new age

  • I should stop saying this but it still boggles my mind that certain names aren’t more well known everywhere. Case in point: one Daisaku Kume. A rarity in the Japanese music biz, Daisaku Kume’s Eastern Shore was one of the few early Japanese ambient records released outside of Japan. An even bigger rarity was that…

  • Sometimes half the battle choosing what to share on this blog is figuring out how to describe music that has trouble defining itself. Berlin’s Achim Gieseler, aka Jakino, of Jakino’s 7th World has no such problem. Achim had a long career making music for films, theater, and television, and an equally varied career backing up…

  • How does one get into the surprisingly prolific work of S.E.N.S. made up of the duo of Akihiko Fukaura and Yukari Katsuki? You start at the very beginning. Japanese readers probably don’t need me to rehash all this old history, but seeing as how S.E.N.S. is practically an institution (if not an actual company) in…

  • It almost seems criminal to listen to Gaia (An Ecological Meditation) by Belfast’s own David “Hopi” Hopkins through headphones or inside (through speakers). Created, initially, as an exercise to create spontaneous, organically-generated music using as “lo-tech” instruments as possible, morphed into David tapping into more of that primordial power found within ancient tools. Drone tubes,…

  • I had a feeling I’d find a way to touch on one of the record label MMC’s other brilliant gems this year but I didn’t think it would be this way. How does one capture the current milieu? Unable to go much of anywhere at the moment, living either in open denial or in excessive…

  • Isn’t it wonderful when you can skip just whole bits of history and get to the pertinent parts? Such is the case with Franco Mussida’s Racconti Della Tenda Rossa (or Tales Of The Red Curtain), made by someone who most of you may already know as the founding member and lead guitarist (and sometimes vocalist)…

  • Let’s take what we can from the late Toshiya Sukegawa’s Bioçic Music – Astrology. Another album in the little understood (or heard) environmental music genre, this album tries to add its own notch to a new totem other composers experimented with in Japan around this period. Graceful, meditative, and quite quiet it was meant to…

  • Sometimes, I feel like I may lead you even further down rabbit holes I’ve fallen into. Case in point: Dream Dolphin’s Atmospheric Healing. Released in 1996, on Harry Hosono’s FOA Records label, Atmospheric Healing began to stretch the label’s original concept of releasing “folk-oriented art” music into something they’d dub the “force of ambient”. Impossible…

  • Pardon me a bit today, for there is a whole lot to unpack behind this work Flesh & Bone’s Skeleton Woman. So, I’ll have to parse things out just a bit. First, I’ll classify this release under the “fourth world” banner but still feel that’s not quite doing justice to it. Part jazz, part ambient,…

  • For those that don’t believe we can there’s a way to engage with the outside world while stuck inside one’s inner space, Awa Muse‘s second compilation: しおのみち ニの巻 (Shio-No-Michi) Vol.2 proves there are other ways to meet it there.

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