-
It goes without saying that this is the silly season for me. While I would like to drop reams upon reams of knowledge on the ins and outs of Ms. Mio Takaki and her New-Tant, unfortunately, I have less time than normal to do so but I’ll do my best. As for those who appreciate…
-
As I grow older, I grow increasingly dumbfounded. There’s absolutely no reason Michel Lemieux shouldn’t be a household name now. Here I am looking at a video performance from his salad days and I see a superstar. Much like Peter Gabriel and Laurie Anderson, who he is both compared to in his Wikipedia entry, so…
-
More fierce humans to support: Monday Michiru Akiyoshi-Mariano. Where does one start with the wildfly prolific career of Monday? How about the beginning with Mangetsu. Unlike little released in Japan at that time, Mangetsu was the sprawling debut of a young Japanese-American who couldn’t quite suss out any style she wanted to gravitate to (nor…
-
Before the image, before the story, before the music, before anything else, what really gets to you is that voice. In full flight, Loredana Bertè’s voice is just this guttural thing unlike anything else, searing quite anything within its range, making you stop and immediately take notice. Powerful and raw, it’s a voice just raging…
-
Yumiko Morioka’s work under the “Synagetic Voice Orchestra” and her Mios wouldn’t have appeared to me if it wasn’t by happenstance and luck. You see, for a moment in time, Spencer Doran had sent me a message about some wonderful work by one Alessandro Ravi or Raul Lovisoni (turned out it was Mr. Ravi) that…
-
“Old-fashioned she might be, dated like last year’s pop-song…”, so too, must I take it inspiration from the late, great Clifford T. Ward to reaffirm some of the power in easy listening. On my latest mix for LYL Radio, I try to present a drifting set of music, a song cycle of sorts, that looks…
-
Just something for the lovers out there: Cindy’s exceptional J-Soul heavy, Angel Touch. Perfectly distilling that gorgeous in between period of the early ‘90s r&b scene, it can’t help but be a tad dated but also more than a tad timeless and (surprisingly) au courant. For those who need a bit of comfort and joy,…
-
How long can you hold on to a secret? Two years, that’s how long I’ve been holding off on sharing Fred Simon and Liz Cifani’s masterful Time And The River, another in a series of quite autumnal, pastoral, ambient/New Age records that speak to some kind of not-so-profoundly “American” universality. “How come? And how so?”…
-
More magic from the Salt Road. Hovering in between the space of other Awa Muse alumni comes another one from the East, from Osaka to be precise, Kosei Yamamoto’s East Ward. Hard to pinpoint, East Ward, focuses on a fourth world-esque blend of Japanese ambient New Age and jazz. And much like the works of…
-
What a week? Now that we can breathe again, I’d love to share a bit of music that seems to have given me a bit of respite lately. A bit twee for some, a bit too measured for others, for some reason, the pianoscapes of Michael Jones have hit that perfect spot for me lately…
ambient art pop art rock balearic brazilian electro-acoustic england environmental music experimental folk-rock fourth world Funk fusion japan jazz minimalist neo-folk neoclassical new age walearic