NikaSaya is a side project from the Tennis Coats’ singer, Saya, and songwriter Nikaido Kazumi. One Summerheim is a gorgeous rainy-day record. Continue reading
If you visit Kyoto, you may stumble into a small home next door to a shrine and, as you’re looking for the shrine entrance, a woman may ask you for 500 yen and assure you that there is English being spoken inside. You will go in, thinking it is a shrine, but it will not be a shrine, and the English being spoken will not be the English you paid 500 yen for.
I’ve dealt with a lot of bands from the 1990’s, so I wanted to shift gears into more recent Japanese bands. Broken Little Sister got started in Yokohama in 2005, mixing a kind of My Bloody Valentine wall-of-noise with shoegaze, post-rock and electronic influences.
When I was a kid I dreamed about flying.
It was always simple in dreams. I’d wake up with the euphoric feeling of having figured something out: The secret to flying was to jump, then repeat the jump while still in mid-air. The younger me would attempt this repeatedly, the older me would let the dream die and go brush my teeth.
Malaysia terrifies my mother. Continue reading
I can’t lie, Nobukazu Takemura is pretty hit or miss with me. A lot of his career is basically straight acid jazz, which isn’t my thing, but his roots are in hip hop, and his first performances were as a battle DJ. His best music combines those elements – the gritty, abrasive nature of sampling with the sparkling openness of acid jazz. Continue reading
This Japanese Life. 