Music

Passionate fandom has become the domain of pop music. Or, at least, that's the image that has developed globally over the past decade, as intense groups of diverse people throw their support behind a wide range of mainstream acts, from Beyonce to BTS. Rock, ...

Born to a forward-thinking father who founded Kajimoto Concert Management in 1951, Masahide Kajimoto calls himself "the eccentric second (president)." Full of curiosity, Kajimoto enjoys art and music, and has also tried motor racing, motorcycling and paragliding. "If you fly in the air, you can experience ...

"Body," the much-anticipated debut album from music maker Amy Furuhara, aka Aaamyyy (stylized as AAAMYYY), opens with an instrumental of tumbling beats, skittering hi-hats, wonky nighttime synth and pitch-shifted samples of a Spanish monologue — the portal of sound aims to transport the listener ...

As he enters his 50th year in the music business, Haruomi Hosono hasn't lost his talent for making you wonder what the devil he's up to. After using modern studio technology to recreate the sounds of mid-20th century pop on "Vu Ja De" in ...

Instead of explaining the essence of classical music in words, French music producer Rene Martin chooses a piece from an enormous number of musical samples stored in his smartphone. Breaking the silence, the sound of a piano version of Franz Schubert's "Serenade," one of his ...

British post-punk pioneers Gang of Four didn't come to Japan until 2005, nearly 30 years after the band formed. If guitarist Andy Gill had his way, it would have happened a lot sooner. "I clearly remember a conversation in the '80s about going to ...

'There are just so many records in Japan," says Yusuke Ogawa, owner of Universounds, a used record shop selling jazz, soul and funk in the Western suburbs of central Tokyo. Now, with the rise of internet sales as well as the increasingly interconnected music ...

The tourist boom in Japan shows no sign of ending, with the number of visitors only set to increase in the lead up to the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. Whether for bulk shopping, temple visiting or sushi-counter hopping, Tokyo and surrounding neighborhoods have endless ...

At the time, the Japanese music scene of the 1970s felt pretty flat to Daisuke Hinata. "But (then) Yellow Magic Orchestra (YMO) and Plastics came out, and we thought the market would open up for more new sounds," the Los Angeles-based musician tells The ...

Eyehategod shouldn't have lasted three decades. "I was there when we started the band and if you had told me back then that we were going to be still going on 30 years later ... to say that this band would've been the one that ...

In the eternal present of modern listening, when the entire history of recorded sound is just a few clicks away, some music reverberates for longer. That's been the case with Fishmans, a cult Japanese act from the 1990s whose blend of dub rhythms and ...