minimalist
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You know, sometimes you’ve gotta go with what you’ve got. It was over three years ago when I first discovered Blue (ブルー・碧い海のイマージュ) by Blue on yaoiboi92’s YouTube channel (whom you really should subscribe to if you haven’t done so). I was immediately taken by this album’s meditative blend of aquatic ambient music and organic, almost…
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There’s a fine line between background music and background music. It’s something that’s easier to hear than explain. And one way to do so, is to introduce you to the melodious environmental music of Kyoji Ohno and specifically, his, Kutsurogi (サイコジェネシス・シリーズ くつろぎ) .
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The chirp of crickets, a babbling brook, the melodies of a songbird, certain things trigger a sense of new life or of spring settling in. I say this because I feel the same way about Jimi Chen’s Discovering Arts Behind The Mountains 發現後山的藝術, his “character music” soundtrack for a documentary of the same name (which…
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Listening to Yukihiro Fukutomi’s music takes me back to a different time. It reminds me of the first time I encountered Japanese music. If anyone else remembers this, it was staying up late at night to tune in to MTV’s AMP. It was on AMP that someone like me – far, far, far, from any…
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As a writer, I try to remain as objective as possible and not inject too much of myself into what I review. Yet, as we all know, it’s impossible to completely divorce yourself from a reality: music hits differently. How any piece of music affects you has to be informed by the contours that shape…
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We all have our soft spots. Lately, for me, it’s been sharing certain kinds of “rainy day” albums tailor-made to appeal to the more mature audience. Less fussy with sonics, less messy with pretentiousness, these are the kinds of albums that I’d like to think others would find as graceful, sophisticated, and measured as I…
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First off: a huge tip of my hat to fellow F/S blog reader, Victor Hsu Jui-Ting, for cluing me to today’s album a good while ago. If you know me, you know that video games, anime, and manga are some of the artforms I’m the least versed about and a lot of quality anything is…
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No joke, I too sometimes feel puzzled as you might be with what gets shared on this blog. On a regular day, I’d skirt around sharing something like Thomas Diethelm and Santino Famulari’s Diethelm/Famulari. It could be because there’s little to no information about the musicians…a major reason I hold back, often. It could also…
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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…
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