Make Believe Mailer #111: Bandcamp Friday Special April 2024
Full Of Some Of My Favorite Labels And Artists
I used to write a feature for OTAQUEST rounding up some Japanese recommendations for Bandcamp Friday. I’ve decided to keep doing that for the remaining installments of this campaign. Here’s a dive into Japanese releases worth your time, attention and money from the last month. Welcome to the March edition!
Kyogen — Hoho Ni Tsuki Wo Yadoshite
There’s a meditative quality to Kyogen’s latest release, at least when it isn’t short-circuiting on its own reflection. The creator’s latest, released via Charlotte For Siren, follows a series of albums last year showing their full range, built largely around fizzy netlabel-descended pop but featuring escapes into slower electronic meditation. That latter sound, in all its spacious glory, gets the spotlight here, without sacrificing the bounce of their livelier work.
Assisted by guest vocalist rea_chan and utilizing the synthesized voice of Tohoku-themed character Zundamon, Kyogen lets the songs here unravel at their own pace, whether leaning ethereal or fragmented. A new-age aura enters when Kyogen leans into synthesized whirrs and chimes on the title track, while slapped bass notes join disorienting digi smudges to create a dizzy minimal dance jam on the following song, offering the best interpretation of ΔKTR I’ve heard in a bit. Part of the charm of Kyogen’s latest is the disorienting edge lurking throughout, and how these bleary-eyed tracks feel close to vanishing or breaking apart…which does happen at points, the dream state turned surreal due to sharper samples. Get it here.
i-fls — OTHER SIDE EP
Let’s mix up the usual i-fls love by focusing on speed rather than sentimentality. The producer’s music has always moved at a dash, and the best moments on the OTHER SIDE EP really make the most of a swifter pace, to the point where the usual suburban ennui moves to the background in favor of the rhythm. “SCENE 7” finds i-fls coming as close to pop-punk as a Garage Band sentimentalist can get, while the house-tempo of “traffic II” reminds of their group_inou inspiration without losing any of their heart. Another set to stir up city feelings, but one also not forgetting the physical response music can trigger too. Get it here.
ksd6700 — Gaming Squid Missile
I meant to feature this one in the last Bandcamp Friday round-up…but forgot, so I said to myself “I’m going to carve out some space for this acid-house jammer in one of the weekly posts.” I did not do that. So sorry ksd6700! Especially because you made an absolute sweltering set that transports me to a really humid basement bar in Koenji. Get it here.
Dove — Palomino
The aching earnestness of the Kansai experimental pop scene comes through clearly on the latest release from Dove. Palomino is a Note posted late at night, with defenses down and emotions running high. Dove sings of love, longing and intimacy over fitting bedroom arrangements of keyboard, machine percussion and her own echoed voice, sometimes leaving everything to play out regularly (“I Wanna Luv U In My Life”) or disrupt it with more nervy production touches, hinting at unease within (“Furetai”). Get it here.
E.O.U — e(loo)p
Experimental Tokyo artist and rave-adjacent creator E.O.U launched their own label today called halo, and christened it with a loopy set of three tracks. Part ambient, part lo-fi floor shaker, the songs here offer a peak into the creator’s pure sonic side. Get it here.
emamouse — Maison De Loeur
A stripped-down emamouse, largely playing instrumental cuts using her keyboards. The wonky energy animating all of their work remains, though, even with words and weirder elements removed. Get it here.
DJ Keshigomuhanko — Hiroi Kako
The description provided by New Masterpiece points to the latest release from DJ Keshigomuhanko as “being inspired by lo-fi hip hop.” Sure, but don’t let that fool you into thinking this is an exercise in chilling or studying…unless you are “studying” your own melancholy. Hiroi Kako is a downbeat affair, where the sampled voices sound like ghosts haunting the inside of your head and the music constantly leaning towards sullen. It feels haunted, with the space within every track only emphasizing some kind of hurt within. Get it here.
natsume hirota — san si drill
If the above uses space as a way to work through an ache, san si drill leans into noise to…really constrict the listener and squeeze them into a good time. Producer matsume hirota lets heavy bass and beats consume these tracks, adding a sense of tension to them via tipsy electronics and glitched-out notes. It’s dense, but carrying it forward is a sense for rhythm that makes even the most bludgeoning moments kind of swift on their feet. Get it here.
Kyozo Sasaki — Me Wo Samashitara
An example of how Vocaloid fused with left-field sounds can create something mesmerizing. Get it here.
kinoue64 — The Time Machine School
An example of how putting away Vocaloid and letting your own voice can reveal new angles to your art. Get it here.
DJ Obake — Kikoetai EP
I’ll always have love for the production half of Her Ghost Friend…all the more so if he continues to explore just what’s possible with their sound. This EP sees the familiar chimes and twinkles defining DJ Obake’s production joined by new wrinkles, including synthesized strings racing along and nervous percussion bordering on drum ‘n’ bass. Get it here.
Shoo Isamiza — Stuck in a loop!i
What exactly can a talkbox do? In the hands of Shoo Isamiza, it can be joyous, sad, unsettling, downright scary and kind of bewildering. The music here is simple and repetitive, but that’s seemingly by design so that Isamiza can just work through it all via the talkbox, which gets rolled out on every song here. A case study in watching an artist see just what’s possible with their instrument of choice…and in this case, a very funky one. Get it here.
.｡*ﾟ+.*.Curren｡+..｡*ﾟ+ — One True Color
While I actually don’t know if this artist is based in Japan, they are touching on something I’ve seen in the Japanese electronic community so they get a pass. That’s because…I feel like Uma Musume is appearing as a visual and ~ spirit animal ~ for a lot of creators in this space as of late. In the same way that Kemono Friends once seemed to sneak into every producer’s set for a bit, the horse-centric anime series is galloping closer to the club world. I’ve heard more songs from the franchise undergo bootleg transformation, and you have things like hirihiri’s dj twintubro alias.
Well, add this one — named after the equine Curren Chan, with a little internet razzle-dazzle bookending it — to the evidence pile. The creator takes existing songs and adds an anime filter while super-charging them up, transforming livetune’s “Hand In Hand” into a pulverizing electro-pop charge or Leroy’s “Snare Of A Lifetime” into a blown-out example of what “extra” means. Sometimes, an artist tries to highlight the goofier shit they like — music, anime, culture, whatever — into their work, but in a way that downplays it or tries to weave it in subtly. That’s cowardly. Here we get an example of the opposite — real The Sub Account spirit — of taking the stuff you love and being like “I’m going to force this into your head.” Get it here.
Written by Patrick St. Michel (patrickstmichel@gmail.com)
Twitter — @mbmelodies