January 03, 2007
News | More Links from the Japanese Underground |
When I round up links of Asian music sites for your perusal, they tend to focus on Japanese music. The reason is pretty obvious: when it comes to English-language representation on the web, Japan easily eclipses its neighbors. This is probably due to the popularity of Japanese pop culture in the west and the presence of some 50,000 westerners in the Tokyo metropolitan area alone. Japan has a large number of distinctive pop music subgenres and a fair number of online reviewers, DJs, and bloggers to help the rest of us sort them out. Here are a few more of my favorite J-links that focus on music you might not otherwise hear about:
What's next, filling you in on a cool new search engine called Google? If you don't know it, Keikaku has at least ten writers in Japan and around the globe and they turn out a lot of reviews. The site is also valuable for its profiles, which provide bios and discographies for a number of indie bands. Think of it as a cross between Pitchfork and All Music Guide for Japanese rock. "Rock" is probably the operative word, as the profiles tend to focus on dudes with guitars like Eastern Youth and Polysics.
The premise for this excellent blog is simple: a foreigner living in Tokyo goes to live indie shows week after week, snapping photos and writing about bands that get little to no exposure outside of Japan. Have you heard of advantage Lucy, Orange Plankton, Plectrum, Spangle call Lilli line or Swinging Popsicle? Neither had I until I started reading Japan Live.
As an outsider, one could be pretty into the Japanese pop, owning discs by disparate groups such as Shonen Knife, Cornelius, Boredoms, and Nobukazu Takemura, and have little idea what scenes they come out of or how they relate to one another. Clear and Refreshing is a good place to get your bearings, as its reviews and articles tend to contextualize artists within their respective regions or genres. It's a good place to read a brief rundown of the Osaka or Tokyo underground and learn that "the "Akiba-kei" strain of new wave and technopop is quite possibly the most irritating of all musical genres," capable of turning an otherwise normal person into a raving kitten killer.
This is an mp3 blog with tasty J-pop, underground, electronic and oldies tunes for your listening pleasure. Unfortunately, downloads are limited and I never seem to get there in time!
I'm cheating a bit here, because I think I wrote up this site when it launched, but Japan Files is now building up trove of Japanese indie rock, pop, punk, techno, and hip-hop for legal download. As far as I know these tracks have no DRM (take that, iTunes!) and go for 99 cents each. Hurrah, I can download the nutso new Limited Express album without paying Japanese import prices!