宅録ミュージシャンのトクマルシューゴが、2010年の作品”Port Entropy”に続くシングル、”Decorate”をリリースしました。今までの楽しいおもちゃ箱のような曲以上を望んでいる人にとっては期待はずれかもしれませんね。今回も、遊び心に満ちた曲に仕上がっています。ベル、木管楽器とアコースティックギターが曲の多くを占め、目覚まし時計のような茶目っ気のある音も面白いです。彼のスタイルは全く損なわれていないです。視聴は上から。シングルを購入すれば、トクマルシューゴによる、かつてMTVで大ヒットしたバグルスの、”ラジオ・スターの悲劇”のカバーも聴けます。シングルカットがどうなっているかは知りませんが、ライブバージョンは以下から視聴できます。
There are several angles one could approach “Winter Valentine” from. It finds Vocaloid-favoring producer mus.hiba teaming up with Brighton-based musician and video-game-music composer Calum Bowen, and is just the latest in a wave of Japanese artists hooking up with overseas artists for various enterprises (see i-fls and, uh, mus.hiba working with Zoom Lens, or Cokiyu…
Her Ghost Friend occupy one of the stranger niches in modern J-Pop music. They are, distinctively, pop…there are clear, catchy choruses supported by twinkly instrumentation and Shinobu Ono’s lovely sing-rapping. Yet they aren’t quite in that hallowed upper crust of mainstream music, rather caught somewhere between front-row-at-Tower-Records and indie. They’ve released two great albums…a solid…
J-Pop doesn’t need to be torn down and built back up. There are lots of bad projects selling lots of albums – this week, Kanjani8 moved more than 200,000 copies of a song, making it the highest-selling single of 2014 thus far – but plenty of great stuff appears on the charts too…and even just…
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,…
OK, this time I checked around – I think this is a Puffyshoes’ original. It isn’t the Michelle Branch song (though that could be interesting), it isn’t ’80s group Scandal’s take. Ain’t the Ed Sheeran version which sucks so bad I won’t even link to it. So…here’s a totally fresh song from Puffyshoes, who do…
The duo Soft As Snow But Warm Inside called it quits over the weekend. The pair, who have been around since July 2012, announced it on a Tumblr blog post. They didn’t release much music during their existence – two EPs and a track via Ano(t)raks – but what they did put out was very…
Bedroom-whizz Shugo Tokumaru has released his first glimpse of the follow-up to 2010’s Port Entropy in the form of new single “Decorate.” For those expecting his whimsical, toy-instrument heavy music to morph into something new by now, prepare to be let down because “Decorate” is another solid example of his playroom pop. Tokumaru’s usual assortment of bells, woodwinds and acoustic guitar dominates this song, and at one point he even works in the sound of an alarm clock ringing off. Also intact – the same sense of wonder the majority of Tokumaru’s tracks possess. Listen above. You can buy the single in stores now, and if you do, you also will get the chance to hear Tokumaru’s take on The Buggles’ MTV-launching “Video Killed The Radio Star.” I don’t know what the single version sounds like, but watch Shugo deliver a cutesy live cover below.
— Erik Luebs shared the latest installment of his Cycle series, the next two tracks representing for the month of May. Previous entries have coaxed words like “woozy” out of me in the past few months, but opener “Concrete Shimmer” takes that haze and adds a real sense of sweltering joy to it. It builds…
In a little over a week’s time, Toyomu (mandatory “it is actually all caps, TOYOMU, if you want to know”) shares his debut EP, Zekkei, featuring all original material. This is kind of misleading — more like his first without using any samples, or at least samples he made himself — but the end result…
Tokyo’s MPEG-7 has recently been creating tracks leaning more on the beat side of things, which while sounding fine also come off like they are lacking something. They sound like a frame looking for one final piece to complete it (mainly: vocals). “Tokyo Neon” isn’t the same case. While clearly influenced by the hazy vibe…
More from the department of “stuff I missed while on vacation”…Michiyo Honda capped of a very busy year with one more single, titled “It’s Me!!!” She opted to end 2011 on a pretty bouncy note, as “It’s Me” is Erasure-inspired electro-pop highlighted by a bubbly chorus that is the poppiest thing she wrote in the…
The Japanese experimental community built around high-impact samples and disjointed electronic melodies that should rupture but always meld continues strong in 2018, and Aichi’s Woopheadclrms only adds to the growing catalog. They waste no time getting attention — second song “Empire of Shopping Mall” opens with spacious electronic waves, but a hi-def scream rips through…
A new label…whether they be net-centric or capable of producing physical object…isn’t a particularly newsworthy development. Imprints start up all the time, so Kyoto outfit Neo-Mo-De Records initially look like yet another bunch of people with wi-fi and musical ambitions, even if they are planning an event in Yokohama this January. Yet Neo-Mo-De demands attention…