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Category Archives: Music

A Peaceful Escape: Sunamachi Sound System’s SI

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Intricate music isn’t always all that calming, but Sunamachi Sound System’s SI functions as an album that’s fun to listen closely too but also one equally nice to play while staring out a Starbuck’s window while turning thoughts over (guess where I am!). The project constructs songs from a pretty sparse set of sounds — simple drum machine beats, a smattering of bleepy notes — but finds all sorts of ways to to arrange them in a way to turn these into little landscapes wowing both micro and macro. “Snowbird” bobs along, new melodies sneaking in and transforming what begins as a pleasant beat into something with a lot of attention to detail that hits on a lot of emotion. “God’s Patience” goes in a more wobbly direction, teasing skippy percussion and more warped passages along the way. Even short creations like “Natsu” hide nice shifts around every corner. And you can approach it from a place where you want to pick up the little things…or just rest in the glow every element brings out. Get it here, or listen below.

Haruruinu Love Dog Tenshi Teams Up With Dubb Parade for Room2017

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Here’s a pairing we can get behind completely. Haruruinu Love Dog Tenshi and Dubb Parade come together for a slippery three-song release that fits nicely in the prior’s bedroom rap world, but with a little more flair around the edges. Songs such as the opener “Furu” combine wispy electronics with piano melodies to make pleasantly warped tracks that are just right for Haruruinu’s whisper rapping, her voice filtered ever so slightly. Part of this releases charm lies in how the two work so well together, with neither one eclipsing the other. Even the rubbery space-out of finale “Planet Planet” finds a happy middle-ground between the two (though wow, what Haruruinu does with her voice is the clear highlight). Get it here, or listen below.

Beat Runner: Miyabi’s Neo City

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Plug in to social media, look for posts about Tokyo and you are almost certain to find photos of comparing the metropolis to the dystopian Los Angeles from the film Blade Runner. It’s an epidemic. What all these snapshots fail to do — besides add any depth to the city beyond “wow purple neon!” — is capture the actual feeling of navigating the city late at night. They zoom in on this techno-orientalist view of the capital when the really thrill of being out late is the mix of bleariness and excitement at all the possibilities the night posses.

Producer Miyabi captures this fantastically on their debut album with Trekkie Trax, Neo City. From the brief intro track, this album establishes a feeling of dizziness — synths whizzing all around to create a disorienting vibe, only a beat keeping everything moving forward. It’s the dominant sound on Neo City, adding a strobe-like affect on “Last Things” (one of the few numbers here with a dominant vocal sample at its center, but turned blurry by the rush of the noise behind it) to the tipsy melodies of “Core” and “Remember.” Miyabi even finds moments of late-night reflection on the spacier “Blue,” giving the album an actual pacing. It’s a set that actually captures the feeling of Tokyo just right, from a lot of nocturnal angles. Get it here, or listen below.

New Pavilion Xool: “Loveless”

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Here’s a good case study in how to make a sample really work for you. Pavilion Xool’s latest builds itself around a sample from Ariana Grande’s “Forever Boy,” specifically a few lines that are mostly tightened up, with an emphasis on the breathing noises she makes between words. Yet Pavilion Xool builds a woozy, pitch-shifted nebulous around this voice, and is able to keep it compelling even if the main vocals are mostly consistent. Look at it as a very enjoyable reminder of their skills in making a track come alive. Listen above.

New Maison Book Girl: “Raincoat To Atama No Nai Tori”

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Maison Book Girl making a play for international listeners is kind of unexpected, though fitting. They just wrapped up a tour of England, and are even signed to a new British labeled focused on Japanese music, and really if any post-BiS (version 1.0) idol group deserves that shot it’s the one with the most interesting sonic palette. “Raincoat To Atama No Nai Tori” sees no major shifts away from the junior-high-school-band-room set of instruments they lean on, but as they’ve done in recent years they make every xylophone note and woodwind count. And it pushes the intensity of their vocals up even further. And it all builds up to a solid chorus, a little more measured than some of the highlights from last year, but sticky all the same. Listen above.