“Spring” isn’t Cairophenomenons preferred season, it seems. The latest song from the group finds them taking a less than rosy view on warm weather and cherry blossoms, directly stating a distaste for this stretch of the year while also slipping in plenty of ennui for something else lost along the way. But they mask it well, wrapping “Spring” up in a jaunty guitar melody that gives it a far more upbeat feel. Listen above.
Category Archives: Music
New Tomatoism: Cute Moments 2017 – 2018
More Tomatoism means more chances to encounter anime samples I don’t know, which is always good for the ol’ noggin. Cute Moments 2017 – 2018 loads up on said vocal snippets (and, uh, Beastie Boy clips jammed up against Kyary Pamyu Pamyu cuts), but this collection of unreleased and deleted tracks also offers as a nice snapshot of Tomatoism’s growth as a producer and all-around skills. Early cuts such as “Right Eye” and “Kouma Hop” load up on neck-twisting bass drops, but then Tomatoism pivots into punishing hyper-speed pop mutations and funkot epics. While speed tends to be prioritized, songs such as “Mikuru” shows a slightly more laid-back style, while “Cat Food…” uses space (and constant song-breaking stops to play out anime dialogue) to create one of the stranger hard-edged bangers to come from a Japanese producer in a while. Get it here, or listen below.
Cold Steel: Ice’s Ice Do Haus (With Bonus Thoughts On Tofubeats’ “Plastic Love” Cover)
Tofubeats’ Hihatt imprint functions as an ideal artist-lead label. It’s a space where he can put out slow-burning dance sputters that probably make the higher ups at Warner Music sweat if presented for an album under their watch, and offering a chance to highlight other creators doing good work (see last year’s Rubber Band EP by Hajime Iida for one prime example). Ice Do Haus by the project Ice — details hard to find about just who this is — might be the best example of what is possible through this avenue. The titular song, particularly the one with vocals, is a wild bit of acid house constantly on the verge of malfunction. And then the singing comes in, wild and fuzzed over, adding an extra unhinged energy to the rollicking track. Get it here, or listen below.
While we’re here…I wanted to do a post about Tofubeat’s cover of “Plastic Love” by Mariya Takeuchi closer to when it came out, but completely failed on that front. Partially because the story behind what has happened recently with the “Plastic Love” upload that helped turn it into a meme gets complicated: the original upload was taken down due to a copyright claim made by the person who snapped the photo featured in it, which created a vacuum for different “Plastic Love” uploads to enter and…it’s a mess! Tofubeats’ cover, then, signals the chance for an official version of the song — from the same label Takeuchi is on, even! — to enter and pick up some of the fragmentation. It helps that Tofubeats finds the right balance between reverent cover (those horns!) and update for 2019 (digi-touched vocals, especially for the final stretch). Listen below.
Island Update: Okinawa Electric Girl Saya’s Discord
I will not pretend to know much about traditional Okinawan music, and cop to having pulled up the Wikipedia page for the central song covered on Okinawa Electric Girl Saya’s Discord release on Terminal Explosion. Despite my lack of knowledge regarding it, there’s something very endearing about the young electronic artist warping a familiar island song into something new. She’s not the first Okinawan creator to play around with folk songs, but her two takes on it are apt for 2019, while also being an extension of an internet music culture in Japan finding creators warping the things they love into their music. The “Discord Mix” matches the Okinawan-style of singing against piano ripples, bass and sliced-and-diced beats ponging around Saya’s vocals, often intercut with samples of her own voice ringing off to create a dizzying number. Better still is the “Ice Mix,” an apocalyptic take on the song giving very little room for Saya’s vocals to come through clearly as everything crunches up. She gives in totally to noise on the final song — here I most note that she is also a member of the idol group Tincy, and she mostly dabbles in noise on the side — which makes for a fine finish, even if her music works best when her voice scampers over it. Get it here, or listen below.
New Pictured Resort: “Daylight Moonlight”
The other day, I went to the bookstore and looked over the music magazines. The latest issue of Switch is…entirely devoted to Suchmos? Like, save for a little bit of fashion news in the back, every page was looking at the group from every single angle. Call it a potential endpoint for the whole “city pop revival” era in domestic Japanese music — I don’t see Suchmos as villains or even all that terrible as a group (they are hit or miss, but dorkly earnest in a way that makes most of their songs far more intriguing than the hip-cafe BGM of Never Young Beach or Yogee New Waves) but time has proven them as the representative group of whatever this movement of vaguely jazz-influenced rock was. That’s when the page can be finished off.
This is all a longwinded way of saying…Pictured Resort deserves way more love. Their Osaka origins and focus on easy-breezy guitar melodies get them tagged as indie-pop…but twist, guess what community in Japan was channeling the vibe of ’80s Japan first? “Daylight Moonlight” drifts forward, no tension present and only the slightest gusts of melancholy coming in. Yet it has some snap to it too, far from floor filler but letting funk sneak in. It’s far closer to city pop (in spirit) than most of the stuff getting the nod, and a great one to just get swooped up into. Listen above.