I’m running out of ways to write about nostalgia and i-fls. At what point do I throw my hands up in defeat over my computer and decide, “screw it, time to dig into myself and write about the feelings dude’s music brings out of me!” Every time I play an i-fls album…and I’ve got a…
One of the reasons Tokyo’s mysterious i-fls has become one of the most intriguing music makers of the year thus far is his ability to stick to a sound – in his case, Garageband-crafted melodies that usually last no longer than two minutes – and wring out a plethora of emotion from them. The various…
Memories are imperfect things. That’s something home-recording artist i-fls understands so well, especially on his latest collection Diary Of Spectre. We like to treat nostalgia as something warm, something that gets stirred up in us and reminds us of simpler times. Yet that’s just the stuff of movies – nostalgia, once treated as a disease,…
Two years ago, when I lived not in the hyper-speed metropolis of Tokyo but rather in the semi-rural mountains of Mie prefecture, I brought a friend from America who was on vacation to my then home. We spent a lot of time in my quaint city, population 80,000. We had spent nearly a week in…
Recently, I watched a debate unfold over Twitter about the quality of Japanese author Haruki Murakami’s work, the majority of those jumping into the fray tearing into his style, in particular his reliance on “magical realism.” I get why some would be turned off to this, but that ability to make the everyday seem special,…