It’s tough to make music that manages to be emotionally evocative and barrier pushing, but producer MSS Sound System and Shiroro pull it off on Time Warp Love, one of the year’s best collaborations to date and a sorta-outta-nowhere contender for best Japanese album of 2018. MSS Sound System has been making music for a…
Think of this more like one solid mini-album rather than two EPs teased as bookends (collecting and polishing up older songs from them). Duo HoneyComeBear have been one of the better projects in Japan at merging the business of “future bass” with an emotional delivery that often feels two clicks away from J-pop proper. Their…
It’s incredible how even the slightest change to an expected formula can re-invigorate a sound that once seemed completely mined clean. Japanese producer Gimgigam’s Cities In Glass comes via Elemental 95, a label dabbling in all sorts of genre but which is most associated with vaporwave, a niche that feels pretty drained in 2018, unless…
The artists on Wasabi Tapes go under a lot of names, but the label has developed a unifying sound that touches nearly all their releases, give or take a Nikkei. They wrangle chaos into something focused, using jarring samples and synthesizer notes smooshed together into something disorienting but fascinating (and, really, fun as hell). DJ…
No label does compilations quite like Ano(t)raks. This decade, their stuffed-tight collections have highlighted artists who have gone on too much bigger things in the Japanese market…and also highlighted some of the more interesting artists to stay in the indie world, too. Die In Pop is the label’s latest, and like previous efforts offers a…