There is no shortage of dance album featuring a bevvy of remixes tagged on to appeal to more listeners — see what we posted earlier today — but HyperJuice’s debut collection Lights is a case where the reworks feel every bit as urgent as the originals. Contributions from Broken Haze and Buddhahouse shine, but the…
The artists on Wasabi Tapes go under a lot of names, but the label has developed a unifying sound that touches nearly all their releases, give or take a Nikkei. They wrangle chaos into something focused, using jarring samples and synthesizer notes smooshed together into something disorienting but fascinating (and, really, fun as hell). DJ…
Oh how the tables have turned…as mentioned the other day mid rant, I’ve yet to listen to Hikaru Utada’s Fantome. Nobody wanted my pitches about it…so I didn’t really have a reason to run out and get it (and it’s not like J-pop-leaning Twitter wasn’t incessantly talking about it or anything). So…yeah, still not sure…
Well this was a nice Google surprise. While researching bands (“research” meaning “clicking random pages on MySpace and hoping for the best”), I ended up finding this incredibly useful guide to live houses in Osaka. This revealed about ten new venues to see shows, and I am eternally grateful to whoever created this page. A…
Writing mostly about “indie” music – “indie” here being vague, but best summed up as “being relatively under the radar” – leads me to expect a certain type of sound most times I cue up a new band’s song. Again, defining what that style sounds like is ultimately sort of futile but it tends (emphasize…
One of the early American pop highlights of 2015 has been Chris Brown and Tyga’s “Ayo,” a joyous number seemingly taking cues from DJ Mustard to create a twinkling song with a few unsettling touches (those echoing vocal samples). It’s good! Kyoto’s Cool Japan has basically remixed “Ayo” for his “I Need U,” which mainly…
Tokyo’s Ningen OK are a group that demand to be seen live. I lucked my way into seeing them this past weekend, knowing nothing about them, but leaving thinking this duo put on one of the better live sets I’ve seen recently. They play surrounded by what appear to be homemade white pyramids. Guitarist Takurou Yamashita stands in front of a board littered with effects pedals, while Ken-ichi Sakaguchi looms over a drum kit which he soon hammers away at. They play very precise, wordless rock that always seems an inch away from tumbling into chaos, but always manages to hold together. Between songs, Sakaguchi leans towards a Vocoder and creates trippy segues featuring his robo-tized voice. Then they launch off again. It’s captivating stuff.
Their music manages to still sound good away from a live house – “Taion No Yukue” highlights Ningen OK’s precision-centric nature while also introducing elements of chaos (listen to that radio feedback). Listen to that below. It comes off their recently released first album of the same name, which is also probably full of good moments. Still, Ningen OK seem like a live band first, one that you should certainly make time for. Bookmark this page.
Everyone seems to be in a summer mood as of late…yesterday, POP-OFFICE were brooding about the end of summer, and now Yucca are getting all melancholy thinking about the season. “Summer Emotion” is a sparse tune that sorta just hangs in the air – I’m surprised this lasts only three minutes and 45 seconds. The…
Diane Halls is a new project out of Aichi that has released one really nice song, the dreamy “Stolen Kisses.” I wrote about it for New-York-based blog International Tapes, and you can read it over here. Highly recommend you get the song here.
This year, Tokyo’s Moscow Club have been balancing precariously between electronic goodness and cheesy gloop. They haven’t abandoned the indie-pop sound that grabbed some attention last year – see the lovely “Radio Vietnam” – but their 2012 output has relied heavily on synths and keyboards, the band conjuring up a spacey, 80’s new wave vibe…
Not quite time to break out the year-end accolade around these parts yet…getting closer…and that’s good, because producer Tomggg just released a new three-song album via Maltine Records. Despite only boasting a trio of new material, Tomggg overloads almost every second of these numbers with sounds. Each song is named after a Japanese fashion magazine…
