art pop
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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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You might not know it, but every mix I’ve made for this site has been the product of searching for a certain state of mind. When I reflected on what I wanted to capture for this mix, I kept coming back to just how many mixes I’ve hosted.
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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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Much like many of you, once you’re done catching up with Maya Hayashi’s life, you’ll come to the same conclusion I did: glad she made it out the other end. Before her current career as a farmer and television personality, Maya had a quite short but very memorable career as a model turned singer, culminating…
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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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You know, for me, sometimes the most fascinating thing about interviews like these with Dream Dolphin is discovering just how much I don’t know.
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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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Life is something, right? When I conceived of my latest mix for my LYL Radio show, I wanted to capture a certain spirit: that of gently percolating music that bubbles at the edges but never quite reaches a boiling point. My thought was, “On certain trying days, we all need music that consoles us, that…
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