In recent times, Seiho has been exploring space. Last year’s Collapse and March’s “Unreal” single allowed for stretches with plenty of room to stretch out, often for experimentation. On “Purple Smoke,” he shifts the other way, with exhilarating results. The single — rounded out by two other songs — opens with wisps of noise, but then the beat creeps in, joined by keyboard and eventually sharper electronic stabs. Then, “Purple Smoke” blows open. It just rushes forward, noises colliding with one another and producing a rush. “Cherry Pie” finds him hooking up with rapper Kid Fresino, and the Osaka-born producer makes the MC work at his pace, laying down a frantic number for him to zip around, even warping his voice at times. Closing it out is “Memories Of Crying,” another one teasing reflection before bursting into a neon dash. If Seiho spent some time seeing how space could suit a swirl of sounds, “Purple Smoke” finds him controlling the chaos. Listen to it on Spotify or Apple Music, or buy it on iTunes.
Seiho is about to do a little tour of the United States in the coming weeks — if he comes near you, obviously go — and ahead of getting on that plane he’s put together a new release called Unreal. It is a three-song “single,” shared via streaming services such as Spotify and Apple Music, as while as for purchase in the iTunes store. The last song here — “Bird Scat” — offers a hint of what the whole release sounds like. When that track first emerged last year, I wrote that it struck a balance between the abstract sound he explored on last year’s Collapse and the older style he came up through the ranks with. The title track is the best example of this meeting point to date, featuring soft piano notes and slow-motion synthesizer, but all of it eventually breaking into a more jittery step, marked by snippets of vocal samples and quick-hit percussion. It bends and twists, but retains the new sensibility Seiho has been exploring in the past two years. It is a very exciting step forward. Listen on your preferred streaming service, or buy it at iTunes.
Half of this entry should be relatively self-explanatory — these are albums that, for various reasons, just missed our final cut. All of them are worth your listening time, and them falling just outside of the top 30 really shows just how much good music came out of Japan.
The other, though, is a bit complicated. I’m not sure J-Pop…here referring to the upper echelons of the Japanese music industry, the stuff topping the Oricon Charts and monopolizing TV air time…produced many great albums in 2016. A few exceptions, sure, but overall not much I’d consider being particularly incredible. However, a lot of deeply interesting and relevant full-lengths came out, all of them mostly good but more notable than great. Those get some space here, too.
Apologies to For Tracy Hyde, Lovely Summer Chan, Paellas, Shugo Tokumaru and any other album that came out too late in the year to get enough spins.
CVN Matters
Moment of honesty to start off with — every single release Orange Milk Records put out from a Japanese artist this year (and plenty from elsewhere, too!) was fantastic. CVN, the solo project of Jesse Ruins’ Noboyuki Sakuma, has the good luck to land at #31 for me, but Matters still shakes my head around wherever I put it. If his best work in Jesse Ruins managed to balance dreaminess with a lurking unease, Matters uses sonic texture to plunge right into that dark zone, the songs here rattling forward on heavy percussion and with vocal samples adding to the persistently shadowy mood. Get it here.
MCpero MCpero No Hitoriasobi
A lot of Western music writers say 2016 saw the return of the album as viable format…well, I don’t know about that, but the long-player continued frustrating artists trying to jump up a level after working in smaller spaces in Japan. MCpero’s quick-hit EPs offered solid introductions to her approach to hip-hop, but her full-length debut album MCpero No Hitoriasobi suffers from just too much space, marred by experiments in reggae and a few less-than-excited additions. The highlights, though, reminded why she captured our attention in the first place, from her ability to skitter along a Foodman beat (“Live!”) to sunny boom-bap (“Amanogawa”). She even hinted at some pop potential on the cheery “Spring Runway.”
Gesu No Kiwami Otome. Ryoseibai
No J-Pop release in 2016 sounds as miserable as Ryoseibai. Try, if you can, to ignore the scandal that surrounded the release of this album back in January and set in motion the breakdown of a group who just a year prior seemed like an intriguing new entry to the mainstream. You don’t need any of that, even if it makes it seem all the juicier. No, this is 17 songs frequently finding Enon Kawatani sounding exhausted about life, singing from the perspective of a burned out office worker and as a “serial singer” who sounds ready to hit Townwork, and as a guy tired of romance (!!!). It’s bloated and ultimately too much of a drag…but when the band is on, they create a knotty backdrop for Kawatani to sing about two sides being equally wrong (which…hmmmmmm I don’t know). Ryoseibai was pulverized in the wake of tabloid revelations, but remains interesting thanks to how done with everything it sounds.
Earlier this year, Seiho released his album Collapse which saw him mostly moving away from the frantic dance music he had been crafting over the last few years in favor of a sparser, jazzier set content to take its time (with a few bangers mixed in for good measure). Not a huge departure (he’s been moving in more abstract ways for years), but it was a reminder that indeed he’s never content to be in one place. New song “Bird Scat,” shared on SoundCloud last week, strikes a balance between Collapse and what came before, showing a sort of hybrid style. There is a very clear beat present, and many of the techniques that were ever-present in his music — split-second vocals, water droplets — reappear. But they are joined by splashes of traditional Japanese sounds, and stretches of this are near a capella. It’s fractured, sure, but also really calm and sweet. Listen above.
Today, Seiho’s new album Collapse comes out globally via LA label Leaving Records. It’s a big moment for an artist who, five years ago, was playing sets in small underground clubs in Osaka and launching his own record imprint. Yet Collapse isn’t a stab at crowd pleasing dance, but rather an album jumping from energetic numbers to more abstract passages. All credit to Seiho — this will be his biggest release to date, with the potential to reach the most people, and he’s making something challenging and not willing to settle. (Though, hey, he has popoutlets too, which helps)
“The Vase” highlights Collapse’s less immediate side. It is a jazz-accented passage featuring very little percussion — a few stray beats and clangs pop up, but it never settles into anything — featuring some garbled voices underneath and plenty of space. It works well with the video (above), but as just music, it finds Seiho actually turning towards his past a bit — in recent years he’s gotten attention for anthemic cuts, but here he takes cues from his really early work, displayed most prominently on his 2012 album Mercury. That full-length, his first, had clear jazz influences, which pop up frequently on Collapse — albeit in far more fractured ways, as “The Vase” shows. Listen above.
