This Monday, Shibuya club Womb will host Out Of Dots, an electronic-music event featuring a stuffed lineup of Japanese artists creating futuristic tunes. There are a lot of artists performing at this shindig – enough to fill three floors, it looks like – so Out Of Dots has uploaded a compilation of these performer’s music….
You don’t need me to tell you the state of media today often feel overwhelming. The Scary Moments series of albums from Wasabi Tapes feel like a nice sonic reflection of this phenomenon, and IV is a welcome addition to it. Like previous entries, it’s a collage set loaded up with video game splatter sounds,…
EDM, contrary to what you might have read, isn’t dead. Maybe it is slowing down in North America or Europe, but it is just hitting its stride in Asia, where festivals continue to do brisk business and K-pop juggernaut SM recently launched an EDM label. In Japan, the style still does well, though one area…
Nagoya’s Lullatone have recently started a new project…well, more like they’ve begun playing around in their studio and creating tracks that don’t sound like what you’d expect from the duo, they write on SoundCloud. Tagged as “Leisure & Research,” the pair of songs to emerge from this experimentation are both really really laid back, numbers…
Plenty of people have come around to producer Yunomi’s maximalist mix of gumball-bright synthesizers and traditional touches, and 2018 has already proven pretty busy. The most notable project he’s undertaken was more or less architecting the debut album from future-bass idols Cy8er, seeing him add in a few more dramatic touches (alongside big dumb drops)….
[youtube=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-ESNxgfnBo”] The new Comeback My Daughters’ album has been getting a fair bit of praise as of late, and “Always On Your Side” sorta nails the final stake in the hype coffin. Earlier song “Why” hinted at high-energy-but-also-a-little-reflective territory, all backdropped by New York City skyscrapers and shitty apartments. “Always On Your Side” dials the…
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.
The titles of i-fls’ albums always seem like clues to what’s going on, but strangely enough his latest throws me for a loop. It has a title within a title – he is referring to a cassette named “Awareness To The Winter,” although I have no idea what that really means. Actual relic of the…
It hasn’t even been a week since I went into a tizzy writing about May.e’s album Mattiola, one of the year’s most stunning releases and one rich in FEELINGS. Turns out May.e is a restless soul, and also capable of churning out high-quality music at will – you can hear a new song of bare-bones…
Boe Oakner is a 17 year old from Nagano Prefecture, and in the span of three months she has already released two EPs of vastly different sonic styles. The pair – August’s Praha. and this month’s Ano(t)raks-supported (Jesus Has Given And) XXX – are testaments to the confusions of the late teenage years, that awkward…
First, too easy joke – Nagoya dream-crafters Lullatone released an album devoted to the arrival of Fall on a day that saw some of the highest recorded temperatures ever recorded in Japan. Isn’t it ironic, etc etc. Lullatone in 2013 is not that radically different from the Lullatone of a decade ago, at least when…
When The Brixton Academy announced that they would no longer be recording under that moniker but instead as Nile Long, one had to wonder if it would also mean a change in sonic identity. The EP the group released last year seemed to signal that, yes, this wasn’t going to be the same collection of…
This Sunday, Japan will hold a general election that could signal many political shifts for the nation. Yet despite the upcoming vote, which will close out a year that saw public opinion about the current government reach very low levels as more conservative politicians try to make strides, political music has been rare in 2012….
