environmental music
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There are so many sides this next recording could fall under: New Age, ambient, environmental music, muzak, tone poems – I choose to give Dan Gibson’s Harmony: Exploring Nature With Music a personal tip of the hat in the direction of worthwhile music. A native of Montreal, Dan Gibson was the internationally renowned wildlife film-maker who…
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Let’s try a little tenderness from Mitsuru Sawamura, otherwise known as Mich Live, one-time member of Japanese band Interior (with whom he wrote songs like “Luft” and “Park“) and brilliant session musician for others like Yukihiro Takahashi, Hajime Tachibana, Pierre Barouh, and Mari Iijima. In 1988, Mitsuru released under the Newsic label (home of Yoshio Ojima) something that straddles…
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I’m truly thankful I live in a world where circumstances led Londoner Morgan Fisher to visit Japan, fall in love with country, and proceed to sell nearly all of his life’s work to make his living there. Some would say it was a foolhardy move but it’s a move that proved essential to his reinvention…
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What a lovely hour of music. What’s else is there to say about Ric Kaestner’s criminally unknown Music For Massage? “an hour of soothing music designed for massage therapy” is what the cassette cover states on the Japanese-influenced woodblock album artwork, for once who am I to disagree? Made up of two cassette sides – one a-side devoted…
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Hiroki Okano’s debut 19871990 is startling in more ways than one. A trailblazing stew of new form Japanese ambient and new age minimal music isn’t something you normally see coming out of Germany’s Innovative Communication label. Also surprising, is that for such a fully formed debut, what we’re hearing is actually a collection of works spanning three…
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Yoshio Suzuki writes in a way that breaks up my style of writing. You see, I have a ritual I go through when I write for FOND/SOUND. Normally, I put on the album I feel inspired to write about and try to write my post in the allotted time that album runs through. I do so,…
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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…
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Going back to yesterday’s point about how Music Interior provided a space for musician’s to stretch outside their known fields, today we have another perfect example of what this exactly means. Tokyo-born and bred, Masahide Sakuma started out his career in the pioneering surfabilly/B-52s-influenced Japanese band Plastics. The multi-instrumentalist of the group, it wouldn’t be rare…
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Ichiko Hashimoto on acoustic piano, synthesizer, and vocal – that’s what the liner notes to Ichiko Hashimoto’s one and only release on Music Interior states as musician credits. Titled Ichiko and graced by a truly autumnal album cover, it’s an album that truly sounds like it looks. Ichiko is a musician well-versed in two worlds. As a trained pianist she…
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A promise tendered is a debt owed. I hinted at more music from Music Interior and here’s my first share. Let’s begin our brief sojourn discovering the albums released by Music Interior with Yoshio Suzuki’s meditative Morning Picture. Who was Yoshio Suzuki? On this album he wasn’t quite the musician he was known to be. Three…
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