インディー・ポップ・アーティストMemory Girlsによる”Our Freedom, Our Darkness”については、公開された２０１０年の６月に紹介させて頂きましたね。２年ほど経った今、なんとその曲がダブリンのThe Choir Invisibleとのスプリットとして、Dufflecoat Recordsからのリリースが決まったようです。なんで見つけるのにそんなに時間がかかったのかは分かりませんし、いつリリースされるのかも確かでないのですが、嬉しいニュースですよね。Dufflecoatのバージョンは確かに丁寧にプロデュースされているのですが、当時聴いた時と同じ気分にさせてくれます。「晴れた日にツリーハウスで聴くのに最適な、童心に戻らせてくれるインディー・ポップ」と紹介させて頂きましたね。
Time for the Music Alliance Pact! This month’s MAP features Hideo Nakasako’s fantastic “Groove Me.” Listen to it…and a lot more great music…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 full 26-track compilation through Ge.tt here….
Ykiki Beat includes members of Timothy Work and DYGL, two Tokyo projects who have produced some solid works in the past year. Yet I gotta know, how did Ykiki Beat end up with the best track any of the lot have presented so far? “Garden” is the sort of song that gets a band a…
boy from HOTEL MEXICO on Vimeo. Hotel Mexico’s new album Her Decorated Post Love dropped yesterday, and definitely worth your time. The Kyoto group also released a video for that album’s lead-off track, “boy,” yesterday, which you can watch above. This song bares a slight resemblance to Hotel Mexico’s older “Starling, Tiger, Fox,” what with…
Nagoya’s Noah already has teamed up with one American artist (Sela) for her first release of the year, and now for number two (which…is named TWO) she’s hooked up with Houston rapper/vaporwave producer Siddiq. Whereas her first 2013 release was a split, this finds the two musicians working together, Noah presumably providing the beats while…
Kansai producer Hideo Nakasako is off to a fast-paced 2014. Last month he released a great EP of music…and now he’s back with another three-song-set called Observation that continues to highlight him as an artist to keep an eye on in the always-busy Kansai electronic scene. It opens with the off-kilter “Star Lily,” a tipsy…
That Nagoya’s House Of Tapes’ debut album Trip Science is an enjoyable experience at all is a small miracle. That sounds harsh, the darkest shade one could throw, but I don’t mean that in a dismissive or ironically surprised way. House Of Tapes’ music has always sounded like a sonic endurance test, the dance-music equivalent…
Indie-pop outfit Memory Girls originally posted “Our Freedom, Our Darkness” back in June 2010 – we wrote about it then (remember that design?). More than two years later, that lovely little song will be released on English imprint Dufflecoat Records, as a split with Dublin band The Choir Invisible. Not sure when the actual record comes out…or why it took so long for someone to notice the song…but exciting news nonetheless. The Dufflecoat version (listen below) sounds better produced than the song I remember from 2010, but still retains the elements that prompted me to write that the song was the “stuff of childhood naivety, skippy indie-pop perfect for soundtracking the construction of a treehouse on a clear day” a long time ago. Treehouses, really? Geez I hope I’m doing better at this now.
This is like ASMR for me. The Oto Factory just coat their music in vocoder, turning funk and dance-pop songs into vibrating jams with a little bit of tension that a lot of similar “city pop” revival stuff avoids in favor of chill vibes. “R _ U _ S _ H _ H _ O…
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8Snh-9CM50″] The premise for Comeback My Daughters’ video for new single “Why” isn’t terribly complex – the band is in New York City, let’s film them running around pretending to play their instruments while a few baffled locals cast strange glances at the camera every once in awhile. Easy, but entertaining. Especially when they end…
Buddhism just a little too boring for ya? Tokyo-based monk Kansho Taga decided the best way to spice up the sutras was to say them a little faster and have some dude beatboxing in the back. Taga now goes by the stage name MC Happiness and presumably raps about the eight-fold path. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CsF0siaYBFc&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en_US&feature=player_embedded&fs=1] Dudes got…
[youtube=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Y2kYQB5nVA”] The above song, off of rapper Wiz Khalifa’s recently released Taylor Allderdice mixtape, features a beat by Tokyo producer Bugseed from his 2010 album Bohemian Beatnik called “Travelog.” Listen to the original below: [youtube=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOw6nEwggag”] Khalifa is definitely rapping over the Bugseed beat. Problem is, the track doesn’t credit Bugseed for the song, but rather…
This year has seen a lot of really good Japanese indie-pop music spring up, but this scene has also been a bit male-centric. Some bands to pop up in 2012 feature women playing in the band, but they are rarely at the forefront of the group and, save for Osaka’s Twinkle Twinkles and (if you…
All praise be to Japanese indie-pop and the description “jangly,” but the one downside of Japan’s current twee obsession is the slow realization that a lot of this stuff sounds the same. That, in and of itself, isn’t a bad thing – if the music sounds good, the music sounds good so whatever. Yet at…