new age
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What exactly gives life to any inanimate object? Is it the way it looks? Is it the way we interact with it? Or is it the memories we attach to it? I imagine these were some of the many questions revolving around Yoshihiro Kanno’s head when he was invited to create environmental music to fill…
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You know, sometimes the struggle is simply trying to quantify how unique something is. I’ve been listening to Liu Xing’s 無所事 (To Do Nothing) for more than a while now and every time I try to find an angle to share it on the site, I backtrack and hold off (thinking I’ll do it and…
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“Now, we’re all under stress. What music do you need to get rid of it? You can find it with this.” – From the liner notes to ストレス・クリニック<自信がつく> (Stress Clinic) Couldn’t have said it better myself. You see, much like many of you, I am not immune to the stresses of life. And lord knows,…
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Brace yourselves, let’s see how far I can take this review of Javier Zuazu’s Cuaderno De Invierno (or A Winter Journal). What was this album? 50-odd minutes of Spanish New Age that hovers from impressionistic piano-led instrumentals and wonderfully, minimal, warm and tender ambient mood music. Throw in one gorgeous ballad and once again, I’m…
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I think, if I’m going to try to “sell” something to you, I should try to to sell it to myself first. For me, what instantly “gets” me about Chen Ming-chang’s music occurs around two minutes into “淡水騎車 (Riding In Danshui)” off this, his soundtrack to Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Dust In The Wind.
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I imagine, much like me, many of you have a peculiar relationship with Christmas (and winter holidays, in general). Yes, this time of the year can appear to be one marketing blitz blowing past another. Yes, religion can rear its inexplicable head and be injected into places one might not want to experience it. Yes,…
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I hate to say this but this review might be one of the lighter ones. Not because of the album itself – the whole package is truly wonderful (a mix of nostalgia, elegance, and a certain uniqueness, tying quasi-ambient, quasi-neoclassical music with gorgeous photography of Hokkaido) – but because of the lack of information about…
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How many intersectional studies can one make? Yes, all of them, it seems for Jin De-zhe. It’s not often you get to write about a Chinese physicist of ethnic Korean descent who moonlights in making gorgeous ambient folk music recorded in Beijing sung in Cantonese Mandarin (editor’s note: sorry for the mix-up) for the Hong…
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It is my hope that more than a few of you out there can truly appreciate the brilliance of pianist Yuriko Nakamura’s debut: Wind And Reflections. Frankly, I expect that something that sounds this painfully out of time requires one to have a certain palette to understand it but if you have it here’s hoping…
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God sure does move in mysterious ways. Listening to Phil Keaggy’s The Wind And Wheat is a fitting testament to that. Only in our realm can an autodidact, Christian musician from Youngstown, Ohio, who only has the faculty of nine of his ten fingers, be more than just an unsung guitar hero (perhaps the “greatest”…
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