new age
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Talk about being in the right place and at the right time. Normally, I’m not blessed with great timing but I consider myself fortunate to reach Randy Honea when he had his last copy of Still Life. Now sitting in front of me, in real life, was this, his album — a heady, moving mix…
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It’s time to fall back. Rather than entreat you with another long-winded overview of another artist’s work, how about we revisit just one more time this other work by Shinsuke Honda: Silence. Whereas Banka (Late Summer) played to the varied moods of late summer, of course, Silence from its album cover to its ruminative, meditative,…
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Banka (Late Summer). What a name? Before I get ahead of myself, my apologies for not sharing the work of Shinsuke Honda much earlier. It’s one of my flaws as a music writer. I see music not in a stylistic sense but through an environmental lens. If it’s not in season, it’s not the time…
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Now here’s a man after my own musical heart. Untied to any single genre or set on creating some easily classifiable, Mark Wood’s La Mezcla takes a tastemaker’s approach to the DJ mix and applies it to the musical medium: the album. Sadly, on his only release, on La Mezcla we hear all sorts of…
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Sometimes I think various music reviewers and blogs bandy the term “floating” a bit too loosely with music. What some might think of as a floater seems to be a bit lightweight to me. However, in the case of Hiroki Komazawa’s Feliz, no other term comes closest to describing it. Here there is just one…
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I’m glad we’ve gotten hints of the special work Lee Byung-Woo has done quietly behind the scenes in his native Korea. I wager some of you’ve already heard his music soundtracking Bong Joon-Ho’s brilliant films like The Host and Mother. Somewhere lost to our shores has been Lee Byung-Woo’s earlier trailblazing career. 1989’s 1집 –…
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For such a short solo career Gianni Nocenzi’s work is quite mercurial. In the span of two albums, recorded five years apart, this giant of Italian prog released music that sounded like little else he’d ever do. Most importantly, here, in 1993’s Soft Songs he tries to cross a bridge few would actually venture to…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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