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Category Archives: Music

New House Of Tapes: Jump Up

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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 melodies to emerge and mutate. And, at its best, Jump Up embraces warmness. The standout here is right in the middle, as the second song whizzes and whirs about, but allows particularly sunny melody emerges out of chaos, specifically, the album’s most dissonant passage, bordering on the industrial — or older House Of Tapes. But it makes what follows all the more powerful. Get it here.

Found It: Yunosuke Featuring Hatsune Mikue “I Seek You”

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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 collection features solid but ultimately generic EDM-pop numbers, worth a listen but probably not warranting a revisit. Save for one song — producer Yunosuke’s “I Seek You,” a fractured pop number featuring the familiar digi-voice of Hatsune Miku. A lot of EDM cornerstones pop up, but the key is Yunosuke lets Miku’s voice weave through them, creating one of the catchier Vocaloid harmonies from 2017. Even when things get roughneck, that singing adds a sweetness that keeps everything working. Listen above.

New Yuichi Nagao: Lumina EP

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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 a time where those are often juxtaposed up against big walls of bass, Nagao plays around with them in a different, less pounding way — and that turns the title track into a shuffling number in the mold of De De Mouse. That comparison is even stronger on “Pisces,” featuring fragments of digi-singing alongside Parisian flourishes. Get it here, or listen below.

New Kamisama Club: “Sugarhead No Koibito”

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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, samples of all sorts, bongos. It’s a rush of a pop song, but Kamisama Club wrangle in all these elements and assemble a catchy and (emotionally) sweet number from them. Listen above.

New Suiyoubi No Campanella: “Melos”

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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 everything work). Plus, it just goes.

But that’s for December. The outfit isn’t resting — or their label isn’t letting them! –and Suiyoubi have a new single out this Friday, “Melos.” It’s a bit unfair to say that it sounds like a Suiyoubi No Campanella song, because that could mean a whole bunch of things — but it does feature a skittery beat that transforms frequently, from chill lounge fare to drum ‘n’ bass-teasing passages to xylophone interludes. Above it all, KOM_I zips about and animates it all. Listen above.