walearic
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More fierce humans to support: Monday Michiru Akiyoshi-Mariano. Where does one start with the wildfly prolific career of Monday? How about the beginning with Mangetsu. Unlike little released in Japan at that time, Mangetsu was the sprawling debut of a young Japanese-American who couldn’t quite suss out any style she wanted to gravitate to (nor…
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It’s time to fall back. Rather than entreat you with another long-winded overview of another artist’s work, how about we revisit just one more time this other work by Shinsuke Honda: Silence. Whereas Banka (Late Summer) played to the varied moods of late summer, of course, Silence from its album cover to its ruminative, meditative,…
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Banka (Late Summer). What a name? Before I get ahead of myself, my apologies for not sharing the work of Shinsuke Honda much earlier. It’s one of my flaws as a music writer. I see music not in a stylistic sense but through an environmental lens. If it’s not in season, it’s not the time…
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Recently, I asked my partner to name the kind of music they’d love to hear play for my next mix for LYL Radio. To my surprise, they simply said: “I’d love to hear more of that hammock music.” Hammock music. I asked them, “What do you mean?”
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Sometimes I think various music reviewers and blogs bandy the term “floating” a bit too loosely with music. What some might think of as a floater seems to be a bit lightweight to me. However, in the case of Hiroki Komazawa’s Feliz, no other term comes closest to describing it. Here there is just one…
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Top down, shades on, it’s time to take Nico’s Valerie out for a spin. Featuring the sterling work of twin brothers Mamoru and Shigeru Shimada, Japan’s answer to America’s Alessi Brothers, so too does Valerie inhabit that same wander zone of genre-defying AOR. Not quite City Pop, not strictly Pop either, it shows all the…
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Take a look at the image above. What you see is an image of a creature belonging to the Daphnia genus. Entirely microscopic in size, a plankton that’s aquatic in nature, and unable to move (or to put it precisely: float) without something else propelling it along — much like certain jellyfish — it’s both…
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For those that don’t believe we can there’s a way to engage with the outside world while stuck inside one’s inner space, Awa Muse‘s second compilation: しおのみち ニの巻 (Shio-No-Michi) Vol.2 proves there are other ways to meet it there.
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First things first: Please go to Noka’s Youtube channel and hit “subscribe” to thank them for sharing this first. None other than sharing other fascinating nuggets of Japanese indie rock, punk, and techno, he made me make a snap decision. In light of all that’s going around us, rather than share another bit of (perhaps)…
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Truth be told: I really had trouble deciding to share this album with you, fair reader. One of my many goals for this blog is to move away from the well-worn stereotype/trope of the “female musician”. However, staring right in front of me (and you now) is exactly what one associates that being by pigheaded…
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