dancing alone.

 

i've been listening to enno velthuys for a decade or so now after discovering him on the silver clouded comp featuring robert turman. a totally under sung dutch artist from the 80's, this is some really special ambient music. if anyone has vol III in this series please drop a link in the comments.

ps not my rip, so thank you to whoever uploaded these to slsk. i've heard rumblings of a reissue series, let's hope it comes to light.

laying in the grass.

 

one of my favorite bands when i was a teen in the 90's. criminally under sung shoegaze band that kinda reminds me of blue ontario at points.

in & onwards.

 

wonderful japanese jungle from the turn of the century. if venetian snares listened to ambient & dub, you might get close to this gem. 

resurrecting the stones.

 after the dissolution of generation x, two of the members linked up with simon bernal from mlr to form empire. a fantastic mix of post punk, power pop & new wave, unfortunately the label folded right after their only lp came out. fortunately for us, copies of the album made its way over the atlantic to dc & was a large inspiration for the revolution summer sound.

 

wala.

 

i've started to call this nordstrom jazz, or mall jazz, because when i was a kid in the early to mid 90's inside of nordstroms they always had some cat playing piano or some jazz lite. perfect for the mpcs.

ps posting this on mediafire since mega has been super buggy.

Finnegans Swing

 

In Brazil we have an expression called comer pelas beiradas, literally "eating around the edges", which has been my approach to Joyce's ouevre. Dubliness, Chamber Music, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (superb), essays, letters, etc, basically everything but Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Maybe someday I'll build the confidence to read them, maybe not, but until then the mystic around those two works is quite enough to entice me. 

That's the case with this record, a "jazz cantata" composed and conducted by Andre Hodeir, based on Joyce's final and most challenging work. Unfortunately the quality's not that great (ripped by yours truly), and to be perfectly honest the sung part can get a bit tiresome at times. That said, it still can be an interesting listen, a jazzy audiobook excerpt.

Rice, yeast, nuruk and water

During the infamous Japanese occupation in South Korea, among many graver violations, the government prohibited Koreans from distilling traditional homebrewed spirits, which contributed to the dominance of the sweet, commercial-grade soju as we know today. This tidbit came to mind when I was gathering info for this post's artist, Kim So-Hee (김소희), as it seems that almost every South Korean name search will return a K-artist as the primary result -- yeah, I'm aware of the restrictions in Korean names.

The recent South Korean cultural boom, or hallyu, certainly brought a well-deserved attention to the resilient South Korean culture, but It came to me how similar the government-sponsored K-pop is to the ubiquitous green-bottled soju, both sweet and inebriating. 

 

Kim So-Hee's musicality, however, is far from sweet and hangover-prone. She is a master of p'ansori, a beautiful Korean folk storytelling style with plenty of room for improvisation. Complex and with an unexpectedness only found in a homebrewed spirit.

ps. It's been a while since I got these files, so I'm not entirely sure if they all belong to the same record, sorry in advance.

 

 

heat dome.

 

when the sage owl was running holy warbles, during the summer he would post a lot of reggae albums to go with the weather. to keep a great idea running, i'll be posting more of my favorite 80's boogie albums. this is such a gem with amazingly lush production. don't sleep on this one. 

 

ps stay hydrated & stay safe everyone during this insane heat wave we're going through!

heart over head.

 

total summer vibes.

 

 

summer breeze.

 

this one is for my buddy bruno. hope yr doing well amigo!

qualcosa cambia.

 

a nice way to start my saturday morning while enjoying some coffee & doing laundry.

 

 

love is a strange affair.

 

i listen to this album at least once a day. no matter how shitty i'm feeling, it always puts me in a better place.

exorcise this wasteland.

 

70's italian fusion for the mpcs.

 

 

never the right time.

 

 

i've been jamming the new andy stott album a whole lot, so i decided to make a screwed version of it.  feel free to pass it around :)

 

diamond dance.

 

 

who knew i needed koto shredding in my life? fans of late eighties era ryuichi sakamoto, mtume & ppu should check this one out.

ps if any of y'all are flipping samples from the records i've been posting i would love to hear them! or if yr just a musician & wanna share yr jams, drop links in the comments section.

pps including this video, this shit goes.

Happiness is GDP

 

The image of a blind Bhutanese musician playing an erhu-like bowed instrument is forever engraved in my mind. A couple of years before this dreadful pandemic, I was lucky enough to enter the Kingdom of Bhutan, and while I had no idea what to expect, I almost went nuts. Probably the most fascinating place I've ever been, in every aspect. On the musical side, it naturally shares many similarities with Nepalese music, because, Buddhism, but keeping their own thing as well.

pw: spooked

the b section of inner urge.

 

beautiful late nite ecm jazz from the 70s.

smoke through glass.

 

80's food court jazz for the flips.

No shipwreck is an island

Greetings anonymous friends and jefe/amigo Ryan. It's been ages since my last contribution here, and although I've been absent for no specific reason, it was jefe who inspired me to come back to this great club, as I've been planning to share this album since forever.

Portugal was the very first western country to ever reach Japan, which resulted in a curious and long relationship, for better or for worse. There's a famous story that Tempura was actually a Portuguese dish, changed and adapted over the centuries.

All this to say that Enka and Fado, even if not directly related, are a match as tasteful as shiso leaves with Portuguese flour drowned in boiling oil. And there's no better proof of concept than this Naomi Chiaki album, full of Fado songs translated and adapted to Japanese. What a better place to sing about the sea than on an island?

run it up.

last year i binged king of the hill & i didn't understand the hate for ole chuck mangione. i had never listened to him before, i just knew him from the show. so i finally got around to it over the summer & discovered that i'm a dum dum. what a beautiful & vibrant album of gorgeously elastic jazz. his playing reminds me of sam gendel at points, so do the smart thing & download this.