Hitori No Mippiki at Navaro. Photos by James Gui. Closer to Seoul and Shanghai than to Tokyo, Kyushu is the southernmost island of the main Japanese archipelago. Far from the hustle of the capital city, those living in Kyushu have room to carve their own niche, as well as access to venues with an open ear to the avant-garde. Regional cities like Fukuoka have their own advantages, like “the possibi

Half a decade before the emergence of music distribution platforms like Bandcamp would open the floodgates for artists to freely upload their tracks on a moment’s whim, the fledgling netlabel movement was already carving out a third way for those seeking to independently release music without investing in physical media or hosting it on the iTunes store. Though the initial wave of DIY imprints set

When considering J-pop today and what caused it to sprout—and delineate itself—from the city pop that defined the backend of Japan’s post-war period, it’s worth looking at economics and sociology. After World War II, the American occupation and the exportation boom resulting from the Korean War led to an unprecedented economic rebound and a bittersweet reshaping of Japanese culture. City pop, whic

LISTS Eight K.K. Slider-Approved Releases Inspired By The “Animal Crossing” Series By Nina Corcoran · Illustration by Julian Glander · March 25, 2020 On paper, Animal Crossing hardly seemed like it would become a popular kids’ game, let alone a huge success with adult gamers. Nintendo’s slice-of-life simulator for the Gamecube, released in 2001 in Japan and everywhere else the following year, look

Born around the turn of the millenium, from the experiments of dark garage practitioners like Oris Jay, Darqwan, El-B, Horsepower Productions, Menta, and Zed Bias, dubstep has gone through more mutations in the intervening decades than the cast of a blockbuster superhero movie. This is due, in no small part, to the template—or rather, the lack thereof—that the genre’s early pioneers set out with.

Tao, Conehead, and DJ Kool Klone, photo by Peco Geographically situated within the 1,900-mile stretch of water that separates China and Japan—and culturally positioned in the shadow of both nations’ more well-known music scenes—the island of Taiwan is somewhat of an anomaly in hip-hop’s international landscape. As the genre’s cultural impact expanded outward from the American bicoastal bases of Ne

Earlier this year, Seoul synth-pop artist Neon Bunny embarked on a tour that took her to Austin, Texas for South By Southwest and a jaunt around Europe. Wherever she went, she was labeled as a K-Pop artist by journalists and promoters. “Yeah, it’s a really freaky thing to me. I’m not a K-Pop artist in Korea. If I go abroad, though, I’m a K-Pop artist,” Neon Bunny (real name Yoojin Lim) says from h

“Brainfeeder,” the opening track on Flying Lotus’s 2008 album, Los Angeles, pulses with a sense of anticipation. Its flutters of static and sci-fi synths seem to telegraph the idea that something new—something weird, mutant, and markedly different from the hip-hop aesthetic of Lotus’s debut, 1983—awaits within. As the album unfolds, Lotus makes good on that promise, delivering a record so groundbr

Photo by Jun Yokoyama All Kouichi Furutono wanted to do was expose Japanese audiences to the skittering sounds of Chicago juke music. “Ten years ago, only 120 to 130 BPM house and techno, along with 170 to 175 BPM drum & bass music, existed in clubs,” the Osaka artist, who records and performs as DJ Fulltono, says. He adds that tracks moving at 160 BPM—an average speed for a juke cut—were just not

“I am only making hardcore in Japan, I do not have the consciousness of making J-core. I think that this is probably the same for many Japanese artists,” says DJ Shimamura. One of Japan’s earliest hardcore producer/DJs, and founder of one of the country’s earliest happy hardcore labels, Dynasty Records, Shimamura is often described as a pioneer of the J-core sound. In reality, his music is much ha

SCENE REPORT Eight Kawaii Artists Using Grotesque Sounds to Redefine “Cute” Japanese Music By Patrick St. Michel · March 23, 2018 YUC'e Few Japanese concepts have spread as far globally as “kawaii.” The word—roughly translated to mean “cute,” but technically referring to a child-like, downright pitiable type of adorableness—often hovers around Japanese cultural exports, from cartoons to clothes. J