album of the month
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As you all may know now, “late summer” is more of a vibe than a season. It’s in between times when hot summer days ease down with cool, easy-going, summer breezes. For the longest, I’ve been fascinated with music that speaks to this period. It’s precisely this hammock season that I’m going back to an…
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You know, sometimes I’m as much of a wanderer as you are. There are stories I’d love to really tell but (try as I may) I run into a limitation called: written history. Catherine Le Forestier’s Music Of Aziza is just one of those creations that merits more discovery than what I can share today.
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Traveling. That’s all I can think about now. I won’t bore you with too much autobiography but life has been quite stressful lately. So, when I put on music – or when I share music – I want it to take me (or us) somewhere. And lately, its cardinal points have taken me to the…
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Talk about worlds within worlds. Isn’t that the essence of Keishi Urata’s 世界の果て (Final Frontier)? It’s about combining electronically-imagined sound atmospheres with otherworldly IRL, acoustic instruments. It’s about exploring the edges of jazz, ambient, and traditional music for an imaginary soundtrack to imaginary environs. It’s a work full of mystery from a man whose whole…
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Once again I turn towards an old love of mine, the music of Brazil. Where else can one get that special emotion of saudade – evoking the bittersweet, mixed up flights of fancy we all share – than through the genuine deal, as today’s album by Vital Lima does? All the touchstones and waypoints that…
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As I fish my increasingly puzzled brain, trying to suss out words for Amahoro’s Flowering Of The Spirit (いのちの花), I go back to just how unlikely of a story and of a pairing these two came to be. You see, if you didn’t know who was behind the music, you wouldn’t think it was the…
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A wiser person than me once said: serit arbores, quae alteri saeclo prosint or he that plants trees, loves others beside himself. It’s a saying that would later gain life as the old adage, “Blessed is he who plants trees under whose shade he will never sit.” I’m thinking of that phrase specifically because I’ve…
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It’s not often that I review something that has me digging through my old piano-playing notes, yet here I am, looking for the right words to convey the construction of sheer joy coming from David Oliver’s music (and specifically his, Hope For La Roo). ‘Trills’, ‘octave runs’, ‘arpeggios’, ‘flageolet’, are some of the not-so-random words…
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What exactly gives life to any inanimate object? Is it the way it looks? Is it the way we interact with it? Or is it the memories we attach to it? I imagine these were some of the many questions revolving around Yoshihiro Kanno’s head when he was invited to create environmental music to fill…
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You know, sometimes the struggle is simply trying to quantify how unique something is. I’ve been listening to Liu Xing’s 無所事 (To Do Nothing) for more than a while now and every time I try to find an angle to share it on the site, I backtrack and hold off (thinking I’ll do it and…
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