reggae
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Here’s another album I’ve been holding off forever, waiting just for the right time of the year to share it. Kyoko Furuya’s 冷たい水 (otherwise known as Cool Water) embodies everything that was intriguing about the influential Japanese label Better Days’ short-lived existence. Kyoko Furuya’s 冷たい水 features a kaleidoscopic vision of what Japanese Pop can be…
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Life is something special, isn’t it? That’s something you can palpably feel in the music of Larry Levan. When he introduced music to the dancefloor he reimagined the music in a way the originals (possibly) never imagined. In a way he made that music everyone’s. Was Gwen Guthrie’s music ever truly hers? Was it ever…
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“Why are there so many songs about love?” that’s the heavy question posited by one Terry Day in “Luv, Luv, Luv”. As he goes about trying to deduce the many reasons we love one another, he fails to land on a specific motive. Terry figures it out the answer, and comes to it, as an…
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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…
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From Germany, via the intriguing mind of Düsseldorf-native, multi-instrumentalist Uwe Ziß, comes this unlikely marriage of AOR, balearic, post-disco, funk, R&B, Krautrock, southern boogie, and soft rock. Perfect for days, much like this one, when your loyal blogger has very little time to actually write/keep up with my own set, writing deadlines. Nothing gets closer…
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Whenever I put on Subliminal Calm’s first and only release I immediately think of spring. Featuring a sublime mix of country, dub, folk and soul music, Subliminal Calm could only have been created by the inspirational minds behind it. Appropriately titled, there’s something quite delicate and beautiful in this set of music from minds that…
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From French record label Nato comes another wonderful batch of Jazz not Jazz. Look At Me, the debut from English multi-instrumentalist Terry Day, is unlike little else he would be known for. Surprisingly romantic, ragged but in a very smooth, put-together way, and (on the great bits) sounding not that dissimilar to the work of Paul…
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The dream continues…coming in next, but arguably first in its conception, is my mix for Radio Jiro on NTS. In this mix I’ll continue to flesh out this esoteric idea of Walearic music. As mentioned in my previous Walearic mix, it’s a conceptual genre of Japanese music looking beyond strict influence from western Pop music and turning it’s eye instead…
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We can affect change or be an effect of change. These ideas, proposed wonderfully in Charles Demuth’s Spring, moved me to take up a call from Zattirizat to create a playlist for their brilliant guest mix series. Umut from Zattirizat got me thinking: What can I do to move your needle? To do so, I had to…
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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…
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