“Prolific” doesn’t even come close to describing Hideki Kaji’s career. Since the mid-90s, the Tokyo artist has been putting out albums and singles of upbeat indie-pop music at a constant clip. None of his releases are amazing, but his entire discography is still consistent. ...

“Mindful Beats Vol. 2″ has one of the most simultaneously accurate and misleading album names of the past year. On a literal level, the title tells no lies — it is a second volume of beats made by Osaka producer Masaki Konagai, who records ...

Last September, music magazine Spin wrote that America was experiencing an “electronica revolution.” Spearheaded by speaker-destroying producers such as Skrillex and Deadmau5, Spin wrote that a “new rave generation” has helped make electronic dance music an inescapable presence on the nation’s music scene, to ...

It has been a good year for Japanese pop music so far. The Oricon charts still house the likes of AKB48, Arashi and a slew of acts that make me want to bang my head against the wall, but a crop of J-pop artists ...

On the afternoon of the South By Southwest (SXSW) Music Conference And Festival’s second day, I sat on a shuttle bus with eight people who had been hustling between the countless concert venues in this city. True to the its slogan “Keep Austin Weird,” ...

Yuta Mitsuhashi says he spends a lot of time falling into “YouTube holes”: Watch a clip, click on a related link, repeat until the majority of your night has been spent staring at a computer screen. He isn’t scrolling through LOLcat videos though, he ...

Your Gold, My Pink’s decision to name its debut full-length album “Teenage Riot” shows some serious guts from the young quartet. It’s a title that has certain connotations, that either the band embraces the adolescent rebellion of punk — or just really likes Sonic ...

“Photogenic” is the sound of a wrongfully imprisoned inmate who was cleared of all charges being sent back to prison for no good reason. J-pop siren Salyu (born Ayako Mori) has spent the majority of her decade-plus career singing over generic instrumentals, her voice ...

Galileo Galilei’s sophomore album, “Portal,” manages to both document everything that’s wrong with contemporary mainstream Japanese rock music and offer a better way for guitar-centric pop in this county. This Hokkaido group falls through many of the same trapdoors as artists dotting the Oricon ...

Tokyo Jihen’s first five albums have titles relating to types of television programming, “Sports” or “Variety” or “Adult.” The Shiina-Ringo-led group’s sixth album, though, is titled “Color Bars,” after the rainbow lines that grace the TV screen during technical difficulties or dead-air time. It’s ...