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Can you feel it? It seems like we’re getting there. Not quite Spring but really not winter anymore. This is the time of the year where we’re in between seasons. This is the time of the year when Simon Stockhausen’s Floating Free makes the most sense to share. Hovering around the meditative, rhythmic minimalism of…
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Truth be told: I really had trouble deciding to share this album with you, fair reader. One of my many goals for this blog is to move away from the well-worn stereotype/trope of the “female musician”. However, staring right in front of me (and you now) is exactly what one associates that being by pigheaded…
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Going back into the well of zouk music. It’s not often I tap into it because I’d be afraid to turn this whole blog into a zouk-only thing…and who knows who’d be into that? Especially, around this time of the year. However, as long as I have your interest in “bass” music piqued — let’s…
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Lately, it seems like I’m becoming the patron saint for lost causes. Case in point: the fretless bass. In my real line of work I see the writing on the wall. In the real music instrument market, bass guitars make up around 20 to 15 percent of all “electric” guitar sales. Of those bass guitars…
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It’s perhaps uncommon knowledge that the best marriages (and relationships) are those comprised of two individuals coming together not in spite of their differences but because of their differences. One can clearly hear this in practice in the nearly telepathic playing of Osaka Japanese New Age guitar duo, Gontiti. In the past I’ve written a…
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What happens if you mix the Everly Brothers and Kraftwerk? The answer you’re supposed to hear should be: Adolphson-Falk’s Med Rymden I Blodet. However, I don’t think it quite is. Taking inspiration from both those iconic bands yet doing something decidedly different, is what led me to write about one of Sweden’s least heralded pop…
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If it seems like this is becoming a yearly tradition here, who knows? It might be. Yes, it’s another mix of some of my favorite love songs for Valentine’s Day. If you know anything about me is that I’m a big softie at heart. And part and parcel with this comes my sincere (no pun…
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Truth be told, few records in my collection sound like Esther Ofarim’s Complicated Ladies. Well, truth be told, few albums will ever sound like it either…in anyone’s collection. A mixture of Israeli melismatic jazz with German liedermacher wouldn’t sound too out of the ordinary (at least in some circles). However, let’s say someone decided to…
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Don’t you just love it when everything comes together? Kenji Sawada must have taken forever to match up his forward-thinking persona with his stagecraft and music, but on Aux Femmes 女たちよ) it all fell into place. Toying with gender, electronics, and all sorts of compositional elements, Aux Femmes 女たちよ proved he just wasn’t some emptyheaded…
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Was the world ever ready for Thomas Leer? Listening back to Thomas’s The Scale Of Ten one can hear all the potential there. It’s this theme of tweaking a recipe. Here it was to make his once abrasive, experimental blue-eyed soul into a chromed-out beast, outfitted in Fairlight CMI clothing, permeating with giant-sized hooks. In…
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