Zushi outfit Half Mile Beach Club has always let a certain darkness creep into their music — distorted vocals turned a tropical breezer like “Yankee” into something alien, while numbers like the still-spell-binding “Twilight” sounded lonely thanks to a late-fall-at-a-resort feel. “Bee Line” finds them getting a bit more direct with their grittiness. It opens…
CLAT is a part and collective based out of Tokyo, focusing mainly on techno and dance music, but also making a bit of space for more laid-back, sophisticated pop sounds. The latter is how I stumbled across the recently released When I Was Holden Gaulfield EP, a sampler of sorts of the crew, as Half…
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…
Zushi’s finest, Half Mile Beach Group, easily could have sat back on their wonderfully windswept debut album Park C from this spring, as that one is loaded up with slow burning songs apt for the warmer months (even if they sometimes lean on the melancholy side). Yet here they are, with a new seven-plus-minute number…
Today feels like the first summery day of 2016 in Tokyo, the sort of sunny weather outside your weather that makes you wonder why you chose a career forcing you to sit in front of a computer. Hopefully the temperatures and conditions hold up, because it would be ideal to put on Half Mile Beach…