new age
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What a week? Now that we can breathe again, I’d love to share a bit of music that seems to have given me a bit of respite lately. A bit twee for some, a bit too measured for others, for some reason, the pianoscapes of Michael Jones have hit that perfect spot for me lately…
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Get your wet boots, we’re going off the salt road with the brilliant Japanese kalimba master and kalimba maker, Bun. Koh-Tao’s Tayu-Tayu is a furthering of a sound you were introduced to in Awa Muse’s wonderful fourth world compilation series, Shio-No-Michi. Here we get a chance to listen to what originally was a four piece…
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If you’ve followed this blog for a while now, you’ve probably realized that I make no bones about my love for and promotion of folk music. And, usually, around this time of the year you actually get a bigger peek into this, one of my earliest musical loves, via various albums or mixes I share…
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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…
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