Connect And Receive – Summer 2022 Japan underground picks

With the year just passed its halfway point, here’s a mix sampling of some of the Japanese releases that have caught my attention thus far in 2022. Rock still feels like it’s in a slump here, which might partly be down to the ongoing impact of the pandemic but which is probably part of a broader trend in which no one under 40 really listens to rock music anymore. It means there are a lot of familiar faces in this playlist, although that’s also a simple feature of my attempts to keep up with the output of artists who’ve impressed me over the years (as long as former_airline keeps putting out good music, I’m going to keep including him in these things). Tracklist and brief descriptions are below. I’ve tried to add Bandcamp links where they exist, but where they don’t, you might be able to find them on one of the streaming services — otherwise, they may only exist on a CD-R sold to you by the band directly.

in the sun – Nostalgia
Compared to the noise-rock leanings of their first album, 2016’s El Energy, the Metaphor cassette album from the label arm of Tokyo’s Discipline event team takes some similarly kraut-adjacent progressive soundscapery further away from rock and into more industrial territory. Some of the results are caustic and others, like this track, point a direction towards the epic.

A.P.O.S. – 人糞 / Zinpun
The band name stands for “a piece of shit” and this Hiroshima duo’s self-titled EP strips away explicitly musical sounds and luxuriates in the textures of the remaining sonic effluence. The results are more subtle than the band name evokes though, as the quiet, ambient hum of this track demonstrates.

BD1982 – Chapter Zero
Swiftly following up his 2021 CD album Distance Vision with the new Initiation Insight, a cassette of gnostic electronic hybrid industrial/dreampop, BD1982 is on a creative run at the moment.

re:lapse – Hello
This second EP by Tokyo shoegazers re:lapse follows up their debut with similarly slight J-Pop melodies drenched in washes of gentle distortion.

Forbear – Numb
They might explain the mismatch between the title of this EP (4songs) and the number of songs on it (5) as being because one of them is a cover, but I have a suspicion the real reason is that they’ve already released an EP called 5songs and didn’t want to change the tracklist. Either way, it’s another strong release, covering distorted 1990s indie rock territory loosely around bands like Hüsker Dü, Dinosaur Jr., proto-emo and, in the case of Numb, maybe even some of the scuzzier forgotten ends of Britpop like The Longpigs.

Boris – Beyond Good and Evil
Perhaps the most completely representative track from the fantastic album W, which in some ways functions as a gentler counterpoint to the heavier No from 2020, leaning a bit more on the shoegaze end of the same general toolbox of sounds.

The Earth Earth – Just Like You
This self-titled album by Aomori shoegazers The Earth Earth has been a long time coming, and its release from KiliKiliVilla, one of the hotter labels in the Japanese alternative scene at the moment (who also released the Boris album) means it will probably send some much deserved attention up to the often forgotten expanses of northern Japan.

jailbird Y – PIX-ME
The first of two tracks from releases this site’s partner label Call And Response has put out so far this year, this noise-punk band from Hiroshima (vocalist Anndoe is also part of A.P.O.S.) released Duality, their first album in over ten years and their first ever with what’s more or less the current lineup in March and, with all caveats for bias, it’s a riot.

おとぼけビ～バ～ / Otoboke Beaver – 携帯みてしまいました / I checked your cellphone
At a time when rock is increasingly dead as a genre and words like indie and alternative are meaningless, Otoboke Beaver are the Japanese band who, maybe more than anyone outside the major label circus, seem to come up in conversations with people overseas. Part of that must surely come down to what a good job UK label Damnably have done giving a platform for them to impress with their raucous punk nonsense (the band describe themselves as genreless but they’re absolutely a punk band in its broad sense), and it’s interesting seeing overseas labels hooking noisy Japanese bands up with audiences that are in sparse supply in the insipid citypop-medicated Japanese music scene, but their new album Super Champon shows that fundamentally the band are just devastatingly effective at wringing something weird and memorable out of something as simple and minimal as punk rock.

oops – ヌートリア / Nutria
These Osaka punks kicked off the new year with a new release, titled simply Demo, with a new singer, Minami Yokota formerly of o’summer vacation and LLRR, and her distinctive voice does a good job of highlighting the band’s existing quirkiness and invention, moving that off-kilter aspect of their sound a little more to centre stage.

worst taste – お願いシンパシー / Onegai Sympathy
The second of Call And Response’s releases from the year, Akumu ni Warae! is another comeback of sorts (although like Jailbird Y, the band have continued to be a very active live proposition), marking what’s essentially Tokyo punk/alternative trio Worst Taste’s first album in ten years. As I say, it’s one we released ourselves, so we’re biased, but it’s a delightfully demented, carnivalesque whirl through the goofy-smart fringes of punk, garage and new wave, shot through with a structural intelligence in the arrangements.

Nicfit – Human Inane
Another band who made a bit of a bang overseas thanks to their release from UK label Upset the Rhythm, Nicfit have been a longstanding feature of the Nagoya underground scene with their distorted, twisted art-punk. With their previous releases coming out piecemeal on a series of singles, split releases and compilations, Fuse is their first time tackling the challenge of a full album from scratch and it’s top notch.

WBSBFK – Haircut
Also from Nagoya, WBSBFK (pronounced “wabi-sabi fuu-kay”) took their time following up their 2017 album Open Your Eyes, but the results on Grotesk seem to pick up their sparse, precise post-punk more or less where they left off, finding new ways of expressing as few emotions as possible using as limited a range of sounds as they can. This dedication to minimalism, however, means that even the smallest diversion or distortion has even greater impact when it sneaks through.

The Noup – Geodesic
Hailing from Okayama, The Noup made a minor but noticeable impact in the Japanese underground scene with their tightly wound 2018 kraut-noise debut Flaming Psychic Heads, but with this follow-up, Nexpansion, they’ve dialled it back to stripped down beats and finely honed repetition, like Nisennenmondai’s entire career trajectory condensed into the step from one album to the next. There’s more than four years of silence in that leap from 2018 to now though, and you can also hear elements of drummer/vocalist Takafumi Okada’s side gig as a member of rhythmical ensemble Goat, as well as his own solo work as Manisdron here.

former_airline – Phenomena
One of Tokyo’s most reliably prolific artists, former_airline continues to explore the fruitful, faintly melancholic 1980s landscape bordering krautrock, post-punk, shoegaze, dub, minimal wave and ambient music in his very nice new Control Factor EP.

Jin Cromanyon – Stone henji
Taken from the Synth in Japan split album with Tokyo’s always excellent Soloist Anti Pop Totalization from the Berlin-based Objet Trouvé label (released as an LP in a series of increasingly expensive and limited edition boutique packaging designs), Jin Cromanyon provided the bouncy and unashamedly pop counterpoint to the dark sonics of the Soloist Anti Pop Totalization side.

Masami Takashima – Stairs-01
Takamatsu-based Masami Takashima is known primarily as a singer-songwriter and as part of the new wave trio Miu Mau, but on her latest solo album she takes a more experimental, instrumental route, weaving piano and keyboard through intriguing electronic soundscapes (or sometimes simple silence).

2021 Japan music roundup: PUNK

This year, I didn’t really post any reviews aside from a couple of mixes of recommended tracks from the year’s releases. I did, however, spend the year keeping a running list of releases that looked interesting to me, so rather than just picking out and ranking (which always felt like a stupid and pointless thing to do anyway) twenty or so highlights of the year, I decided to go back over that list and try to write up pretty much everything released in 2021 that crossed my path. I’ve divided it into (sometimes very loose) genre themed sections to make it at least vaguely coherent. There are eight posts rounding up the year, and here’s the first one, focusing on music that’s more or less punk. I’ve embedded Bandcamp players where they exist. Where they don’t, you might find it on the evil Spotify, or else it means it’s only available in a physical format.

Born Shit Stirrers / Ledzepvietcong – Overworked Underfucked
Fukuoka-based punk troublemakers Born Shit Stirrers’ approach centres around warpspeed micro-songs that communicate whatever message they have more through the haranguing energy and snotty, often hilarious titles than the generally incomprehensible lyrics. The nuts and bolts of their songs are getting more distinct with every new release though, with individual elements here, like the way the band pingpong about between vocalists, standing out more clearly within the songs’ internal chaos. Over the side, Kumamoto-based Ledzepvietcong throw down some fuzzy, lo-fi nuggets, with a hint of a lonesome and liquored up Sebadoh to their take on punk rock, and after the fierce and frantic first side, the slurred looseness of their side is a welcome chaser.

HALF KILL / DAISEI STOCK HAUSEN – Split EP
The first side of this split cassette from Shizuoka Prefecture belongs to Half Kill, who trade in shouty, raucous punk with a scuzzy, 1990s alt-rock trash tilt. The interplay between the male and female vocalists gives the music a lively internal dynamic, while the shifts in tempo and layers of guitar distortion keep the songs on the Hüsker Dü side of punk convention. Over the side, Daisei Stock Hausen, whose members have past form dating back to the early 2000s in bands like Nemo and The Hasshin Telepathies, are still (post-)punk of sorts with their rambling, ranting vocals, but they channel the spirit through the sequencers, bleeps and madcap beats of techno and EBM and trashy, 80s Helios Creed guitars that sound like they’re being played underwater. It’s messy, which means it’s also unpredictable and kind of fun.

Kagami – Demo
This frenetic EP of short, sharp blasts of hardcore (the longest song is 1:12 long) might pitch itself as a demo, but if so, it sounds fantastic, the guitars scratchy blasts of foil-thin metallic tinnitus while the bass pummels the heart of the songs at you.

LeakLeek – Leak
This is a release my label Call And Response put out, so obviously I’m biased, but it seems pointlessly timid to leave CAR artists out of roundups like these at this point. LeakLeek are a band who are definitely punk, but of a proudly unconventional sort, dropping guitar from the lineup in favour of violin and musical saw (and an extra bassist). This gives the mini-album here a queasy sort of psychedelic take on no wave, with a cover of DNA’s Not Moving driving home that part of their, well, DNA I guess. There’s also hints of the sort of manic Japanese new wave of bands like P-Model and the Plastics in songs like the disconcertingly perky China Doll. A couple of members of LeakLeak crop up later in here too, as part of the also excellent band Nicfit.

LLRR – <=>
Another Call And Response release, this EP from mostly Kyoto-based LLRR (“lew-lew-low-low”) was originally released in 2020 exclusively on streaming services like Spotify, but I felt that was a waste for such a good collection of spiky, obliquely poppy, intelligent art-punk and talked the band into letting CAR do a limited cassette and Bandcamp release as well.

LRF – The Anti-Vax Punk Songs EP
The first of six Bandcamp releases from this Osaka punk act (some of which seem to be re-ups of old releases), this EP does exactly what it says on the tin, delivering four fuzzy, lo-fi punk anthems in the Sham 69 vein, railing against bio-fascism, Bill Gates, the “plandemic” and you, the zombie masses ruled by fear. It’s hard to tell how seriously this guy takes the conspiratorial specifics of what he’s singing or whether he’s just waving them as sloganeering banner images in his more general war on the genuinely unsettling and illiberal culture of restrictions, mandates and surveillance that the pandemic has ushered in in many places. A year on, it feels like a throwback to an impossibly ancient panic, at least here in Japan, but a bit of righteously angry paranoia isn’t always a bad thing for a music scene — like a vaccine in its own right against complacency.

M.A.Z.E. – II
This second mini-album picks up where this Tokyo band’s first one in 2019 (and their 2020 split EP with Nagoya no wave noise-punks Nicfit) left off, firing out micro-missives of jittery, authentically thin-sounding, offbeat punk that recalls the ramshackle early blasts of Kleenex. There’s an irrepressible sort of bounciness to the way these songs leap out of the traps that skirts just clear of being disco-punk but retains a lot of its toe-tapping energy.

Nicfit – Nicfit
This short album isn’t a new release exactly (the band’s 2022 album Fuse, from UK label Upset the Rhythm, is the one you want if you need the most up-to-date statement of where the band are now) but for anyone after a primer for one of Japan’s best purveyors of distorted art-punk, this release from French label Sorcerer gathers together the tracks from their Swell 7-inch as well as from their split EPs with M.A.Z.E. and Pinprick Punishment. The fantastic Creep off 2012’s Ripple Nagoya indie compilation would have been a nice addition too, but it’s still a solid starting place for some dark, dirty, twisty-turny guitar abuse.

Non Band – Non Band II
Forty years after they burst onto the Japanese early 80s punk scene with their wonderfully off-kilter self-titled debut album, Non Band finally decided to follow it up in 2021 with a collection of all new songs. The passage of time has weathered Non’s voice into something harsher and more ragged, and which fits in well with the scraping violin and delirious, whirling rhythms of tracks like Indepup 2018. The songs on this album’s idiosyncratic structures often leave you wondering what it’s even trying to do, but demanding a group like Non Band be more normal feels both petulant and futile. After four decades, they’ve earned the opportunity to cut loose.

Oops – out of pictures 7”ep
Hailing from Osaka, the home of punk that won’t do what it’s told, Oops officially dropped this EP at the end of December 2020, although it just sneaks into the 2021 roundup because the physical version didn’t materialise until the following month. In these four sharply curtailed songs, exasperated vocals ring out over tunes that draw on emotionally wrought alt-rock sounds one minute, sparsely arranged post-punk another, and scattergun spazzcore the next. The band went through a significant shift later in the year with the recruitment of a new vocalist (Minami from LLRR, fact-fans), but this EP is still a tantalising momentary snapshot of a band in motion.

The Questions – Koi no Yokan
Fizzy garage-punk from Okinawa that kicks off with a minute-long theme song for the band, before settling into a groove of lively, scuzzy garage/mod party music. Vocalist Chelio might be familiar to Japanese neo mod scene-watchers from her old band Six, and The Questions are very much in that vein. They followed this release up quite quickly with another EP, titled Beehive (presumably after the band’s hairstyles), in the summer.

The Smog – First Time, Last Chance
This 7-inch single revels in the tightly wired sounds and hurried rhythms of late-70s punk, with the sharp-edged and angular guitars jerking around like a heavily caffeinated Wilko Johnson on both tracks (and especially on B-side Noise Noise).

Worst Taste – Ultra Power EP
Worst Taste were one of the core bands in the scene of oblique punk/alternative acts that gathered around the venue Club Goodman in the early 2000s under the influence of groups like Panicsmile, and they’ve remained active ever since, being key figures in the Tokyo Boredom event organiser collective in addition to their own activities as a band. This three-song cassette EP is their first new release since 2014’s Live-ban live album, released in their slightly altered and electronically-augmented lineup of Worst Taste & Special Magic and it sees the band back to their raw rock trio roots. What that means is that you get three dizzy whirls around the dance floor by the demented ringmaster of a post-punk circus. Inevitably, your mileage will vary with that sort of thing, but there’s no one else who sounds quite like them. At the moment, it’s only available as a cassette from the band themselves, but it seems to be designed partly as a taster for more widely available things to come.

Top 25 Releases of 2019: No. 20-16

Vinyl, Episode Sounds, 2019

20. V/A – Nicfit/M.A.Z.E.
This split EP features two of Japan’s leading purveyors of energetic, darkly leftfield punk rock and both bands shine. With Nagoya quartet Nicfit’s contributions, the guitars yowl and scrape at your eardrums as the songs barrel breakneck towards their conclusion, bass pounding out an atmosphere of doom. Meanwhile, Tokyo’s M.A.Z.E. come in all scuzzy, slashing guitars and post-punk jitters, then just as quickly as they arrive, they’re gone. A breathless, electrifying seven and a half minutes.


CD, self-released, 2019

19. Towel – 「」
Hamamatsu-based avant-indie band Towel’s new EP crams six songs into ten minutes, blasting you alternately with bouncy melodicism, jagged post-punk guitars with atonal yowling, and off-kilter, Sebadoh-esque songsmithery. On some level, you can make out parallels with a band like Siamese Cats in the songwriting sensibility, but Towel have way more ragged edges that they seem to have no interest in sanding away. And rightly so, because on this EP the edges are what give it its charm.


Vinyl/CD, Damnably, 2019

18. Otoboke Beaver – Itekoma Hits
Kyoto garage-trash quartet Otoboke Beaver are currently the Japanese band that people overseas have heard of, and their growing status outside Japan is all the more remarkable for the fact that they’ve managed to do it all within the restrictive limitations of touring while apparently holding down jobs with typical Japanese holiday allowances. Itekoma Hits is half a compilation, gathering tracks from recent Japanese releases together with a handful of new and re-recordings, and if you’re already familiar with their particular style of breakneck garage-punk with hairpin rhythmical turns, you’ll be well prepared for this. But when they jettison the chatterbox vocal stream with shouted choruses and take a turn for the melodic, they reveal the songwriting heart of a J-pop group amid the crafted chaos, in a way reminiscent of Kansai-area forbears Midori. With 14 tracks in about 27 minutes, Itekoma Hits is dense with ferocious yet deftly structured oddball punk rock and packed with unexpected twists.


Vinyl, Groovie Records, 2019

17. The Routes – Tune Out Switch Off Drop In
Calling The Routes part of Japan’s garage rock scene isn’t quite accurate, as the band seem quite content sequestered away in Oita, rarely playing live and having very little to do with the core Back from the Grave/Garage Rockin’ Craze scene in Tokyo. And they stand out from most of that scene too, by having much stronger and more sophisticated songwriting. The opening The Ricochet might veer a little too close to Oasis for some tastes (let’s be charitable and say it has echoes of Ladies And Gentlemen…-era Spiritualized instead) but overall, the feeling recalls the sounds of the 1980s Nuggets revival, more along the lines of Chris Stamey, Dream Syndicate or the Fleshtones (maybe even a hint of Ian McNabb and The Icicle Works in there too in songs like Just How it Feels) gifting the music a lively, sharply-cut, hook-heavy energy.


CD, Gyuune Cassette, 2019

16. Otori – Digitalized Human Nature
Where Otori’s 2014 debut album I Wanna Be Your Noise was loosely themed around ideas of communication, many of the songs on their 2019 follow-up Digitalized Human Nature — from the opening Encode Jungle to the closing Neuromancer — are concerned in one way or another with being human in a digital world. The arrival of new bass player Tsuda (of psychedelic rock band Owarikara) has also seen a shift in sound from the propulsive post-punk of their early years to something more rhythmically hyperactive, with vocalist Sae working more quirky, squeaky melodies into the songs and the introduction of more synth sounds (at least in some cases seemingly being worked Robert Fripp-style through Hino’s guitar). Digitalized Human Nature is an extremely busy album that retains and expands on Otori’s post-punk roots but is also intent on causing discomfort, overloading you with contradictory sensory input to the point where you don’t know where the man ends and the machine begins.

V/A: Ripple

There’s a review I wrote of Knew Noise Records’ excellent new Ripple compilation of contemporary Nagoya indie and postpunk music in The Japan Times now, so please pop over there and check it out.

Here, I’m just going to add a few things that there wasn’t really enough space to go into over on the JT piece. Firstly, to expand on the comparison with the 7586 Nagoya Rock series, I feel that Ripple is kind of being pitched as a sort of “export-ready” compilation, focussing on bands who are going to be, or at least sound, familiar to non-Nagoya audiences. These are the kinds of bands that could support a good, offbeat, John Peel style UK indie band on the Nagoya date of a small Japan tour or that could satisfy a small crowd of Tokyo indie hipsters. It generally avoids the really esoteric, psychedelic or quirky acoustic stuff and keeps centred on stuff that satisfies some wider, more generic kind of cool. A compilation that says, “Look, Nagoya can do this too!” rather than, “Look what Nagoya can do that you all can’t!”

This isn’t a criticism, and in fact it’s something that’s close to what I try to do with my own music promotion activities in Japan. There’s enough stuff that sells itself on its quirkiness and wackiness, and Japanese music is already cursed enough by the perception of its pop culture as mad and (ugh) inscrutable, so it’s good that there’s someone out there showing that Nagoya participate in national indie pop culture on a level playing field with Tokyo, Fukuoka, Kyoto etc. just as I would hope that Japan itself can compete with the UK, US etc. on those same terms. Sure, express your uniqueness, but don’t wall yourself in. This compilation is a small but important part of maintaining that balance.

One reason it all hangs together so well, I suspect, is that so many of the bands share musicians. There seems to be some kind of crossover between various members of Nicfit, Free City Noise, Sika Sika, 6eyes and Dororonika at least, and those bands are very much at the core of what makes this album tick.

There are some bands that I didn’t mention, so sorry Dororonica but your track was a great piece of raw, uncompromising, jazz-inflected prog-punk, reminding me a bit of fellow Aichi punk-noise types The Act We Act. Jubilee’s track was a solid piece of high-octane punk too.

I drew a contrast between the 80s UK-style indiepop of The Moments and the 70s Japanese-style folk music of Yoshito Ishihara. You can hear The Moments’ track on their Soundcloud, here:
And you can get some idea of Ishihara’s more rambling, freeform style in this rather distant live clip recorded at London’s Cafe Oto:

Possibly my two favourites from this were Freedom and Free City Noise, and I was able to track down some interesting clips of them. This one of Freedom doesn’t feature their track from Ripple, but it’s interesting in its own right. Experimental and imaginative, but still fun and approachable.

Freedom: Noise Disco

It’s certainly reminiscent of Kansai stuff like Afrirampo and particularly the kind of thing Ni-Hao! were doing six or seven years ago, but it’s carried off with aplomb and a lot of charm.

Free City Noise have a full half-hour set online and it really is very good, as long as you take “very good” as meaning “exactly the same as Sonic Youth”, which let’s face it, is as comprehensive a definition as you’ll ever need.

Free City Noise live at Bar Ripple (appropriately)

I say in the review that Ripple makes a good jumping-off point for some of the other bands in Nagoya and Aichi, and you can find out about some of them in a pair of articles I wrote for The Japan Times last year. I’ve also written about Pop Office on this blog twice, so check those out too.