new age
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traight from Duisburg, Germany comes the impressive debut from Klaus Hoffmann-Hoock (otherwise known as Cosmic Hoffmann) on Klaus Schulze’s wonderful Innovative Communication record label. Music For Paradise was Klaus’s attempt to present his spiritual journey from space-disco cosmic man to “woke” Eastern-influenced musician, via various forms of musical movements. Originally titled “Music for Meditation”, somewhere, along its phase from demo…
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rquesta de las Nubes, The Cloud Orchestra, isn’t really an orchestra, that we know for sure. What it is is a trio of Spanish musicians aiming to make music that was unlike anything else. While researching the history behind the band I ran across interviews by founder Suso Sáiz mentioning how even they themselves didn’t know the type…
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How do you classify a six-piece Japanese band like Apsaras? Their debut album Apsaras definitely covers a ton of bases. Let’s count all the genres that they bring into their musical mix: dub, new age, minimalism, vocoder funk, balearic, are a few. Heck, you even hear the glimmers of Afropop and Jazz-Fusion. How many genres have I mentioned so far?…
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f someone’s in touch with the music of the cosmos it’s Kagawan Toshi Tsuchitori. The music I’m sharing from his 1980 release, Breath, gives us a peek at what would set him off on his life-long journey to create music that harkens back to Japan’s prehistoric time. Now known primarily as a percussionist, Breath is the rare…
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There’s a vastly more interesting topic hidden in full view of Claire Hamill’s unique and brilliant 1986 release: Voices. What is Voices? It’s an utterly fascinating bit of art pop, a middle ground of Cocteau Twins and Kate Bush -stylistic music, that combines forgotten English Folk with nomadic, electronic dream pop. Composed entirely free of instruments other than her own…
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What happens when a Japanese minimalist band gets signed to the American New Age juggernaut that is Windham Hill? Led by Daisuke Hinata, Interior remains an interesting piece of this label’s history. Few examples exist of William Ackerman’s roster ever attempting to tap into the decidedly more electronic, ambient New Age that Japanese labels like Music Interior or…
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All I could think about while creating this second mix was Kapalbhati Pranayama. I wanted to treat you to two hours of music that exactly presented what this idea means to me. Kapalbhati Pranayama is the sanskrit phrase for “Breath of Fire”. In a cross-legged, seated position one tries to create internal heat without actually moving the…
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There’s something perfect about our imperfect minds. Most of the thoughts we think are the best, most of the time, aren’t the product of an instant occurrence. I’d say the best ideas truly come from a combination of luck/accident plus human intuition. Sometimes we may not know that our answer, or thought, is correct, but we feel it…
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There’s an interesting debate that’s been raging – as much one could rage – in the yoga world. It’s over whether music should be played during yoga classes. Modern, decidedly more western, yogis argue that there is no problem with hearing music while practicing, since the act of hearing music seems to stimulate their muscle intensity. Classically-trained…
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I‘m dipping into that huge well that is Polish Jazz. After listening to “Bialy Garbus” it’s not hard to understand why. Bass-player and hard rock session man extraordinaire, Krzysztof Ścierański takes machines that can bend sonic time and space — the Ibanez HD1000 Delay/Harmonizer and Roland Echo/Chorus— and discovers that there are ways out of Jaco Pastorius-doldrums, into…
ambient art pop art rock balearic brazilian electro-acoustic england environmental music experimental fourth world Funk fusion japan jazz minimalist mpb neo-folk neoclassical new age walearic