Category: Music

  • Emo

    Tokyo’s Coolest Sound has news that Towa Tei is releasing a new album on March 22, called Emo. It features tons of guests — including his supergroup Metafive. You’ll find all the details in this post.

  • Toriena

    Patrick Macias’s latest post on Mondo Tokyo covers chiptune artist Toriena, pictured — you might remember me mentioning her back in November, as part of the “Chiptune Primer” post on Bandcamp’s blog.

  • Family Swing

    YMCK have a new album coming out this month, called Family Swing, and it sees the band get a bit jazzier than usual (without losing their chiptune touch). Patrick shares all the details in this post, which includes a video trailer for the album.

  • Diggin’ in the Carts, the Radio Show

    Remember the fantastic Diggin’ in the Carts documentary web series about Japanese game music? Well, it continues, in the form of a weekly radio show on RBMA Radio, hosted by Nick Dwyer, who was also behind the web series. I haven’t listened to it yet, but looking at all the episodes that have been produced so…

  • Daisuke Kashiwa

    I really do need to make a point of highlighting every episode of Toco Toco TV here, because it truly is my favorite online video series. The episode before the latest (on Shinji Tsuchimochi) covered musician Daisuke Kashiwa, who has been composing the soundtracks for the animated films of Makoto Shinkai, whose latest film, Your…

  • Quit Your Band

    Ian F. Martin is a music columnist for The Japan Times, and he’s just released a book about the music scene in Japan that sounds quite interesting. Quit Your Band! Musical Notes From the Japanese Underground is available now, and Ian wrote a piece the other day to commemorate the release, that highlights other books…

  • Pizzicato Five Discography: 1998-2006

    And so here it is, the final part of David‘s massive Pizzicato Five discography review series. The fact that I’ve highlighted every part here probably gives away that I so love that David took the time to do this, and it was fun to read along and listen again to a lot of these records.…

  • Pizzicato Five Discography: 1994-1997

    Part 3 of David‘s review series of the Pizzicato Five discography is up on Neojaponisme, this time covering probably peak P5. So many great records here, including the album that introduced me to the band (and probably many other of us non-Japanese fans), Made in USA. I used to play so many tracks from that album…