#10. Parupunte Primitive Imagine your favorite pop songs, but recorded deep within a cave. That’s Parupunte’s debut album Primitive, a rough but formidable collection that manages to capture the Osaka duo in all of their scratchy glory, playing absorbing pop songs that sound like the were recorded deep inside a national park. Whatever the circumstances,…
20. Lolica Tonica Make Me Feel EP Tokyo’s Trekkie Trax runs on pure energy, the netlabel being a rare case where seeing anyone in their orbit live trumps digging into the .ZIP files they upload online. And they have released a lot of great dance music over the last couple of years, with 2015 being…
I’m not sure anyone can be truly nostalgic for a time that was about three years ago, but 2015 was the year I reminisced frequently about albums. Specifically, the commitment it took to go out and buy CDs back in the far-off time of 2010 (a point when physical releases remained the only way to…
Here’s my personal view on these sort of lists, at least as someone operating an English-language blog about music from a country that mostly gets overlooked by English-language media/listeners — it doesn’t even matter whether I view year-end lists as a portal for discovery or as some attempt at canon building, because for the bulk…
The final MAP for 2015 has arrived and, as winter sets in, we spotlight Osaka’s The Neon City and the warm “Summer Memories.” Listen to it, and more, below! Click the play button icon to listen to individual songs, right-click on the song title to download an mp3, or grab a zip file of the…