expect delay
When my listening habits first swung towards Japan, Plastic Girl In Closet from Iwate prefecture was in heavy rotation, in particular their 2014 album Eye Cue Rew See, though I favoured the 2022 remake of that record because… I don’t really know, actually. Advertised as “re-edited, re-recorded, and re-mixed”, presumably it’s better produced and better […]
The day the Next Music From Toyko lineup is announced is kind of like Christmas for me… at least since I started attending last year. So yeah, not that long, but considering that the traveling mini-festival is the only way I’ll get to see any of Japan’s indie rock scene live short of flying over […]
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 […]
Nagoya dreampop duo Blurred City Lights came just about out of nowhere last year – okay, out of their bedroom studios – with their full-length debut 天使のいない街で that ended up with a highly-coveted position on my 2024 year-end list. It did this on the strength of its vision, songwriting, and managing the impressive task of […]
It’s impossible to get into the Japanese music scene even a little without encountering the world of idols, and by extension, alt-idols, which basically is the combination of idols with alternative music genres (see: Babymetal). It’s strange and fascinating and actually quite entertaining live – I saw Planet After The Rain at a shoegaze showcase […]
If there is any place on earth that is a physical manifestation of the Japanese dreampop/shoegaze scene, I think it would be Kōenji HIGH, a venue – or live house, as they call clubs here – in the northwest of Tokyo. They regularly host showcases from label/promoters Dreamwaves and Total Feedback, and by pure luck […]
I don’t know much about re:lapse, save for the fact that all the members have previous tours of duty in other bands in the Tokyo shoegaze scene and they’ve put out a series of terrific EPs since the Fall 2021, helpfully self-titled and sequentially numbered. The first was a pleasant if rather unremarkable slice of […]
“Influenced by Kinoko Teikoku” is basically a J-gaze subgenre – or maybe a synonym – and one of the current leading lights of that style is Hammer Head Shark, a Tokyo quartet especially good at their forebear’s combination of sonic aggression and angsty vocals, with a healthy dose of snotty youthful rebellion added for good […]
Despite being probably the heaviest rotation artist for me in the past year and having discovered them through my investigations of Japanese dreampop, I’ve not written anything about Hitsujibungaku because, well, I don’t really think of them as dreampop. As I mentioned in my 2023 wrap up I’d grant you adjacent, maybe, as Moeka Shiotsuka […]
From the relatively familiar to the new , Hokkaido’s Plums, who despite being wholly un-Googleable, have put out a number of excellent EPs of fuzzy power pop since 2019, including a new one just this past February in Life. At least those exist on streaming, and they’ve got a YouTube channel so folks can stumble […]
