minimalist

  • The Green Chinese Table

    This one is a bit special. Last we heard from Seigen, he was introducing us to his very jazz-influenced take on Japanese New Age music. On the follow up to that epic debut, The Green Chinese Table, we find Seigen dividing his time up between recording sessions in Tokyo and New York City. It’s impossible…

  • It would be easy to supplant whatever I stated in my post for Nuno Canavarro’s Plux Quba and simply transport it here. If we include Roberto Musci & Giovanni Venosta’s Water Messages On Desert Sand, as another trafficking in that gorgeous unplaceable thing — then we can think of it as another forgotten reimagining of…

  • More Dutch love for these close-to-summer days. The final album by Nasmak, Silhouette, truth be told, was a sell-out. And truth be told, was absolutely their best work. I imagine it was a hard sell to quantify back then, take a spellbinding blend of Japanese-indebted electronic pop, mix in the sinewy, fretless-bass sound of Japan-”the…

  • toshifumi hinata

    Toshifumi Hinata, what can one say about Toshifumi? By far one of my favorite artists and composers, it’s not hard for me to talk about his career and music without ruminating over his work with some wild wanderlust affectation. I’ll spare you that, though, because you don’t need me fawning over one of my personal,…

  • Romie Singh’s Masters is more than just one killer 12” dub plate surrounded by lord knows what. Masters is a wonderful reminder of the bit of delightful weirdness that Romie was able to capture in a bottle, some months in Hamburg, in 1986. Masters was an early collection of proto-future Pop from someone who managed…

  • jeanmichel

    Holding fast to some heartfelt theory, I do believe the best musicians aren’t always, exactly “musicians” themselves. Joining us today in our personal, illustrious group which includes Steve Hiett and Brian Eno, is native Frenchman Jean-Michel Gascuel. In the span of two years, from 1982 through 1984, Jean-Michel Gascuel released two albums C’Est L’Premier Pas…

  • When we last left off discovering the “comfiest music” on earth (all self-appointed, of course), Gontiti was gently surprising me both at a Japanese hair salon and, later on, at home discovering their little known, early experimental work. Today, I go even further back, to their beginnings as a duo ever more in tune with…

  • Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right, here I am, stuck in the middle with Shadowfax’s The Dreams Of Children. Clearly, a dividing line between their more celebrated/known early work as Windham Hill darlings of jazz/fusion and their later work as ultra-smooth New Age group, The Dreams of Children (seems to me)…

  • It’s hard for me to separate Mick’s past from the work you’ll hear in Titles. Still impossibly underrated and unaccounted for — compared to the actual influence he put in motion — there is just something truly unique found in the late Mick Karn’s bass technique, musicality, and ideas. Titles, his first solo work after leaving Japan,…

  • Gabriela Marrone’s Altas Planicies is the very quiet work of a true pioneer. Born of rural, Argentinian descent, but cosmopolitan via adolescent growth, Gabriela took what could have been a forgettable life as a diplomat’s daughter and used it as a way to develop personally into the inspirational force she came to be.

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