Nobuyuki Sakuma is no stranger to new names. For years, he DJed and produced music as Nites and a few years ago launched a new project, one that would eventually grow into a trio and grab international blog attention, called Jesse Ruins. Now Sakuma is recording solo again under the moniker Cold Name, and so…
The music Jesse Ruins – and, to some extent, every act associated with Tokyo’s CUZ ME PAIN label – has always been vaguely unsettling, but that trio’s songs also always added a glimpse of light to the shadowy sounds, whether it just be a dance beat or a particularly pretty vocal. Jesse Ruins’ head Nobuyuki…
So this is sort of a big deal – three of the heaviest hitters in Japanese indie music today (which is to say, they are all signed to international labels of some sort) have collaborated on a song called “Yubiwa,” which is basically The Avengers of shadowy sounds from Japan. The players: Kyoto’s Hotel Mexico…
This weekend, American dance-punk artist Pictureplane will play two Japanese shows this weekend, one in Tokyo on April 6 and one in Osaka on April 8. In advance of that, I wrote about Pictureplane for The Japan Times today. You can read that here. The shows themselves look to be really good too. The Tokyo…
It’s not uncalled for a musician to show why they are good, why they matter, via a remix. Most of the time, though, the remix serves a purely marketable function – it keeps the wheels of the hype machine rolling while allowing two artists to stay relevant in a media sphere prone to tossing acts…