Edmund Yeo

Last month, after getting hold of her two albums UKINA 浮き名 and MITSUGETSU-SHO 蜜月抄 (both albums were released to commemorate her 15th anniversary in the music industry), I became addicted to the songs of Shiina Ringo 椎名林檎 again.

Yesterday evening, I headed to Manda=la 2 at Kichijoji to catch Japanese director Masahiro Kobayashi's live gig.

Now, finally, something not about the screenings of my film. A few years ago I mentioned my teenage love for the Japanese pop group SPEED. They started in 1996, then disbanded in 2000. I was crushed. In 2008, they came back again, I was skeptical . Yet the intensity of my love for SPEED, especially lead vocalist Hiroko Shimabukuro (the tall one), was so intense that I composed silly haiku for her.

UPDATED (1/9/2008): I've added the videos of yesterday's reunion. Incredible that it's on Youtube that soon.

UPDATED: CLICK HERE TO WATCH THE VIDEOS AND PHOTOS FROM SPEED's REUNION SEGMENT ON NIPPON TELEVISION'S 24-HOUR TV DURING THE 31ST OF AUGUST, 2008. Got this from Tokyograph .

[Unrelated note: I found out that KURUS was on TV again yesterday. Ming Jin is currently in Australia for the Brisbane International Film Festival, where KURUS ('Days of the Turquoise Sky' to the foreigners) is screening. Interested to know what the Aussies think about the film.] Kahimi Karie I went to the Liquidroom at Ebisu for one of their 4th year anniversary events on Wednesday night, a live performance by Kahimi Karie and the electronic musician Rei Harakami. I first read about this from Japan Times two weeks ago, and immediately decided to go even though ticket price is a little steep.

Sifow . Second album. Love Spell . It was released about a week ago; I just went to Shibuya and bought it. I know I said I'd given up reviewing music, but what the hell.

Updated (September 2, 2012): Zard is a pop group. And Izumi Sakai was its lead vocalist and leader. I always referred to her as Zard because to me, she WAS Zard. But I decide to revise this blog post so that I can try to separate the Sakai the person, from the group. I was pretty shocked when I read about singer-songwriter Izumi Sakai 's death on today's newspapers.

"I ride boys like a motorcycle." - Rum There's an interview about her and her sister here .

One album I've been listening to a lot in the past week is Asobi Seksu 's CITRUS. Asobi Seksu's a shoegazing rock band based in New York, their lead vocalist is Yuki Chikudate, who said in an interview with Pitchfork that one of the creepiest fan experiences for her was when she was surrounded by a bunch of hardcore otaku who called her Asobi and talked to her about anime. The band name, Asobi Seksu meant 'play sex' 'fun sex' 'playful sex' or something like that in Japanese. What a coincidence that both Justin and I have been getting pretty into female Japanese singers named Yuki these days, just that his Yuki is in Japan while mine's in US.

HIKARU GENJI

One of the advantages of getting heavily into J-Pop is that, almost unconsciously, I've started to appreciate and enjoy musical genres I once scorned. When I was a teenager, anything remotely pop or commercial was anathema to me, and R&B was the worst of the worst. R&B was irritating screaming melismatic female voices, moronic beats, grating lyrics. R&B was something listened to by people I held in contempt. If you said your favorite music was R&B, I probably wouldn't like much else about you, either, and if you had of given me Crystal Kay's 2006 second album Call Me Miss as recently as five years ago, I probably would have spat in your face.

I have my problems with Koda Kumi. Apart from her lacking a certain...how to put this tactfully, star quality (i.e. if she wasn't famous already...) and relying on an obvious gimmick (feigned sluttiness), I've come around to much of her music, even if it struck me as undistinguished at first. The production is often good, befitting an Avex artist; and KK is talented, even if the hooks sometimes take a while to sink in. She tried out for Morning Musume and was rejected, yet that actually reflects well on her: no one in H!P can really sing like her; their voices need to be massed together to achieve any real resonance or tone. But KK is more than capable of carrying a track, and her voice is distinctive.

Listened to their entire discography over the course of like six hours. Think I just found my new favorite band. Can't be bothered to write an in-depth entry. Just...wow. As much 'ink jizz' as a site like Pitchfork expends over a band like Deerhoof , you wonder what they'd make of JAM or ( the previously discussed on this site ) Ego Wrappin'. I mean, 'Judy is a Tank Girl'? Just brilliant... Get Warp or The Power Source if you want to hear Japanese music completely overstepping national bounds and stacking up against anything on a world stage.

For me, the height of Ayumi Hamasaki's career was the 2002/2003 Rainbow / I Am... era. On those two albums, Ayu and Max Matsuura forged an original and intensely modern sound, one that combined the futuristic gloss and production of electronic dance music with the grind and guitar base of hard rock, all leavened with strong pop flourishes that somehow sounded more ambitious than any of Ayu's previous material (which had been good, to be honest, if a bit sugary and conventional). Appellations like 'dancy metal-pop' or 'club-core with solos' sound ridiculous, but accurately describe the albums' innovative fusions. And they were albums, too, with transitions and spaced-out interludes to bridge the more disparate songs. Because of the unified production, a straight up club track like 'Connected' could segue easily into the driving rock of 'Evolution', and the whole thing felt seamless. For a while, Ayumi Hamasaki really did feel like the

UPDATED (April 27, 2014): It's been 8 years since this blog post was written by Justin. Since then, Sifow had announced her indefinite hiatus in 2008. I'm not sure whether she still sings, but as of April 2014, after her hiatus, she moved to this new(er) blog , where she still updates quite often. I've written about my future girlfriend's music before , now to take a look at something equally influential, equally interesting, something everyone reading this should be well-familiar with: blogging .

I'll be honest: most everything I know about Japanese music has come as a result of the tireless efforts of Taka . If it wasn't for his more-euphony-than-James-Joyce command of the English language and his unquenchable passion for "80' electorical dance sounds", I'd probably still be listening exclusively to mid-90's NYC metallic hardcore (Orange 9MM, Helmet, Quicksand, etc.).

Sometime during 2002 (or was it 2003?), disillusioned with annoyingly underaged pop groups and still dealing with the heartbreaking disband of his much beloved SPEED , the Great Swifty, who suffered from Erotomania, lost faith in mainstream Japanese pop, and experimented with the non-mainstream, into what is generally referred to as Contemporary Japanese Groove Music (their jazz stuff).

The appeal of ZONE isn't difficult to explain: girls with guitars. This simple, retardedly awesome premise lies behind much of the popularity of Shonen Knife , the 5 6 7 8's , and uh...in a different genre, Sleater-Kinney and L7 . But the one thing uniting those fairly disparate bands is that they're all - to a greater or lesser extent - PUNK.*

I have a confession to make. I'm in love.