A bit late posting this, but my 2016 indie roundup column for The Japan Times is available to read here.
There’s a lot that I didn’t get round to mentioning in this article, but which I’m still planning to write about more comprehensively somewhere else, but there’s a still a lot of great stuff to get started with. Here's three to help you kick things off:
Sonotanotanpenz, "Conga"
Sonotanotanpenz played at a show I helped organise in December, coming on in the middle of a lineup composed almost exclusively of noise-rock and dance-punk acts. They struck the room silent almost instantly and the response when they finished was incredible. It was, I believe, what we call a "moment".
Narcolepsin, "eat/moon"
Like Sonotanotanpenz, Narcolepsin hail from Fukuoka in southwestern Japan, where a lot of my favourite bands continue to come from. Narcolepsin's "Mojo" was a wonderfully, insistently irritating take on post-James Chance no wave, and a strong contender for my favourite of the year.
Kuruucrew, "Voyage"
If Narcolepsin exist at the mischievous end of the noise-rock spectrum, Kuruucrew are more towards the cosmic end. Both bands make good use of sax though. 2016 may have a been a bad year for musical heroes and Western civilisation generally, but was a good year for sax in Japanese indie.
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