Similar Posts
New Jesse Ruins: “Laura Is Fading”
Finally, Tokyo trio Jesse Ruins’ debut album will come out on May 21 via Lefse Records. In advance of the album A Film, the imprint has released a new song called “Laura Is Fading” from the group, which you can hear below. It’s more immediate than many of the songs Jesse Ruins has played before,…
New White Wear: Night In Blue EP
This one is only around for a little while longer, so lets not dilly dally – CUZ ME PAIN project White Wear (formerly :visited and part of Faron Square) has followed up his A Black From White Space EP with another trio of songs, this one titled Night In Blue. You can download the EP…
Connected: Bo En’s Pale Machine Featuring Avec Avec And mus.hiba
Ho hum, another Maltine Records from an artist not based in Japan, another opportunity for me to come up with some weak excuse to write about it anyway. But wait! English artist Bo En’s Pale Machine features collaborations with two of Japan’s finest producers going – Avec Avec and mus.hiba. Jackpot, no need for excuses!…
Okadada Teams Up With Skirt For Special Song: “Kaisou”
I’m not sure whether Diorama Books are a bookstore or an independent book publisher (or…both!), but they have somehow made a collaboration between Kansai producer Okadada and the lead singer of the band Skirt a reality. It’s a nice bit of 80s-indebted pop, Okadada giving the song a warped electronic feel courtesy of his keyboards,…
New PixaPhonica Compilation Featuring mus.hiba, Ryuuta Takaki And More
Another day, another electronic music comp combining familiar faces with new ones, so let’s just run through this quick, yeah? The old: mus.hiba and his Vocaloid partner in art Sekka Yufu contribute “Hitori,” another slow-moving stunner in a song catalog that’s starting to overflow with great work. It’s one of his most glacial numbers yet,…
Sound Of The City: YYSHIDD
シティ・ポップスは、日本経済がピークを迎えたバブルの頃に盛り上がったジャンルですが、数年前から復活の兆しを見せています。ジャパンタイムズでこの流行について取り上げられています。Things That Fadeをリリースしたデュオ、Greeen Linezを中心として書かれてるのですが、彼等の音はまるで銀座のホテルでくつろいでいるような気分にさせてくれます。最近注目している他のシティ・ポップスアーティストといえば海老名のYYSHIDDです。SoundCloudのプロフィールには、“Japanese composer/student” (日本の作曲家/学生)と紹介されています。彼の“Naomi’s Love Affair”という曲では、シティ・ポップスの醍醐味が全て取り入れられています。シンセやベース、そしてトロピカルな雰囲気を持つパーカッションが、仕事の後のリラックスタイムのような空気感を表現しています。夏の暑さを和らげてくれるようなスムーズなボーカルも印象的です。 だからといってYYSHIDDはシティ・ポップスに留まろうとしている訳ではありません。Greeen Linezのように、他のジャンルからの影響も積極的に取り入れられています。例えば、“Potato”では涼しく心地良い楽曲の上にラップがサンプルされています。視聴は以下から。
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.
Similar Posts
New Okadada: When The Night Falls EP
Man, it’s pretty crazy that we live in a time when someone can throw an album up on Bandcamp whenever they want and the listener can pay just five dollars (or less!) to download it. As long as we ignore all the industry doom and gloom, it’s kinda a great time to be a music…
Bebecut.toca Featuring Lio of √thumm: “チャーリー&Bob’s”
The poorly-named outfit Bebecut.toca recently teamed up with often-robotized √thumm lead singer Lio to record a song both for their debut album and for a Hook Up Records compilation album. Now a cursory listen to Bebecut.toca’s music reveals a group sorta exploring the same indie techno-pop territory √thumm does, all gum-drop electronics owing a bit…
Electro Overload: New Songs From Motometointe And Aire
Great week for fans of near-suffocating (in the best possible way that word can be deployed) electro-pop originating out of Japan. First up is “Weekend,” a bouncy dance-pop cut courtesy of Motometointe, a duo featuring Nmotome and Intend. While the busy electronics and generally upbeat pace hit immediate pleasure centers, its the tag-team vocals that…
New ELLEH: Anthems Part 1
Electronic duo ELLEH have been building up to this EP over the last few months, and now here it is, Anthems Part 1. It collects all of the singles and loosies the pair have put out thus far, including the tipsy “American Lover” and recent highlight “New To This.” It’s the first real dive into…
New Tenma Tenma: “Rehearsal”
While still quite young, Local Visions has stood out among Japan-based labels in 2018 thanks to one of my personal favorite mish-mashes of recent times. They dabble in the same sound and (sigh) aesthetic of internet niche genres such as vaporwave or future funk, but owing to the fact the bulk of artists thus far…
Review: Jesse Ruins’ Dream Analysis
Someone out there in Twitter’s hyper-short content wasteland decided to make an account for Jandek, the Texas recluse who has spent 30 years recording music from his house in Houston. The accounts a fake, but one that serves as a nice reminder of how much the musical world has changed in a dozen years. Jandek…
