1986

  • Seems like the perfect time to sneak this one through ye olde FOND/SOUND blog. Led by Makoto Matsushita, proud creator of one of City Pop’s timeless gems (First Light), and Chris Mosdell, proud creator of this totally slept on “Japanese” techno-pop gem, comes this decidedly different collaboration called Paradigm Shift. Like its namesake, it actually does…

  • Let’s take a step back. Let’s take a breather and rediscover the music of Hajime Mizoguchi. Romantic, sunny, and surprisingly graceful, Halfinch Dessert notched another special rung on Japan’s wonderful New Age music from that era. In 1985, it was that debut, that gave us a taste of the string-laden, pining sound Hajime was inkling…

  • Port・fo・lio

    Now, I finally feel that we’re ready for an album like Mebae Miyahara’s Port・fo・lio. But first a huge thanks to Giacomo Lee for sharing it with me and, by extension, with us. Full of wonderfully gorgeous, lilting tropical techno-pop, Port・fo・lio should instantly remind you of all those artists you might have heard in the recent Walearic…

  • I think the right phrase for this one is: “all my Christmases came at once”. Never before had I thought I’d be able to bring up someone from my very, very early blog past, in this latest version of it, in a way that made perfect sense. Dave Stewart & Barbara Gaskin’s Up From the…

  • Romie Singh’s Masters is more than just one killer 12” dub plate surrounded by lord knows what. Masters is a wonderful reminder of the bit of delightful weirdness that Romie was able to capture in a bottle, some months in Hamburg, in 1986. Masters was an early collection of proto-future Pop from someone who managed…

  • fumio

    You always begin with a blank canvas. Then, you fill it with as many colors and shapes you need. Ending with a blank canvas is the ideal of any meditation. Music for meditation, as the late Fumio Miyashita’s Tenkawa Isuzu intends to be, should be an oxymoron. I beg to differ. You see, meditation itself…

  • Who can argue that an apple falls far from its tree after listening to Demo Tape 1? Demo Tape 1 was a compilation of music curated by Ryuichi Sakamoto and Akito Yano for their Midi Inc. label. The premise was simple: ask anyone who tuned in to Ryuichi’s ongoing NHK radio program “Sound Street” to send a…

  • Other than being a great proponent of why we need paid maternity leave in America, Tabo’s Project Eyes Of A Child is a great proponent of how many hidden gems in Japan’s musical history are still left to be rediscovered. A balearic masterpiece, or walearic (if we’re being pedantic), Eyes of a Child was conceived in…

  • 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…

  • 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…

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