japan
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Blue. What does the color “blue” sound like? I don’t believe that’s a question I (or others) easily answer. Barriers to sensation, usually, come via barriers from feel. The eyes can’t experience what the mouth can taste or skin can touch. Traveling. That’s a word that helps. Music can, in some ways, paint a picture…
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Talk about worlds within worlds. Isn’t that the essence of Keishi Urata’s 世界の果て (Final Frontier)? It’s about combining electronically-imagined sound atmospheres with otherworldly IRL, acoustic instruments. It’s about exploring the edges of jazz, ambient, and traditional music for an imaginary soundtrack to imaginary environs. It’s a work full of mystery from a man whose whole…
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As I fish my increasingly puzzled brain, trying to suss out words for Amahoro’s Flowering Of The Spirit (いのちの花), I go back to just how unlikely of a story and of a pairing these two came to be. You see, if you didn’t know who was behind the music, you wouldn’t think it was the…
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I’ve always had a belief: it’s that you can really tell a lot about a person by what they listen to, how they create, or what inspires them to create. As I read interviews with today’s focus, Hajime Mizoguchi, I sense that his music speaks volume of the person he is. Elegant, graceful, yet uniquely…
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What exactly gives life to any inanimate object? Is it the way it looks? Is it the way we interact with it? Or is it the memories we attach to it? I imagine these were some of the many questions revolving around Yoshihiro Kanno’s head when he was invited to create environmental music to fill…
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“Now, we’re all under stress. What music do you need to get rid of it? You can find it with this.” – From the liner notes to ストレス・クリニック<自信がつく> (Stress Clinic) Couldn’t have said it better myself. You see, much like many of you, I am not immune to the stresses of life. And lord knows,…
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Certain albums are pretty hard to justify, or quantify, the how, when, or why to share. Salon Music’s O Boy isn’t one of them. My only regret is how long it’s taken me to get to writing about it. Far from being “alien” to any of your musical taste — in its proto-shoegaze, proto-noise, dream…
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Surely, he must have known. That’s all I can think about when I listen to Katsuhiko Nakagawa’s memorial album, Again, Me… Released just months after his untimely death, this best-of collection served as a memory of a young artist who seemed just at the cusp of doing one other great step forward. It’s not often…
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‘Tokiko Kato’ – now that’s a name. A giant of Japanese folk music, it was Tokiko who in many ways was at the vanguard, transforming Shōwa era traditional ideas into more nebulous regions throughout her musical career. But what do you say when, supposedly, such an artist ages out of innovating? Do you put their…
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“Prince.” Now with that out of the way, can I focus on what I think is one of J-Soul’s least heralded and easily most slept-on albums: Shinji Harada’s Doing Wonders (ドゥーイング・ワンダース)? Before you think that all this blog likes to share is background music for taking a nap or studying, I’d like to let you…
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