Remember the city pop revival? That buzzed about thing from the first half of the year? Perhaps the latter half of 2016’s sudden shift to ’90s reflection jarred you out of those smooth sounds, but regardless of how many weeks Fantome sits on top of the Oricon Charts (a lot!), the bands from that boom…
Collective Noun’s new compilation Flower highlights a set of artists making music from the corners. The songs featured here are rarely showy, opting instead for sparseness and a sense of unease, conveyed through warped electronic sounds and samples. It leads off with one of the finest doing this parallel-world pop, Metoronori, who provides a woozy…
1. In a moment of pure honest — I kind of hate streaming services. Well, at least as someone maintaining a blog (ha!) in 2016 (ha ha!), as lots of great albums appear on, like, Apple Music, but I feel like I can’t really write about them here, since they seem so inaccessible to most…
Between major label releases, tofubeats tends to explore sounds that might not be the sort of thing to make it on his major-label albums. In the year since Positive, he’s been getting deeper into house — with a pretty fantastic house set at this year’s Maltine event at WWW X — while “Shopping Mall” gives…
Korean producer Night Tempo has been a frequent to visitor in 2016, playing shows across the country over the past 12 months where he can showcase his take on future funk, one leaning on the funky sounds of ’80s Japan (which he’s happy to shout out). Now, he’s teamed up with Japan’s own Tomggg for…