world music

  • I’ll be one of the first to admit this: intriguing album designs draw me in. Even in the age of digital artwork, nothing quite says “listen to me” than a singular, creative, point of view. I mean, what else would explain how I stumbled upon Miguel Braga’s haunting nocturnal ambient jazz album, Ritual? 

  • Jazz. Why even bother? At least, that’s what I ask myself when I choose to share something from that realm. Of all musical rorschach tests, it is Jazz, I feel, that seems to feature prominently as the one. Does one highlight its technical proficiency (and thereby, turn off a large part of the readership)? Does…

  • “Inspired ethnological musical exploration from an unlikely source.” — what better way to describe Michael Atherton’s Windshift? Michael Atherton might best be known in Australia as one of it’s leading scholars and practitioners of Aboriginal and Pan-Pacific music but somewhere in his history lies a fantastic composer/musician who understood a fourth way to bridge all…

  • Uman, pronounced (YOO-mahn), was a unique group. Vacillating from many visions — world music, ambient, jazz, and many uncategorizable things — this French sibling duo has never been a group to easily pigeonhole. Chaleur Humaine, their debut, I think, is a perfectly birthed idea of what they can do. Chaleur Humaine exists in that gray…

  • I’m at a loss what to classify the late, great Hideki Mitsumori’s 彩 Colours as. It’s obviously heavily indebted to world music and to all sorts of ethno-music flavors but it’s completely digital with no acoustic instrument in sight. Much like Apsaras, the previous band he led, keyboardist Hideki Mitsumori trades in Japanese New Age…

  • A call to worship, that’s what do’a, the original Arabic-Persian name for New Age group Do’ah means. World Dance by Do’ah slots into that imperfect crevice where good ideas fall prey to bad ones (due to appearing over earnestness) look for one false move to write off the whole shebang written as unnecessary/dated. If you’ve…

  • eco1

    Deep, deep, earth music from Tsutomu Ōhashi and the Geinoh Yamashirogumi crew. A macrosymphony composed for the International Garden and Greenery Exposition in Osaka, Japan, 1990, Ecophony Gaia, was supposed to be the stunning, aural centerpiece for a light and water performance system echoing the sentiment of the venue: “Harmonious Coexistence of Nature and Mankind.”

  • How do you classify a six-piece Japanese band like Apsaras? Their debut album Apsaras definitely covers a ton of bases. Let’s count all the genres that they bring into their musical mix: dub, new age, minimalism, vocoder funk, balearic, are a few. Heck, you even hear the glimmers of Afropop and Jazz-Fusion. How many genres have I mentioned so far?…

  • Sylvan Grey

    If one would pick up a practice as a musician, one wouldn’t normally pick up the kantele as a focus. Of Finnish descent, this instrument that features close to 40-strings, whose closest relatives are a hammered dulcimer, zither, or a Japanese koto, requires nearly devotional study to accurately pick up all its nuances and capabilities.…

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