New (and old) music from Japan – Spring 2025 edition

Notable new Japanese releases and reissues

This might be a return to regular programming, but no promises. Things have been quiet on the work front recently, which has given me more time to sift through my Bandcamp pile and ferret out the good stuff. Here are some of the releases and reissues from the first three months of the year (plus one straggler from 2024) that have grabbed me. I should note that some of these snuck up on me gradually, rather than revealing all their charms on first listen. An album as subtle and intelligently crafted as Eiko Ishibashi’s Antigone wasn’t designed for the streaming era, which is all the more reason to cherish it.

Notable Japanese releases from 2024

Good music from a (mostly) bad year

I fell out of the habit of posting album reviews during 2024, partly because I simply wasn’t listening to as much Japanese music as I had done in the previous few years. Still, it felt remiss not to acknowledge a few of the highlights of a year that, by most objective measures, was pretty wretched. I’m grateful to the handful of people who gave me a much-needed nudge to write this, and also to my friend Ian F. Martin for showing how it should be done with his defiantly unpunctual zine, Last Year’s Music. (I’d post a link, but I’m afraid you’ll have to seek out a physical copy.)

New (and old) music from Japan – Winter 2023 edition

Notable new Japanese releases and reissues

By far the most time-consuming thing I wrote this year was a guide for Psyche about listening to music in the age of abundance. It’s a subject that I think about constantly, and I’m still not sure if I have the answers (who does?). Looking through other people’s AOTY lists, I’m amazed not just by how much music the serious heads are managing to listen to, but that they manage to remember it clearly enough to compile a proper ranking. Patrick St. Michel’s exhaustive list for Make Believe Melodies runs to 100 releases, while Ryo Miyaichi has posted a bunch of 2023 round-ups on This Side of Japan, including a great rundown of his 60 best albums that are available on Bandcamp. I was planning to do something similar myself, but it would’ve meant relistening to a bunch of stuff from earlier in the year, and I honestly haven’t found the time. Instead, here’s a bumper wrap of some new releases and reissues from 2023 that I haven’t already written about on here.

New music from Japan – Summer 2023 edition

Notable new Japanese releases

I swear, if it wasn’t for the arbitrary deadline of Bandcamp Friday, I’d probably never get around to finishing one of these things. Here’s a selection of music from these fine isles that has caught my attention over the past few months. No reissues this time (though Music from Memory’s Dream Dolphin compilation, released in March, is making a weird kind of sense now that we’re swimming in an interminable summer heatwave).

New (and old) music from Japan – Spring 2023 edition

Notable new Japanese releases and reissues

It’s starting to feel a lot like spring in Tokyo, and there’s a lot of stuff happening on the music scene if you care to look, including a bunch of new venues and – finally! – a diverse range of international touring acts doing the rounds. That said, I feel like I’ve been spending a lot more time compiling listings of upcoming gigs than I have actually going to them, which is a balance I need to redress. Anyhoo, enough of my prattling: here’s some of the good stuff that’s caught my attention over the past few months, both new and archival. As ever, I’ve just focused on artists who are active in Japan, which means I haven’t written about Tujiko Noriko’s extraordinary Crépuscule I & II, though you should definitely check that if you haven’t already.