・ゾーン (Chaos Zone) for short, tries to exploit a technological demo of sorts to promote…

  • There’s something I really admire about Naples’ own Teresa De Sio’s way of thinking. When I went around digging through interviews to find a little more about the backstory for 1988’s Sinderalla Suite, I encountered Teresa’s fuller story. In it, Teresa painted a much bigger picture than I was expecting.

  • The changing of decades always seem to introduce truly amazing albums that fall through the cracks. Be it because they are caught in between eras. Be it because they’re simply made outside of any prevailing trend. These albums, unfortunately, reveal their true brilliance (sometimes) only in hindsight. Recently, I’ve had that aha! moment with Clevedon…

  • Winter heat from an unlikely source. Perhaps I’m showing my bias as a violinist, but I have to share another of my favorite (sadly unknown) releases from my fellow brethren. Another wonderful cross-thatched affair of fourth world and new age grooves not from the west but this time from Japan’s other uber-talented, and quite prolific,…

  • I told you things were going to get real here. Let’s get intimate. Let’s get closer to the work of Yukie Nishimura. Call it various names: neoclassical, ambient, new age, easy listening or BGM. You can call it anything you want but you can’t call it boring. Romantic is the key word here. Take one…

  • I’ll be completely honest. Lately, it’s been getting harder to carve out time to write for this blog. After a long moment in time, I’ve finally found a degree of it to do other things that vie just as much for my attention. Yet, I still feel the need to share things with you. Maybe…

  • Albums as unique as Lucio Battisti’s Anima Latina are rarely the product of one person’s/band single vision. It’s easy to forget how little by little Lucio was baiting his audience — mostly Italian and rarely big outside of mainland Europe — into letting him explore places his own influences had gone before. He did all…

  • Let’s hope this post posits something with clarity. You see, yours truly, has been mightily under the weather this week and propping myself up to put words on screen has been (equally) that much of a struggle. Thankfully, this week, Shiho Yabuki’s New Meditation the subject of this post, has provided  perfect backgrounding music to…

  • American Clavé. What a name. Kip Hanrahan is one of those musicians that deserves, mightily, to be a large household name, but for reasons unbeknownst to me, never quite could break that final barrier. No matter how perfect his blend of outsider jazz and instantly “getable” ideas were. We’re worse off as a music culture…

ambient art pop art rock balearic brazilian electro-acoustic england environmental music experimental folk-rock fourth world Funk fusion japan jazz minimalist neo-folk neoclassical new age walearic