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sneek-m · 4 years

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Please rec more songs like she is summer songs. Preferably available on Spotify

More Like Summer: A Spotify Playlist for Anon

I went ahead and made a small Spotify playlist (15 songs!) for you with Japanese pop songs that’s in the vibe of She Is Summer. I sequenced it a little so it flows from the bummer mood of “Call Me In Your Summer” to more upbeat to back to melancholy again.

If you want more back info on these songs/artists, go below:

She Is Summer: “Call Me in Your Summer” -- from Wave Motion, 2019

You’re probably familiar with this one.

Kirinji: “Killer Tune Kills Me” ft. YonYon -- from Cherish, 2019

Kirinji have made nu-city pop, a term I just made up to refer to city pop in the 21st century -- since the beginning of the 2000s. Unfortunately, they just disbanded last year, but they’ve left behind a long catalog. “Killer Tune Kills Me” is my favorite from their last album, Cherish; honestly, that’s the only song in there with that moody, after-hours vibe.

YonYon is a Korean artist very active in Japan as much as she is in South Korea. She’s featured on the new Yaeji album! She also posts DJ mixes here and there on YouTube. Her song “Overflow” with nu-city-popper Hitomi Toi (another name you should look up but unfortunately not on Spotify) is my favorite. I didn’t include it here because it’s more house than, like, pop-funk or whatever lane you consider She Is Summer.

Kiki Vivi Lily: “80denier” -- from Vivid, 2019

Kiki Vivi Lily just recently guested on Tofubeat’s new EP! It’s one of my favorite songs of 2020. It could potentially fit here too.

Yufu Terashima: “Last Cinderella” -- from the Ii Onna De Yoroshiku single, 2019

Speaking of Kiki Vivi Lily, she wrote the lyrics for this song by solo idol Yufu Terashima. Yufu doesn’t regularly do this kind of after-hours song; it’s a lot more of the typical sparkly outfit idol-pop stuff. But I love this one a lot for that “Call Me in Your Summer Mood.” Her other stuff is really good, though, if you’re looking for idol pop.

Punipunidenki: “Last Summer” -- single, 2019

I’ve considered a Punipunidenki more fit for SoundCloud with a lot of one-offs and loose string of EPs. She consistently hit it last year collaborating with Mikeneko Homeless, a producer that’s actually good for this smooth, hip-hop-influenced, after-hours stuff. He produced Chelmico’s “Balloon”! Punipunidenki also put out a great single earlier this month too.

Erika Nishi: “Palette” -- from Love Me, 2019

Erika Nishi is more of an R&B solo singer who happens to land sometimes in a nu-city-pop or the kind of pop-funk that lands really adjacent to it. Her album Love Me from last year has a variety of stuff; my favorite song from it, “Take It Slow,” takes from Southern bass or at least it sounds like someone really like Ghost Town DJs’ “My Boo.” I think it’s worth clicking around, though, especially the earlier stuff.

Ayami Muto: “Amane” -- from Mirrors, 2020

Ayami Muto used to be in the idol group Sakura Gakuin, the same ones the girls of Babymetal used to be in, but she graduated a while back and just recently launched her solo singing career. “Amane” was the first one of her singles; the rest go more into an ‘80s idol pop lane. Mirrors was a good album if you’re into that area of pop nostalgia.

G.Rina: “All Around the World” ft. Asako Toki -- from Live & Learn, 2017

Starting from here is the more pop stuff, and this stuff is really glossy retro-funk.

HALLCA: “Twisted Rainbow” -- single, 2020

HALLCA used to be in the idol group Especia, one very influential act that was ahead in the nu-city pop game. (You may have come across them as vaporwave idols which is not wrong considering their later phases.) I think Especia is worth checking out if you like music here! HALLCA, on the other hand, stepped out solo in 2018 with the great Apertif EP. Last year she put out an amazing single every month, which is all compiled in the VILLA album. This is her new one.

Monari Wakita: “A La Espadrille” -- from Right Here, 2019

Monari Wakita was also a member of Especia, and she has an amazing solo catalog as well. You’re here just in time because only recently did her catalog become available on Spotify. Really, any of her three albums is worth diving into. This one is from her newest one from last year.

Asako Toki: “Emerald” -- from Passion Blue, 2019

Asako Toki started at the end of the 90s in the Shibuya-kei band Cymbals and then continued to make nu-city pop on her own since the beginning of the 2000s. She’s as tenured if not longer than Kirinji. (My take is that Shibuya-kei is only ‘90s city-pop but with a fancier name but that is a conversation for another day.) As you may noticed she already sang on G.Rina’s song. Asako Toki’s catalog also recently became available on Spotify, and what’s on there is all worth checking out. I got into her from Pink; Emerald Blue from last year is great too.

Dance for Philosophy: “Heuristic City” -- from Excelsior, 2019

When I first discovered the idol group Dance for Philosophy, I took them as nu-Especia. They play with similar retro dance-pop genres; I guess you can say they are more funk than city-pop. But make no mistake, they hold up all well as their own. “Heuristic City” from their great album Excelsior, a top 5 pop album of 2019 for me, is a very melancholy one. They got a lot more upbeat stuff, too, of course.

Sakuraebis: “Nee, Loafer” -- from Octave, 2019

If I can be selfish for one song to push on to you here, it would be this one. It’s another very melancholy one that I just love. Sakuraebis is an idol group who were built as sister groups to Shiritsu Ebisu Chugaku, one of my absolute favorite groups. They don’t play with city pop, retro funk or those lanes that much at least intentionally like Especia or Dance for Philosophy. But I think Octave has a few more of those like “Nee, Loafer” that nods at them.

Sato Moka: “Melt Bitter” -- single, 2020

Sato Moka began more as a bedroom-pop singer/songwriter type then she started to incorporate more funk and R&B into her sound come the second album, Merry Go Round. She’s going on a great trajectory and her new one here is for those after hours.

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frankmacari · 6 years

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Revolution at 3.5″: Inside Vaporwave’s Mini-Boom of Floppy Disk Releases

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Sterling Campbell had co-founded a cassette label and a VHS tape label in Ottawa, but needed a new creative outlet after moving back to Cornwall, Ontario, to be closer to his daughter.

“I was like, ‘I need to start something up for myself here,’” he says. “‘What’s the most ridiculous thing I could do right now?’”

The answer was Strudelsoft, the label that the 36-year-old bills as the first vaporwave imprint dedicated exclusively to releasing music on 3.5″ floppy disk.

The misty, Internet-fueled subgenre has long thrived on nostalgic physical formats. Vaporwave’s sound, often produced by slowing down and/or reverb-drenching existing songs to walk the line between the sentimental and the sinister, is a perfect match for cassette tapes, those beloved relics of hissier times. Now a boomlet of patient and creative label owners are recovering an even more esoteric medium: the Eighties and Nineties artifact once used for Windows installations, AOL trials and sessions of Doom.

“Floppies are cheaper than cassettes, they don’t have to be tediously dubbed, they look appealing, they’re available in a lot of colors and have cool designs that people like,” says Matthew Isom, 40, of San Diego plunderphonic vaporwave label Power Lunch, who notes that floppies also cost substantially less to ship overseas than cassettes.

There are less convenient aspects to the format, of course, but floppy aficionados have found ways to work within its limits. “I discovered, after playing around, that you can actually release about 11 minutes and 38 seconds of 8-bit audio MP3 on a floppy disk,” says Campbell, who has released six floppies so far via Strudelsoft. “The first one that I did was this vaporwave artist called Cat System Corp and I had a run of like 20 floppy disks. And it fuckin’ sold out in 8 seconds.”

Campbell sourced his first batch of disks on eBay. When that proved too expensive, he sent a call to the employees at the contract manufacturer where he works in IT. He followed that up with a post on Canadian classified site Kajiji, where he offered to pick up floppies from peoples’ homes. He wagers he currently has about 400 or 500 floppy disks in his basement.

“You find some interesting stuff on them, like pictures of I Dream of Jeannie and Gilligan’s Island,” he says. “People’s family photos and stuff. I found, actually, a Trojan virus on one, which was called hotguy.exe. Good thing I didn’t click on it.”

Vlad Maftei, 29, of Constanța, Romania label Sea of Clouds hit up his country’s online marketplace, Okazii. “Guys will have thousands of them in their house, and they’re giving them away for very cheap,” he says. “So I met with a bunch of shady dudes in alleyways and got a whole bag of them. … I think the biggest challenge for me definitely was some of the floppy disks were so old and written and rewritten so many times, by the time I got to them they weren’t really working anymore. And sometimes I had to try to write an album five or six times on five different floppy discs until I found one that finally worked.”

Despite – or because of – the obscure format, these labels’ floppy disk releases often sell out promptly.

“I released it one evening, and woke up in the morning and it had sold out,” Power Lunch’s Isom says of Eggo Jams by Sponge Person, released in a few cassette editions and a run of 20 copies on “waffle-yellow floppy disk.” “People love that release. It’s a collaborative work between a few different vaporwave artists, so it’s sort of done anonymously, but it’s probably a bigger success than any one of those single artists have ever done.”

“The thing about it is, people in the vaporwave scene love physical releases,” Campbell says. “You got guys in the Vaporwave Cassette Club on Facebook that post up these cassette tape collections that are worth thousands of dollars. It’s insane. And a lot of these people, I don’t even think a lot of ’em play the shit. They just kind of put it on their shelf.”

The original explosion of musicians releasing floppies occurred during the mid-Nineties, when discs were sometimes packaged alongside CDs as a way of providing bonus content, like for tech-savvy plunderers Emergency Broadcast Network and Billy Idol’s industrial misstep Cyberpunk. Sony’s “Music Screeners” series featured 3.5″ disks with video clips and screensavers for artists like Cyndi Lauper, Michael Jackson and The The. By the aughts, however, floppies were mostly the domain of European electronic acts and subterranean experimental groups.

The 2010s have seen occasional use of the format among big-name noise acts – Eighties cassette pioneers like the New Blockaders, GX Jupitter-Larsen and Maurizio Bianchi have all released floppies within the last decade – and experimental labels like Hungaria’s Floppy Kick. Miami Vice’s Culture Island, released in 2012 in an edition of 25, is generally regarded as the first vaporwave floppy disk – “and apparently it’s just fuckin’ insane to get ahold of,” says Campbell.

Even retro-minded jazz-funk group (and Kendrick Lamar collaborators) BadBadNotGood got in on the fun when their label Innovative Leisure wrote a 40kbps mp3 of non-album track “Up” onto 100 floppies before the release of their 2016 album IV.

“We would mysteriously place them in different locations around the world, whether it was a coffee shop, boutique, record store, and then we would take a photo of the floppy, tag the location and some lucky fans received a nice surprise,” says Innovative Leisure co-founder Jamie Strong. “Now it sells for $40-$50 online. Maybe we should do another run?”

Beyond the obvious nostalgia factor, the floppy is a natural fit for vaporwave, music that is often lo-fi even before it’s compressed down to fit into such a tiny space. “One floppy holds 1.44 megabytes of data. So, the most I’ve been able to fit on one was three songs,” says Sea of Clouds’ Maftei. “They were compressed to hell, but still very listenable. I listened to them from the floppy and I couldn’t complain. It sounds good enough.”

But floppy heads say the utilitarian aspect is important, too. “It’s even cheaper to get into floppies than it is to get into cassettes,” says Isom. “Cassette players, they’re not really manufactured anymore, and the prices are going up on used ones. They’re getting scarcer, they don’t always work. It’s a little daunting. But a floppy drive? 10, 15 bucks and they’re ready to go. Pretty much anybody can afford to get into doing this.”

The bottom line? “It takes up a lot of your time,” Campbell says of the process of collecting, ripping and mailing Strudelsoft’s catalog. “And sometimes I wonder if it’s worth it. But then of course it’s worth it, you know? ‘Cause I got a fuckin’ floppy disk label.”

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