Listening/music info: Bandcamp
Info
This is a remastered selection of older music from June Chikuma’s “archives,” which is probably just some hard drives and boxes of tapes, but it’s fun to imagine she has an entire building. The album blurb only hints at what the music was originally written for, but luckily she’s previously posted all of the tracks on her SoundCloud account with very brief descriptions, so that’s cool!
The first four tracks are various “jazz studies” and feature live violin, bass, and drum performances in addition to Chikuma performing on keyboards; they’re mostly all dated and smooth cheesy in a way that I can get behind. The last three tracks (or only two if you have the vinyl for some reason) were written for “commercial footage” for various companies and so are a bit more varied stylistically; these tracks are programmed entirely by Chikuma without other performers, so you get the 100% Old Keyboard Experience. A fun release for sure!
Recommended tracks:
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“Alpine Plant” has twinkly bell chimes doing weird tonal stuff throughout, and I suppose I should mention the rad electric violin solo too because that would probably be a much bigger highlight for “normal” “people”
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“Still Life” is an “ambient jazz study” (as opposed to the other “smooth jazz studies”) and is a big ol’ rhythmic sandwich
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“Something Is Technically Wrong” was written for something called “ANATOMICAL” (I have no idea if that’s a company or a product or what), and it’s also pretty richly layered like the last track but has a much more chill, new age vibe to it
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