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Category Archives: Music @ja

Sharp Corners: Plastic Pop’s “I Die In Tomorrow”

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This is, as the project’s name implies, a pop song. It just happens to be captured through a very damaged prism, all the catchiness of “I Die In Tomorrow” turned sinister and unsettling, a bad dream rendered into a just-under-two-and-a-half-minute track. The beat is jagged and the vocals are blurred out, the actual words nearly impossible to understand, making the whole number all the more creepy as a result. Though, Plastic Pop has gone and done something nice and post the lyrics to the SoundCloud page…turns out they aren’t terribly optimistic! Still, even if you don’t know anything being said (or even the song title), PLastic Pop’s first song does goosebump-raising music really well. Listen below.

Holy Holy: Berserker Children Club’s Someday EP

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Shoegaze has turned into one of those genres of music that I always treat harshly. Part of this might be how in love with dreamy, guitar-centric music I was when I was younger, how it filled me with ~feelings~ of vague hope and sadness. Whether I’ve just hardened or time or been able to not fall for everything blissed out, I’m not sure, but it takes a very special sort of shoegaze to get me excited anymore…especially in a country like Japan, where people love this stuff. At first glance, Berserker Children Club is just a band with a great name and a so-so song. The first track on their Someday EP is called “I Don’t Know,” and it isn’t bad by a long shot. The guitars are assertive, and enough interesting stuff happens on the edge to keep your attention. The vocals bring to mind Hotel Mexico, an all-together-now delivery that blurs everything together into a sexless void of sound. Still, it sounds like a lot of other shoegaze songs. It’s alright.

Then the title track comes on…and I’m caught off guard how great it is. “Someday” is nearly seven minutes of slow build, of hard-hitting drums and those same all-together now singing. Yet BCC give the song more room to breath, to let the group sing together. The music sounds fragile, a synth blurbles and a guitar plays a few notes. That singing becomes almost like a prayer, something powerful. Then the guitars pick up, distortion entering the song, which only makes it even stronger. Then the voices fade after one more incantation, and the music just plays on and on. It’s oddly…holy. It ends with the voices one more time. This is the shoegaze that hits me now. Listen below, or get it here.

Out Of Step: FOODMAN’s Iroiro

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As of late, websites Tiny Mix Tapes and the Fader have been making a big deal about Japanese juke and footwork music. Both have profiled Japanese artists operating withing that scene, Tiny Mix Tapes going as far as to review a Paisley Parks’ album. One name that comes up sometimes is FOODMAN,who has been one of the more prolific producers in this realm of Japanese music over the years. And he’s got a new album called Iroiro out now! Rejoice juke and footwork fans, yeah???!!!

Well, not quite, because this is not your typical juke/footwork album. Iroiro is a very experimental affair. There are moments where FOODMAN’s latest approaches…APPROACHES…those forms, like the beat heavy “BASHI BASHI” or the giddy-up beat of “HAHA2.” Yet most of this tape just takes the idea of chopped up sounds and runs with it in more oddball ways. Tracks like “Rock Kid” and “Battle Man 2” sound like disjointed festival songs, while “Un” is less than a minute of bongos. Most of these brief songs are deconstructed numbers, minimal to the max. This is FOODMAN exploring specific sounds, constructing at times crude (and at other times, fascinating) songs out of noises that caught his ear. It’s a fun one to get lost in. Get it here, or listen below.

New Capsule: “Rainbow”

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Yasutaka Nakata has been super busy over the last year and a half producing music for Perfume and Kyary Pamyu Pamyu. He hasn’t had much time to devote to his project Capsule, who haven’t released any new material since 2012’s so-so Stereo Worxxx. At long last, Nakata has put together a new song for his original outfit in advance of the Asobitunes compilation out now in Japan. “Rainbow” is a little bit of a switch from what he had been doing with Capsule over the outfits last three albums – 2010’s Player didn’t give itself over completely to hard-hitting club beats, but that one featured three Ed-Banger-esque numbers lasting longer than five minutes. Nakata only became more interested in the stuff over Capsule’s next two releases…and “Rainbow” still bares traces of that interest. Yet with this one, Nakata seems more interested in exploring several forms of dance music in the space of just one track. Toshiko Koshijima sings, but she only pops up a few times to do her thing. The bulk of “Rainbow” is pure dance, from the gentle synth-pop intro to the threat of brostep, a little wub-wub spin before the song dives into a more traditional segment. From there, it’s all about small mutations and sudden shifts into new territory. It’s a dance-floor adventure, of sorts. Listen here.

New i-fls: Windowsill Of Perception

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Notes on Windoswill Of Persception, i-fls’ new album out on Niphlex that you should obviously download right away:

– Suburban life/childhood/adolescence is often remembered as a simple time in one’s life, relatively carefree days (at least in comparison to adulthood) that has in 2013 become nostalgia, Buzzfeed list after Buzzfeed list of “remember when?” Yet that setting and those ages are just as complicated emotionally, which i-fls recognizes on Windowsill. He spikes his pleasant synth melodies with noises – the very first track features random cell phone rings and jittery drums seemingly recorded off a boombox playing Aphex Twin (many of the songs here feature this sort of percussive sound). “Maki Tread The Turntable” features an off-beat pounding. “Rebroadcast” sounds like it’s about to pop open.

– There is a song here called “Atami Teenage Riot” which both manages to sound like a Garageband version of an Atari Riot Song (again, the beat), but also sounds far more sincere and sweet than the typically manic German group comes up with.

– As mentioned in pretty much everything I’ve written about i-fls, he works with a very limited range of sounds, but that he’s able to (still) draw so much out of them is incredible. The way he milks tension out of just some synths and beats, building all of it up until it practically glows (see “Chiaki Fluctuate” and the gorgeous, eyes-sparkling “Kudo Want To Be Piano Star”).

– “Go Out” is pretty intense, the sound of late-night melancholy, building up into something hopeful.