japan

  • 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…

  • Top down, shades on, it’s time to take Nico’s Valerie out for a spin. Featuring the sterling work of twin brothers Mamoru and Shigeru Shimada, Japan’s answer to America’s Alessi Brothers, so too does Valerie inhabit that same wander zone of genre-defying AOR. Not quite City Pop, not strictly Pop either, it shows all the…

  • Editor’s Note: For today’s post we’re joined by Tristan Pollack sharing a wonderful recording (a collaborative work) between Japanese pop star Seri Ishikawa and totemic composer Toru Takemitsu. According to his bio: Tristan is a composer, musician, writer, born in Tokyo and based in New York City. He has scored original music for feature films…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • You don’t always know where the muse takes you but sometimes you get some semblance of its thoughts. Looking back at my latest mix for LYL Radio I had felt there were huge tell-tale signs pointing me what I needed to discover. What was the Brazilian-Japanese connection?

  • 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…

  • Certain albums just sound special from the get-go. When I put on Ayuo Takahashi’s Nova Carmina instantly I hear something that takes me back. It’s something quite simple: Ayuo’s violin playing streaks of glissando over something he wrote for Aideen Morgan. It’s poetry speaks of a rebirth of sorts, of its narrator finding in the…

  • Some of my favorite artists are those that fluctuate along the same wavelength as yours truly. One of these is the incomparable Ayuo Takahashi. Never moored by any specific idea, his vision is expansive — all is fair game in his musical world. From English folk to mystic Persian devotionals, to electro and mutant funk,…

  • And now some jazz… up next on my ongoing quest to lose half my audience: Yoshio Ohtomo Quartet’s As A Child. I kid, of course. Classifying this under jazz is like classifying Dylan’s latest masterpiece “Murder Most Foul” as rock ‘n’ roll or the multi-layered yeoman tomes of the late John Prine as folk. It’s…

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