fourth world

  • Now here’s a man after my own musical heart. Untied to any single genre or set on creating some easily classifiable, Mark Wood’s La Mezcla takes a tastemaker’s approach to the DJ mix and applies it to the musical medium: the album. Sadly, on his only release, on La Mezcla we hear all sorts of…

  • One of my worst kept secrets is my love for Diana Pequeno’s Mistérios. It’s no mystery that it hits all the points I love about music: it’s dreamy, it’s complex but easy going, it’s the product of an artist going out on a limb (in a way most wouldn’t expect). Most importantly, the reason Mistérios…

  • For such a short solo career Gianni Nocenzi’s work is quite mercurial. In the span of two albums, recorded five years apart, this giant of Italian prog released music that sounded like little else he’d ever do. Most importantly, here, in 1993’s Soft Songs he tries to cross a bridge few would actually venture to…

  • I should stop saying this but it still boggles my mind that certain names aren’t more well known everywhere. Case in point: one Daisaku Kume. A rarity in the Japanese music biz, Daisaku Kume’s Eastern Shore was one of the few early Japanese ambient records released outside of Japan. An even bigger rarity was that…

  • Sometimes half the battle choosing what to share on this blog is figuring out how to describe music that has trouble defining itself. Berlin’s Achim Gieseler, aka Jakino, of Jakino’s 7th World has no such problem. Achim had a long career making music for films, theater, and television, and an equally varied career backing up…

  • Once again I feel like I might not do justice to someone of such stature as Matti Caspi. A true giant of Israeli Pop music, it was Matti who spurred so many trends simply by following his muse, wherever it led to. Once there, he’d come back, fusing Israeli music with styles like psychedelia, prog,…

  • How does one get into the surprisingly prolific work of S.E.N.S. made up of the duo of Akihiko Fukaura and Yukari Katsuki? You start at the very beginning. Japanese readers probably don’t need me to rehash all this old history, but seeing as how S.E.N.S. is practically an institution (if not an actual company) in…

  • It almost seems criminal to listen to Gaia (An Ecological Meditation) by Belfast’s own David “Hopi” Hopkins through headphones or inside (through speakers). Created, initially, as an exercise to create spontaneous, organically-generated music using as “lo-tech” instruments as possible, morphed into David tapping into more of that primordial power found within ancient tools. Drone tubes,…

  • Take a look at the image above. What you see is an image of a creature belonging to the Daphnia genus. Entirely microscopic in size, a plankton that’s aquatic in nature, and unable to move (or to put it precisely: float) without something else propelling it along — much like certain jellyfish — it’s both…

  • Let’s have a talk about cancel culture. I refuse to endorse any images that will promote racism of any kind. We punch up, not down, here. It’s for that reason I have to confront legitimately racist works, like the comics and anime behind Open Sesame’s! Chocolate Panic, with some modicum of introspection. Although the music…

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