expect delay
I’ve mentioned before that my descent into the deep, bottomless rabbit hole of Japanese shoegaze began in early 2022 with For Tracy Hyde’s final record Hotel Insomnia, but navigating the scene over there – which goes back 15 to 30 years, depending on which thread you pull on – is no easy task, particularly when […]
Like many, I suspect, I found my way to Tokyo’s AprilBlue via the fallout from the disbanding of For Tracy Hyde in early 2022. One of the main questions from distraught fans of the Japanese shoegaze heroes was “what can we listen to now?”, and the easy answer was the (many) other projects from chief […]
The first post from Tokyo proper – Kon’nichiwa! – should be the band that kick-started this whole J-pop/J-gaze obsession that’s been going on hereabouts for over a year, and is in no small part one of the reasons I’m here right now (don’t tell my family) – the dear departed For Tracy Hyde. I’ve celebrated […]
Shoegaze and J-Pop don’t initially seem like the most obvious of bedfellows but it turns out that loud, churning guitars and the super-saccharine sound of Japanese idol groups can be like chocolate and peanut butter. At least that’s the case for the premier – and maybe only – J-pop idol/shoegaze crossover act I know of, […]
I suppose that technically, I already shared this performance from For Tracy Hyde‘s farewell show in Tokyo from this past March, but as good quality as that footage was, it was still pretty raw in terms of production values. They’ve since gussied up the footage – “remixed from multi-track, added unused footage and greatly powered […]
Tokyo’s For Tracy Hyde may be gone, but they leave behind a decent enough trove of archival material for me to wade through beyond their final record Hotel Insomnia and it’s final wake. I’ll start with this five-song live set they recorded in April 2020 for DKFM Radio’s (DecayFM) DreamGaze Worldwide, which I guess was […]
It may or may not be clear to readers that I’ve descended down a vast and deep rabbit hole of Japanese shoegaze and dreampop which will almost certainly inform content hereabouts for a long time to come. And the white rabbit that led me here is For Tracy Hyde, whose fifth album Hotel Insomnia was […]
It was a truly perverse bit of timing that almost the same moment that Tokyo shoegaze/dreampop veterans For Tracy Hyde got a glowing review in Pitchfork for Hotel Insomnia, their fifth album in ten years, they announced they were splitting up, declaring: Since the turn of last year, we had been thoroughly discussing about our […]
