album of the month

Yukie Nishimura (西村由紀江): L’espoir (～レスポワール～) (1989)

2019/12/13

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…
Carla Bley (with Steve Swallow): Night-glo (1985)

2019/12/11

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…
Lucio Battisti: Anima Latina (1974)

2019/11/26

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…
Shiho Yabuki (矢吹紫帆): New Meditation (1990)

2019/11/22

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…
Kip Hanrahan: Days And Nights Of Blue Luck Inverted (1987)

2019/11/19

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…
Syun (旬): Landscapes (1994)

2019/11/15

Sometimes certain albums force you to ponder just how the heck that certain something was created. Syun’s Landscapes speaks of using fractal theory to both influence and create a lot of what you’re hearing here. Found on older Amiga, Mac and PC computers, software like VistaPro was responsible for creating virtual landscapes in an early…
Clement/Deschamps: Wolfsong Night (1994)

2019/10/29

There’s something I truly love about Tim Clément and Kim Deschamp’s Wolfsong Night that I can’t quite pinpoint. Atmospherically, it just puts you somewhere few albums would know how to actually get you there. Perhaps it’s a place many haven’t ventured to visit lately or often enough: the Canadian wilderness. As tied to its location…
Mayumi Miyata, Midori Takada: 「星雲」～サウンド・フォレスト・シリーズ (Nebula) (1987)

2019/10/18

If we can thank the heavens for something today, it is for bringing together Mayumi Miyata and Midori Takada. Released as part of CBS/Sony’s short-lived Sound Forest (サウンド・フォレスト・シリーズ) series,「星雲」～サウンド・フォレスト・シリーズ (Nebula) presents a different aesthetic within that series idea of “environmental music”. Not necessarily made to attract electronically-minded listeners, Nebula is a nebulous blend of truly…
David Friesen: Inner Voices (1987)

2019/10/15

Here’s hoping this writeup lasts not much longer than David Friesen’s meditative Inner Voices. What exactly was David Friesen’s Inner Voices? Much like Eberhard Weber in Europe, in America, David was that kind of quicksilver, enigmatic, bass player that played on countless “jazz” records spanning from bebop, free jazz, modal, and other chin scratching, heady…
Hiroki Miyano (宮野弘紀): D / I/ V /E /R /G /E (分岐点) (1988)

2019/09/20

And now some jazz… *Quietly watches all my readers’ eyes glaze over*. For those who can appreciate the bigger “jazz” picture, here’s Hiroki Miyano’s D / I/ V /E /R /G /E. Showcasing Hiroki Miyano’s wonderfully elegant guitar playing, D / I/ V /E /R /G /E takes great pains not to rock the boat…