“Hey! Fake ass Japanese! Listen to real Japanese girls shit before you guys lie!!” This was a tweet by Tokyo hip-hop duo Mioriyuri aimed at BenZel, the most fake pair of adolescent Japanese girls making music today. Still, reading the background story about Mioriyuri makes one raise an eyebrow post-BenZel – the duo are sisters, made up of Yuri and Miori (get the name???), the prior being 23 and the latter being a high school student. Tough to swallow, yeah? Same here – which is why I e-mailed the pair asking if they did, in fact, live in Tokyo. “Yes we do live in Tokyo 🙂 日本人だよｗ,” they wrote back. I’m going to take their word – and hope it’s true, because they’ve put together a hell of a debut album in Plastic Feather, an 11-song collection of beats that would sound great paired with rapping, but stand strong by themselves.
I also asked Miori and Yuri what artists inspired the music on Plastic Feather, and their lists are revealing – Miori takes cues from the likes of Lex Luger, Seiho and Yasutaka Nakata, while sister Yuri ups m-flo, Lil Sad and Lil-B-associate Keyboard Kid as just some inspirations. All of those influences shine through on this album, as the tracks here split the difference between heavy-hitting Southern Rap and swirling psychedelics. A song like “Miti” features a snapping beat begging for inclusion on a Bricksquad mixtape, but the duo offset the hard-hitting percussion with synths that swirl about and lend a slightly softer edge to the song. Their best songs strike this balance – the dizzying Nakata-esque construction of “Twinkiez,” the synth-drunk stumble of “Night In Osaka,” and the woozy “Cassettetapes n Cake” which is only a few notches away from “The Age Of Information” beat. What separates Mioriyuri from other producers in Japan, though, is the menace they bring to some of the songs on this album. “You Are Still Inside Me” pulses with unease, the pair matching the slowly unfolding beat with distorted voices breathing underneath. “Love Like Ice,” meanwhile, turns a sampled line like “all night baby/all night baby/baby love me love” into a mechanical command. The beats here could be fire on a mixtape – but they also standout in the Japanese beat scene, and congeal into one of the strongest albums of the year in this country. Get it on iTunes, or listen to some tracks here.