German-japanese sound wizard Naoki Kenji started his career as a keyboard player in Tokio and Osaka. Deeply influenced by the Japanese culture that surrounded him, his interest for electronic music started to grow. And when it have been the big electronica heros such as Yellow Magic Orchestra and Riuchi Sakamoto that inspired him back then, Kenji today may look back on his own long-lasting career as producer, composer, and remixer.
With his first album Tozai from 1999 he already landed a US release, such as few European artists manage. In 2000 Naoki released the album Shogun on Neuton under the pseudonym “JP Juice”, followed in 2001 by the album Electric Bolero on ICM by his project “Planet Lounge” - a style mix of jazz, world percussion and electronics…
George Frederick Pinto (1785–1806) is one of the major ‘what-ifs’ of music history: a child prodigy both as performer (on violin and piano) and as composer, he was only twenty when he died, probably from tuberculosis or from what one writer called ‘dissipation’. But the music he composed in the little time he had reveals a composer as gifted as almost any of his contemporaries. These three quirky and inventive violin sonatas – receiving their first recordings here – sit on the cusp of Romanticism, their Classical elegance warmed by a graceful lyricism that looks forward to Schubert.