• I told you things were going to get real here. Let’s get intimate. Let’s get closer to the work of Yukie Nishimura. Call it various names: neoclassical, ambient, new age, easy listening or BGM. You can call it anything you want but you can’t call it boring. Romantic is the key word here. Take one…

  • I’ll be completely honest. Lately, it’s been getting harder to carve out time to write for this blog. After a long moment in time, I’ve finally found a degree of it to do other things that vie just as much for my attention. Yet, I still feel the need to share things with you. Maybe…

  • Certain things aren’t lost on me. Whenever I look at my time slot at LYL Radio I feel a sense of responsibility. Each month on Wednesday, I end their programming day. For some, it’s 11 PM Paris time. While for others (like myself) it’s 4 PM Central Standard time. While one part of the world…

  • Note: Guest, Francis Heaney, rejoins us to share the second part of his mix series covering Japan’s incomparable Akira Inoue. This time around the focus is on his brilliant collaborative work with others like Aska Kaneko, David Rhodes, and many more. I’ll let Francis take it from here…

  • Albums as unique as Lucio Battisti’s Anima Latina are rarely the product of one person’s/band single vision. It’s easy to forget how little by little Lucio was baiting his audience — mostly Italian and rarely big outside of mainland Europe — into letting him explore places his own influences had gone before. He did all…

  • Let’s hope this post posits something with clarity. You see, yours truly, has been mightily under the weather this week and propping myself up to put words on screen has been (equally) that much of a struggle. Thankfully, this week, Shiho Yabuki’s New Meditation the subject of this post, has provided  perfect backgrounding music to…

  • American Clavé. What a name. Kip Hanrahan is one of those musicians that deserves, mightily, to be a large household name, but for reasons unbeknownst to me, never quite could break that final barrier. No matter how perfect his blend of outsider jazz and instantly “getable” ideas were. We’re worse off as a music culture…

  • Sometimes certain albums force you to ponder just how the heck that certain something was created. Syun’s Landscapes speaks of using fractal theory to both influence and create a lot of what you’re hearing here. Found on older Amiga, Mac and PC computers, software like VistaPro was responsible for creating virtual landscapes in an early…

  • Is it jazz? That’s a repetitive refrain that I’ve been proposing lately to this blog. Native New Yorker, Mark Nauseef’s Wun-Wun is classified under the jazz moniker but it doesn’t sound remotely like it. It all begins with percussive motifs that speak of improv and “free” ideas but settle into Pan-Pacific movements that require very…

  • Once again, we’re back in England for another journey. If you can entertain me just one more time, I’ll share with you some of the music I feel brings out the best colors of autumn. On this mix for LYL Radio I wanted to take you to those early Saturday mornings at home in November…

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