During his years in New York, pianist Makoto Ozone fronted a number of small combos and gigged with such heavyweights as Branford Marsalis, Gary Burton and Christian McBride. But the collaborators he has come back to time and time again are his Japan-based big band, No Name Horses. This 15-member ...
The former owner of an Osaka nightclub charged under Japan’s controversial “no dancing” law has been cleared of wrongdoing after ...
DJ Obake “H” (Zoom Lens) To the uninitiated, DJ Obake’s latest album must sound like an intercepted transmission from another ...
The avant-garde scene in Kyoto has a unique challenge, being based in a city where tradition is synonymous with local identity. There are a few elements challenging the status quo, though, such as Urbanguild in the Nakagyo district. Over the past 18 months, this ...
Tokyo is a jazz lover’s paradise — only New York can claim to have as many clubs and live houses to choose from. Though, the high-end clubs that pull in the big acts can cost a fortune, populated with patrons who are more interested ...
Kimonos and heavy metal. It’s a combination that few groups have pulled off convincingly. While the aesthetic may have been used last year to turn (or bang) more than a few heads in the West by heavy metal idol unit Babymetal, the tiny trio ...
Avex has landed another No. 1 spot on the charts, but this time it’s for the record label itself. Oricon Inc., the company behind the domestic music industry’s ranking charts, announced its annual market report for 2014 last week, with Avex Group Holdings Inc. ...
When Swans last played Tokyo in 2013, the venue itself seemed to be groaning under the weight of the onslaught. Two hours into a set of tempestuous rock catharsis, the power cut out; once restored, the group kept playing for another 30 minutes. Such ...
Since emerging in the summer of 2013, Fukuoka label Yesterday Once More has made some of the country’s most intriguing electronic music in recent memory. The artists hovering around this Internet imprint embraced styles that have been in vogue with the Japanese do-it-yourself dance ...
Idol group E-Girls have a knack for covers. On last year’s “Colorful Pop,” they opened with a song borrowing the main synthesizer line from Yellow Magic Orchestra’s “Rydeen” before later transforming Japanese disco tunes and Bananarama singles into tightly crafted blasts of electro-pop. It ...
The dressing room of Camden’s Electric Ballroom in London is hardly the most glamorous of settings at the best of times, and for Royal Blood it is the early evening after the night before. The previous night, the blues rock duo played its biggest ...
Fans breach the language barrier at overseas expos of Japanese pop culture as soon as the music starts. Legions of non-Japanese, most of whose knowledge of the language is limited to basic greetings and exclamations, burst into karaoke-style singalongs, mimicking dance moves and waving ...
On a chilly Friday afternoon in December, trumpet player Toshinori Kondo reclines in the clutter of his Kawasaki recording studio, pours out two cups of shōchū liquor, and starts to explain what prompted him to abandon a lucrative career in Japan and move to ...
An un-Googleable delta symbol name (∆), genre-hopping, challenging sounds and esoteric lyrics inspired by Japanese deer are not the usual recipe for surefire pop success. Yet when alt-j arrives in Japan for its debut headline show — catapulted by 1 million album sales, a ...
Vinyl sales and music streaming both soared by more than 50 percent in 2014 in the United States, even as overall sales kept declining, a music industry monitor said. With few blockbuster releases and streaming becoming more mainstream, consumers in the world’s largest music ...
