new age
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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…
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Marcus Miller, this is your redemption song. Marcus Miller. Marcus Miller, man, where do I begin? For so long, had I absolutely loathe what you did to one of my all-time favorite musicians. It was your slap bass that figuratively sunk Miles Davis’s career when he needed you the most — really. You were the…
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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,…
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It’s not often you stumble upon an album quite like this one. A huge debt of thanks goes out to a fellow reader, Francis, for sharing Kazutoki Umezu’s Diva with me (the first of two, from him, I’ll share with you). I’m still grinning from end to end just looking at the credits of this…
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Well, this one’s a tough ‘un to describe. Meditative, elegiac, and at points quite melancholic, André Geraissati’s DADGAD is another instrumental, guitar album that uses it’s one voice to say so many things. In this case, it is André Geraissati’s wonderful fusion of Americana and Anglophilic roots music with Brazilian sambista rhythms and edgings of open-tuned “eastern” music…
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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…
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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)…
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You always begin with a blank canvas. Then, you fill it with as many colors and shapes you need. Ending with a blank canvas is the ideal of any meditation. Music for meditation, as the late Fumio Miyashita’s Tenkawa Isuzu intends to be, should be an oxymoron. I beg to differ. You see, meditation itself…
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I might be stringing myself out there but it’s due time for me to bring up the unbridled, unheralded genius of Seiji Toda — and to be more specific: Real Fish’s Tenon. Much like Scritti Politti’s Green Gartside, one listen to a Seiji Toda group — Shi-Shonen, Real Fish, or Fairchild — or his production…
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The dream continues…coming in next, but arguably first in its conception, is my mix for Radio Jiro on NTS. In this mix I’ll continue to flesh out this esoteric idea of Walearic music. As mentioned in my previous Walearic mix, it’s a conceptual genre of Japanese music looking beyond strict influence from western Pop music and turning it’s eye instead…
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