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Jesse Ruins’ Nobuyuki Sakuma Makes Soundtrack To Isabelle: Isabelle X
I have never seen the film Isabelle, and am not even sure if this is the film Nobuyuki Sakuma is referring to with his Isabelle X project. Here’s a trailer…seems like it could be! Sakuma has gone and created an “imaginary soundtrack” to the film, and even at 22 minutes it is a disorienting listen….
New Salyu X Salyu: “Jibunngainai” Live In Studio
Another week comes to a close and – confession – this one was a super-busy one around these parts. So much good stuff came out…tough to keep up! Anyway, one thing that sorta slipped by was this live version of a new Salyu X Salyu song, so let’s savor it over the weekend. Remember when…
New House Of Tapes: “Warped”
It took some time, but Nagoya’s House Of Tapes has been starting to push himself into more interesting sonic directions as of late. The project started out as a noisy thing taking conventional dance-music structures and seeing just how heavy he could make his take on floor-filling stuff. This meant a lot of four-on-the-floor beats…
New Pa’s Lam System: “Bit By Bit”
Maltine Records has released a lot of music during their existence – a few gems were bound to slip by. One really fantastic song I failed to write about, from earlier this year, was Pa’s Lam System’s “b00mb0x,” an absolutely thumping number that’s one of Japan’s best pure floor-fillers in 2013. Now here comes the…
New Sakanaction: “Music”
Sakanaction’s latest single “Music,” due out January 23, finds the group touching on some of their older material. The way lead singer Ichiro Yamaguchi stretches out syllables in the verses brings to mind the single “Endless,” while the late-song surge in emotion resembles another cut from DocumentaLy, “Monochrome Tokyo.” Yet this isn’t the sound of…
Kill Them With Cuteness: Chibi-Tech’s “Moe Moe Kyunstep”
オタク文化は長い間アニメやアイドル、そして漫画等と関連していた為、秋葉原にある全ては敬遠されがちでした。その周辺の音楽も例外ではなく、AKB48の名前を聞くだけで嫌がる人もいますよね。でも今年に入ってからはそのオタク文化が他のジャンルと上手く解け合ってきている気がします。アニメのサンプルは数々のインディーポップ作品に使われていますし、Shortcake Collage Tapeからも、Fazerockのダンスミュージックからも聴く事が出来ます。ボーカロイドをユニークに使うmus.hibaや、アイドルグループの東京女子流とタッグを組んでリミックス作品をリリースしたネットレーベル、Maltine Recordsも興味深いです。あまり認めたくはないのですが、AKB48の”Uza”もなかなか良かったです。 そしてアメリカ出身のChibi-Techは何と…EDMとメイドカフェの世界観を融合させた2曲を発表しました。作品名”Moe Moe Kyunstep”はそんなお店で働いてる店員さん達のセリフをもじったタイトル。でも曲は決してカフェで演奏するようなスタイルではなく、あくまでクラブ用です。一曲目はぶっちぎりのチップチューンなのですが、Chibi-Techはゲーム会社で働いているため納得です。AKB48をスーパーマリオブラザーズ2のフィルターを通して愉快に歌わせたような雰囲気が好印象。2曲目ももっと注目されるべきだと思っています。彼女の放つ特徴的な8-bitの音はスクリレックス風のブローステップに吸い込まれていき、一時は可愛らしかったNESの音はしだいに攻撃力を強めていきます。FazerockやMaltineも似たような事をやっているし、Youtubeには数多くの8-bitブローステップはあるのはわかっているのですが、その中でも”Moe Moe Kyunstep”は本当によく作曲されていると思います。試聴はこちらから、購入はこちらから。 Moe Moe Kyunstep by chibi-tech
New Elen Never Sleeps: “Slow (Neu)”
“Slow” originally appeared on Moscow Club’s C86 compilation back in the spring, but has now been touched up a bit (hence the “Neu” in the title) and sounds a lot crisper than Elen Never Sleeps’ original version. Well, it sounds as crisp as something so hazy can sound – the song title is almost an understatement, because “Slow” practically crawls, the guitars and drums sounding glacial. It’s all intentional, though, a decision meant to match up with Elen Never Sleeps repeated cries of “but you slow down/slow down/slow down,” delivered in a dejected-but-pretty voice that this project has gotten so good at utilizing. The original version was good, but this slightly fleshed-out version shows what can happen when an artist spends time perfecting their creations. Listen below.
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Slow Bounce: Traampooliine
Within the Kansai region, it’s a breeze to find interesting music in Osaka, Kyoto and Kobe. That leaves poor Nara as the odd-one-out of the area’s musical scene…it’s not some barren wasteland of sonic ideas, but you don’t hear much about the stuff coming out of the city and prefecture the same way you do…
Lives Up To The Name: Yogen Hayama’s Simplicity
Information on Yogen Hayama is scarce, but Simplicity offers up maybe everything one needs to know about the artist. It is, indeed, simple — five songs featuring nearly zero words, constructed from guitar and electronics. This sparse arsenal forces Hayama to get the most out of everything, and the songs on Simplicity deliver straightforward energy….
Controlled Karaoke: Slash’s Japan-Only Song With B’z Lead Singer
Koshi Inaba sings lead vocals in popular Japanese rock band B’z. Slash once played lead guitar in Guns ‘N’ Roses and has since become one of the most inessential people in music today. Slash has a new album coming out soon (the perfect stocking stuffer for your friend who lined up outside of Best Buy…
Prepare For A Discombobulating Time Warp With Schau Essen 2, Featuring Coffee And TV And Boogie Idol Among Others
The City Pop revival chugs on in the Japanese music industry, and as has been pointed out by Ryotaro Aoki at The Japan Times, it’s basically just a joke. So bless outposts like B.O.O.S.T.R and compilations such as the just-released Schau Essen 2, for actually diving into the at-times grotesque sounds of Bubble Era Japan…
A Very Chocolate Day: Pop Chocolat
“Lo-Fi Tech” quickly makes it clear that it’s an album opening track. A glance at Kyoto “girlie band” Pop Chocolat’s tracklisting for the recently released Trip mini-album confirms this fact, but such fact checking isn’t necessary here. The track opens with some fierce drum pounding before developing into an ever-developing piece of rock massiveness. More…
New Woopheadclrms: Asaga Fu An Fumoragu Aria
We accumulate so much junk. The internet just overflows with forgotten content, gigabytes of “Damn, Daniel” memes and thinkpieces about Iggy Azalea. It’s funny, but also depressing. But from that social-media-age churn comes stuff like Asaga Fu An Fumoragu Aria, the latest from Nagoya’s Woopheadclrms. It’s an album somewhere between ridiculous and gorgeous, the electronic…
