It won’t be business as usual at Big Love Records this Saturday, April 19. The store, one of the best places to shop for records in Tokyo’s trendy Harajuku neighborhood, will be selling limited-edition music from various artists, including film director David Lynch. Meanwhile, shadowy beatmaker Sapphire Slows will perform ...
E-Girls are a 28-member-strong idol pop collective constructed by Avex. The “E” stands for “Exile,” as in this is the ...
At a live venue in Fukuoka’s Tenjin district, passionate fans are well prepared to record every second of Rev. from ...
Tokyo producer Yoshino Yoshikawa has often described his work as “ultrapop,” and for a while that term made perfect sense. Yoshikawa created busy, buzzing songs in the mold of Yasutaka Nakata. With names such as “Kawaii Candy,” they were a colorful rush of synthesizers ...
The first topic that comes up when I sit down with Oreskaband’s singer/guitarist Naoko “iCas” Yoshioka isn’t music or her band, it’s a lunchtime variety show called “Waratte Iitomo!” The finale aired March 31 and she asks me if I saw it, which I ...
It is certainly good to see Maestro Seiji Ozawa back at the podium again. Japan’s most celebrated conductor made a triumphant return to the Saito Kinen Festival last summer after having taken two years off due to bad health. He took a rest after ...
When Osaka was chosen as the Global Host City for the third annual International Jazz Day earlier this year, jazz fans across the country were elated. Organized by UNESCO and in partnership with the U.S.-based Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz, the main event on ...
It was a bit of good timing for Tony Miller when two underground music scenes he liked intersected in 2011. “I was becoming increasingly interested in the U.K.’s pirate radio scene, and I thought I could use my Web engineering skills to make something ...
Igor Stravinsky’s “The Soldier’s Tale” remains as thought-provoking a piece today as it was in 1918, when it was created just after World War I. As the third part of a Stravinsky-focused series by the Spring Festival in Tokyo (following “The Firebird” and “Petrushka” ...
Clad in a T-shirt for U.K. punk pioneers The Clash, 16-year-old Kyo Asada probably doesn’t fit most people’s image of a typical Bob Dylan fan. But judging from the crowd lined up outside Tokyo’s Zepp DiverCity on the opening night of his latest Japan ...
Not every Bob Dylan fan in Japan is going to nab a ticket for the musician’s many shows, but don’t worry — Dylan fever can be sated in other ways. Umeda Akaso in Osaka’s Kita Ward will screen “The 30th Anniversary Celebration” on April ...
Just 123 days after tumultuous applause engulfed the waning strains of “Blowin’ In The Wind” to bring Bob Dylan’s last concert to an end at the Royal Albert Hall in London on Nov. 28, a similar cacophony awaited him at Tokyo’s Zepp DiverCity on ...
Kanye West has canceled his headline appearance at this year’s Fuji Rock Festival “due to artist circumstances,” according to festival organizers. The news came as West’s camp also announced the 36-year-old hip-hop star would postpone his tour in Australia next month until September, citing ...
Video-chatting with Los Angeles resident Shinya Mizoguchi toward the tail end of a particularly testing Tokyo winter, it’s hard not to feel a twinge of jealousy. I deliberately avoid defaulting to my typically British weather-related opening gambit of small talk, but it’s not long ...
Maceo Parker will be carrying a heavy load of history on his shoulders when he visits Japan for a string of gigs this month, but you wouldn’t know it from his carefree attitude. The 71-year-old musician is best known for his seminal sax work ...
