As anyone who still occasionally checks into this site will have noticed, updates over the past few years have gone from sporadic to almost non-existent. There are a lot of reasons for this, ranging from general online trends (online discourse has moved pretty comprehensively over to social media and no one really reads blogs anymore) to the personal (writing it isn’t fun anymore).
That doesn’t mean I’ve quit writing about Japanese indie music entirely, though. I’ve been continuing to track new releases of note, but instead of writing last year’s roundup as a chunk of disposable internet content, I found putting it together as a grainy, old-skool, photocopied zine a more satisfying experience.
While perhaps retreating to physical media is a self-indulgent thing to do, which ends up making information about already obscure music even more scarce, the fact remains that the internet is just a far less fun place to be than it used to, and the time it takes to write 7,000 words on this music feels far more worth it to be able to hold something in my hand at the end of it.
The finished product, titled Last Year’s Sounds, includes 38 reviews and some additional commentary, spread over 12 A5 pages, cheaply photocopied at 7-11. If you want a copy, I can post it to you wherever you are, as long as you don’t mind waiting the 2 months for surface shipping that is still the only affordable postage option Japan Post offers to many places (US and most of Europe, for a start).
It’s available for ¥500 via the Call And Response Records Bandcamp page here, or message me directly and I’ll give you a PayPal address to save yourself some sales tax and save me some transaction fees (either way is fine). Also, if you’re in Tokyo, you can pick it up from Dig A Hole Zines, Uptown Records and SUBstore in Koenji.
For those of you who just want the list of artists to search for yourselves without the need of slogging through my bloviating prose, here they are in alphabetical order:
1797071
Academy Fight Song
Aldo Van Eyck
A.P.O.S.
BD1982
Boris
computer fight
The Earth Earth
Fluid
Forbear
former_airline
Hazy Sour Cherry
Henrytennis
Hoach5000
In the Sun
jailbird Y
kyosuketerada
Looprider
Masami Takashima
酩酊麻痺 / Meiteimahi
nessie
Nicfit
The Noup
oops
Otoboke Beaver
re:lapse
Sawari On
Soloist Anti Pop Totalization
SOM4LI
Strip Joint
Takeshi Yamamoto
te_ri
Tropical Death
WBSBFK
worst taste
V/A – GAL
V/A – MITOHOS IV
V/A – 若い契り / Wakai Chigiri
Clear And Refreshing 