Similar Posts
Real Youngin: Toyu’s Experiments EP
Last year, a duo made up of two teenaged girls living in New York but originally from Osaka appeared online. They called themselves BenZel, and claimed they met one another over a message board thanks to a shared love of J. Dilla. This seemed like a stretch. Naturally, the first song they ever released featured…
New FOODMAN: Are Kore
(Editor’s Note: I’m moving to a new apartment in two days, so posts might be on the briefer side. Gotta pack!) Footwork producer FOODMAN already released one great off-the-wall album of music recently…and now he’s back with another on Hiroshima’s Dubliminal Bounce. Are Kore opens on the harsher end of the spectrum and along the…
Skitter Step: Licaxxx’s “□ ▷▷”
Tokyo’s Licaxxx covers a lot of ground on the inconveniently titled “□ ▷▷.” She speeds up and slows down the beat over the course of this just-under-four-minutes-long song, occasionally weaving in little vocal details like a shout of “hey!” or a split-second moan. It’s a track that manages to evoke elements of British dubstep along…
Kansai Scene: New Madegg, And Vice Versa, Eadonmm X Ryuei Kotoge
Lot to report out of the Kansai electronic music scene this week, starting with Kyoto producer Madegg’s newly released Alone Breath To My Family EP. It’s a collection of his wonkiest productions to date – late cut “Moviesound,” in particular, is among the most off-the-wall song he’s ever put together – yet still defined by…
Music Alliance Pact October 2013
New month, new MAP! This month, our Japanese pick hails from Tochigi prefecture….bedroom producer Hisamokuden-kow and his disjointed pop number “Our Song.” Enjoy that and more than two dozen other songs 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…
New For Tracy Hyde: All About Ivy EP
The first three songs on For Tracy Hyde’s All About Ivy are lovely indie-pop numbers. They continue the sound the group has been mostly working with over the past year, guitar-pop topped off by vocals sung in Japanese. There are individual elements in each song that jump out as especially impressive – the drumming in…
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
Here Comes The: ICECREAMMAN
In an age where I could follow everyone of my state representatives on Twitter, it’s nice to find the occasional thing shrouded in some sort of mystery. ICECREAMMAN fits the bill – a non-decorated MySpace page boasting a few photos and one song. No website beyond that, nearly no info, not even many friends. It’s…
New Stones Taro: “Insane” EP
It feels like Stones Taro has been keeping busy in 2019, releasing on all kinds of labels and generally just delivering quality each time. The Insane EP comes from Italy’s Bellissima!, but follows in the footsteps of the tracks he’s put out via Japan’s NC4K. These are slightly loopy house tracks teasing a little bit…
Tipsy And Cute: TsubusareBozz’s “Blue Fairy”
“Kawaii” music in Japan tends to embrace a sugary maximalism, aided by bells and whistles…literally. It’s a hit or miss approach, and one extending beyond SoundCloud producers who love anime girls as art — when it works, it’s a dizzying mutation on modern electronic music, but when it misses it gets really cloying. TsubusareBozz avoids the…
Opened Up At Last: Keita Sano’s “I Found The Key”
Some artists release music at such a rapid pace that finding the right track to spotlight…whether they are an established act (Lullatone, who have been releasing a song a week this year and I just don’t know what to do without turning it into a weekly fixture) or a relative newcomer. Keita Sano isn’t super…
New Magical Mistakes: Special Friends EP
Despite being a staple in the INNIT scene, Magical Mistakes (the project of Erik Luebs) doesn’t live in urban Osaka, but rather a tiny forested village in Miyazaki Prefecture. When I talked to him a few months ago, he said how his remote home gave him ample time to record material, and that the natural…
Floor Filler: Otenba Kid’s Pink Panther EP
The latest from Maltine Records requires know super deep analysis, at least not on a Friday night. The relatively mysterious Otenba Kid’s Pink Panther EP is a rollicking set of disco and house tunes, recalling artists such as Cherryboy Function on shimmering opener “G.o.o.d.y,” which matches bright synthesizer up against piano lines. It’s a high-energy…
