japan
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It’s time to fall back. Rather than entreat you with another long-winded overview of another artist’s work, how about we revisit just one more time this other work by Shinsuke Honda: Silence. Whereas Banka (Late Summer) played to the varied moods of late summer, of course, Silence from its album cover to its ruminative, meditative,…
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Banka (Late Summer). What a name? Before I get ahead of myself, my apologies for not sharing the work of Shinsuke Honda much earlier. It’s one of my flaws as a music writer. I see music not in a stylistic sense but through an environmental lens. If it’s not in season, it’s not the time…
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When I was asked to make a mix for KPISS.FM’s “Paradise Of Replica” regularly hosted by fellow reader/guest contributor Canterel, plus Himiko and Kyle Kyle, I felt inspired by what is their regular episode opener. It’s a brief intro featuring a snippet of from intro track to After Dinner’s brilliant album of the same name…
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Sometimes I think various music reviewers and blogs bandy the term “floating” a bit too loosely with music. What some might think of as a floater seems to be a bit lightweight to me. However, in the case of Hiroki Komazawa’s Feliz, no other term comes closest to describing it. Here there is just one…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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?
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