album of the month
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Whenever I put on Subliminal Calm’s first and only release I immediately think of spring. Featuring a sublime mix of country, dub, folk and soul music, Subliminal Calm could only have been created by the inspirational minds behind it. Appropriately titled, there’s something quite delicate and beautiful in this set of music from minds that…
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When we last left off discovering the “comfiest music” on earth (all self-appointed, of course), Gontiti was gently surprising me both at a Japanese hair salon and, later on, at home discovering their little known, early experimental work. Today, I go even further back, to their beginnings as a duo ever more in tune with…
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Donovan’s A Gift From A Flower To A Garden, Paul McCartney’s Ram, Kate Bush’s The Dreaming, or Clifford T. Ward’s Mantle Pieces, these are a few of the albums I hold quite personally in my heart space. Completely earnest, lovely, bittersweet, precious, and intricate, they exemplify a certain spirit or spirits that are sorely lacking…
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I might be stringing myself out there but it’s due time for me to bring up the unbridled, unheralded genius of Seiji Toda — and to be more specific: Real Fish’s Tenon. Much like Scritti Politti’s Green Gartside, one listen to a Seiji Toda group — Shi-Shonen, Real Fish, or Fairchild — or his production…
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Disclaimer: If I’m wrong on Ossian, please let me be wrong spectacularly. Usually, I do my due diligence and keep some note or bookmark some site when I discover a particular history that could help me write about an artist in the future, whenever I get back to covering them for FOND/SOUND. In this case,…
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There always come a point in your life when you just have to say: “fuck it”…and lead with your heart. The late great icon frequently seen in black and white, with smoky cigarette in hand, had lead the life of someone unmoored by her origins in Japan. Deeply tied and influenced by American Jazz and…
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Am I allowed to punt on this one? Literally, it’s all there — right on the album cover. Magical computer music by Magical Power Mako. I’ll never top this description. Just one look at the album cover puts you there — a smoldering Makoto Kurita surrounded by a shoji panel, two TVs playing VHS tapes, two…
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In pre-Hispanic times, the name of Coatlicue was on the tip of every mouth found, in the sprawling Aztec empire located in present-day, central Mexico. Coatlicue, the given Nahuatl name for the “mother of all gods”, was the earth goddess with a skirt of many snakes, adorned with human hearts, skulls, and hands. It was she whose…
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Is it Jazz? How many times can one ask that question. What exactly constitutes Jazz? Genji Sawai’s Sowaka stretches this idea limit. Myself, I think it’s exactly what Jazz should be: dangerous, provoking, and exploratory. A fusion of Japanese free-jazz with New York noise-punk shouldn’t work, then, yet again, who could ask for more? On…
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It’s hard for me to separate Mick’s past from the work you’ll hear in Titles. Still impossibly underrated and unaccounted for — compared to the actual influence he put in motion — there is just something truly unique found in the late Mick Karn’s bass technique, musicality, and ideas. Titles, his first solo work after leaving Japan,…
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