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….
A surefire way to grab this blog’s attention is to take familiar retro ideas — say, anything inspired by (or straight samples) from city pop — and put a new spin on it. Kobe’s Tsudio Studio does just that with the harbor-cruise-paced Port Island, one which embraces the slower side of the style to come…
I’ve been mentioning it on Twitter and Tumblr, but might as well get it here too…this week, I’ve been given the digital keys to One Week, One Band, an excellent music blog where writers devote one week to writing about one specific band or artist. I’m going where no other contributor has gone yet –…
One of the best new(ish) names to pop up frequently this year has been Lovely Summer Chan. So far, she’s released a collaborative EP with producer Yoshino Yoshikawa through Maltine Records, joined up with For Tracy Hyde and now collaborated with Uchu Nekoko on one of the better shoegaze songs I’ve heard as of late….
Genres of music never vanish completely, they just go to the shadows until someone makes them “cool” again. So, it isn’t like shoegaze turned into vapor until Diiv came along and got all swirly in the U.S. That said, shoegaze thrives in Japan, maybe not at a hugely mainstream level, but step down to the…
I had to turn my apartment heater on for the first time Sunday evening, which means winter is probably still a month away for people with a normal tolerance to colder weather. Yet in preparation (and, well, for me now, I guess), producer MPEG_& (formerly known as Athena) has a new three-song album called Diamond…
Izumi Makura has had a pretty quick rise up in 2017. Sure, the whisper-rapper from Fukuoka isn’t pulling any Daoko-level ascension, but she’s gone from a pretty secretive artist to one with music gracing fashion shows and commercials. Now, she’s providing theme songs to movies. This is a nice update on her status, but “Eien…