drone

  • 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…

  • Sun-lit, rainbow music for respite after rainy days. That’s how I would describe Alap Jetzer’s largely acoustic renditions of Hindu guru Sri Chinmoy’s compositions. Attracted to the same devotional spiritual path that struck other musicians like Pete Townshend, Carlos Santana, Narada Michael Walden, and Roberta Flack, so was this young Swiss instrument maker and multi-instrumentalist…

  • 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…

  • quiet

    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…

  • music for massage

    What a lovely hour of music. What’s else is there to say about Ric Kaestner’s criminally unknown Music For Massage? “an hour of soothing music designed for massage therapy” is what the cassette cover states on the Japanese-influenced woodblock album artwork, for once who am I to disagree? Made up of two cassette sides – one a-side devoted…

  • We’re in the wilderness now. If nothing puts you there, Takami’s 天使行 Y. De Noir Ⅱ will. Playing out like a modern Japanese update on Nico’s Marble Index or Desertshore, Takami’s debut album sounds like little else. 天使行 roughly translates to “Angel Line” giving you, the listener, a clue into what the theme of the album is about. Were these songs…

  • This might not be the most proper way to start off FOND/SOUND’s blogging new year, but I’m hoping for a blessing in disguise. Let’s get this right out the way: I have little info to provide on the following Japanese band, Pale Cocoon. Released on cassette, in 1984, 繭, which translates to “cocoon”, has all those perfect wintery things we…

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