I’ve mentioned that I’ve been increasingly fascinated with Japanese group RAY, who are both shockingly prolific and utterly committed to the concept of shoegaze idol bands. If you browse some of their live footage, you’d think it’s mainly the five girls singing and performing over canned backing tracks and it often is, but some of their shows have been surprisingly innovative in term of arrangement and execution.

Their “Groove! Groove! Groove!” show at Liquidroom in Shibuya, Tokyo last September featured three live drummers laying down some incredible beats for some songs – check out this performance of “Blue Monday” – and for their “Shoegaze Point” co-headline show with Tokyo Shoegazer at WWW X last January, they had the legendary (at least relative within the scene) band act as their backing band for at least one song, 「逆光」, and the results were pretty great. Getting used to the choreography aspect might take some getting used to, but you have to admit – it’s a lot more visually engaging than watching people staring at their shoes.

There’s a number of different videos of the performance are available on YouTube, but this one has the best balance of visuals and audio quality. And if you want to see the whole show, it’s here, though the Tokyo Shoegazer collab isn’t in the set and it’s not clear to me when in the show it took place. One of the other videos shows RAY coming onstage after Tokyo Shoegazer have already started playing, so maybe it was an encore not included in the otherwise complete set video? These are things that only I wonder, probably.

While on the topic of RAY, natalie.mu recently had an interview between founding RAY member Uchiyama Yuua and Ride frontman Mark Gardener – who wrote the lead single “Bittersweet” from last year’s White – and conducted/translated by Azusa Suga, ex-For Tracy Hyde, who has also written for RAY since day one. The whole conversation is actually quite interesting, as the two artists from different cultures and generations express their mutual admiration and thoughts on music; I’ll just excerpt the bit about how Mark came to write for the band:

First of all, we have mutual friends, including For Tracy Hyde (the band Suga Azusa was in; Mark mastered their fifth album, “Hotel Insomnia”). That’s how I got the request. I value the connections between people through music, and I love doing new things through music. I thought that being involved in RAY’s work would be an extremely new challenge, so I enthusiastically said, “I definitely want to be a part of this project!”

RAY特集 内山結愛×マーク・ガードナー｜グループを新たな領域へ導く夢の提供曲「Bittersweet」@ natalie.mu

And Tokyo Shoegazer will also be getting some ink around here soon – they just announced that their fourth album (or fifth or sixth, if you count their unreleased/redacted releases) Remains will be out April 22. Get excited!