ambient

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • When autumn comes rolling in, I always welcome a fresh wind that shifts my focus elsewhere, towards music with a more folkloric bent. And for some reason, I’m always surprised to be unsurprised by how much there is to harvest from the Irish or Gaelic diaspora. As leaves start to turn and a certain seasonal…

  • Sometimes I have to catch myself. Do I really want to go down the rabbit hole, searching for information…not for some brilliant bit of music…but for…a well-off music production company? If you, like me, have a bunch of records with literally no-name behind who created them, what do you do when you’re staring down Toyo…

  • I don’t know about you but for me certain albums are colored by memory. Whenever I put on Ricardo Fabini’s Cidade De Cristal it brings me back to a certain difficult time I had to go through. On those days where I felt a bit aimless, a bit withdrawn, all over the place – yet…

  • Looking back, it feels like my relationship with Endy goes back more than recently. Trolling through my Discogs orders I see that my oldest purchase from the man behind Groove Bunny Records was in 2017 – a copy of Mich Live’s Message From Heart which y’all finally got a chance to listen to in 2019.…

  • It’s late summer again. Like before, I’m drawn to music that evokes feelings found at the corners of each such season. And in today’s case, it’s that pull of the sea (or a life aquatic) that reminds us that life keeps moving, as much as we keep exiting, stage left. It’s something you hear in…

  • Some artists make whole careers out of reinventing themselves. The best ones, you name it from the late David Bowie, to Joni Mitchell or Tom Waits, always leave you guessing just what they’re going to do next. The ones that try too hard, which shall remain nameless, always leave you wondering why they just can’t…

  • Find your space in the pocket. If ever there was a phrase that I’ve been trying to hammer home lately, on the blog, it’s that. It’s about exploring the work of musicians who moved things around, found ways to pick at frayed threads and bind them together, to build their own work. China’s Säju is…

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