art rock
-
Some of my favorite artists are those that fluctuate along the same wavelength as yours truly. One of these is the incomparable Ayuo Takahashi. Never moored by any specific idea, his vision is expansive — all is fair game in his musical world. From English folk to mystic Persian devotionals, to electro and mutant funk,…
-
What happens if you mix the Everly Brothers and Kraftwerk? The answer you’re supposed to hear should be: Adolphson-Falk’s Med Rymden I Blodet. However, I don’t think it quite is. Taking inspiration from both those iconic bands yet doing something decidedly different, is what led me to write about one of Sweden’s least heralded pop…
-
Truth be told, few records in my collection sound like Esther Ofarim’s Complicated Ladies. Well, truth be told, few albums will ever sound like it either…in anyone’s collection. A mixture of Israeli melismatic jazz with German liedermacher wouldn’t sound too out of the ordinary (at least in some circles). However, let’s say someone decided to…
-
Don’t you just love it when everything comes together? Kenji Sawada must have taken forever to match up his forward-thinking persona with his stagecraft and music, but on Aux Femmes 女たちよ) it all fell into place. Toying with gender, electronics, and all sorts of compositional elements, Aux Femmes 女たちよ proved he just wasn’t some emptyheaded…
-
Was the world ever ready for Thomas Leer? Listening back to Thomas’s The Scale Of Ten one can hear all the potential there. It’s this theme of tweaking a recipe. Here it was to make his once abrasive, experimental blue-eyed soul into a chromed-out beast, outfitted in Fairlight CMI clothing, permeating with giant-sized hooks. In…
-
Guest post by Giacomo Lee. You’d think being in one of the biggest cult Japanese bands of the ’90s would make one of your biggest side projects pretty well known, but Yasuharu Konishi’s Girl Girl Girl must be the exception to that rule.
-
Who knows what would have happened in France if New Yorker Valli Timbert hadn’t met filmmaker Philippe Bourgoin, at some Chelsea Hotel, in the late ‘70s? Philippe, not pictured on the cover of Chagrin D’Amour’s self-titled debut, was the French artiste who had fallen in love with rap early on in 1979. Then, via The…
-
Gabriela Marrone’s Altas Planicies is the very quiet work of a true pioneer. Born of rural, Argentinian descent, but cosmopolitan via adolescent growth, Gabriela took what could have been a forgettable life as a diplomat’s daughter and used it as a way to develop personally into the inspirational force she came to be.
-
There are few albums that just put me in a special place. Flávio Venturini’s Nascente is one of them. When it’s on, it seems my whole spirit bends to its will. Overrun with string instruments, mostly warm-sounding, and some of the most captivatingly tender harmonies on any side of the hemisphere, or era, Nascente just has…
-
As much as one tries to distance themselves from being just another mp3 blog, one has to realize that one is operating in a gray territory. For as much as I’d love everyone to discover rare albums like Flüght’s Flüght, one from a fascinating Mexican band that debuted with a sound that experimented with ambient, progressive electronica, and new age, not…
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