It’s startling how sweet the singing on Haruno’s first full-length album Filia can sound. Last year’s lovely Flower’s Laugh had similarly pretty vocals, but those came courtesy of a real human — this time around, Haruno uses Vocaloid technology for all ten songs here. Yet despite (or, maybe because of) a visible electric hum surrounding…
Duo Frasco keep up their prolific pace in 2018 with “Dramatic,” their latest digital single. And like the numbers before it, “Dramatic” finds them shifting things up ever so slightly, highlighting the pair’s ability to bring in various elements under a funk-pop umbrella. “Dramatic” features a pronounced electronic bounce, which gives it extra force than…
There is a blurriness to electronic duo Animal Hack’s new album Gift that helps it stand out a bit from other artists in the same zone as them. Their latest release features plenty of hallmarks of contemporary electronic music in Japan — see the big release of opener “Body,” the breezy portions of “Plastic Night”…
Sapporo’s Bighead is one of the better producers in Japan going right now when it comes to creating flat-out electro-pop jams featuring Vocaloid singing. World Is Wide finds them in their comfort zone, utilizing the familiar digi-sing of Hatsune Miku to create energetic pop numbers. The music across these 11 songs features plenty of contemporary…
Video game-derived sounds appeared in the swirl that would eventually be called Shibuya-kei — while lots of attention (rightfully) goes to the style’s focus on the dustier corners of the record store, not-so-faded 8-bit sounds also popped up frequently, giving the style a nice splash of computer-age energy. Shibuya-Kei Chiptune Cover Compilation, then, isn’t a…