November music thoughts
Here's some music I listened to in November. This month feels like it was really good for music for me but it's also the first month where I've been journaling the whole month so maybe every month is like this if you're writing it down. Looking into this.
macaroom
macaroom is a band consisting of an electronic music composer and a female vocalist, which means I am biologically predisposed to liking their music. I think I found out about them checking out my neighbors in lastfm a few months ago, but I didn't really bother to sit down and listen to them until now.
I really enjoyed it. The vocalist (Emaru) has a lovely voice, and the sound designer (dakiyama) isn't afraid to get weird with it to make the voice fit better with the rest of the music. The composer/lyricist/occasional vocalist (Asahi) is also apparently very interested in experimenting with pronunciation and texture in the vocals; I think a lot of it goes over my head since my knowledge of Japanese isn't that good, but I do generally like how Emaru's voice works as an instrument. The composition also uses a lot of non-musical sampling like voice recordings or natural sounds, which I'm always a big fan of. In general they've kind of gotten me excited about the idea of making stuff with music: their workflow seems interesting and related to the stuff I've personally played with, and since they make their music all free-to-use they get used a lot by DJs which is another thing I'd like to try out. In general, if you like this kind of dream pop-y electronica sound or similar groups like yanokami/sasalasa/binaria I would check macaroom out. Some highlights:
Song from "swimming classroom" that uses a lot of fun non-musical samples. I'm seeing the videoclip for the first time now and it's interesting, it makes me feel really emotional for some reason. I also liked seeing the behind-the-scenes stuff at the end. I was looking into the band and found out dakiyama is actually fairly prolific in the Max/MSP space, which is something I'm a little bit interested in, so it's nice to see how their workflow is.
Opener track for "inter ice age 4". Again, really good noises on this one: I really like the melding between the squishy organic sounds and the more ethereal electronic sounds.
Song from their newest album, "burning chrome". They have quite a few of these songs that are kind of close to like DAOKO or Kero Kero Bonito j-pop girl rap, which I really like. Again I'm watching these videoclips for the first time now and I love them a lot. I'm surprised they don't have that many views I thought the group was fairly rym coded so I expected it to be way more popular
Really cool, moody song. I love the piano counterpoint-hold-the-counter for emaru's voice in the "chorus".
Another song where emaru does some cool rapping. I really do like her voice.
minimum electric design (med)
November 12 was Good Hifuu Day (ććē§å°ć®ę„), which inspired me to go listen to more med again. If you don't know, most of these art meme JP social media days are number puns: in this case, the "11" for November looks like "ii" which is "ćć" which means "good" (hence all the other "good [thing]" days in the month), and then the "12" can be read as "ć²ćµā (as in "hitotsu" and "futatsu").
Back when I was in middle school, a lot of the western YouTube channels that curated Touhou doujin music would kind of sideline the original circles, so I never felt like I was listening to "SOUND HOLIC" or "Silver Forest" as much as I was just listening to Touhou music. Gensokyo Electronic Shoegazer was one of the first albums I remember listening to and seeking out specifically as a product of some circle, so it's pretty special to me and kind of kicked off my interest in "seriously" keeping up with Touhou doujin stuff.
med is kind of just generally a rock/electronica circle? I know their debut album is called "Gensokyo Electronic Shoegazer", and it does have a shoegaze vibe on some songs, but I feel like med is less concerned with the defining trappings of shoegaze (like effects pedals or whatever) and more with the experience: dreamy, coarse music that you can kind of get lost on. This is clear in their earlier, more instrumental work, but I think it stayed their objective even once they began incorporating mineko and KANIHARA more as vocalists. Overall I think I just mean to say that I wouldn't even really say that Gensokyo Electronic Shoegazer is a shoegaze album, but I do think if you like shoegaze you'd probably enjoy the circle. I'm surprised it hasn't gotten popularized by people looking for easy-listening Touhou albums like what happened to TOHO BOSSA NOVA or the Cafe de Touhou series: I wonder if it's just an algorithm thing or if people don't like vocal tracks for that end. Maybe a compilation of their instrumental tracks could pop off. After writing this I did end up making a playlist of their music (including vocals though). Here it is:
Anyways, I love med's music a lot, both their earlier instrumental stuff and their modern vocal stuff. They didn't have a big Hifuu focus initially, but a lot of their recent albums are very Hifuu-focused which I love. I love the painterly style in their covers for the Hifuu albums (I tried looking up the artist but they seem to have disappeared from social media), I love the majority of the original Hifuu songs so it's nice to see them arranged, I love mineko and KANIHARA's voices and have kind of canonized them as the Official Hifuu Singing Voices in my head, and I love the Hifuu-focused lyrics on the songs. PARTICLE (their second album in this new direction) came out as I was on my last year of high school and beginning to get more into Hifuu, so their albums kind of mirrored my own Touhou Lesbian/Kin Journey.
Some highlights:
This is just a good song from Gensokyo Electronic Shoegazer (the TRAIL albums are compilations of old songs). You see what I mean right it's kind of just synth rock but you can still gaze at your shoes to it
They have a few of these fun jazz-y tracks sometimes and they're always a treat. The piano here is soo punchy I really like it
This is actually an original song (so not a Touhou arrange) but I really love it.
This is such a cool like lower-energy heavier track and it's a great highlight of KANIHARA's voice. Definitely one of my favorite songs on Two-Tone
This is actually kind of a vocal version of the last song from Gensokyo Electronic Shoegazer. I remember clapping like a seal when I was listening to PARTICLE the first time and got to this song it was so cool... Again I was finishing up high school as PARTICLE came out so I kind of felt like this song kind of bookended that part of my life. Mineko's voice is so good in this
This is a song from their latest album, which actually came out this year. It's really good I love when mineko does little accompaniments for herself.
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Really really really good Adachi Rei-specific compilation album??? I wasn't expecting that much out of it but the songs are all incredible and they really fit Adachi's voice. They haven't really published it anywhere public and I feel like it'd be kind of a dick move to do that myself when they still haven't sold out their first print but keep a lookout for it. This album will go huge on rym in like 3 years. Here's the crossfade (and you can buy it on https://adcnwdc.booth.pm/):
å¾®å has uploaded the closer for the L album. It's a really beautiful dialogue between Adachi Rei and Nurse Robot_Type T.
GNX
You can probably see people talking about how good GNX was everywhere but I am just going to corroborate that it's a really good album. I've been listening to Kendrick's older songs a lot and I love how this album is closer to that kind of old-school style: it's not the sort of bombastic and high-effort album you expect out of mainstream rap artists nowadays. It really highlights how great of a lyricist and rapper Kendrick is that he can still make something special out of these more lowkey beats.
Ayaponzu
Have you listened to old ayaponzu/yuikonnu covers of vocaloid songs recently you should they're still good. It pissed me off so much when I paid attention to kunochi demo koi ga shitai for the first time and realized that even though it's two girls singing it the titular koi is not between two girls
Miscellaneous
There were some good singles released this month. Here are they:
This was a new single by MĆ¼te, a project headed by singer mami (currently the lead singer for UK Rampage, sasakure.UK's rock band). I really love mami's voice and I hope her solo project works out. I think this song really highlights something I love about her work with UK Rampage: she's really good at breathing life into these kind of irregular rhythm songs. Let's support her.
New song by sumibi, a Vocaloid producer. I really love the visuals on this song, they do a lot with just video effects. I haven't had a very active romantic life, so I really like listening to these kind of bittersweet romantic songs to try and kind of experience that headspace. KAF(U) songs in that genre work particularly well for me, lol. The song itself is probably pretty wide-appeal: if you like normal electronic pop songs you'll probably enjoy it.
Newest entry in the second series of KAF Suite tracks, where KAF collaborates with non-Kamitsubaki musicians. This one is with Suisei and it's really good.. their voices work so well together... The actual music was composed by Shuichi Mabe which was a big contributor to the early Soutasei Riron albums (the first three, up to 2010), and the song definitely does have that slightly quirky pop vibe from like Hi-Fi Anatomia. It's cool to see Soutasei Riron members in other pop/rock projects. I also really like the video clip: I obviously like the traditionally animated clips they do sometimes for Suite (like the one for thunder in bud), but as far as 3D animation goes I prefer when they do these clips putting KAF into real places rather than the high-concept ones where she's in an old-timey Japanese town or something. They remind me of the older KAF videoclips, it's really nostalgic. Great song! I'm happy Suisei can probably detach from the hololive sinking ship easily since she owns her own lifeboat.
New Pinnochio-P song. Very beautiful. One of the main ideas behind Zen Buddhism (and, as I understand it, also Mahayana more broadly) is that awakening is not enough, that the final step is to come down to conventional reality and use your awakening-informed mind to work to the benefit of other people in your everyday life. I have lived a very lonely and painful life and I have been feeling very aware of that fact recently, so I'm reassured by the idea that I can find similar meaning in it by working in my everyday life to make reality a little less lonely and painful for other people. This song captures the feeling well.