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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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To paraphrase the great Janet Jackson, “Like a moth to a flame, Burned by the fire, My love is blind, Can’t you see my desire?” That’s the way love goes…and a way certain passions take us to some wonderful places. It’s something we can explore in Kim Wan Sun’s The First Touch.
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When I went about curating my latest mix for LYL Radio, a phrase kept guiding me forward: “atmosphere as culture”. If any of you are like me, I imagine one of your passions might be exploring how much music can drive culture and vice versa. Some of that urge to simply “dig deeper” might lead…
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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…
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Much like y’all, I’m apt to “feel the room”. And my friends, it’s awfully nice outside. I’m peering outside: the sun shining, flowers bloomin’ crazy, and life is good. So, I’m scrapping what I originally wanted to write about and feeling something else. I want to hear something upbeat, accessible, and meaningful…I want to share…
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My apologies to all those readers expecting a well-researched entry about Mélange’s Passion To Poison. It appears I might fail in myriad ways today. I say that because just like many of you, I too can get easily sidetracked when exploring certain rabbit holes. And in today’s case, it’s the way we or others feel…
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It bears repeating, well, at least serve as a reminder to myself, that: music lives best outside any kind of gatekeeping. When we’re blessed to discover music that moves us, doesn’t that blessing feel even more profound when we discover that others can partake in its existence with us? It’s what’s leading me to explore…
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How does one bridge the span between our past and an uncertain future? If you can put yourself inside the mind of one, Kazuo Uehara, perhaps you can deduce that answer. You see, it was he who had the same question. It was sometime in the ‘60s, while listening to The Beatles’s “Revolution #9”, that…
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“Wherever I’ve been and gone, wherever I have gone, the blues are all the same…”, truer words could not exist to place Lee Jung-Sun’s music somewhere under the sun. Over a decade removed from his debut, it’s what drove his most unlikely masterpiece 9집 雨 (which roughly (?) translates to: A House Rain “Rain” —…
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