neofolk

  • 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,…

  • Isn’t it wonderful when you can skip just whole bits of history and get to the pertinent parts? Such is the case with Franco Mussida’s Racconti Della Tenda Rossa (or Tales Of The Red Curtain), made by someone who most of you may already know as the founding member and lead guitarist (and sometimes vocalist)…

  • Time for another palette cleanser. You already know mine: folk music. Doug Smith’s Order Of Magnitude is more of that same vein. However, it’s a bit of its own tributary. Here, largely acoustic guitar of the American Primitive style, get’s us one step closer to what a larger, universal other expects of “their” type of…

  • Once again, we’re back in England for another journey. If you can entertain me just one more time, I’ll share with you some of the music I feel brings out the best colors of autumn. On this mix for LYL Radio I wanted to take you to those early Saturday mornings at home in November…

  • Rather than belabor you with nonsense trying to rectify itself as a theme, I’d rather rectify something I didn’t do last year: share my special hour-long Halloween mix for LYL Radio. For those that tuned in, you were treated to one of my deepest loves: British Folk Rock.  Today I’m taking it a bit further.

  • If we can thank the heavens for something today, it is for bringing together Mayumi Miyata and Midori Takada. Released as part of CBS/Sony’s short-lived  Sound Forest (サウンド・フォレスト・シリーズ) series,「星雲」~サウンド・フォレスト・シリーズ (Nebula) presents a different aesthetic within that series idea of “environmental music”. Not necessarily made to attract electronically-minded listeners, Nebula is a nebulous blend of truly…

  • Forgive my roundabout way to get back to the healing music of Japan’s Awa record label. I feel like we should go back to Okinawa and discover where it all began. It is on しおのみち (Shio-No-Michi) that Hideaki Masago rounded up like minded Japanese musicians to fashion a label that could tap into ethnic music…

  • This might sound like yet that same old story: Noted folkloric or jazz muso discovers drum machines, synths, and samplers, proceeds to turn into both a sweeping statement unlike anything else in their oeuvre/pisses old fans off. I can play Madlibs with my write-up for Joan Bibiloni’s For A Future Smile and substitute Lisboa-native Júlio…

  • Népzene, or Hungarian folk music, has always been a quietly influential, if not leftfield, version of music. A mix of Old Central Europe and even older nationless Europe, népzene has moved greats like Bela Bartok, Franz Liszt, all the way to Martin György to toy with transforming its deep pentatonic melodies through all sorts of…

  • How do we get beyond the “fourth world” ideas thought of by early progenitors of it, like Eno and Jon Hassell? We begin by seeing it, hearing it, through the eyes/ears of those who felt a need to connect to other traditions as it could form part of their own. The classic idea was to…

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