album of the month
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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,…
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How long can you hold on to a secret? Two years, that’s how long I’ve been holding off on sharing Fred Simon and Liz Cifani’s masterful Time And The River, another in a series of quite autumnal, pastoral, ambient/New Age records that speak to some kind of not-so-profoundly “American” universality. “How come? And how so?”…
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Editor’s note: Ayuo was kind enough to email some corrections to my review. I’ve included them inline for readers to take in. It’s never easy to be the first in anything. Kazue Sawai’s whole career is a living testament to this with multiple convictions rendering their verdict on her choices. In 1987, she chose to…
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Now here’s a man after my own musical heart. Untied to any single genre or set on creating some easily classifiable, Mark Wood’s La Mezcla takes a tastemaker’s approach to the DJ mix and applies it to the musical medium: the album. Sadly, on his only release, on La Mezcla we hear all sorts of…
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Sometimes I think various music reviewers and blogs bandy the term “floating” a bit too loosely with music. What some might think of as a floater seems to be a bit lightweight to me. However, in the case of Hiroki Komazawa’s Feliz, no other term comes closest to describing it. Here there is just one…
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One of my worst kept secrets is my love for Diana Pequeno’s Mistérios. It’s no mystery that it hits all the points I love about music: it’s dreamy, it’s complex but easy going, it’s the product of an artist going out on a limb (in a way most wouldn’t expect). Most importantly, the reason Mistérios…
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I’m glad we’ve gotten hints of the special work Lee Byung-Woo has done quietly behind the scenes in his native Korea. I wager some of you’ve already heard his music soundtracking Bong Joon-Ho’s brilliant films like The Host and Mother. Somewhere lost to our shores has been Lee Byung-Woo’s earlier trailblazing career. 1989’s 1집 –…
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I should stop saying this but it still boggles my mind that certain names aren’t more well known everywhere. Case in point: one Daisaku Kume. A rarity in the Japanese music biz, Daisaku Kume’s Eastern Shore was one of the few early Japanese ambient records released outside of Japan. An even bigger rarity was that…
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