Nagoya’s House Of Tapes offers up something hypnotic on Jump Up, a three-track album released via netlabel Force Records. Roughness exists around the edges — every song here sounds like flakes are coming off of it, while the beat itself often sounds especially clattering (track one in particular) — but it never gets overwhelming, allowing…
Released earlier this month, the VREATH VOL.1 compilation features songs merging the digi-singing of Vocaloid with EDM. This isn’t a breakthrough by any means necessary — ever since the idea of a drop reached wide-spread visibility, producers have been trying to work synthesized singing under the umbrella term — and for the most part this…
Electronic producer Yuichi Nagao teamed up with Omoide Label for this EP, a brief but whimsical set. It doesn’t come far from last year’s enchanting Reverie, and Lumina finds Nagao further exploring how to turn twinkling sounds into dance-leaning cuts. Bells and chimes are the go-to element — part of the charm here is, at…
Duo Kamisama Club have a mini-album on the way via Purre Goohn, and “Sugarhead No Koibito” shows they are only getting trippier with their music. “Sugarhead” plays out like a distant cousin of “kawaii bass” fare, zipping ahead on a stuttering beat and featuring all sorts of loopy details in the mix — pitched-up voices,…
Not to play the “midyear report” card too soon, but Suiyoubi No Campanella’s Superman remains near the top of my personal list. It’s an album where one person’s character — in this case, KOM_I — shines through and illuminates the project wholly, a nice flip of how this usually goes in J-Pop (the producer making…