album
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Be honest. How many of you know someone (or are friends or acquaintances) with a certain somebody that in the way they act, the way they dress or think, seem not of this era? I keep thinking of this thought when I go back to Toshihiro Nakanishi’s music and this selection: You Make Me Blue.…
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I think, if I’m going to try to “sell” something to you, I should try to to sell it to myself first. For me, what instantly “gets” me about Chen Ming-chang’s music occurs around two minutes into “淡水騎車 (Riding In Danshui)” off this, his soundtrack to Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Dust In The Wind.
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I hate to say this but this review might be one of the lighter ones. Not because of the album itself – the whole package is truly wonderful (a mix of nostalgia, elegance, and a certain uniqueness, tying quasi-ambient, quasi-neoclassical music with gorgeous photography of Hokkaido) – but because of the lack of information about…
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Recently, while dabbling in the world of wine reviews, I’ve been ruminating on a term that I believe would be well-adapted for use in the music criticism realm: QPR. “QPR”, or quality-to-price-ratio, is a term used by wine aficionados to denote how much bang for your buck inexpensive wines can provide. While it’s awfully rich…
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How many intersectional studies can one make? Yes, all of them, it seems for Jin De-zhe. It’s not often you get to write about a Chinese physicist of ethnic Korean descent who moonlights in making gorgeous ambient folk music recorded in Beijing sung in Cantonese Mandarin (editor’s note: sorry for the mix-up) for the Hong…
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Would you mind if I share something simply for no other reason than: it’s beautiful? From the packaging to the music, I have to say Tomoyuki Hayashi & ForestIII’s The Forest is just plain pretty. If you had your hands on the physical copy, you can lift up the CD cover and feel the same…
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Sometimes telling the story of something feels like it won’t match the quality of the source material. In my case, its detailing the music and history behind 中國經典名著電影音樂2: 怨女 (otherwise known as the “Rouge Of The North” soundtrack) without falling prey to the trappings of Orientalism. Ambient, mysterious, and wickedly incisive, it’s this work by…
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You’re probably getting tired of reading this but….here’s another big thank you to someone else: here’s one for Austin from Incidental Music for steering me in the direction of today’s focus, Junichi Kamiyama. What he exposed me to was the healing music of Junichi Kamiyama featuring Mr. Kamiyama’s patented “tender sound”, displayed particularly well in…
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Once again, I’m just here to add overtones to others’ resonances. In this case, it’s to add something to further describe Carioca guitarist Ulisses Rocha’s Casamata. It’s not lost to me that somehow when I’m writing about this release, we’re all sharing a bit of the same seasonal weather. In the Northern Hemisphere this part…
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Who says you need a trip out to the country to get into the spirit of Akira Inoue’s Anne: Dreaming an Island (The Light and Wind of Prince Edward Island) 夢みるアンの島 ～プリンス・エドワード島の光と風～? When I speak of road-tripping records, I speak of records just like this one, one that accepts all the conceits of the “road”…
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