Cooking For You
No reason to waste words on this one – let the drifting guitars and occasional bleeping chaos wash over you as you listen to Cooking For You. Enveloping stuff.
No reason to waste words on this one – let the drifting guitars and occasional bleeping chaos wash over you as you listen to Cooking For You. Enveloping stuff.
The ellipses at the end of the title here tell you a lot. Kagoshima-based artist Ryoma Sakoh conjures up images of coastlines and easy-breezy days in the sun on “Island’s…” gentle glide, highlighted by bell chimes and piano notes. It’s at times relaxing and calming, tied together by Sakoh’s near-whispered vocals. Yet that barely-there voice…
It has been a pretty good stretch of time for Japanese artists making pop with a deeply unsettling side. Entering the fray now is the latest release from a netlabel I’d usually associate with the brighter side of sound, Tanukineiri Records, with Araki Takara’s Paranoia. Similar to yahyel, you don’t have to bend yourself out…
Video game-derived sounds appeared in the swirl that would eventually be called Shibuya-kei — while lots of attention (rightfully) goes to the style’s focus on the dustier corners of the record store, not-so-faded 8-bit sounds also popped up frequently, giving the style a nice splash of computer-age energy. Shibuya-Kei Chiptune Cover Compilation, then, isn’t a…
Kyoto’s Homecomings have found their corner of the music world, and they fit snuggly into it. “Songbirds” is their latest song, and it is a further Sharpie-underlining of what they do so well. No band in Japan captures suburban ennui —- a very Kyoto-born longing, a place that allows for the space and time to…
FNCY makes nostalgia seem so natural. The trio of Zen-La-Rock, G-Rina and Chinza Dopeness has largely turned throwback hip-pop ideas into tag-team successes, as recently as this past January. Latest single “DRVN’” still nods to the past, but strips the sound back in favor of a cool West Coast breezer of a beat (produced by…
Producer Amunoa excels at turning small moments into anthems. “Smmr” is poised as, well, a summer jam from the frantic artist, featuring a warm disco vibe and some sweltering synth work. The real hook of “Smmr” is the vocal snippet rippling throughout — it sounds like it was recorded through a talk box, but rather…