Ambition is a hell of a thing, but certain artists just really need to chase it. Daoko built her reputation on mystery — she was a wise-beyond-her-years high school rapper who never showed her face and took Sotaisei Riron’s tone of a teenager scribbling personal poetry during a boring math class and applied it to…
Quick late-afternoon round-up of some good electronic stuff lurking around the edges of the Internet: – Sometimes, it’s good to let a lot of goofiness into your music. Dead End’s “Kaishin Shiro” is an acid-tinged dance number loaded up with vocal samples of people talking (at times about disco) and children giggling, along with a…
Sometimes, you just need music that propels you forward. Producer Tororoudon’s “Summer Stream” excels at that particular point, featuring a persistent beat and several layers of high-noon-bright synthesizers, all whirling together alongside some piano notes to form an instrumental cut that just skips ahead all joyful like. Maybe its the constant shifts, from electro-bouncer to…
Denial surrounds and unnerves. The first album from the Tokyo-based project of Cemetery…the solo outing of Batman Winks’ member Kota Watanabe…loads up on spoken-word samples in all sorts of tongues and layers on the thick synthesizer lines to create a collection following somewhere between Jesse Ruins and a puddle of wet cement. Sometimes, a clear…
Long-running Kobe producer Takeshi Kouzuki’s latest is a good number to zone out to while staring at your laptop screen (or maybe I’m revealing too much about my Sunday night). At nearly seven minutes long, “Computer Lovers” is a mish-mash of jittery percussion and dusty synth notes, all rounded out by some audio popcorn and…