In the 1980s, Japanese ambient music emerged as a unique genre that combined traditional Japanese sounds with electronic music. This movement was primarily inspired by Brian Eno’s groundbreaking album “Music for Airports”, which had a profound impact on Japan’s burgeoning minimalist music scene.
"What most surprised me about Ms. Hahn’s take on Bach—she performed the first sonata and the first two partitas—was its throwback glamour." —Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim
It’s festival season again, and we like the idea of combining a good music festival with travel to a great...
Hope you are having a great weekend. I was hoping to have this week’s Five Songs up sooner, but it’s a long...
Write about what you know, they say. All due respect, that’s lousy advice, far too easily misinterpreted as “write about what you already know.” No doubt you find your own knowledge valuable, your own experiences compelling, the plot twists of your own past gripping; so do we all, but the storehouse of a single life seldom equips us adequately for the task of writing.
If you listen to the experts, much of the place I’m from is not a place at all. Suburban Michigan is full of winding roads dotted with identical houses, strip malls stuffed with chain restaurants and big-box stores, and thoroughfares designed for cars, with pedestrian walkways as an afterthought.
Solitude has become a topic of fascination in modern Western societies because we believe it is a lost art – often craved, yet so seldom found. It might seem as if we ought to walk away from society completely to find peaceful moments for ourselves.
The first time I heard about Taylor Swift, I was in a Los Angeles County jail, waiting to be sent to prison for murder. Sheriffs would hand out precious copies of the Los Angeles Times, and they would be passed from one reader to the next.
The allure of smoking has proved hard to stamp out. Despite the fact that cigarette use is at an 80-year-low in America, smoking has, unfortunately, become cool again.
I recently completed the road trip of a lifetime. I struck out from Napanee, Ontario, to Los Angeles, California – a 2,800-mile trip that I had been planning since before Covid times. I wanted to take this time to think deeply about our overreliance on cars and our love affair with the open road.
In your brain, neurons are arranged in networks big and small. With every action, with every thought, the networks change: neurons are included or excluded, and the connections between them strengthen or fade.
WHEN A MOVIE becomes a mass culture phenomenon, like Barbie, any negative criticism of it runs the risk of coming off hysterical. Any meanness toward it becomes the mirror version of the reactions of fans who see the movie in the theater again and again, who cry during certain scenes each time, and who tell the world about it on social media with a great sense of pride and purpose, or even with a certain amount of shock about its power over them.
IT STARTED INNOCENTLY enough, as a search for decent pastrami, an item not easily found in Western Europe. We were emerging from lockdown, and while my American passport had allowed me to travel back to the United States a few times...
For about five minutes a few months ago, people seemed to genuinely believe that our culture was entering the age of “deinfluencing.” “Step aside, influencers,” wrote CNN.
A half-formed thought feels worse than an empty head—the tip-of-the-tongue sensation, the inkling of a there there without the foggiest notion of how to get, well, there. Especially dire is when the “what” that we wish to articulate feels half-formed itself, something observable yet emergent, for which the masses have yet to find language.