album of the month
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There is no harder thing for a music reviewer to do than categorize music that’s, quite simply, uncategorizable. Especially so when it’s trying to pigeonhole or describe Chito Kawachi’s jaw-droppingly, unclassifiable 1993 debut, チトチック/クラクラ (CHITOTIHC/KULA-kura).
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You know, sometimes the hardest part is making a decision. And in my case, it’s selecting the crown jewel amongst so many diamonds. But the choice has been made. The choice is Toshinobu Kubota’s absolutely personal heartfelt ode to the Caribbean and its diaspora: Kubojah – Parallel World I.
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I know some have posted this question to me before: “How do you pick what to share on the site?” I wish the answer was easier than: “vibes”. Yet, sometimes it’s not even that. Sometimes, it could be something far more ordinary, and dare I say, less placeable. It could be just one song that,…
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“I was born to sing” – so graces the words of Teresa Carpio, to the Japanese-version of her powerful pan-Asian debut, 心己许 (Tokyo Dreaming). And after listening to the record, who am I to disagree? Much like her voice, it was this record that finally expressed fully the range of her voice and her ideas.
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Sometimes, I think we’re all in need of some kind of palette cleanser. At the cusp of summer, the urge is to find more in-between season music. It’s with this in mind, that I’m breaking one of my cardinal rules for this blog and choosing to cover music closer to our station in life. It’s…
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You know, there’s something strangely meditative about filling out a Discogs credit list. I find it so, because you feel like you contributed to artists getting their proper accreditation and also you getting a fuller picture of how something got made. So, when I finished populating Maria Kawamura’s 「春の夢」 – サンクタス – (or Spring Dream…
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The more I listen to Yang Xiao-lin’s 禧樂 (I Take You There), the more I’m impressed by how malleable folklore is. In the original liner notes, the words “elegant, pure, psychedelic, lively, remote and modern” are thrown as adjectives to describe this album. Myself, at first, I thought each word seemed to contradict the other…but…
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While I was writing about “Korea’s Madonna”, mentally, my mind going elsewhere, as well, thinking about that other Madonna: the late, great, Minako Honda. Putting myself, mentally in their shoes, I kept thinking about how as a young woman (especially of that ‘80s era) all the nonsense they must have gone through to simply: a)…
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As I start to look ahead, toward future travels, today I’m touching back on an album and an idea that I felt has guided me in some way, recently. It’s hard to pinpoint what Jun Kawabata accomplished on his 1997 release, 『Absolute Elsewhere』 but one doesn’t need to put a stake in the ground to…
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If y’all can count on one thing about me, it’s on this: I’m unafraid to promote adult music. Years of listening has led me to tuck away a special place for artists or music that gets by not on sonic gimmicks or complexity but on a certain amount of grace and sophistication. It’s what makes…
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