healing music

  • Certain things aren’t lost on me. Whenever I look at my time slot at LYL Radio I feel a sense of responsibility. Each month on Wednesday, I end their programming day. For some, it’s 11 PM Paris time. While for others (like myself) it’s 4 PM Central Standard time. While one part of the world…

  • Let’s hope this post posits something with clarity. You see, yours truly, has been mightily under the weather this week and propping myself up to put words on screen has been (equally) that much of a struggle. Thankfully, this week, Shiho Yabuki’s New Meditation the subject of this post, has provided  perfect backgrounding music to…

  • And now some jazz… *Quietly watches all my readers’ eyes glaze over*. For those who can appreciate the bigger “jazz” picture, here’s Hiroki Miyano’s D / I/ V /E /R /G /E. Showcasing Hiroki Miyano’s wonderfully elegant guitar playing, D / I/ V /E /R /G /E takes great pains not to rock the boat…

  • We all have our palette cleansers. For me, musically, it’s “acoustic” music. I know I have a large readership that appreciates the more electronic, out there, musical selections…but truth be told, when I’m listening to music for relaxation I prefer far more “simple” music. That’s not to say that we should think of simply-sounding music…

  • We’re back in the thick of it. Divining that perfect balance of nature and melody, Satoshi Sumitani now joins us in this long journey through Japanese environmental music. Part of CBS/Sony’s quite forward-thinking environmental music imprint, Sound Forest, 不思議の森~Forest Marvelously~ (or Fushigi no mori, Mysterious Forest) took ideas that were taking root in Japan’s New…

  • There’s a moment in Hiroya Minakuchi + Missing Link’s Dolphin that never ceases to take my breath away: a minute into “The Cradle Of The Ocean”, the sound of actual dolphin speech mingles with a plaintive piano melody to deliver a sublime aquatic ballad that exudes what I think is perfect example of “womb music”.…

  • Someone’s going to look back at this post and wonder: “why the hell did this guy write so much about what amounts to be adult lullaby music”. Well, stopping “theoretical person” in their track, I do so because this kind of music is unlike much else you’ll hear today. Ken-Ichiro Isoda’s ナチュラル・トリップ マジエルの星, which (don’t…

  • This next one, for me, has been pretty special ever since I received it. It took me a while to pinpoint why exactly I loved Tomoyuki Asakawa’s Relaxation Music For Harp And Wave. Everytime I put it on bits and pieces of familiarity crept into my subconscious. I kept thinking the whole time: “I’ve heard…

  • Illustration by Laura Gomez I usually don’t gravitate towards writing about something I didn’t include in a mix but I just have to make an exception this time, with the final volume of the Japanese New Age and Ambient series I created for NTS. Satoshi Sumitani’s “金の星と銀の星” (Kin No Hoshi To Gin No Hoshi) from 不思議の森~Forest…

  • Illustration by Laura Gomez By fits and starts I struggled, for some reason, to create this latest mix for NTS. I had so many ideas. Scrapping them one by one, until I settled on something. “Fire”, this element could mean so many things. I wanted it to mean one thing: breath.

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