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Simply phenomenal. That’s a great word to describe Chris Modell’s debut: Equasian. Phenomenally hard to describe. It’s an album released exclusively in Japan by an American artist who got his start translating Japanese lyrics into English for them, and used that entry way to get repaid back, by said Japanese artists, by allowing them to…
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Dr. David Mingyue Liang’s Dialogue With The Ocean merges deep ethnomusicologist study with floating, electronic minimalism for a watery kind of meditative ambient music. With one foot deep in Chinese folk music and another in modern experimental composition, David Mingyue Liang creates something that sounds less like the “Chinese Meditation Music” envisioned by his Tao…
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Pull out your surfboard, put some sangria on ice, and really enjoy this one. A surprisingly unknown masterpiece, and a rare, rare, rare one at that, of Japanese City Pop, J-AOR, or light mellow, no matter what you call The Milky Way’s Summertime Love Song, one thing you can’t say it is is uninspired. Released…
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It almost seems like I really shouldn’t have to write that much about the Water Melon Group. If you don’t know the two main players of this group, the late Toshio Nakanishi and Yann Tomita, now would be a great time to go back into the FOND/SOUND vault and dig up my entries on their…
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Entirely slept-on, to the point that it still boggles my mind how with all the recent reissues and rediscoveries of artists like Telex, Alec Mansion, Li Garattoni, and Linda DiFranco – artists who skirted the line of Balearic, electro-pop, post-disco, and boogie – there hasn’t been room for someone to be woke enough to Montpellier’s…
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Man, what a world to we live in. Just this year Italy’s Archeo Recordings reissued Paolo Modugno’s intriguing debut Brise D’Automne. Once a member of Italian multi-media performance group O.A.S.I., what turned as a love for Middle Eastern and African music transformed into the exploration of new ways to interconnect the electronic with the acoustic…
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If anyone knows me, they’d know this album forms a perfect storm of what I dig about music. I love it when someone actually aims to “sell out” by doing it in such a way that everyone is left dumbfounded by the product of that intended vision. There is one “right” way to pull that…
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Hard to describe what’s going on in Triangulus and Björn J:son Lindh. The closest analog I could think of would be what would happen if the Alan Parson’s Project relocated to the island of Majorca and replaced their members with Swedish electro-acoustic minimalists. Imagine a very math-y (complex, musical time signatures galore) version of Balearic…
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I so had another post in mind for today, but Kunio Muramatsu’s Green Water spoke to me and said: “hold that powder for some other day, the sun’s still shining!”. From the first song on it’s not hard to see why. A flooring collection of meticulously crafted Pop songs screaming “SUMMER!” merit, at least this…
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There’s an appeal to Katsutoshi Morizono’s 4:17 p.m. that can only be heightened, or fully appreciated, during summer, our current time of the year. Cycling from truly elegant compositions – a frequent, recurring theme lately on the blog – 4:17 p.m. mixes jazz fusion, post-bossanova, reggae, light mellow/City Pop, and even experimental bits of New Age…
ambient art pop art rock balearic brazilian electro-acoustic england environmental music experimental fourth world Funk fusion japan jazz minimalist mpb neo-folk neoclassical new age walearic