Safe At Home: Juliana Paris’ “Wasuremono No Mori”

Plenty of bedroom-based musicians do not deserve your time, but when a good one pops up, they are special. Japan’s introduced a lot of good ones into the musical conversation over the last year, and even more continue to pop up online. Out of the digital ether comes Juliana Paris, a project whose latest track “Wasuremono No Mori” stands out from the ever-crowding online world. It sounds distinctively lo-fi…the vocals trip over themselves, and the entire song’s sound comes off as just a little jumbled together, a lot of stuff going on but not always coming through clearly. The whirring synths are nice, especially as the notes go higher as the song unfolds, but I’m not writing about this one because of the crisp sound. Rather, Juliana Paris have hit on a great melody on “Wasuremono,” a twinkling little number that manages to find a balance between shuffley dance number and emotional beast. It brings to mind a basement Brixton Academy…or, maybe more immediate, Super VHS…in how touching this shuffling little track can get. Listen below, or get it here.