As anyone who still occasionally checks into this site will have noticed, updates over the past few years have gone from sporadic to almost non-existent. There are a lot of reasons for this, ranging from general online trends (online discourse has moved pretty comprehensively over to social media and no one really reads blogs anymore) to the personal (writing it isn’t fun anymore). That doesn’t mean I’ve quit writing about Japanese indie music entirely, though. I’ve been continuing to track new releases of note, but instead of writing last year’s roundup as a chunk of disposable internet conte ..read more

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 go ..read more

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 relea ..read more

Obviously this section is another one with a lot of crossovers with earlier parts of the roundup, but I’ve gathered these acts together as two parts of the indie scene that often trade in dreamy or dreamlike atmospheres — they often intersect for this exact reason in the sort of music that often gets called dreampop, and there is often a shared foundational influence of The Velvet Underground. The acts here span from the guitar pop fringes of Shibuya-kei and neo acoustic, through lo-fi indiepop, dreampop, shoegaze and the guitar-heavy end of post-rock. Boyish – Blue Rain There’s a strange sort ..read more

There’s inevitably going to be a fair amount of crossover between this section and things like punk, psychedelia and other leftfield rock, but this edition of the roundup is basically devoted to song-based guitar music based on more or less familiar pop or rock structures, albeit often with their own quirks or divergences. As usual, Bandcamp links are here where they exist; where not, you’ll either need to get a CD from the band themselves or find them on The Evil Streaming Websites. Closh – Dokkyo Rojin A few years ago, Closh had a fantastic band called Doodless (with a double-s) and more rec ..read more

In this blog, I nowadays mostly focus on indie, punk and underground music, and have never been even remotely plugged in to the club and hip-hop scenes. Since most pop nowadays is really a genre hybrid that touches on elements of traditional pop/rock, hip-hop and club music some way, I threw them together in this section of genre-fluid artists mainly for my own convenience. It’s probably the area of the roundup where you’ll find the music that feels most relevant to whatever the conversation around pop music is nowadays though, and perhaps to contemporary life in general, with these releases i ..read more

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 ..read more

In this section, I’m going to be dealing with another loosely defined collection of releases, this one encompassing psychedelic, progressive rock and the more experimental ends of the indie/alternative sphere. At its core, this is song-based guitar music, but of a sort that pushes sound or structure beyond rock or indie music conventions in some ways. Barbican Estate – Way Down East In the Tokyo indie scene, Barbican Estate have had a buzz around them for a while now as one of the most promising up and comers, helped by their terrific debut EP (courtesy of the Rhyming Slang label’s finely tune ..read more

In this section, I’m looking at music in the general sphere of experimental and improvised music, covering a couple of different takes on free jazz, some minimal ambient and drone work, some raw sampling and found sounds junk, and other more or less adjacent approaches. As usual, if there’s no Bandcamp link available, you might be able to find it on the evil streaming sites, but I’m not going to link to them. Alternatively, it may only be available in physical form from the label or artists themselves. estude by Takane Nakajima – diurnal delirium This was a CD I picked up at the square on the ..read more

This section of my 2021 roundup is really a continuation of the punk roundup, bringing in releases with a darker, heavier or more gothic take on punk, as well as acts with dark electronic or industrial elements. A lot of these bands have connections with the Discipline event held at the venue Bushbash in Koiwa, while others are just here because their sense of sonic gloom sat well with the general vibe while offering something interesting of its own. Dead Bitch – self-vandalism The Discipline event crew come up a few times in this roundup, and this cassette EP by industrial/noise producer Dead ..read more