city-pop
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Top down, shades on, it’s time to take Nico’s Valerie out for a spin. Featuring the sterling work of twin brothers Mamoru and Shigeru Shimada, Japan’s answer to America’s Alessi Brothers, so too does Valerie inhabit that same wander zone of genre-defying AOR. Not quite City Pop, not strictly Pop either, it shows all the…
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First things first: Please go to Noka’s Youtube channel and hit “subscribe” to thank them for sharing this first. None other than sharing other fascinating nuggets of Japanese indie rock, punk, and techno, he made me make a snap decision. In light of all that’s going around us, rather than share another bit of (perhaps)…
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I told you things were going to get real here. Let’s get intimate. Let’s get closer to the work of Yukie Nishimura. Call it various names: neoclassical, ambient, new age, easy listening or BGM. You can call it anything you want but you can’t call it boring. Romantic is the key word here. Take one…
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A leftfield reimagining of vaunted Afro-Cuban jazz classics, in a new school “futuristic” Japanese Pop style, shouldn’t sound so interesting as it does in Today’s Latin Project. Launched on the demise of one famous group (The Tokyo Cuban Boys) and the rise of one important, new musical voice, Yasuaki Shimizu, you’d expect something titled Today’s…
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What is it today? Over here, in the U.S. it’s the Friday just before Memorial Day, a long holiday weekend. Yes, it’s that time of the year when our minds turn to summer — and at least my mind — it turns to music that’s even brighter, funkier, perhaps, something more suited for the weather.…
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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…
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I so had another post in mind for today, but Kunio Muramatsu’s Green Water spoke to me and said: “hold that powder for some other day, the sun’s still shining!”. From the first song on it’s not hard to see why. A flooring collection of meticulously crafted Pop songs screaming “SUMMER!” merit, at least this…
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There’s an appeal to Katsutoshi Morizono’s 4:17 p.m. that can only be heightened, or fully appreciated, during summer, our current time of the year. Cycling from truly elegant compositions – a frequent, recurring theme lately on the blog – 4:17 p.m. mixes jazz fusion, post-bossanova, reggae, light mellow/City Pop, and even experimental bits of New Age…
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Power can manifest itself in many ways. Power isn’t always in the density of something but in the lightness of it. Kenji Omura’s spirited take on funk, sophisticated pop, and so many other smooth genres comes together into one powerful album: Gaijin Heaven. The late, great Kenji Omura, one time or some time YMO guitarist,…
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Heady, windswept, gauzy saudade that could only come from someone like Sonia Angelica De Carvalho Rosa, are things that don’t quite reveal themselves when you hear Samba Amour. Sonia Rosa had an unlikely musical career. Although she was born in São Paulo, Brazil it wasn’t there where’d she stake her claim to fame. A precocious child, she taught herself Joao Gilberto’s songs when…
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