かわいい Appreciation

#1

I’ll never forget the first time I heard this kind of music…it was during the tail end of one of Plastician’s weekly programs on Rinse maybe three or four years ago…he had this Russian artist 813 do a guest mix and I just totally lost my effing mind.

there’s a lot of “kawaii” music floating around but I love this particular style of really hi-NRG, super harmonically complex tracks. in fact, a lot of these tracks use similar chord progressions and I’m wondering if anyone here knows what’s going on from a theory perspective.

#2

I used to listen to this music a lot in soundcloud around mid 2015, as a result of a combination of Submerse (UK garage turned hip hop producer) name dropped Trekkie Trax in an interview, and me getting more interested in anime. However I mostly moved on from this music, mostly cause it was formulaic and derivative which made it boring quick, and it was pretty bait cause a lot of tracks were overtly mainstream EDM leaning. I’m having deja vu about this topic since I was chatting shit about this in dubstepforum a couple of months ago, so let me transpose my thoughts from here to there:

2015 was a weird year, I don’t know how I got from copping dubstep / grime 12"s for the first time ever to some stupid internet scene.[Overall, a lot of it is just] shit derivative EDM with some cute aesthetics, and no substance. Nowadays that type of music can be lumped with super basic youtube music channels and soundcloud collectives. “soundcloud collectives” are so immensely fucking lame though, i shudder at the thought of them lol.

it doesnt help that a lot of these producers have such horrible social media presences. One thing that really irks me, is how some of these producers are so obsessed with anime aesthetics it permeates into every single fiber of their work and persona on the internet. I may sound a bit hypocritical since I’m a bit of an animehead as well lol. That one lad, “cute girls doing cute things” (really?) puts up his soundcloud / bandcamp location as Tokyo, Japan. Like fuck off mate everyone knows you’re some white dude from the US / Europe. Some of them are legit Japanese producers tho.

Granted, I actually made a couple of internet acquaintances thru venturing into soundcloud communities (which I ended up unfollowing like most of them lol), and even though it sounds like I think it’s all shit, there’s a lot of great tracks I have fond memories of.



^^ super blissful. saved my life in early 2016.

yeah Plastician was doing some pretty great experimental stuff around 2013-2015 when he wanted to release stuff on Terrorrhythm other than dubstep, but it all turned to shit with “wave” :s

#3

I think a lot of this falls under the umbrella of “netlabel” music, stuff like Trekkie Trax and Maltine Records releases. Pitchfork did something on it a while back, it was written by Patrick St. Michel, who’s maybe the most notable critic writing about Japanese music in English.

I kind of flirted with the stuff but I’ve always had an aversion to Kawaii culture (for a lot of reasons, mostly because I think it ruined anime) so I haven’t really explored that deeply. I have a few friends in Japan who listened to similar stuff but I think they tend to be more into future bass type shit, less the directly anime-facing stuff.

#4

love it so much :heart_eyes_cat:

#5

finally something the users of 5^7 and the writers of dancing astronaut can agree upon :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye: