easy listening

  • With Valentine’s Day upon us, I thought I’d share an album that’s one of those perfect mood makers. I’ve often said this: “I love love songs.” Most of my most treasured albums, songs, and mixes hover around that whole idea, “What is love?” And in today’s case, in Yoshiro Nakamura’s Literário it’s when does our…

  • We’re still sailing along aren’t we? Hopefully, aiming towards more easy-going, yet surprisingly deep waters. It’s all to reveal sights and sounds, mostly, that reveal far more hidden at the surface. Listening to Shigeru Suzuki’s くじらの海 (Living Whales) I’m reminded of this sentiment. 

  • Would you mind if I share something simply for no other reason than: it’s beautiful? From the packaging to the music, I have to say Tomoyuki Hayashi & ForestIII’s The Forest is just plain pretty. If you had your hands on the physical copy, you can lift up the CD cover and feel the same…

  • Trigger warning: “Good morning. It’s 5 o’clock, from the J-WAVE Singin’ Clock…” J-WAVE 時報コレクション My apologies to all of you who’ve grown up in Tokyo, waking up to their radio alarm blasting out J-WAVE 81.3 FM’s ultra-cozy, “singing” time call signal. However, if it wasn’t for Tokyo’s “classic hits” radio station we wouldn’t have the…

  • “Old-fashioned she might be, dated like last year’s pop-song…”, so too, must I take it inspiration from the late, great Clifford T. Ward to reaffirm some of the power in easy listening. On my latest mix for LYL Radio, I try to present a drifting set of music, a song cycle of sorts, that looks…

  • 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…

  • Disclaimer: you’re not going to hear any music on Jun Kawabata’s Mind Migration (Voyage To The Whale). What you’re hearing on this release is the kind of healing music little known on this side of the world. In the early ’90s CBS Sony created a record sublabel dubbed “Aqua Planet” combining three things: aquatic themed…

  • This is not entirely the way I wanted to introduce everyone to Akira Inoue but I can’t help myself and share Dolphin. It was September 1990, on one fateful night at the some cafe dubbed Heinecken Village in Harajuku, Tokyo that keyboardist extraordinaire Akira Inoue was joined by ex-members of Aragon, Parachute, and Kazumi Band…

  • ho knows what’s going on in the air? Something in it is stirring me to share this wonderful compilation of music brimming with ideas that seem so gauche in our time. It seems like the sweeping, uber romantic, and grandiose music of Parisian Michel Legrand only gets fleeting kudos whenever someone speaks of French music in general, and film…

ambient art pop art rock balearic brazilian electro-acoustic england environmental music experimental fourth world Funk fusion japan jazz minimalist mpb neo-folk neoclassical new age walearic