“Pppppppp-picnicwomen-women-women-women”という強烈なタグの曲。Picnicwomenがジュークにチャレンジし、今年のお気に入りの一つになりました。このプロジェクトの最新EP、Stylusには、 “Ripstick Girl”という曲意外に、同じKool Switch Worksのアーティスト、Ahmad Jackson Jr.の曲も含まれています。”Ripstick Girl”はゆったりとしたギターで始まり、攻撃的なマシンガンのようなビートに、ググっても探すのが不可能に近いマニアックなサンプルが乗っています。その後、曲はテンポが速まり、他の要素が入ってきたりして、複雑になっていきます。Ahmad Jackson Jr.の”Done For You”も面白く、ホーンがや、泡がはじけるような音がふんだんに使われ、ミックスの奥には、J. Dillaがやっていた事で有名なサイレン・サウンドが聴こえます。購入はこちらから。
Time for the Music Alliance Pact! This is 2013’s last installment of MAP, where more than 30 blogs from all over the world share one song with everyone else. This month, Make Believe Melodies highlights Coffee And TV’s Prefab-Sprout-sample-boasting “Guess What? Summer’s Arrived.” Listen to it and a lot more below! Click the play button…
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。
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…
This just slithers, all icy synths and vocals. Miu Mau are a new-wave trio, and on “Monochrome” they have created a prickly number that’s both catchy and a touch mysterious. It is a relatively sparse song – some leading guitar and synth bouncing, which gives way to just drum and woozy synth notes. This backdrop…
This is, as the project’s name implies, a pop song. It just happens to be captured through a very damaged prism, all the catchiness of “I Die In Tomorrow” turned sinister and unsettling, a bad dream rendered into a just-under-two-and-a-half-minute track. The beat is jagged and the vocals are blurred out, the actual words nearly…
I wouldn’t go as far as to say Kai Takahashi’s remix of French outfit Phoenix’s “Entertainment” is better than the original…but it is definitely more consistently good. What bugs me about the Phoenix cut is how the hook just sort of hangs in the air, the driving energy of the verses gone in favor of…
“Pppppppp-picnicwomen-women-women-women.” That sonic identification tag has become one of my favorite sounds of the year, not just because it’s a pleasure to hear but also because it means I’m about to listen to some sample-stretching juke courtesy of Picnicwomen. The project’s latest, “Ripstick Girl,” appears on the recently released Stylus EP, which also features a track from fellow Kool Switch Works’ artists Ahmad Jackson Jr. “Ripstick Girl” opens with some laid-back guitar before introducing the skittery beat and an especially difficult-to-Google sample (I think it might be from some sort of Christian artist?). Then the song launches off, the original beat speeding up and an extra one also dropping in as Picnicwomen bends the song in a bunch of different ways. Ahmad Jackson Jr.’s “Done For You” doesn’t slouch either, the producer creating a horn-heavy track also featuring what sounds like bubbles popping and, deeper in the mix, J. Dilla’s signature siren sound. Get it here.
Picnic Women deals in samples, turning familiar songs (in most cases) into warped juke numbers. They are rarely as direct with what is going on as with “PICNICWOMEN On The Floor,” which lays out the idea right in the title. This is Bruno Mars’ sultry “Versace On The Floor” — the slow-dance/make-out session counterpart to…
This week has seen some exciting news for Japanese music crossovers with the Western world. Today, Lady Gaga announced Hatsune Miku will be opening up some of her tour dates…great, cool, neat. But even if it isn’t headline-worthy, the news that Japanese electronic label Trekkie Trax teamed up with Finnish label/promoters Top Billin is pretty…
Talk about good timing – around the same day Pitchfork posts an article about the rise of the cassette tape, one of Japan’s young acts making heavy use of said platform post a new song onto their MySpace. Puffy Shoes’, whose debut cassette was distributed by Scotch Tapes, “Lazy Seventeen” highlights the duo’s garage-fuzz sound,…
Kyoto’s Maho Littlebear makes up one half of the duo 20th Century Girls, and she releases plenty of solid music alone as well. Recent highlight “Quite (Everybody Know Nothing)” hops forward via a minimal electro beat, a simplistic arrangement that lends itself well to the dancefloor. Except Littlebear seemingly wants to take this number into…
Look, if a former Especia member does something musically, this blog will almost certainly cover it. If parts of this HALLCA release lean in on nostalgia for Especia, Monari Wakita’s solo career has been an effort to take similar ideas and turn them into livelier numbers that seem to be a bit more focused on…