1984
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New age records shouldn’t sound (or look!) as fun as German Büdi Siebert’s Hmm…, but I wager no one ever asked Büdi where his records should be classified. If I could compare him to anyone, it would most likely be Don Cherry, a similar artist who has no specific style but a magnificent taste in music. Straddling…
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It still boggles my mind that Quiet! was in fact crafted by the same artist who sang in the proto-Asian Underground hit “Ever So Lonely“. A severe departure from the proto-Asian Underground Pop she’s known for, Quiet! showed Sheila Chandra working untethered, trying to go beyond the Orientalism of her past work and push it forward in directions that weren’t entirely…
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Just look at that album cover. Mio Fou’s self-titled debut has an album cover that has fascinated me to no end. You see, the utterly sublime music found in Mio Fou must have some connection to this image. For months I struggled to define what time of the year this picture was taken and what time of…
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Even for me, what I’m going to write next seems something out of a fever dream. Polly Eltes, elite, English model/actress seen in the pages of Italian Vogue, and on the catwalks of Europe, teams up with CAN guitarist Michael Karoli to create a forward-thinking blast of Fourth World dub music. If I didn’t have…
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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…
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Now here’s someone’s backstory I can’t even begin to try to tackle. To be brief: pioneering Japanese composer and musician/violinist Joe Hisaishi might best be known for his timeless work soundtracking the vast majority of Studio Ghibli’s films and all of Hayao Miyazaki’s oeuvre. We all can fall in love with his music from Princess…
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How do you classify a six-piece Japanese band like Apsaras? Their debut album Apsaras definitely covers a ton of bases. Let’s count all the genres that they bring into their musical mix: dub, new age, minimalism, vocoder funk, balearic, are a few. Heck, you even hear the glimmers of Afropop and Jazz-Fusion. How many genres have I mentioned so far?…
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Hiroshi Yoshimura was commissioned in 1984 by Japanese multi-national personal care company Shiseido to create something that might be entirely out of his own wheelhouse: music that could complement a fragrance. It’s a pitch that would sound ludicrous to most musicians but for Hiroshi presented a magnificent idea.
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