art pop
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As the year begins to draw to a close, my mind goes back to some of the people we lost this year. I’m thinking of artist’s artists like Alan Rankine, Pharoah Sanders, Tina Turner, and YMO greats (like the sorely missed Ryuichi Sakamoto and Yukihiro Takahashi). In this year full of great loss, at the…
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15 years can fly by. Yet, 19 years can seem like a blink. You see, it was in fact 19 years ago — if one can completely trust the internet — when a germ of a thought and of a vision was being created, one piece at a time, when Ricks and April were hand-painting…
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There’s nothing like youthful naivete is there? I fully believe it’s that ingrained spirit to want to shake things up and light your own path that forces the spirits of the past to look forward to the future. It’s that kind of spirit you hear positively soaring in the unclassifiable music of Koto-Za and their…
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When autumn comes rolling in, I always welcome a fresh wind that shifts my focus elsewhere, towards music with a more folkloric bent. And for some reason, I’m always surprised to be unsurprised by how much there is to harvest from the Irish or Gaelic diaspora. As leaves start to turn and a certain seasonal…
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First off: a huge thank you for Sara Mautone for cluing me in to this album. I say this, because when you listen to Nina Catarina’s Acordei Com Preguiça I think you’re getting to hear something special. What I believe you’re hearing is part of that ongoing Brazilian musical evolution, influenced by the proximity, culture,…
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Timing. Isn’t that what life’s all about? If you’re there at the right moment, it all works out. If you’re there late, you’re at someone else’s fate. If you’re there too early, all that effort might not be for naught. If you’re speaking about Japan’s Kusu Kusu (and their album, 世界が一番幸せな日 (Sekai Ga Ichiban Shiawase…
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I know some have posted this question to me before: “How do you pick what to share on the site?” I wish the answer was easier than: “vibes”. Yet, sometimes it’s not even that. Sometimes, it could be something far more ordinary, and dare I say, less placeable. It could be just one song that,…
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“I was born to sing” – so graces the words of Teresa Carpio, to the Japanese-version of her powerful pan-Asian debut, 心己许 (Tokyo Dreaming). And after listening to the record, who am I to disagree? Much like her voice, it was this record that finally expressed fully the range of her voice and her ideas.
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You know, there’s something strangely meditative about filling out a Discogs credit list. I find it so, because you feel like you contributed to artists getting their proper accreditation and also you getting a fuller picture of how something got made. So, when I finished populating Maria Kawamura’s 「春の夢」 – サンクタス – (or Spring Dream…
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The more I listen to Yang Xiao-lin’s 禧樂 (I Take You There), the more I’m impressed by how malleable folklore is. In the original liner notes, the words “elegant, pure, psychedelic, lively, remote and modern” are thrown as adjectives to describe this album. Myself, at first, I thought each word seemed to contradict the other…but…
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