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Donovan’s A Gift From A Flower To A Garden, Paul McCartney’s Ram, Kate Bush’s The Dreaming, or Clifford T. Ward’s Mantle Pieces, these are a few of the albums I hold quite personally in my heart space. Completely earnest, lovely, bittersweet, precious, and intricate, they exemplify a certain spirit or spirits that are sorely lacking…
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From French record label Nato comes another wonderful batch of Jazz not Jazz. Look At Me, the debut from English multi-instrumentalist Terry Day, is unlike little else he would be known for. Surprisingly romantic, ragged but in a very smooth, put-together way, and (on the great bits) sounding not that dissimilar to the work of Paul…
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I might be stringing myself out there but it’s due time for me to bring up the unbridled, unheralded genius of Seiji Toda — and to be more specific: Real Fish’s Tenon. Much like Scritti Politti’s Green Gartside, one listen to a Seiji Toda group — Shi-Shonen, Real Fish, or Fairchild — or his production…
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Disclaimer: If I’m wrong on Ossian, please let me be wrong spectacularly. Usually, I do my due diligence and keep some note or bookmark some site when I discover a particular history that could help me write about an artist in the future, whenever I get back to covering them for FOND/SOUND. In this case,…
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There always come a point in your life when you just have to say: “fuck it”…and lead with your heart. The late great icon frequently seen in black and white, with smoky cigarette in hand, had lead the life of someone unmoored by her origins in Japan. Deeply tied and influenced by American Jazz and…
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The dream continues…coming in next, but arguably first in its conception, is my mix for Radio Jiro on NTS. In this mix I’ll continue to flesh out this esoteric idea of Walearic music. As mentioned in my previous Walearic mix, it’s a conceptual genre of Japanese music looking beyond strict influence from western Pop music and turning it’s eye instead…
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Am I allowed to punt on this one? Literally, it’s all there — right on the album cover. Magical computer music by Magical Power Mako. I’ll never top this description. Just one look at the album cover puts you there — a smoldering Makoto Kurita surrounded by a shoji panel, two TVs playing VHS tapes, two…
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In pre-Hispanic times, the name of Coatlicue was on the tip of every mouth found, in the sprawling Aztec empire located in present-day, central Mexico. Coatlicue, the given Nahuatl name for the “mother of all gods”, was the earth goddess with a skirt of many snakes, adorned with human hearts, skulls, and hands. It was she whose…
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Is it Jazz? How many times can one ask that question. What exactly constitutes Jazz? Genji Sawai’s Sowaka stretches this idea limit. Myself, I think it’s exactly what Jazz should be: dangerous, provoking, and exploratory. A fusion of Japanese free-jazz with New York noise-punk shouldn’t work, then, yet again, who could ask for more? On…
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It’s hard for me to separate Mick’s past from the work you’ll hear in Titles. Still impossibly underrated and unaccounted for — compared to the actual influence he put in motion — there is just something truly unique found in the late Mick Karn’s bass technique, musicality, and ideas. Titles, his first solo work after leaving Japan,…
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