new age
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Hard to describe what’s going on in Triangulus and Björn J:son Lindh. The closest analog I could think of would be what would happen if the Alan Parson’s Project relocated to the island of Majorca and replaced their members with Swedish electro-acoustic minimalists. Imagine a very math-y (complex, musical time signatures galore) version of Balearic…
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These are the things that surprise sometimes. I went into researching some background story behind Hajime Mizoguchi’s deeply affecting Halfinch Dessert and wound up uncovering that their is some meaning behind this album. Hajime Mizoguchi was born and raised in Tokyo. By the age of eleven he had chosen to educate himself in the ways…
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What’s with Japanese session bass players? Yoshio Suzuki, Tsugutoshi Goto, Hirobumi Suzuki, etc. and now Motohiko Hamase, all at one point or another decide to show the world that they can do more than lay down a tasty bass line. #Notes of Forestry shows exactly how fascinating their own ideas can be when they’re given…
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Takashi Toyoda’s Big Bang promises in the back cover “total spiritual stability and stress relief” through 40-odd minutes of Japanese New Age music. What really stands out, though, is the word “BIG BANG” in the album title. Attempting to provide some respite from a stark external world, Takashi tries to create the first 1/f fluctuation…
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So cool and forgotten. Very little is explored from such an integral member of the Art of Noise, that’s what makes this work enticing and exciting. Anne Dudley’s bite-sized background music for audio visual, television, radio, films, jingles, slide presentations, and advertising – part of a larger, less interesting “muzak” series – achieves exactly what…
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There is a time in any good musician’s life when they absolutely nail down whatever they had to place. Akira Ito, one time keyboardist for influential Japanese psych rock outfit The Far East Band, could have stayed with that group rehashing “out there” musical troupes – variations on psychedelia with The FABs or Kitaro-like, Jean-Michel…
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Heavy, shamanic, tectonic Fourth World music from French-American composer, of Cherokee descent, Steve Shehan. Primarily a percussionist, Steve developed his own improvisational recording method to be able to capture the moody, spiritual, polyrhythmic music of his favorite Indonesian music tradition, working to translate it to modern environs and add other non-Western influences from the Middle…
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There are so many sides this next recording could fall under: New Age, ambient, environmental music, muzak, tone poems – I choose to give Dan Gibson’s Harmony: Exploring Nature With Music a personal tip of the hat in the direction of worthwhile music. A native of Montreal, Dan Gibson was the internationally renowned wildlife film-maker who…
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Let’s try a little tenderness from Mitsuru Sawamura, otherwise known as Mich Live, one-time member of Japanese band Interior (with whom he wrote songs like “Luft” and “Park“) and brilliant session musician for others like Yukihiro Takahashi, Hajime Tachibana, Pierre Barouh, and Mari Iijima. In 1988, Mitsuru released under the Newsic label (home of Yoshio Ojima) something that straddles…
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I’m truly thankful I live in a world where circumstances led Londoner Morgan Fisher to visit Japan, fall in love with country, and proceed to sell nearly all of his life’s work to make his living there. Some would say it was a foolhardy move but it’s a move that proved essential to his reinvention…
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