Look, I’m watching the second half of this Japan-Colombia World Cup game and it is stupid stressful, here is a new song from Osaka’s Soleil Soleil, it’s good. Back to sitting all scrunched up like seeing if Japan can score two goals….
Toyomu’s radical re-works — especially that one — are always going to be the immediate image of the Kyoto artist for a lot of people. But “Maboroshi” shines because it channels all the other elements that have been present in Toyomu’s original music, synthesizing them into one squiggly track. Traces of his Brainfeeder-loving early days…
The city sits at the center of Japanese life in 2016, as the number of people moving to major metropolitan centers keeps growing while the countryside — and even mid-size cities — see populations dwindle, once bustling shopping arcades reduced to shuttered-up artifacts. Music, accordingly, has shifted towards a more urban crowd. This has been…
Pretty easily classified as indie-pop, right? Exhibit A being, uh, that twee-tastic name. Or maybe how the group identifies as “indie/pop.” The majority of Monochrome Chocolate’s bite-sized samples also backup this theory, tracks like “Vineyard” and “Beyonce” balancing sweet ennui with galloping vocal delivery. So yeah – indie pop. Yet this four-piece works in some…
February just rolled around, yet I’ve seen barely any snow this winter. A few flakes fell on the school where I work in mid January, and I saw some residual clumps in the streets of Tokyo, but I’ve yet to really see a true snow storm. Madegg’s newest track, “Don’t Cry,” might end up being…
1. In a moment of pure honest — I kind of hate streaming services. Well, at least as someone maintaining a blog (ha!) in 2016 (ha ha!), as lots of great albums appear on, like, Apple Music, but I feel like I can’t really write about them here, since they seem so inaccessible to most…
There is a moment on the song “Joints” from beatmaker YAGI’s new EP Flowers in which he coolly admits his major source of inspiration. Relatively early into the song – and only for a second or two, and only once at that – you can hear the same siren sample the late J. Dilla used…