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Category Archives: Music

New Nazoyama Meisoun: Magic Teapot

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Producer Nazoyama Meisoun isn’t making outright trippy music, it just happens to have a few zonked-out elements on the periphery. Magic Teapot collects four electronic numbers from the composer and oil painter (check the cover art!), each of them offering up immediate thrills underlined by some wonkier details. “Vintage 4K Monitor” just rumbles ahead, an energetic dance number guided by one of Meisoun’s more forceful beats, but it’s the synthesizer scribbles (some pitched down deeper in the mix) and the late appearance of bells that add a psychedelic layer to the song. “Yellow Wavetable” is even more straightforward, but again the smaller details warp it ever so slightly. Of course, there is one more experimental moment via opener “Single Ended Push Pull Acid,” a clanging number that mutates into oddball acid house late in its run. Get it here, or listen below.

Longing Away: Bojou In Da Tracks

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Simply embracing self-provided descriptions of music or, really, any art without any personal reflection on it is usually a fools game. But man…Bojou Tracks description of themselves really nails it, and is as good as you could ask for. “Bojou Tracks is a label for sensitive hearts,” and the compilation Bojou In Da Tracks delivers a set for the tender set. Although a few inclusions feel a touch more chipper, the bulk of this 12-song collection via the fledgling label finds artists focusing on the rougher side of love, sounding all as muddled as one would expect from such feelings. If 2018 has you down, here’s a soundtrack.

Yet what makes Bojou In Da Tracks one of 2018’s first great albums (yeah yeah, a week in) is the musical variety all over this comp. Feather Shuttles Forever start the proceedings off with a reflective bit of smoothness on “Weekender,” while one half of that group Mukuchi pops up later with a bouncy acoustic shaker. Not everything hits — Dog Food Kai Taro’s little guitar number is a little too goofy for my taste — but Bojou In Da Tracks features so many highlights that the misses just breeze by. Albert Kokorozashi Mura’s surreal “Honeybee” pairs spoken-word lines about “squashing red egg” with playroom twinkles, while disc:ours’ crafts a bouncy synth-pop number out of bubble sounds and ughhhhhs. There’s even a show-stopping rap number from Tamana Ramen, delivering detail-rich lines (shouts out Doutor) bordering on poem-core over a tear-stained beat. Every song offers a different perspective on having a sensitive heart, and always keeps it sounding interesting even if the emotions hurt. Get it here, or listen below.

New Gokou Kuyt, Tohji, Sleet Mage And Who28: “nap”

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More of a Soundcloud-centric rapper round robin than a song proper, “nap” highlights four very promising artists taking their own perspective on the hazy, often-gloomy sounds of a wave coming from America. We’ve highlighted two of them before — Sleet Mage, whose Astral Body Boi tape makes our top 50 of 2017 if we redid it now, along with Gokou Kuyt, a guy who can handle K-rap beats pretty well. They are joined by Tohji and Who28, and each jump on this emo-wrencher of a beat, offering quick verses that highlight what each is all about. It’s a nice swirl to get lost in for just over two minutes, but think of it as more of a gateway forward. Listen above.

New Paperkraft: “Arousal”

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Another one from the “technically, 2017” file, but “Arousal” feels like a good bridge between the old year and the one we’ve just landed in. Osaka’s Paperkraft had a nice little year, establishing himself as one of the better artists in Japan you could tie with the “lo-fi house” tag (though, to be fair, that’s a whole longer discussion, but the sounds related to that maybe-genre do intersect) while also help produce one of the year’s most intriguing pop debuts. “Arousal” finds Paperkraft grabbing parts of Bjork’s “Venus As A Boy” and converting it into a fuzzy house number. The key is how Paperkraft focuses on just the right phrases — which, with Bjork, is probably necessary, since most of her songs are like free-form thoughts spilling over — which helps focus the song and puts the center all on the energy. Listen above.

Returning Home: djnewtown Returns With “SHO,” “POS,” “SOW” And “YUU”

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Along with his tofubeats projects*, Yusuke Kawai worked as djnewtown. Under this moniker, he created breakcore loaded up with anime samples sliced up neatly and rearranged into jittery numbers full of life, while also offering flashes of his future work. If you went ahead and wrote the history of Japanese netlabels in the 21st century, djnewtown would be one of the most important names in the conversation even if Kawai never went on to become a crossover artist, as the project was one of the earliest on Maltine Records and helped get that digi-imprint attention (anecdotally, I feel a fair share of people I’ve met who have known Maltine for a long period of time got into it because of djnewtown).

And now, djnewtown is back with four new songs uploaded to SoundCloud, which all take the scalpel to existing tofubeats’ songs (“Positive,” “Shopping Mall,” and “Yuuki,” though I admit I can’t quite place what “SOW” is built from, get at me with what I’m missing). So why now? I can only speculate, but one possibility is sorta obvious — it’s the ten year anniversary of his first Maltine release, which is a nice round number for looking back and re-exploring ideas. Yet listening to the quartet of new songs, I also think about last year’s Fantasy Club (and not just because, uhhhh, he’s sampling himself). That tofubeats’ full length was shaped by exhaustion and unease, and while the back half found some salvation, the bulk of it bristled with confusion and a world weariness. So…why wouldn’t tofubeats want to return to the simple joy of syllables bouncing off one another, built from recent creations? Why not wade back into a time when the internet was a thrilling other world and not, well, the world proper? Just check the ping-pong of “POS” above, or the elastic hiccuping of “SOW” below. There’s no doubt here — these, to me, sound like someone having a blast. Listen to all the new songs below.

*CORRECTION: The initial version of this post said that the djnewtown project came before the tofubeats one. This isn’t true, as tofubeats had started work back in 2006. Make Believe Melodies regrets the error