new age
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“Rhythmic music for African dance, Dervish rituals, and belly dance. Music for turning on accumulated energy.” — That’s what the liner notes to Anugama & Sebastiano’s Exotic Dance released on German record label Nightingale Records state boldly and clearly. For once, who am I to disagree? I boldly remember when I was a young kid…
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I‘m still struck by this release. It’s hard to realize, but Seigén Ono was only 26 years old when he created his debut album, Seigén. Just months removed from assisting others like Yasuaki Shimizu’s Mariah, David Sylvian, Ryuichi Sakamoto, and Takumi as their mixing engineer or producer, Seigén had just an inkling of all the arrangements he had to get…
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Going back to yesterday’s point about how Music Interior provided a space for musician’s to stretch outside their known fields, today we have another perfect example of what this exactly means. Tokyo-born and bred, Masahide Sakuma started out his career in the pioneering surfabilly/B-52s-influenced Japanese band Plastics. The multi-instrumentalist of the group, it wouldn’t be rare…
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Ichiko Hashimoto on acoustic piano, synthesizer, and vocal – that’s what the liner notes to Ichiko Hashimoto’s one and only release on Music Interior states as musician credits. Titled Ichiko and graced by a truly autumnal album cover, it’s an album that truly sounds like it looks. Ichiko is a musician well-versed in two worlds. As a trained pianist she…
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A promise tendered is a debt owed. I hinted at more music from Music Interior and here’s my first share. Let’s begin our brief sojourn discovering the albums released by Music Interior with Yoshio Suzuki’s meditative Morning Picture. Who was Yoshio Suzuki? On this album he wasn’t quite the musician he was known to be. Three…
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It’s not often you get a peek at something legitimately different. Released in 1985, on Canadian record label Attic, Sounds from the Interior (The Music Interior Sampler) seems to mimic the iconic New Age Windham Hill Record Samplers of the ’80s. We all know the drill now. Frame a compelling nature scene on a stark white album…
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In these dark and foreboding times, it’s important to latch on to things that provide hope. Maybe that’s why the music of Poland has seemed so striking to me lately. The vast majority — at least the majority which remains unheard and “out-there” — of this music was the product of unimaginable restraints. Before the rise of Glasnost and Perestroika,…
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Some music is really hard to describe. Not because it’s indescribable, but because the vast amount of background info required to contextualize the work might be either a) too academic or b) too conceptual to get. Yoshi Ojima’s truly spartan website describes his music plainly as: Yoshio Ojima uses computers to program gentle, ambient music.…
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If one would pick up a practice as a musician, one wouldn’t normally pick up the kantele as a focus. Of Finnish descent, this instrument that features close to 40-strings, whose closest relatives are a hammered dulcimer, zither, or a Japanese koto, requires nearly devotional study to accurately pick up all its nuances and capabilities.…
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My apologies to David Lynch fans, but when I imagine what the music of Twin Peaks should be, I imagine something more along this profound piece of music from Toshifumi Hinata than the real life, final product. I say this, because Toshifumi Hinata’s Sarah’s Crime captures a fully idealized musical vision of an in-between feeling. It’s…
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