NYC, June 2026 It has been a looooong time since I wrote in my blog. Maybe it's time to give my blog some music. Check out the jazz that the bustling NYC metropolitan public transportation makes here: www.trainjazz.com I rode on a subway for the first time ever last June, and I am fascinated by the coordination that happens behind the scene. This is a perfect visualization to it. Cheers to NYC MTA, and to free bus! Khoa. Reply to this post

Tokyo’s musbime are relative newcomers, having been active only since 2024, but have already made an impression with their debut EP 煌めきを凌いで (Brave The Blinding), which came out in late April. Like most of their peers, shoegaze is only one of the genres they’ve absorbed into their sound – there’s math in the guitar lines, […] The post musbime -『流星群のあと』 appeared first on Space Echo.

Wild & Frantic Official CD (Denmark, 1995) Wild & Frantic, as the title suggests; on Official Records contrary to the name suggests

A few weeks ago I joined Jared to record a new episode of his Dead Code podcast, and now it’s out — go have a listen! Jared’s titles never disappoint, and I feel it’s only appropriate that “Bloom of the Undying” take the place of honour as the title for these weeknotes. After all the effort to get Hanami 3.0 out the door, this week I’m having a break. I’ve travelled to Adelaide with my wife and kids to spend some time with my parents. It’s a rainy winter week here, but we’ve all been having a…

Resavoir - Themes for DreamsThis one slipped out with little fanfare (at least as far as I could tell!) earlier this spring, but don’t let it slip on by. I’ve loved all of Will Miller’s Resavoir LPs; Themes for Dreams might be my favorite so far. As its title suggests, dreamy sounds abound, heading into a kind of undiscovered soul/chamber jazz territory, intimate and intricate, mixing warm keys with ravishing strings, modular synths with pedal steel. Even though Miller calls Themes “a…

Good morning! Saturday, I talked a little bit about two music “hot takes” I have. At the risk of sounding like a broken record (sorrynotsorry), there’s a third: I’m not especially fond of Nirvana’s In Utero. Writing about the record in 2023, I noted: Part of that incuriosity was down to my insufferable gatekeeping mindset back then, but the reality was this: I had first heard the songs from Bleach live before I heard them on cassette. I can remember how “Negative Creep” was introduced as…

The last couple of weeks have been hectic, but afforded me a few good opportunities to listen. There’s nothing like long flights, restless jet lagged afternoons, and protracted editing sessions to free up time to listen to music. I’ll generally listen to anything that William Parker and Matthew Shipp dream up and their most recent album, Synesthesia (2026), with Ivo Perelman on sax and Bobby Kapp on drums is a good one and a provocative follow up to their 2019 album Ineffable Joy. Perelman…

Day Two in Nagoya. A wild boar is on the loose, attacking salarymen. However, no new kyujo to report. In Makushita, Asahifuji defeated Kaiseijo with a kotenage, video below courtesy of Abema’s Twitter feed. Calm and collected. His competition is getting stiff but Asahifuji is still racking up solid wins. He will face Otsuji tomorrow. … Continue reading Nagoya 2026: Day Two

In this Monday Pressing Concerns, we’re looking at new albums from Hurry and William Matheny as well as new EPs from TIFFY and Twin Bloom. This also would’ve more or less been last Thursday’s Pressing Concerns if I’d been able to post a “normal” one (I’ve been experiencing computer difficulties lately, which has impacted the blog schedule a little bit). I’m hoping to get things back on track this week, though. If you’re looking for more new music, you can visit the site directory to see what…

Sent out a new issue of my newsletter

"Rock Around the Clock" by Bill Haley and His Comets Listen on Apple Music Your browser does not support the audio element. What song makes you feel nostalgic for a time you never lived through? - Rock Around the Clock by Bill Haley and His Comets The first few seasons of Happy Days, a must watch TV show about a family in the 1950s, this tune was the theme song (until the producers got tired of paying for it and wrote their own.) I'm pretty sure it was also used in American Graffiti. View Lou…

Music is my safe space. It always has been. No matter what life had in store for me, there was always an album that made everything feel a little better. And that hasn’t changed.

On Sundays I try to at least quickly note some of my favorite listening from the week prior — things I would later regret having not written about in more depth, so better to share here briefly than not at all. ▰ There’s upstream, and then there’s up upstream. As you find your curiosity pulling you deeper into the making of music, you take pleasures in demos of new functionality for pre-existing gear. A “no-talking” (YouTube category of demo) performance for a couple minutes on an instrument…

Hey people! Can you imagine that I’ve just slept through almost two entire days?! :O I’m not entirely sure how it happened myself. I was just not feeling too great, physically I mean; I went to bed Friday night, and I woke up on Saturday at 5 PM, with a migraine. So then I fell asleep again, until 8 AM today, at which point the migraine was gone but instead I was having hypoglycaemia from not having eaten for two days (I get that sometimes because of having septo-optic dysplasia). But my family…

Dinner Jazz With ECM is a fascinating anomaly in the label’s history. Released in 2011, the compilation did not emerge from a conventional studio project or from Manfred Eicher’s austere curatorial imagination. It was assembled through a partnership between ECM, Universal Music Canada, and the Canadian radio station JAZZ.FM91, where host and music director Brad Barker had cultivated a popular evening program under the same title. Barker selected some of the catalog’s most accessible and…

Wonderful words by the ever erudite Adam Turner. Konformer come from Nuremberg, a city steeped in all kinds of history. The three piece band – synths, bass and drums – make music that recalls the culture of West Germany in the late 1960s and 70s, the motorik and kosmische sounds of Neu!, La Dusselfdorf, Harmonia and Cluster. The fun of the autobahn. Their second album, Konformer II, is 6 tracks long and has a geography / travel theme with numbers named after Mont Ventoux, Marseille, Todmorden,…

I am teaching two new NYU classes this fall. One of them is History of 20th Century American Popular Music, which I wrote about recently. The other is Pop Music Analysis for Non-Majors. I enjoy teaching new classes, even though they require a lot more work than teaching an existing class. The history class takes significant prep on my part, but it isn’t difficult work, because I know why people are taking the class and what we’re expected to teach them: in addition to factual information about…

Today at Crucial Tracks: Sabotage, by Beastie Boys What’s your go-to song for getting ready in the morning? This is more of a gotta go, gotta go now kind of song, but it’s definitely right for some kind of mornings.

Scribed by Sandre the Giant Released: 22nd May 2006 When I wrote about Swedish blackened death metallers Necrophobic back in 2023 for the anniversary of their classic debut record ‘The Nocturnal Silence’ in 1993, I mentioned that I first got into them on their 2006 record, ‘Hrimthursum’, a record that appeared at the perfect time for my expanding music taste of that era, with its fluid songwriting, serpentine riffs and insatiably memorable songs. Well, thankfully the time has come to revisit…

last night in my dream you kissed my foot the oddest occurrence yet in that moment the shockwave it sent would make any other act pale in comparison and even awake now my cheeks are flushed heartbeat elevated

This ↑ is what happens when Joe Dart breaks the sound barrier playing “Dean Town”. (And not when i drop my phone on a 2,000-year-old theatre’s stone steps trying to put it in my pocket — my back pocket.) Vulfpeck’s concert at the Jazz à Vienne festival was the best non-jazz concert i’ve ever been to, but also one of the loudest. Which is to say: it was the perfect venue to test out new earplugs. Believe it or not, foam plugs like the good old 3M E-A-R Classics are the gold standard, as they can…

This ↑ is what happens when Joe Dart breaks the sound barrier playing “Dean Town”. (And not when i drop my phone on a 2,000-year-old theatre’s stone steps trying to put it in my pocket — my back pocket.) Vulfpeck’s concert at the Jazz à Vienne festival was the best non-jazz concert i’ve ever been to, but also one of the loudest. Which is to say: it was the perfect venue to test out new earplugs. Believe it or not, foam plugs like the good old 3M E-A-R Classics are the gold standard, as they can…

Calm waters on Lake Superior. I've been collecting a lot of images of water lately. This is the outgrowth of a post I made on Ennui Vagaries about repurposing weather camera photos. There are a lot of weather cameras that are on the shores of lakes, rivers, or at the docks and launches. Collecting these photos has been made exceptionally easy by the Fediverse having many feeds of these images. While collecting a bunch of the sunset images tonight, I thought of the song Downstream by Supertramp.…

Market Street This and more in today's update to Northern Folk Archive here -https://northernfolkarchive.pagecord.com/manchester-city-centre-27-june-2020

Day One in Nagoya. The Sumo Association is riding high after its big Paris tour. One visible indicator, aside from the sold-out arena, is the massive growth in kensho banners. This tournament breaks the record for kensho banners at a regional honbasho (Osaka/Nagoya/Fukuoka) with 3504. The previous Regional Tournament record was set this spring in … Continue reading Nagoya 2026: Day One

Not a lot of movement from last week for the majority of my latest chart, although there are five new entries. “Homewrecker” by sombr remains at #1 for a second week, while Dexter and The Moonrocks‘ “Freakin’ Out” inches up a spot to #2. “Repeat Offender” by Scottish band Gloom Is Okay enters the top 10 at #9. There were at least eight songs I wanted to add to this week’s chart, but I had to cull my list down to only five as there were no other songs I was ready to drop. The first new entry is…

Listening to Aurora en Pekin by Marc Ribot & Marc Ribot y Los Cubanos from Y los Cubanos Postizos. Really lovely album from 1998 🎵

— On repeated play this week, Lana Del Rey’s version of Don’t Let me Be Misunderstood. (Compare to Nina Simone, 1964). Not sure why this song is hitting me so hard, but I'm a LDR fan so maybe that’s enough of a reason. We’re all just souls whose intentions are good. We’re trying our best at a weird and difficult time. — We watched Peter Hujar’s Day last night. I loved the bloody whole slow thing of it. The life of the artist, the day in the life, the project behind it that never really took…

Rachel is playing in an old time music jam in Paoli tonight. Having no musical talent, I’m one of four or five spectators. Two upright basses, two mandolins, a banjo, a fiddle, a dulcimer, several guitars, and fifteen voices. If you aren’t jealous, you should be.