February 2017

  • imeless Italo-disco featuring an album cover its designer could only love, it’s Walter Beinat’s (aka Peter Richard) Frozen Red. The album’s main hook is the unsung club banger “Walking In the Neon.” Nearly seven minutes long, the audacious electronic mix of Hi-NRG, post-punk, and post-disco still gives rise to a constant DJ request: what the hell was that? Quite atmospheric for such…

  • ot much is known about the Japanese female/male musical duo Tolerance made up of Junko Tange and Masami Yoshikawa. Understatement of understatements, even 36 years later the forward-thinking slab of music a few people know of as Divin has yielded little in terms of discovery on how the duo came to be, and (more importantly) why/how they…

  • We’re in the wilderness now. If nothing puts you there, Takami’s 天使行 Y. De Noir Ⅱ will. Playing out like a modern Japanese update on Nico’s Marble Index or Desertshore, Takami’s debut album sounds like little else. 天使行 roughly translates to “Angel Line” giving you, the listener, a clue into what the theme of the album is about. Were these songs…

  • ugust 21st, 1988 in Rotterdam, Netherlands must have been some kind of wonderful night. On that night, the music of composer Madrileño Mariano Lozano-Platas played to a crowd of 250,000 in attendance (and millions on TV) in an event unlike any seen/heard before. Heralding the designation of Rotterdam as the culture capital of European in…

  • News travels so quickly now that it’s hard to keep up with the cycles of life. Word of Pierre Barouh’s passing, at the end of December 2016, didn’t come recently to me, it came to me this week. It came when I discovered them while researching this thought in my head – of sharing his work at FOND/SOUND.…

  • ho knows what’s going on in the air? Something in it is stirring me to share this wonderful compilation of music brimming with ideas that seem so gauche in our time. It seems like the sweeping, uber romantic, and grandiose music of Parisian Michel Legrand only gets fleeting kudos whenever someone speaks of French music in general, and film…

  • t’s impossible to know how much to believe of Swedish journalist, model, linguist, literary agent, interpreter, and musician Virna Lindt’s backstory. Before the creation of Shiver, it is said that in 1981, while traveling by train to London she met local record producer/artist Tot Taylor and told him of her plan to record an album that would be…

  • assively influenced by American R&B, Do You Like Japan? holds that rare thing for us as listeners: it’s a question posed in the title. Was ex-Plastics frontman Toshio Nakanishi asking us if we liked Japan or was he asking himself that same question? The answer would be hard to tell after you listen to the album. Created after his breakup…

  • he first year of Yen Record’s existence surely must have felt like a fruitful one for its famous YMO founders Haruomi Hosono and Yukihiro Takahashi. Initially begun as an imprint for the Alfa Records company, Yen Records became less of a way to release YMO side projects, and more as a way to expand upon the amount of musical ideas…

  • traight from Duisburg, Germany comes the impressive debut from Klaus Hoffmann-Hoock (otherwise known as Cosmic Hoffmann) on Klaus Schulze’s wonderful Innovative Communication record label. Music For Paradise was Klaus’s attempt to present his spiritual journey from space-disco cosmic man to “woke” Eastern-influenced musician, via various forms of musical movements. Originally titled “Music for Meditation”, somewhere, along its phase from demo…

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