The title can't be seen in the picture, but this is Yumi Iwaki's "Spin a Tale," on the wonderful Muzan Editions label. Very worth the purchase. Here's the link. https://muzaneditions.bandcamp.com/album/spin-a-tale
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I am not very up to speed on newer music, and the other, negative website had become my primary music discovery place in recent years. Interestingly, I found myself gravitating toward instrumental music, primarily though not only on cassette, that often gets called "ambient" or "new age."
I'm not sure I'd use either of those labels for Iwaki's music, nor for most of this more recent stuff I've enjoyed. For worse most likely, we label or categorize music in our world and that's how it is. I might call this "quiet, functional music," as a genre.
"Functional" because the music has a tangible, opening effect, not simple relaxation but substantial in a relaxed. way. Iwaki's music here is one of the very best new albums in any format I've got over the last several years, and it is head and shoulders above most older "ambient" or "new age."
What's very interesting to me is that while there is a lot of older "ambient" stuff that's first-rate, obviously Eno etc., but others as well, to me most of the first go-round of "new age" stuff was pretty thin as music. Even the best of it was nowhere near as compelling as a Budd or Eno, for me.
But for some reason I don't entirely get, there seems to have been a nostalgia of sorts in the last 10 years or so, maybe more, for music that clearly takes from "new age" more than "ambient." I've gone a little afield from the original post: Iwaki's music on the surface is closer to "ambient."
Whatever the case, the newer crop of "new age" musicians I've encountered are as a group much more interesting than what would be called classic "new age." I listen to all kinds of music and while I will say that current jazz players are on the level of those of the past, I won't call them better.
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