album of the month
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Blessed are those who have background info to work from. I say this because I need to come clean about the album I’m writing about here: I have little to no info about those behind the music. With great pain, I have in my possession this wonderful work – Plus Cross Power Flower – whose…
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Before I introduce you to Missa Fukuma’s Festa Manifesto, I’d be remiss if I didn’t share how I first encountered her music. I was in Osaka, visiting Eiji’s Revelation Time record store, when I kept glancing at the stack of CDs on his counter. Fearing that I was taking too much of his time, a…
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One of the wonders of digging into history is realizing how life has a way of shaking out differently than you expect. Right now, as I’m ingesting all this information outlining Mari Hamada’s 編む女 (The Knitting Woman), I’m starting to see how it all digests into capturing a bit part in her creative career. Now…
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When I listen to Harumi Kitagawa’s Love & Flowers, I’m instantly transported to what I love about music. It’s its ability to show maturity in a way that is simply mature. Coded in phrasing, couched in a certain sophistication, one can be “adult” without falling for the adult trappings of trying to compete with youth.
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What better way to ease into spring than with an album that exemplifies that grand idea we call “rebirth”? Rebirth, more often than not, is defined by what one lets go in order to awaken something entirely different. And in the case of Mayumi Itoh, it’s about completely putting to bed a certain past so…
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There’s just something about Valentine’s Day that stirs me to share music steeped in that feeling. If you know me, you know I love “love songs.” I firmly believe that the hardest songs to write are those that touch on love (in its myriad meanings). It’s what led me this time around to cut to…
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One of my favorite things to discover and hear in music is how ideas translate across genres and borders. Listening to Midori’s Vortex Symphony, I get the sense that they share a similar spirit of discovery. Yes, this is “dream pop,” but it isn’t the dream pop we usually imagine – it’s the kind that…
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I can’t help but smile a little when I hear how brazenly Yuji Sugiyama begins what would become his sole release under the name Logik Freaks. On 1995’s Temptations of Logik Freaks – One Fine Day, the opening track, “Tekno Prisoner/Preacher,” starts as a hypnotic piece of Japanese ambient techno before being yanked out of…
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Don’t you just love listening to something that isn’t easily categorized? When I listen to Mikihiko Matsumiya’s 1994 debut, Mu-Myou (無明), I spend a moment trying to figure out what kind of music I’d like it to be, only to find that music has a right to remain mysterious and this haunting, lovely, album is…
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It’s not often I revisit works from artists I’ve already written about, but when I do, it’s because these other works shed light on a new dimension of their creativity. In today’s case, few artists reveal as many fantastic—and drastic—sides as Naoko Kawai through her work as The Gentle Wind.
ambient art pop art rock balearic brazilian electro-acoustic england environmental music experimental fourth world Funk fusion japan jazz minimalist Mix neo-folk neoclassical new age walearic