Noise — vast, enveloping noise — is at the core of My Bloody Valentine’s music. Halfway through “You Made Me Realise,” the quartet lands on a single chord that proceeds to suck the entire song into a gawping, sense-scrambling maw of distortion. On the ...

October seems to be a good time for indie music. A lot of the smaller artists that need to do the festival circuit in Britain and the United States take a break in September and October, which gives them the chance to pop over ...

With 90 minutes to go before the start of the Rock God Dam music festival, organizer Nakako Isoo is trying to find one of the headlining acts. She’s supposed to pick up Virginia band Suburban Living, but comes back to Shibuya club Vuenos alone. ...

As a model, Nadia Mladjao would have seen all there is in the world of luxury and excess. But the 27-year-old singer, better known as Imany, keeps it simple with her guitar on her debut album, “The Shape of a Broken Heart.” “What I ...

Maximum The Hormone’s sixth album, “Yoshu Fukushu,” proves its members know how to laugh at themselves. The four-piece have long been slapped with the “hardcore” and “nu-metal” tags, putting the band in the company of other such acts like Limp Bizkit and Korn, who ...

It’s getting harder to listen to netlabel-released albums in one sitting recently. Electronic-music compilation series “Fogpak” recently put out a collection featuring 48 different artists (should we call the Guinness people?). Now Tanukineiri Records has popped out “Tanukineiri Drink Sampler” — 90 minutes and ...

There’s nothing like a comeback story. This summer, Japan saw a return to the stage by Seiji Ozawa, one of the country’s most celebrated musicians. On Aug. 23, the 78-year-old maestro took up his baton at the Saito Kinen Festival Matsumoto, the event he ...

On seeing the lineup ahead of this year’s Tokyo Jazz Festival, my initial feeling was the organizers had maybe cast their net a bit too wide with the acts booked, but those fears were completely unfounded. With the festival being held on three main ...