minimalist
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As the year begins to draw to a close, my mind goes back to some of the people we lost this year. I’m thinking of artist’s artists like Alan Rankine, Pharoah Sanders, Tina Turner, and YMO greats (like the sorely missed Ryuichi Sakamoto and Yukihiro Takahashi). In this year full of great loss, at the…
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15 years can fly by. Yet, 19 years can seem like a blink. You see, it was in fact 19 years ago — if one can completely trust the internet — when a germ of a thought and of a vision was being created, one piece at a time, when Ricks and April were hand-painting…
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Sometimes I have to catch myself. Do I really want to go down the rabbit hole, searching for information…not for some brilliant bit of music…but for…a well-off music production company? If you, like me, have a bunch of records with literally no-name behind who created them, what do you do when you’re staring down Toyo…
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You know, sometimes you’ve got to step back and realize that there’s only so much thread to pull at. It’s not ideal, but it’s something I keep reminding myself of when I have to write about (or share an album) much like Sha’aban Yahya’s Return To Jogja.
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A wiser person than me once said: serit arbores, quae alteri saeclo prosint or he that plants trees, loves others beside himself. It’s a saying that would later gain life as the old adage, “Blessed is he who plants trees under whose shade he will never sit.” I’m thinking of that phrase specifically because I’ve…
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It’s not often that I review something that has me digging through my old piano-playing notes, yet here I am, looking for the right words to convey the construction of sheer joy coming from David Oliver’s music (and specifically his, Hope For La Roo). ‘Trills’, ‘octave runs’, ‘arpeggios’, ‘flageolet’, are some of the not-so-random words…
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Recently, while dabbling in the world of wine reviews, I’ve been ruminating on a term that I believe would be well-adapted for use in the music criticism realm: QPR. “QPR”, or quality-to-price-ratio, is a term used by wine aficionados to denote how much bang for your buck inexpensive wines can provide. While it’s awfully rich…
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Don’t ask me why but I have something to literally share with you. For some reason I’ve been carrying around Aki Fukakusa’s Silk Strings Enchanting everywhere I go lately. In this weird time in my life, in between moving to a new place and getting rid of the old baggage, I packed up all my…
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Due to unforeseen circumstances — aka moving all my record collection to a new locale/home — once again I have to go into the well of knowledge, you the readers, have passed on to me to pass on something else back. Today’s post comes courtesy of a great find by sometime guest, Francis Heaney, who…
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I hate giving you just a taste of anything but Né Ladeiras’s Corsaria has to serve as one today. Ambient and ethereal, Corsaria rightfully belongs in a certain pantheon of Portuguese music, much like the work of Zeca Afonso (and others), trying to bridge that gap between the moorless, Portuguese fado tradition and whatever new…
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