ambient
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Be honest. How many of you know someone (or are friends or acquaintances) with a certain somebody that in the way they act, the way they dress or think, seem not of this era? I keep thinking of this thought when I go back to Toshihiro Nakanishi’s music and this selection: You Make Me Blue.…
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I think, if I’m going to try to “sell” something to you, I should try to to sell it to myself first. For me, what instantly “gets” me about Chen Ming-chang’s music occurs around two minutes into “淡水騎車 (Riding In Danshui)” off this, his soundtrack to Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Dust In The Wind.
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Don’t ask me why but it seems that jewelry companies always find a way to leverage their buying power to commission others to create some of the most interesting music-related value propositions. In plain speak: I’m holding an album, 4℃’s Christmas Suite, given as a holiday gift to (what I imagine) were there well-to-do customers,…
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I imagine, much like me, many of you have a peculiar relationship with Christmas (and winter holidays, in general). Yes, this time of the year can appear to be one marketing blitz blowing past another. Yes, religion can rear its inexplicable head and be injected into places one might not want to experience it. Yes,…
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I hate to say this but this review might be one of the lighter ones. Not because of the album itself – the whole package is truly wonderful (a mix of nostalgia, elegance, and a certain uniqueness, tying quasi-ambient, quasi-neoclassical music with gorgeous photography of Hokkaido) – but because of the lack of information about…
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Recently, while dabbling in the world of wine reviews, I’ve been ruminating on a term that I believe would be well-adapted for use in the music criticism realm: QPR. “QPR”, or quality-to-price-ratio, is a term used by wine aficionados to denote how much bang for your buck inexpensive wines can provide. While it’s awfully rich…
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How many intersectional studies can one make? Yes, all of them, it seems for Jin De-zhe. It’s not often you get to write about a Chinese physicist of ethnic Korean descent who moonlights in making gorgeous ambient folk music recorded in Beijing sung in Cantonese Mandarin (editor’s note: sorry for the mix-up) for the Hong…
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It is my hope that more than a few of you out there can truly appreciate the brilliance of pianist Yuriko Nakamura’s debut: Wind And Reflections. Frankly, I expect that something that sounds this painfully out of time requires one to have a certain palette to understand it but if you have it here’s hoping…
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God sure does move in mysterious ways. Listening to Phil Keaggy’s The Wind And Wheat is a fitting testament to that. Only in our realm can an autodidact, Christian musician from Youngstown, Ohio, who only has the faculty of nine of his ten fingers, be more than just an unsung guitar hero (perhaps the “greatest”…
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When, or if, someone would ask me what kind of album I think perfectly encapsulates the promise of ‘80s music in Japan, I’d say look no further than Macoto Tezka Presents Reiko Okano’s Fancy Dance (ファンシイダンス). As before, I’ll be the first to raise my hand and state: “If you’re looking for someone who is…
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