Yesterday, Space Is The Place, a magnificent podcast out of England, did us a huge honor and asked us to contribute a mini-playlist. We submitted seven tracks for the show, as I felt these were pieces of music which influenced how I listen to music and where that influence may…
Li Yilei is a London-based sound artist based whose roots are Chinese. Li’s latest album, Of (Chinese: 之) reminds me of some of the amazingly good Japanese new age ambient releases of the 1980s which seem to be gaining a lot of attention like Hiroshi Yoshimura and some of Haruomi…
I feel a bit silly admitting this, but for some reason, I thought I had Soundtrack To The Blind Owl previously. Iran’s foremost dark ambient composer Xerxes The Dark has been active for many years now, and is part of a pretty amazing scene developing in one of the least…
View this post on Instagram A post shared by Space Is The Place Radio Show (@spaceistheplaceradioshow) On Thursday, September 9th at 11 pm GMT, the venerable Space Is The Place Radio Show (see their Instagram page here) is playing a mini-mix of tracks I selected which influenced…
Frames aren’t quite a new name for me, but it seems I missed this post-rock gem. I was amused to read that a lot of post-rock fans don’t see much good in this album because it doesn’t fit their pre-conceived notions of what music in the genre should sound like,…
Guerssen Records out of Catalonia, Spain is known for putting out some amazingly weird psych and lo-fi music, but this one has to be one of the most charmingly weird ones in their catalog. Two Paraguayan brothers of German origin, Joern and Dirk Wenger, self-released an album in 1971 called Pops…
India is a country with such an embarrassingly rich musical history that it boggles the mind as to how good it is, and it’s not merely their traditional music. Jazz, pop, progressive rock, metal and everything else you can imagine seems to flourish there, yet there is only one problem. …
Another day, another great loss to music. The legendary Alèmayèhu Eshèté, known lovingly as the “Ethiopian Elvis,” passed away yesterday at the age of around 80. I came across his work on this particular album, Éthiopiques 10: Tezeta – Ethiopian Blues & Ballads, and though I didn’t hear much Elvis (despite some physical…
Enji Erkhem is a jazz singer who is originally from Mongolia, but who currently calls Munich, Germany, home. She has quite an interesting personal story, growing up in a yurt to a working-class family, traveling to Germany to study music pedagogy, and getting utterly inspired by jazz singers like Carmen…
Sad news from Greece today. The legendary composer, lyricist and politician Mikis Theodorakis, known for so many pop songs, but forever associated with the song Zorba The Greek passed away today in Athens. He was 96 years old.