September 2017
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These are the kinds of albums that really live with you. Sao Paolo native, Edson Natale’s name may be the lead on the album cover, his visage may be the one seen folding in the background (with guitar in hand), but its those other small names around him that make Nina Maika such a beautiful…
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Some music you discover, and some simply grabs you instantly. For me, the music of Suba, the brilliant Serbian musician Mitar Subotić, is one of them. The line between atmospheric, ambient, New Age, and environmental music is so thin, that to render one type of music, a certain something misses the whole point. With Mitar…
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You can always hear music in Steve Hiett’s photography. You can definitely hear the music on the cover of his solo debut, Down On The Road By The Beach. Heavily saturated with color, mesmerizingly flash-lit, and warmly off-center, this image was like an Edgar Degas painting come to life – albeit one fashioned with Miami’s…
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Lightness, sweetness, and melancholia those are things that define Tom Jobim’s career. You don’t need me to regurgitate a whole Wikipedia page to stress his heralded place in Brazilian music history. Together with João Gilberto, Antonio Carlos Jobim allowed for things like space, quietness, and off-beats to have a place in pop music. Everything we…
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Six years after our first introduction to Joan Bibiloni, via his fantastic debut (Joana Lluna), the world had moved under him. For A Future Smile presented Joan Bibiloni in a way unlike anything before. Just a year earlier Joan had been commissioned by a Spanish TV network to create a soundtrack for a nature documentary.…
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Something so simple as an album of 10-string viola caipira instrumentals shouldn’t sound so impressive, but leave it to Campo Grande native Almir Sater to make you rethink a whole lot of something. This release, Instrumental, was more than just a musical document of some brief musical sojourn, it was a massive peek into the…
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Simply phenomenal. That’s a great word to describe Chris Modell’s debut: Equasian. Phenomenally hard to describe. It’s an album released exclusively in Japan by an American artist who got his start translating Japanese lyrics into English for them, and used that entry way to get repaid back, by said Japanese artists, by allowing them to…
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Dr. David Mingyue Liang’s Dialogue With The Ocean merges deep ethnomusicologist study with floating, electronic minimalism for a watery kind of meditative ambient music. With one foot deep in Chinese folk music and another in modern experimental composition, David Mingyue Liang creates something that sounds less like the “Chinese Meditation Music” envisioned by his Tao…
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Pull out your surfboard, put some sangria on ice, and really enjoy this one. A surprisingly unknown masterpiece, and a rare, rare, rare one at that, of Japanese City Pop, J-AOR, or light mellow, no matter what you call The Milky Way’s Summertime Love Song, one thing you can’t say it is is uninspired. Released…
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