neo-folk
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Some music you discover, and some simply grabs you instantly. For me, the music of Suba, the brilliant Serbian musician Mitar Subotić, is one of them. The line between atmospheric, ambient, New Age, and environmental music is so thin, that to render one type of music, a certain something misses the whole point. With Mitar…
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Koharu, Koharu, wherefore are thou Koharu? That’s the big question rolling around in my head. Koharu Kisaragi’s 都会の生活 Tokai No Seikatsu (which translates to: Urban Life) isn’t just an impressive, largely, unheard of album, it’s also impressive for being largely unknown in details both in what went into its creation and what happened to its creator. This true one-off by Japanese playwright, theater…
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In a way, rebirth is exactly what my third mix is about. Taking cues from various feelings springtime evokes, I wanted to compile a set of songs that moved in concert with the season. By themselves, each song has a faint musical seed that germinates and blooms into a much more pronounced, powerful direction. However, taken as part of a whole, despite…
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ere’s another fascinating release from the CODA label. I say fascinating because Frugivores’ New Age Songs vacillates between a thin line of taste. As you listen to the album initially, one doesn’t know whether to truly recommend it as a listen. But as the album continues, one hears certain songs, forcing you to fire up the old WordPress account and…
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We’re in the wilderness now. If nothing puts you there, Takami’s 天使行 Y. De Noir Ⅱ will. Playing out like a modern Japanese update on Nico’s Marble Index or Desertshore, Takami’s debut album sounds like little else. 天使行 roughly translates to “Angel Line” giving you, the listener, a clue into what the theme of the album is about. Were these songs…
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rquesta de las Nubes, The Cloud Orchestra, isn’t really an orchestra, that we know for sure. What it is is a trio of Spanish musicians aiming to make music that was unlike anything else. While researching the history behind the band I ran across interviews by founder Suso Sáiz mentioning how even they themselves didn’t know the type…
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There’s a vastly more interesting topic hidden in full view of Claire Hamill’s unique and brilliant 1986 release: Voices. What is Voices? It’s an utterly fascinating bit of art pop, a middle ground of Cocteau Twins and Kate Bush -stylistic music, that combines forgotten English Folk with nomadic, electronic dream pop. Composed entirely free of instruments other than her own…
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All I could think about while creating this second mix was Kapalbhati Pranayama. I wanted to treat you to two hours of music that exactly presented what this idea means to me. Kapalbhati Pranayama is the sanskrit phrase for “Breath of Fire”. In a cross-legged, seated position one tries to create internal heat without actually moving the…
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I‘m still struck by this release. It’s hard to realize, but Seigén Ono was only 26 years old when he created his debut album, Seigén. Just months removed from assisting others like Yasuaki Shimizu’s Mariah, David Sylvian, Ryuichi Sakamoto, and Takumi as their mixing engineer or producer, Seigén had just an inkling of all the arrangements he had to get…
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Going back to yesterday’s point about how Music Interior provided a space for musician’s to stretch outside their known fields, today we have another perfect example of what this exactly means. Tokyo-born and bred, Masahide Sakuma started out his career in the pioneering surfabilly/B-52s-influenced Japanese band Plastics. The multi-instrumentalist of the group, it wouldn’t be rare…
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