2021 Japan music roundup: PERSONAL HIGHLIGHTS

Over the course of the last few posts, I’ve reviewed nearly every new release that came across my radar last year, which adds up to just a few shy of a hundred albums and EPs. While I tried to look at each release in terms of its virtues (rather than grabbing something unknown only to slag it off), I didn’t apply any particular critical filter in the selection process beyond the inherent filter built into the information bubble I inhabit. With that in mind, for those who trust my biases enough to find such a list useful I’ve created a short meta-roundup of my personal highlights from the releases covered in the earlier posts. Or if you’re a new arrival, you can use this as a jumping off point to explore a bit deeper into the themed deep dives.

Main features:
PUNK
DARK/INDUSTRIAL
EXPERIMENTAL
LEFTFIELD ROCK
INDIETRONICA
HYBRID POP/CLUB/HIP-HOP
INDIE ROCK
INDIEPOP/SHOEGAZE

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HIGHLIGHTS OF THE YEAR
(alphabetical by artist)

Aya Gloomy – Tokyo Hakai
Fun pop music with a dystopian tilt.

BD1982 – Distance Vision
Beautiful and often eerie techno-organic sonic landscapes.

Dead Bitch – self-vandalism
Scary and cool.

Greg Snazz – Wrong Answers Only
Rock’n’roll with the guts ripped out and strewn around on the floor of a bombed out garage.

Her Braids – EP01
Simple, smart and beautiful DIY indiepop.

Jesus Weekend – Rudra no Namida
This just landed right with me for reasons I can’t put my finger on.

Kuunatic – Gate of Klüna
A bit silly but a lot of fun.

LeakLeek – Leak
I’m going to stop pretending that the stuff my label puts out isn’t the best stuff in Japan.

M.A.Z.E. – II
Cheap, scratchy sounding punk rock done right.

Merry Ghosts – Pink Bloom
Really well put-together alt-rock songwriting with some cool, sharp edges.

Mikado Koko – Alice in Cryptoland
There’s usually something I find insufferable about crypto or anyone who cares or even knows about it, but this is so deliriously fun and righteously anarchist that I can’t help but get swept up in it here.

Ms.Machine – Ms. Machine
Hot Tokyo band lands their debut with panache.

Otagiri – The Radiant
Ridiculously good, kaleidoscopically fun hip-hop album.

pervenche – quite small happiness
I’ve been waiting for this album practically since I started writing about music in Japan back in 2003, and it didn’t disappoint.

Phew – New Decade
A new Phew album is always going to be one of the year’s highlights.

re:lapse – re:lapse.ep
Subtly textured, dreamy shoegaze.

Softsurf – Returning Wave
Heart-surging, indie-rocking shoegaze.

Various Artists – Mitohos II / III
Two new parts in this increasingly detailed map of Japanese indie’s experimental and math rock back alleys.

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ALBUM OF THE YEAR

Barbican Estate – Way Down East
I knew this was going to be good, but what delighted me about it so especially was that they found an extra gear that I didn’t know they had. This is an immense album and a fantastic debut.

2021 Japan music roundup: INDIETRONICA

In this section, I’m taking a look at electronic (or including significant electronic elements) releases that don’t sit easily in the club music or pop fields. I know indietronica is a stupid word, but that’s what this is.

BD1982 – Distance Vision
One of the founders of the Tokyo-based Diskotopia label, BD1982 has been a regular feature in the label’s release lineup over the past ten years, but this 2021 album is really a standout. Still based firmly in electronic music, it nonetheless sketches out shapes and colours that echo shoegaze and krautrock, with the blurred boundaries of the vocals, the distorted washes of sound and the occasional dalliances with motorik rhythms. It recalls the less abrasive Hot on the Heels of Love side of Throbbing Gristle too in places, constructing an icy, crystalline dreamworld from glistening synthetic parts.

Buffalo Daughter – We are the Times
To see any sort of optimistic vision of the future, it seems like we have to look further and further back to the past. With We Are the Times, Buffalo Daughter are a band in the 2020s who sound like a band in the 1990s looking back at the 1970s, and even when the world songs like Global Warming Kills Us All describe is a grim one, the vantage point they’ve staked out allows the music itself to look forward with both the clean lines and smooth textures of still-new technology and the inquisitive playfulness of someone given all sorts of disco, math rock and technopop possibilities to explore.

former_airline – The Air Garden
Following on from his 2020 full length album Postcards From No Man’s Land (that I put out from my Call And Response label and which is excellent), this new EP by instrumental bedroom technopunk-krautgazer Former Airline is in familiar territory, touching on all the motorik beats, noisy urban clatter, hazy ambient textures and spacious dub workouts that those who’ve encountered is work before will recognise right away. It’s expertly assembled and makes for a concise calling card for this prolific artist’s larger body of work.

Her Ghost Friend – Itsuka no onshinre
Released as a farewell collection of loose or unreleased tracks to mark the dissolution of the group, this high-sugar dose of ferociously cute, pastel-coloured technopop is going to be too candy-sweet for some ears, but there’s a wonky charm to some of the arrangements and it’s all done in good humour by an act who know how silly they sound and revel in it.

Jesus Weekend – Rudra no Namida
In their first flurry of action back in the early 2010s, Jesus Weekend were always uncertain whether they were lo-fi indie-guitar songwriters or purveyors of quirky, abstract synth instrumentals, but this new incarnation (which seems to now be the instrumental solo project of former vocalist Seira) embraces the synth fully, turning out a sparse, atmospheric and affecting mini-album of ambient music that isn’t afraid to take eerie and unsettling turns.

Mikado Koko – Maza Gusu / Alice in Cryptoland
Mikado Koko is one of the most interesting artists currently firing out album after album of fractured electronic beats and eccentrically delivered poetry into the eager ears of those listeners who can keep up with her. The first of these two 2021 albums is Maza Gusu, a katakana rendering of “Mother Goose” that sets Japanese readings of the famous children’s stories against sinister synth textures and skittering beats. The second takes Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as its starting point and relocates the action to the metaverse with the help of Penny Rimbaud and Eve Libertine from Crass. Obviously. Obnoxious as NFTs are, it’s hard to fault Mikado Koko her playful and good humoured enthusiasm for them, having gone as far as creating her own pixellated character Alice Voxel to cheerlead them on one song, and really the whole album is dizzy, kaleidoscopic fun throughout.

Susumu Hirasawa – Beacon
A lot of the attention this album by veteran new wave musician Susumu Hirasawa came from his striking performance at Fuji Rock, which due to its high profile YouTube live broadcast, not to mention the pandemic-necessitated all-Japanese lineup that boosted some eccentric acts to unusually high profile positions in the bill, meant the festival offered a fascinating, in-depth and widely accessible view into the Japanese music scene. Susumu Hirasawa has been farming pretty similar musical ground to this since the later days of his old band P-Model in the late-80s and early 90s, which means he knows what he’s doing as he continues refining his Southeast Asian-flavoured operatic synth-techno toolkit. Less easy is describing exactly what that thing is. There are echoes of No.1 in Heaven-era Sparks, but Hirasawa has made this territory his own over the years and there’s really no one like him.

Connect And Receive – Summer 2021 Japan underground picks

I’ve put this blog on hold while I’m trying to finish writing the terrible book I’ve been putting off working on for the past five years, but as a compromise, I made this mix of tracks from Japanese underground and weirdo punk releases that have come out during the first half or thereabouts of this year. You can listen to it here:

TRACK LIST:

OOPS – Riso no Morning / 理想のモーニング
An up-and-coming punk band from Osaka, taken from their Out of Pictures 7-inch single.

LLRR – Anonymous
Released on streaming sites last year, this Kyoto art-punk band’s debut < = > EP got a limited cassette release this spring (full disclosure: from my Call And Response label).

THE QUESTONS – I am I
This garage-punk trio from Okinawa have put out a couple of releases this year, with this track coming from their Koi no Yokan EP in February.

M.A.Z.E. – Spread the Germicide
Punk with oblique no wavey flourishes, from this reliably in-your-face band’s short, sharp, sub-15-minute 9-song collection II.

Ignition Block M – Houses of Fire
There’s a lot of buzz around this Tokyo punk band, with this song the title track of their recent Houses of Fire EP.

KLONNS – Gehenna
One of the core bands of the Discipline event, usually held at the great Koiwa Bushbash live venue, which combines punk, metal, psychedelic noise and intense techno, Klonns hold up the ferocious, gothic grindcore end of the spectrum on this single. The label Black Hole has also carved out a noteworthy space as a key hub for young, stylish, noisy artists in Tokyo. Aisha from Ignition Block M appears as a guest vocalist on this track.

Ms. Machine – 2020
Another young band with connections to the Discipline and Black Hole crews, Ms. Machine’s debut album was one of the few underground releases to really attract a buzz in Tokyo this year, combining simple hooks in swirling, gothic no wave squalls of noise.

Barbican Estate – White Jazz
Another hotly tipped Tokyo indie band, this 4AD-esque psychedelic swirl came out as part of the Rhyming Slang label’s Japan/China compilation cassette early this year.

yokujitsu – Just Vibes
This Tokyo psychedelic band released a live EP earlier in the year, followed up with this cassette single in the spring.

concrete twin – Nigella
Lo-fi shoegaze that builds up towering walls of distorted sound around its fragile melody in this track from their “Re​:​encounter” sound source #04 EP. The band claim a trip-hop influence, which is hinted at in the shuffling drums, although I get more of a Madchester vibe from it.

BD1982 – THEW3ST
One half of the team behind Tokyo’s fantastic Diskotopia label, this track hails off BD1982’s excellent Ryuichi Sakamoto-meets-Throbbing Gristle solo album Distance Vision.

Jesus Weekend – Forever Breeze
A welcome return from what was once a curiously meandering Osaka lo-fi band and is now a more ambient-focused Tokyo solo act, with this Eno-esque piece taken from the lovely Rudra no Namida cassette EP.

rima kato – today was so bad
This is an old track, from the Four Songs EP, originally released by the aotoao label in 2010 and just re-released this year. Rima Kato’s simple, melancholy melodies and gentle, warm delivery are always worth checking out.

Mitsuru Tabata – Nichijo Part 1 / 日常パート1
Another old song, re-released this year as part of eclectic underground legend Mitsuru Tabata’s (ex-Boredoms, Zeni Geva, Acid Mothers Temple and a billion other bands) large archive of tracks released for compilation albums over the years, Compilation Breakdown.

Closh – I don’t care bcz I’m just ????
A curious and always interesting presence in the Tokyo indie scene, Closh released a couple of mini-albums with the band Doodless before joining alt-rock band Wetnap. As far as I know, this is her first solo release but her exasperated vocal howls and catchy, lo-fi indie-punk guitars are instantly recognisable.

Merry Ghosts – Scotch Egg Struggle
Previously known as Trespass, Merry Ghosts are a post-punk-edged Osaka-based (I think originally from Kobe) alt-rock duo, with this track a deceptively catchy, scuzzy highlight of their very good new album Pink Bloom. It’s not available on Bandcamp, but there’s a CD out there if you can track it down.

Worst Taste – New creation
A mainstay of the Tokyo alt rock scene over the past 15 years or so, this piece of sparse yet intense art-punk comes from their recent Ultra Power EP, which seems to be available only as a cassette directly from the band at the moment.

PANICSMILE – Have You Seen The Bridge
Another album not available on Bandcamp, but the self-titled CD album it comes from is available pretty widely from label Like a Fool Records (and you can find it on the evil Spotify if you don’t want the band to get any money). Put together last year through a sort of pass-the-parcel remote recording process between Tokyo, Nagoya and Fukuoka, this album revels in its fragmentation and unexpected turns, but comes together with an urgency that it’s amazing a band with such a long career can still summon.

Interview: Jesus Weekend

In The Japan Times a couple of weeks back I interviewed Osaka indie trio Jesus Weekend in advance of the release party for their mini-album/EP Agleam in Tokyo. The album actually came out towards the end of 2013, but the article in the end took longer to put together than I’d anticipated so we decided to use the release party as the event to hang the article off instead of the CD’s release.

That’s actually one of the things I always find a bit awkward about writing about music. The Japan Times is very good at taking music seriously, and it doesn’t take part in the Japanese music press practice of taking money from labels in return for coverage. It’s also a a big no-no to have me writing about bands I personally have on my label, although it’s got to the point now where I’ve released so many bands that it’s also deeply unfair to ban my acts from appearing in the paper at all, so sometimes other writers write about them (and I stay out of their way). In any case, ethics are important and foremost among those is maintaining the distinction between journalism and PR. The thing is, however, that because music journalism is journalism, it basically has to be writing about something new or in some way tied to events that are happening now, i.e. bands who have a new release or a big event or festival appearance to promote. This means that basically everything we do kind of is PR whether we like it or not, because we will only write about bands who are currently trying to sell something.

Of course with interviews, I don’t think there’s necessarily much of a conflict there, since your interest in making the article interesting for readers and the band’s interest in making themselves seem interesting to a potential audience are closely aligned. As a writer, you want to find the story in what they say, and to tease out something from their comments that sheds light on their music. I do wonder sometimes whether by focussing on releases, we miss something important sometimes, denying coverage to bands who’ve simply chosen not to release anything and focus on developing their sound live, while bands like Jesus Weekend who have taken the equally admirable approach of developing their sound out in public in the recorded medium are fair game.

Anyway, Jesus Weekend are an odd band. The bit about animal suicides and my subsequent discovery that contrary to the band’s claims, suicide is apparently a well-observed occurrence in the animal kingdom was a fascinating discovery for me and honestly, callous bastard that I am, made me laugh out loud in some instances. Personally I feel the song in question, Animal Suicides, is more eerie than sad, but then the article’s about them, not me.

I mention in the article about the album sounding like fragments of a picture, but it was recorded last summer and when I went to the release party in late February and saw them live, you could see that there was this coherence that was far better developed than on the album. Puberty Bell sticks out as a particular oddity in the album, but live it became apparent that they now have other songs that place it in more of a context. There’s also a confidence and assurance in how they play that gives you a sense up close that while the sounds may be diverse, they are all aspects of the same group of people.

It was a very short set, although a bit longer than when I saw them in Tokyo last year, and this underscores just how early Jesus Weekend have been picked up and hyped (not least by me). The gap between a cool new band appearing and everyone on the scene scrambling to get a piece of them is getting shorter and shorter, especially among the indie or crowd (as opposed to the slightly more traditional alternative crowd — I’m not going to go into the differences here) and while at the moment I don’t see too much of a problem given how small that scene is to begin with, there is the danger that when a band becomes cool too early, it can stymie their creativity, subtly influencing them towards just making more of what people already like and unconsciously holding back their own development. I don’t see that happening with Jesus Weekend, who seem very serious about what they’re doing and appear to be quite earnestly exploring how to express themselves. They’re in a musical adolescence, which is exciting and interesting in the possibilities it presents, but it would be a waste if they were to become trapped there.

Top 20 Releases of 2013: No.16 – Jesus Weekend – Agleam

CD, Fancy That!, 2013

One of the most fascinating and hard-to-categorise bands to emerge over the past year or so has been Osaka’s Jesus Weekend. Once I’d got over my disappointment that they weren’t a gospel-themed Vampire Weekend tribute group, what I discovered was a lo-fi band playing a mixture of fragile, low-key guitar pop songs and mysterious synth instrumentals. I’ve heard them compared to Stereolab, Broadcast and Laika, although given that the band’s members would have been in pre-school when those bands were making waves, a direct influence seems tenuous. At first glance it seems half-formed and untidy, but you find yourself coming back anyway as the depth and richness in ideas can’t help but filter through.

The two sides of Jesus Weekend’s sound are best illustrated by the sparkling, guitar-driven, whisper-voiced indiepop of Puberty Bell and the eerie John Carpenter soundtrack soundalike of Animal Suicides, with the opening Virgin acting as the nexus, the central node that demonstrates both sensibilities and spins them off in their respective directions. Agleam is a mysterious album and Jesus Weekend are a mysterious band. After listening you may be none the wiser about what lies beneath, but successive visits to their world are no less compelling for that.

Jesus Weekend: Demo

CD, self-released, 2013

Osaka lo-fi trio Jesus Weekend have been getting a lot of attention in indie circles lately, partly thanks to their association with buzzy web label Ano(t)racks and their appearance on a split cassette with Miila and The Geeks. This four-song demo CD/R suggests a lot of potential if and when they decide what kind of band they really are. Most of the EP is characterised by harsh yet melodic, droning synth, with opening track Prisoner of Lies layering the vocals 4AD-style over the simple four-note melody, while the instrumental Sunshine Lake has a more subtly nuanced melody and closing track Animal Suicides has the faintly menacing edge of an 80s John Carpenter soundtrack.

The odd one out is Puberty Bell, also featured on the Miila and The Geeks split, and here Jesus Weekend sound like a completely different band. It shambles along like The Raincoats, vocalist Seira starting out cooing the lyrics in that childlike, over-precisely enunciated way that many Japanese indiepop bands have, before the melody shifts into a more bluesy register and she reveals a hidden side to herself that resembles a sort of teenage Japanese Tanya Donelly. The shift to the more sexually mature sounding, world weary blues melody from the sweet and girly intro is a short step but also an unexpected one, which crosses an invisible line, sending a little thrill with it, a subliminal sensation of transgression.

It’s hard to judge from this demo EP what kind of band Jesus Weekend are or will become, and which direction they go from here is anyone’s guess. Their Soundcloud page also has stuff ranging from what you could almost call industrial to material skirting the fringes of krautrock, but at the very least, this collection demonstrates that the band have options.