Artist: Envy
Song: Left Hand?????
From album: All The Footprints You’ve Ever Left And The Fear Expecting
Genre: Epic-core
[Buy CD][Website]

This is Envy, whom I have mentioned previously. This image is from the same photographer, another dynamic slice. I’m not sure what to say about such a staple of Japanese melodic-abyssal-shoegaze-core except that they are worthy of the often carelessly-slung descriptor, “epic.”

Not just in adjective form, but in the original noun form as well. In historical epics all the feelings and understandings of a culture, all their thoughts about the world and mankind were condensed, redacted, and molded into a narrative structure that attempted to approximate the outlook of the society. It seems that much the same object and process are evident in Envy’s records. Tumult and anguish show their faces, but so do awe and quiet serenity and a proliferation of emotion that seems to evidence a near-total self-investment.

Artist: Radwimps
Song: ???????????????????
From album: ??????????????
Genre: Poppunkcore
[Buy CD][Website]

I don’t have much time on me, but here, have a fun video of a little girl destroying a city with a whiffle ball bat. Her energetic, catchy soundtrack could very well fit in on one of our “edgy” American radio stations.

Artist: Apogee
Song: ???? (Yakan Hikou [Night Flight])
From album: ????
[Buy CD][Website]

This video “Night Flight” blends Apogee’s silky synthpop with a nicely edited milieu of cosmical and mythological yet whimsical imagery; and to quite a charming effect.

Not much pop catches my ear these days, but this song and video have something special. The album link is to their first full album “fantastic” which has a newer version of the song. The original is from their single of the same name.

Artist: Toe
Song: Everything Means Nothing
From album: The Book About My Idle Plot on a Vague Anxiety
Genre: Instrumental Subsequent Rock
[Buy CD][Website]

I should have posted Toe a long time ago; they have stood out as one of the best Japanese instrumental bands I’ve heard since I started looking. They have an unfading talent for constructing glittering twilight braids of melody that twinkle and flow in swaying coils.

I’ve also been pleasantly surprised by their website, and most especially by the photography section which strikes me as containing some of the absolute finest band photography I’ve seen anywhere. Foremost among these are the photos by Yoshiharu Ota which are worth a post in themselves. The photo-viewer on Toe’s homepage is big and beautiful, the photos saturated with color and movement; and it has a nice elegant interface too, whose concept I might appropriate and adapt for myself at some point.

So, I’m sortof back now, and I’ve got this nifty new video player with me. It has been in the works for a while, being built up from scratch, and will probably be refined a little more before it’s fully implemented. Please feel free to mess with it, try to break it, give me feedback, and let me know if it does anything odd. It fits the scheme more, and it’s now extra-simple to plug stuff into so it’ll be easier to do videos in the future.

I realized recently that I have been doing this for over a year now and have made an average of around 1.3 posts per week. It’s neither here nor there, but I think I’ll try to increase that to at least 2 per week on average in the coming year, starting now.

Artist: Downy Song: ? (Delta) Album: ?? 4th (Mudai)

Here’s the video that first introduced me to downy. It came like manna from heaven at a time when I was at a dead end in my exploration of Japanese music.

The Japanese music industry has a whole lot in common with the American music industry; in fact, it’s probably a glimpse of the American Industry’s near future state: A behemoth of advertising, mass production, formulaic repetition, and blatant revenue creation. Years ago I used to hear it rumored that the Backstreet Boys and N’Sync etc. were creations of record companies, more or less genetically designed to make the most money from the least effort by pandering to a demographic with sparse discernment and extremely liquid assets. Well, often the Japanese industry doesn’t even pretend to hide it, and no one seems to mind.

Take Johhny’s, for instance. It’s more or less a boy band factory. It scouts members based on personal magnetism and charm, and then puts them through boy-band-bootcamp to learn how to dance, and hopefully at least marginally, to sing. Johhny’s does this successfully over and over and over, people keep buying the records, and they end up #1 on the charts. Also, basically each member in one of these groups is guaranteed a starring role in at least one tv drama, product endorsement deals, and various variety/gameshow appearances, and in fact, most groups actually get their very own TV show.

Not that any of this is intrinsically bad, it just gets old after a while. One can, perhaps, only take so much of the same sound, same routine. Thank goodness for downy, my first taste of life after so long having wandered in the aural wasteland.

Listen, listen again, then let go and really hear.

Artist: Takagi Masakatsu
Song: Girls
[Buy CDs/DVDs|itunes][Artist’s Site]

Found via “Film. Music. Philosophy.”, Takagi Masakatsu has instantly become one of my top favorite multimedia artists. He paints with video, over it, through it, around and into it. Watching his incredible moving paintings is like seeing into a world of true forms. In his world, everything is literally burning with life and color and emotional essence; the sky, the wind, everything. It’s all more real than one could imagine.

The miraculous movement and flow of his works is wrapped up in what he calls the missing color of sound; the expressive ambient musical compositions he writes for each piece. The song in this post is “girls” from his album “Coieda”.

Despite the Macsturbatory propaganda, the Apple Pro video piece on him is of a very good quality, and shows some excellent samples of his work. In this PopJam interview he talks a bit about his art, and there are several other nice clips, though at a much lower resolution. His own site has many many large stills from the works as well.

Simply put, this stuff is effing gorgeous. Links: [1][2][3][4][5]

The samples used in that Gellers song reminded me of the voices in Kurekure Takora, (Gimme Gimme Octopus [and pals,]) a bizarre 60’s Japanese children’s show in whose first episode the main character, (a bipedal red octopus): assaults a police officer, (a badger?), steals his uniform and gun, uses it to threaten someone, (a dragon-rat?), steals said someone’s girlfriend, (a walrus-saur?), assaults his best buddy Chombo, (a pear? gourd?), gets chased by a water-spraying conical vampire ghost, and more! It must be a subtle use of reverse psychology to show kids what never ever to do, because the many short episodes depict gratuitous anti-social behaviour, violence, lawlessness and depravity in general! Good times!

[Buy this album][Site]

Here is a pretty funny hip-pop-ish music video that parodies the great American infomercial. Good times. I could take or leave the song, but the video is dead on. Have a super mega ultra extra value sized weekend.