Arni Kristjansson is an Icelandic music writer, DJ and photographer based in Tokyo. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate at Tokyo University of the Arts, researching the history of club music in Japan.
For Arni Kristjansson's latest contributions to The Japan Times, see below:
I am at Battle Train Tokyo, the first official footwork dance tournament in Japan. It's being held at Kata, a gallery in the capital's Ebisu district. Sixteen dancers have signed up in the hope of becoming Japan's footwork champion, which comes with a ¥50,000 ...
Nostalgia is nothing new in popular music. A disco revival during the 1990s (think Deee-Lite), led to a renewed fascination with the 1980s during the 2000s (think Chromeo and a synth-pop boom) and that decade even started seeing a '90s revival toward the end ...
Talking with Takeaki Maruyama in a Tokyo cafe, I'm caught off guard when the dubstep artist better known as Goth-Trad suggests that his fourth and latest album is pop. When I let it sink in, though, I realize that "New Epoch" could in fact ...
Bass advocates Diskotopia are a small group of producers and DJs who have been holding events since 2005. Their main focus is the ever-expanding area of dance music that uses heavy bass sounds, including dubstep and bassline-house. Originally based in Osaka, they moved operations ...
My favorite Japanese album of 2011 sounds even better live. "Magnetic Soil," the eighth album from self-described death-jazz act Soil & "Pimp" Sessions, further proved that this Tokyo-based sextet belongs in a class all its own. However, it was the way the band performed their ...
The British media quickly championed James Blake as the poster boy of dubstep's entry into mainstream outlets. Along with artists Untold and Joy Orbison, Blake rode into the scene with a mishmash of melancholic chord sequences and manipulated vocal samples taken from 1990s ...
Azari & III (pronounced "Azari and third") have snagged a lot of influential supporters in the short period they've been making music together. Their first single, "Reckless (With Your Love)" in 2009, was hailed by tastemaker BBC Radio One DJ Annie Mac, and producer The ...
Matthew Herbert can hardly be called a one-trick pony. Leaving his background in classical violin early on in his career, he has traversed many genres of dance music with his Doctor Rockit, Wishmountain and Herbert aliases. He has also conducted his own jazz big ...
Thirty-two-year-old Yoshiyuki "Yosi" Horikawa from Ibaraki, Osaka, couldn't believe his eyes when he went online the morning of July 16. "When I got the e-mail I was so surprised," he says. "I started pumping my fists in the air in celebration. Since it was early ...
It's juke night at Club Noon in Osaka on a Monday. The event, called Hobo, has drawn about 50 people — not many, but alright for a genre of dance music that is making its debut on the city's club scene. As with most ...
