Diego Olivas

  • Vibe with me for just a bit longer. As you can surmise, lately, I’ve been touching on a more universal kind of music. It’s this shift that’s letting me to revisit and share some of what I think has flown under the radar. And in today’s case, it’s Yoshimi Iwasaki’s daring and quite forward-thinking reemergence…

  • When I wrote about Rie Miyazawa, I knew I’d have to come back to share another interesting side trip she’d take. In this case, it’s Rie’s work with Tadashi Namba and Takeshi Itoh on Tokyo Elevator Girl (東京エレベーターガール), a fascinating coda to her inspiring early ‘90s period, a soundtrack to Japanese TV drama of the…

  • Do you know who I don’t envy? Pop stars. Out of all the careers or aspirations one can hold in the music business, none holds a candle to the sheer amount of stress, anxiety, work, and all-encompassing human problems that one will endure to simply make it as a pop artist. Rockers, jazz artists, and…

  • Out of all the things I remember about my time in Japan, funny enough, one thing I can’t seem to forget is this: just how “French” so many things are. Walking down the street, shopping around, looking for a bite to eat (or just a place to relax), more often than not, you’re bound to…

  • As the year begins to draw to a close, my mind goes back to some of the people we lost this year. I’m thinking of artist’s artists like Alan Rankine, Pharoah Sanders, Tina Turner, and YMO greats (like the sorely missed Ryuichi Sakamoto and Yukihiro Takahashi). In this year full of great loss, at the…

  • 15 years can fly by. Yet, 19 years can seem like a blink. You see, it was in fact 19 years ago — if one can completely trust the internet — when a germ of a thought and of a vision was being created, one piece at a time, when Ricks and April were hand-painting…

  • Sometimes the hardest thing isn’t putting words on screen. Sometimes the hardest part is finding space to write about a certain piece of music you’re not completely certain others will understand (or have the patience for). Unfortunately, you know me, and you know I have patience to spare and more than enough time to choose…

  • Is it: “Everything new is old again?” or is it: “Everything old is new again?” Before I left for my visit to Japan, I was freshly reminded of this paradox by (friend of the blog) Chris Morris’s YouTube share of an autumnal neo-folkloric favorite of mine: Begoña Olavide’s Salterio – one I reminded myself to…

  • Is it wrong to feel nostalgia for a past you never lived through? With the rise of City Pop and other genres or media evoking some sort of hauntology, I keep trying to purposefully separate myself from being too backwards-looking, for fear of running the risk of falling through a kitsch trap many fall in.…

  • There’s nothing like youthful naivete is there? I fully believe it’s that ingrained spirit to want to shake things up and light your own path that forces the spirits of the past to look forward to the future. It’s that kind of spirit you hear positively soaring in the unclassifiable music of Koto-Za and their…

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