SXSW's Japan Nite celebrates 20 lively years
For the past two decades, the Japan Nite showcase has been one of the most celebrated events at the South By Southwest (SXSW) music conference and festival, a gathering where industry types, everyday music fans and performers from all over the world descend on ...
2328 umbrellas + one drone + OK Go = made-in-Japan brilliance
“When you’re employing hundreds of umbrellas that all have to go up at the same time — there’s going to be problems,” says Damian Kulash, the lead singer of OK Go.
Perfume announces worldwide re-release of 'Level3' ahead of tour
Perfume has announced the worldwide release for a bonus edition of its album "Level3" via U.S. label Astralwerks, just in time for the trio's first American concerts. The shows will take place at the Hollywood Palladium in Los Angeles on Nov. 9 and the Hammerstein ...
Familiar obstacles stymie change in domestic music industry
While the Japanese music industry ended last year on a promise of change, 2013 has highlighted a few of the ingrained practices that are going to be a little bit more difficult to dislodge. One industry story that caught the interest of the international press ...
Daito Manabe set to work his visual magic at Electraglide
In late 2008, a YouTube video began to circulate online of a bespectacled man with electrodes attached to his face, short bursts of electricity making his muscles twitch in time to a soundtrack of glitchy electronica. Titled "electric stimulus to face -test3", the clip ...
Look to pop culture if you want to blame someone for A-Chan's gay gaffe
All art is political. All pop culture is political. This idea provokes fierce opposition from many. Politics is dirty and discredited, they say, and art should be above politics; pop culture is entertainment and shouldn't have to mean anything. These arguments are wrong. All art and ...
Capsule's Yasutaka Nakata reworks signature sound on 'Caps Lock'
As the producer behind electro-idol trio Perfume and oddball techno-pop style icon Kyary Pamyu Pamyu, Yasutaka Nakata has been behind some of the most interesting and forward-thinking pop in Japan, consistently pushing back the boundaries of what the mainstream can handle while maintaining a ...
"Level3" is going to look amazing live. Perfume member Ayaka "A-Chan" Nishiwaki reportedly told producer Yasutaka Nakata that her trio wanted songs suited to the huge venues they'd perform it in. Nakata has obliged. Perfume's fourth studio album — the first with access to ...
Perfume dances to No. 1 with hard-edged new album 'Level3'
"Level3" is No. 1 on Japan's Oricon music chart this week, but it is not a J-pop album. While Perfume's studio-slave producer Yasutaka Nakata has always built the trio's anthemic hits from a bedrock of carefully layered and intricately produced electronic sequencing (the very voices ...
Hard rock, J-pop rule Summer Sonic
Veteran Japanese rockers Mr. Children attracted so many fans to this year's edition of the Summer Sonic music festival that they made Smashing Pumpkins' frontman Billy Corgan upset. "Thank-you for the warm reception," he said sarcastically in Osaka on Saturday, in response to the legions ...
Today’s J-blip: Perfume daifuku
A small traditional sweet shop in Nippori offers updated, flavorful renditions of the Japanese sweet daifuku.
Will the world soon wake up to the scent of Perfume?
When the Nippon Budokan was built in 1964, its architects probably never envisaged it one day resembling a massive nightclub filled with hundreds of laser beams in every shade of neon as three women in lightup minidresses danced like finely tuned robots to the ...
