This bubbly beat comes courtesy of Tokyo’s Yuichi Nagao, and it is a nice bleep-blooper full of bouncy details (the way those synths intersect with one another! how hopeful this sounds!) and just a fun little groover. Listen below.
Half of this entry should be relatively self-explanatory — these are albums that, for various reasons, just missed our final cut. All of them are worth your listening time, and them falling just outside of the top 30 really shows just how much good music came out of Japan. The other, though, is a bit…
New Masterpiece isn’t a label I’d associate with Japan’s wilder experimental side. The imprint dabbles in vaporwave and a few other hazed-out sounds, but in general they seem like a dance label fluctuating between high-energy and past-glazed hoppers. But the latest from Sayohimebou approaches the head-splitting wildness of Wasabi Tapes or Moyas, with a healthy…
Zone out for a second, or let your preconceptions win out, and you will miss the real hook of Beat Is Murder’s debut EP. More on that later, though, because I almost blinked past it too. Beat Is Murder is the new moniker of the outfit NUBACK, who is the founder of the label Too…
Gauging the political intentions of music in Japan can be tricky, especially when you rely on Google Translate and Firefox extensions to figure out what’s going on. Plenty of artists can be direct about their stances, and in the wake of this year’s nuclear situation a handful of anti-nuclear-power songs appeared albeit far from the…
Kindan No Tasuketsu have been teasing a few things lately — highlighted by the arrival of a new member — but with no new songs as of yet. So “Minamo Mina Omou Wa” will have to do for now. It originally came out on a special single put out in 2015, but it’s a rarity…
It’s an easy come down for a Thursday, but one that’s also a touch more clever than it might initially lead on. Feather Shuttles Forever offer a very easy-going number in “Croquette Nanoni,” one mostly focused on pleasant acoustic guitar strums, soft vocals and whistling. It’s a soothing number with just enough of a lift…