neo-folk
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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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There’s nothing like youthful naivete is there? I fully believe it’s that ingrained spirit to want to shake things up and light your own path that forces the spirits of the past to look forward to the future. It’s that kind of spirit you hear positively soaring in the unclassifiable music of Koto-Za and their…
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When autumn comes rolling in, I always welcome a fresh wind that shifts my focus elsewhere, towards music with a more folkloric bent. And for some reason, I’m always surprised to be unsurprised by how much there is to harvest from the Irish or Gaelic diaspora. As leaves start to turn and a certain seasonal…
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It’s such a cliche but it’s one that bears repeating: sometimes music just speaks to you. While listening to Chyi Yu’s wonderful covers album, 1987’s Stories, I discovered her interpretation of Don McLean’s little-remembered “Castles In The Air”. Myself in an autumnal-kind of mood, as Chyi sang every lyric, I listened ever closely, and piece…
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Doesn’t it always seem like fall weather brings along autumnal feelings? Nothing speaks to this preternatural connection to our environment quite like art, and in our case: music. You see, in my latest mix for LYL Radio I was inspired quite directly by the song and words of Ayuo Takahashi’s “Across The Seasons”.
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Albums as unique as Lucio Battisti’s Anima Latina are rarely the product of one person’s/band single vision. It’s easy to forget how little by little Lucio was baiting his audience — mostly Italian and rarely big outside of mainland Europe — into letting him explore places his own influences had gone before. He did all…
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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…
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Disclaimer: If I’m wrong on Ossian, please let me be wrong spectacularly. Usually, I do my due diligence and keep some note or bookmark some site when I discover a particular history that could help me write about an artist in the future, whenever I get back to covering them for FOND/SOUND. In this case,…
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What a perfect image. Even William Blake must be blushing at Masumi Hara’s otherworldly portrait for Yoko Ueno’s Voices. Feminine angels (bearing more than just their souls), perfectly trapezing on man-made wires, as ever darkening skies, grow ever more, endlessly, on some barren land. Mystical and philosophical, through one image Yoko Ueno’s Voices had its…
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It is with great joy that I’ve decided to share Killing Time’s Irene. Undoubtedly one of the toughest groups to describe on this hear blog, Killing Time hovers among so many styles and moods that to render them one thing or another would miss the point of their existence. Irene, though, in 1988, perfectly placed…
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