-
Paris in the winter must be a whole lot different than any other time of the year. Yes, the feeling of romance and culture is still there, but the atmosphere to take it all in must impress all sorts of different stimulations. Romance, city and lights, filtered through multiple environmental layers, meet a more distinct cessation…
-
A true giant of Polish Pop music comes out of the wilderness to join up with a Polish Jazz giant who purposely went into its wilderness to create a masterpiece of Coltrane-influenced Spiritual Jazz…one influenced by the Coltrane we tend to forget. You see, Samarpan has all the touchstones of one Turiyasangitananda Alice Coltrane.
-
One of my favorite albums from one of my favorite record label series. Largely piano-based, José Luis Macias’s Regreso a Valencia (Returning to Valencia) touched on that personal essence that made other albums like Toshifumi Hinata’s or Ichiko Hashimoto’s so intimate and gorgeous. Combining western-style minimalism with their own more regional, neoclassical styles, all these releases affect austerity at first, but…
-
Funk can sometimes come from the unlikeliest of places. Take for example: Hollywood. Hollywood, and America’s West Coast one could argue, has always been a haven for all sorts of groove maestros…but Tallinn, Estonia? Estonia, that’s where the creators of Zuke hail from. From an ex-Soviet country that barely has a record industry one would be hard-pressed to…
-
Tokyo, Berlin, London and other points in between, are the locales touched by Meat the Beat an intriguing work from surprisingly prolific (yet largely unknown) Japanese musician Takumi Iwasaki. Eleven songs in total, nine sung in English, two in Germany, with a startling album cover touching on the austere visuals of Berlin-era Bowie, should it be any surprise that what you’ll…
-
ere’s another fascinating release from the CODA label. I say fascinating because Frugivores’ New Age Songs vacillates between a thin line of taste. As you listen to the album initially, one doesn’t know whether to truly recommend it as a listen. But as the album continues, one hears certain songs, forcing you to fire up the old WordPress account and…
-
imeless Italo-disco featuring an album cover its designer could only love, it’s Walter Beinat’s (aka Peter Richard) Frozen Red. The album’s main hook is the unsung club banger “Walking In the Neon.” Nearly seven minutes long, the audacious electronic mix of Hi-NRG, post-punk, and post-disco still gives rise to a constant DJ request: what the hell was that? Quite atmospheric for such…
-
ot much is known about the Japanese female/male musical duo Tolerance made up of Junko Tange and Masami Yoshikawa. Understatement of understatements, even 36 years later the forward-thinking slab of music a few people know of as Divin has yielded little in terms of discovery on how the duo came to be, and (more importantly) why/how they…
-
We’re in the wilderness now. If nothing puts you there, Takami’s 天使行 Y. De Noir Ⅱ will. Playing out like a modern Japanese update on Nico’s Marble Index or Desertshore, Takami’s debut album sounds like little else. 天使行 roughly translates to “Angel Line” giving you, the listener, a clue into what the theme of the album is about. Were these songs…
-
ugust 21st, 1988 in Rotterdam, Netherlands must have been some kind of wonderful night. On that night, the music of composer Madrileño Mariano Lozano-Platas played to a crowd of 250,000 in attendance (and millions on TV) in an event unlike any seen/heard before. Heralding the designation of Rotterdam as the culture capital of European 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