July 2017

  • 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…

  • Nothing makes one cringe more than when someone tries to “modernize” traditional music. The issue isn’t with modernization but with trying to will it so that “traditional” music has no way of becoming modern other than by adding modernity to it. What does this all mean? It means that the jaw-dropping music of Italian quartet…

  • Now this, this right here, is the promised boogie wonderland. The late Michele Francesco Puccioni’s (aka Mike Francis) 1984 debut is that unheralded statement piece of funk and R&B music that once you have your chance to get your hands on you’ll never forget. Let’s Not Talk About It was the product of some hard-earned…

  • Power can manifest itself in many ways. Power isn’t always in the density of something but in the lightness of it. Kenji Omura’s spirited take on funk, sophisticated pop, and so many other smooth genres comes together into one powerful album: Gaijin Heaven. The late, great Kenji Omura, one time or some time YMO guitarist,…

  • MIX5.4

    When conceiving my latest mix all I could think about was the works of master Impressionist painters. Where other painters try to highlight the contours and contrasts shapes, objects, and environments have between each other, these Impressionists tried to understand connections found among still and moving life. It’s an understanding of the beauty of gradients…

  • african

    We might not all be able to know the way to get on that righteous path but there are signals that could help us get there. These are ones found merely by observing that walk to it, in others. Adrian Sherwood’s experimental reggae and dub label On-U Sound wouldn’t have been what it came to…

  • 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…

  • 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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