This is NOT Visual Kei: BUCK-TICK, Soft Ballet, Der Zibet / ISSAY and their associated 90s J-Rock side projects

There was some discussion on the Japanese New Wave Listening Club but this scene deserves its own thread.

The common link is that the bands all knew each other from the 80s Tsubaki House scene in Shinjuku. They toured together, made guest appearances on each others' records and did solo projects together.

Musically all lean towards the dark, gothic side of J-Rock. Lots of electro and industrial elements. But all three artists have vast catalogues over decades, spanning multiple genres. (B-T are generally credited alongside X Japan, with inventing Visual Kei, though they themselves were not part of that later genre.) And all three were known for their androgynous 'vampire handsome' front men and homoerotic imagery.

I am still learning about these groups (I know quite a lot about B-T, bits and pieces about SB and only a little about DZ) but I am looking forward to discussing them.

BUCK-TICK was a fairly recent discovery for me the other year, but learning that they were gothy long-haul total veterans absolutely intrigued me and I liked the digital best-of I was able to get via Apple.

Most Westerners come to these bands through the time-honoured tradition of anime theme tunes. So we will start, as is traditional, with the B-T song that most Westerners hear first, the atmospheric gothic trip-hop of ドレス (DRESS) from their 7th album, DARKER THAN DARKNESS STYLE 93

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMbyDfvdxjM

Since people on the other thread were interested in handsome singers, may I present to you Sakurai Atsushi, winner of fan voted 'most handsome man' awards in Japanese music magazines for decades.

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/32/e5/09/32e509e7051be56d88f9d8bede8d6a7f.jpg

Hey, Endo!

Yeah, these guys all got their start modelling and doing softcore homoerotic shoots for Boys Love magazines in the 80s so there are quite a lot of photos like this out there.

B-T have the most incredible and implausible history - 5 guys who met at school as teenagers in the remote province of Gunma. Inspired mostly by Japanese new wave and punk - YMO, Boøwy, The Stalin, Ippu-Do.

They moved to Tokyo and became wildly successful as teen idols - playing very cute, cheerful and upbeat new wave pop-punk. They were an absolute phenomenon, selling out the Budokan, had hordes of teenage fans who dressed like them and did their hair in similar towering 2-foot hairstyles.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KiUMzQZvjtY

They put out 3 and 1/2 albums in about 2 years and just skyrocketed playing this absurdly catchy punk-pop.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G16ae2hiTMw

Then over the period of about 6 months over the winter of 88-89 everything changed.

First, they went to London to record their fourth album. Spent a lot of time hanging out in Notting Hill and Camden Market, took drugs for the first time, discovered Goth, got into Bauhaus - and recorded Iconoclasm, possibly one of the best Bauhaus songs not actually recorded by Bauhaus:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kcy5TAHQpvA

Went back to tour Japan and almost immediately their guitarist and main songwriter, Imai Hisashi, was arrested for LSD posession and sent to jail for 6 months. It was a huge scandal, made the evening news, splashed all over the papers, crying schoolgirls mobbing the courthouse where he was sentenced. This would have been a career-ending catastrophe for most Japanese celebrities.

But the experience seemed to have something of a catalysing effect on the band. They dropped the cutesy punk-pop and went harder, darker, more experimental. Released the Baudelaire-influenced album, Aku no Hana (Flowers of Evil, 1990) as a defiant middle finger to the Japanese establishment - basically, 'if you are going to treat us like criminals, they we will play up that image and encourage our fans to celebrate rebellion'. They started mocking Japanese conformity and basically comparing their detractors to nazis on National Media Boys:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ranxc-M3SPg

But there were also the first signs of musical ripening, the hazy proto-shoegaze psychedelia of PLEASURE LAND, the acid-fried Love and Rockets homage, LOVE ME, experimenting with more jazzy rhythms on Misty Blue, dragging in marimba on Kiss Me Goodbye

Sorry, I love this video, it's just so perfect an aesthetic, really captures the mixture of goth and psychedelia during this period:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Oy75zjpb4s

It's odd because this was the material that was most successful in Japan. You can hear hints of the band they would later become - but their early material sounds like a totally different band. Most bands simply do not get 7 or 8 albums to find their true sound. But it's because this early material was so wildly popular and influential - and it's important to remember that more internationally successful bands like X Japan got signed to majors in their *wake* - that they were given the time and money to create their more adventurous later work.

Are drug scandals that big a career killer in japan? I've heard of an actor being knocked to lower budget films because of it but never complete career death.

Yes, maybe not complete career-death but still a huge deal.

It was a very, very big deal. The band were under pressure to replace their guitarist - they refused, as the guy was the founding member and wrote almost all of their material.

But to show you the attitude of Imai Hisashi (and the band in general) - 2 years later, after 'hanging out' with Soft Ballet (who made their debut in 1989) and discovering dance music, they released a madchester-tinged dance-rock song. The original proposed name for the song was ACID, but their record company freaked out and refused. The band renamed the single 'スピード' - SPEED - as the record company were so naive that they were blissfully unaware that this was also a drugs reference.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_sqXQCY1GbA

(Imai is the little red-haired guitarist in leather shorts. He was 'very close friends' with the industrial-loving keyboard player out of Soft Ballet, Fujii Maki, who had a huge influence on his tastes.)

Sorry, I really wanted to get into the 'band boom' of the late 80s. Soft Ballet made their debut with the single BODY TO BODY - the title was deliberate homage to Front 242. In fact, the band were literally named after Soft Cell and Spandau Ballet. Their first album was very, very derivative of European dance music. I know that Robert said they reminded him a bit too much of Depeche Mode - but there are songs on this album that are dead rip-offs of e.g. DAF. Listen to this track (KO KA GE NI) and tell me the intro isn't note for note DAF's Kebab Träume:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qE8FAHPe7mk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KV6NnB7CuX0

But as they matured, they found their own sound - especially live, with a full band, they took on a far more dynamic and aggressive sound. A lot of archivist type fans have been doing a lot of work uploading their live material to YT which is worth investigating to see how they changed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSC60iyR4mk

These images may be of interest, they may not. I really want to concentrate on these bands' music. But I want to make it clear that their image, their personal charisma, their position as visibly queer-coded people in such a repressive society was as important to their fans as the music.

https://www.tumblr.com/ch1se/637325331438731264/ryoichi-endo-and-maki-fujii-in-1985-before-the

Visual Kei is such a strange scene, because it was so much about the fashion. And a lot of the later bands just took up the cross-dressing and the homoerotic stage play in order to provide the 'Shock' in 'Visual Shock'. Many of them were just doing fan service, heterosexual men performing for a female audience. But for the first wave of bands (ISSAY in particular was very very open about his bisexuality) there was a lot of 'hiding in plain sight'. According to Tokyo gay gossip, some of them were indeed couples, but not always the ones you see making out onstage...

https://www.tumblr.com/living-on-the-net/180134017237/satellitecircuit-in-heaven

Sorry, more drugs questions: is still the same today? Does anyone care if Boredoms, Masonna or Acid Mothers Temple take drugs? Is this just a mainstream thing?

I have never lived in Japan, so I'm probably not the best person to answer these questions?

But from friends who do live there - they say that Japan is still far more strict about drugs. For example, you cannot even get ADHD medication on prescription. That does not mean that musicians cannot obtain drugs (there are various traditional routes to drugs - organised crime; or American military bases) but it's far less socially acceptable.

I think in Hisashi-kun's case, the police were deliberately trying to make an example of him. Because the band was so popular with young people. Because of their rebel image. Because the band had just been in the permissive West recording an album. The government wanted to make a statement that such permissive attitudes towards drugs would not be tolerated in Japan.

But the arrest had the opposite effect. The old Japanese cliche - '出る杭は打たれる' - the arrest galvanised Imai and B-T to become 'the nails that stick out but refuse to be hammered down'.

The band culturally represented a generational culture clash - they absolutely played on it in their image. Here's an advert they did for boomboxes, that pits them as cyberpunk rebels blowing the minds of grey-suited salarymen in an airport lounge:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFoJ0OeShc4

I keep beginning posts and abandonning them because they get too long and effusive.

Does anyone actually want to read longform posts about bands they don't really know? Or would I better off just throwing YT links of their better songs until someone clicks play?

This thread has been fantastic so far. Your long posts are very welcome afaic.

This is an area of Japanese pop/rock that I know little about beyond having heard of a few of these band names.

I'm enjoying these a lot too.

Yes, very informative!

I'm enjoying your posts too

me too. cool band!

Sorry, more drugs questions: is still the same today? Does anyone care if Boredoms, Masonna or Acid Mothers Temple take drugs? Is this just a mainstream thing?

When Pierre Taki from Denki Groove was busted for cocaine in 2019, brands dropped him, his voiceover work was replaced, his songs and videos were pulled from streaming until a sufficient amount of time had passed. So it still happens.

Yep, he used to act in prime-time tv dramas too... since that bust he's been blacklisted by the mainstream broadcasters.

I keep beginning posts and abandonning them because they get too long and effusive.

Does anyone actually want to read longform posts about bands they don't really know? Or would I better off just throwing YT links of their better songs until someone clicks play?

― Etherwave

i absolutely want to read longform posts about bands i don't really know

this is totally the stuff i go for

the only reason i don't respond often to these sort of posts is because, uh, i don't really know the bands :)

Does anyone care if Boredoms, Masonna or Acid Mothers Temple take drugs?

these bands are probably even more niche there than abroad. def the case for boredoms at least. too under the radar for anyone to really care, i’d guess.

looking forward to diving into the albums mentioned, don't really know anything about these bands

More connections: Ken from Soft Ballet's father was a film composer and his brother did videogame music

the Pierre Taki thing still upsets me, for one Sony has a ton of artists who are known to be big drug fiends that are still worshipped in Japanese media, for two lets face it these guys are ravers, like it or not that's a very drug-influenced scene top to bottom, for god's sake check out some Denki Groove videos from the mid 90s

its cool they're on a label again and doing shows here and there but they haven't made a new album in 8 years now so I think it's affected the band somewhat, some real bullshit

Thank you for the kind words of encouragement!

I was wondering if this kind of writing would be better suited to a blog. But if folks are enjoying it, I'll keep going.

If anyone just wants to skip ahead and just listen to the music without me blethering about the history, this might be a good intro. The Japanese fanbase recently did a big social media survey of their best tracks. Like most big surveys, the consensus tracks at the top are not necessarily the best? I'd skip the first 3 and come back to them. But I have an irrational hatred for ROMANCE. It is probably their most well known track but it's kind of mid-tempo and Emo and to me, not very representative of their style.

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7jIffc0Pt0W3cd3CdV72ce?si=3807b9ada2c84906

The band members themselves often refer to 1991 as the 'hinge' or the 'pivot' where everything changed for them. A number of things happened both on a personal and professional level.

As mentioned before, the band had been hanging out with Soft Ballet and Imai Hisashi in particular had been immersing himself in dance music. There was a series of compilation albums called DANCE2NOISE where rock musicians were paired up with dance producers - several members of B-T got involved. Imai and Fujii Maki (the Industrial-loving keyboardist from SB) started a long-running side project called Schaft. (More on them later, they're amazing.) These compilations also featured ISSAY's new project, Hamletmaschine (you may notice a bit of a German Industrial theme here)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KGJx0dRClSE

I'm trying to get my friend who knows more about Der Zibet to come and give some tips as I know more of the ISSAY catalogue is worth exploring. He was a huge influence on Atsushi (known as Acchan to the fans) both in his androgynous stagecraft. And also in learning to inject ambiguity and poetry into his words. My Japanese is minimal at best, but there have been some great translators in the Western fandom who have tried to convey the double-meanings and poetry. In a language with 4 separate writing systems, there is a lot of space for wordplay, and B-T often play with the distance between the sung word and an unexpected kanji - or, for example, use katakana instead of the expected hiragana to convey puns. Hisashi in particular loves to make up new words or phrases by smashing 2 kanji from different words together.

Around this time, B-T start their musical expansion. Imai Hisashi gets bored with guitar and starts mucking about with fun digital effects. Then he moves swiftly onto exploring the possibilities of MIDI guitar. He started a long-running collaboration with Fernandes Guitars, designing weirder and weirder models. Starting with MIDI interfaces, adding sustainer effects (kind of like a built-in eBow) on my personal favourite, the Stabilizer Guitar. He even designed a theremin-guitar hybrid which is one of the coolest things I've ever heard. He's one of those guitarists who has no interest in making a guitar sound like a guitar. To him, it's just a tone generator. He went through a phase of playing a fretless guitar with a violin bow before getting the Stabilizer made for him. But using the Sustainer effect to hold a note, he then manipulates the pitch with the tremolo arm in this incredible warped, floating, attackless tone somewhere between Kevin Shields and Michael Rother.

https://guitarz.blogspot.com/2013/12/wacko-japanesese-fernandes-hisashi-imai.html

Also their second guitarist, Hide (Hoshino Hidehiko, not to be confused with HIDE / hide (Hideto) from X Japan, who was also very close with Hisashi.) For this album, Hide learned how to play keyboards, and really stepped up his composing game. It's wild how this guy was their second string songwriter, only produced a song or two per album, but ended up composing some of their biggest hits and most beloved songs. As a general rule, Imai writes the rockers and dance tunes, and Hide writes the ballads. This is Jupiter (and Dress, posted above, is also one of this.) The best Ocean Rain song that Echo and the Bunnymen never wrote.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAlAtQ7_chs

This album, Kurutta Taiyou (Lunatic Sun) was the first album where the Japanese rock press suddenly started to paid attention to the band's music. They had previously dismissed B-T as just an Idol Band famous for their haircuts. They still rocked just as hard, but there are all these industrial and noise elements creeping in:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvrriiB-h_M

It was also reportedly a pretty horrible time, personally, for Acchan. His beloved mother died unexpectedly while he was on tour and he never got to say goodbye. A loss he spent the rest of his life repeatedly addressing in some of his most poignant lyrics. He understandably went off the rails a bit. He got married (fan gossip says it was a shotgun wedding), had a child, then got divorced within a year after a vicious 'trial by tabloid' when gossip magazines staked him out and published photos of him at a love hotel. It was really not a great time for him. He was not able to cope with mass market tabloid style fame. But his personal turmoil brought a new depth to the lyrics from Kurutta Taiyou to Darker Than Darkness.

After 6 albums, the record label demanded a Greatest Hits. They responded by re-recording all of their earlier 80s hits in the new MIDI style. With mixed results. They called it 'self-covering' (joking they were 'murdering' their own hits in the title: Musical Murder: This is NOT Greatest Hits). It was another number 1 record for them.

But a much better document of where they were at, poised just at the start of their Imperial Phase, was the live video, Climax Together. It's weird because Imai is such a 'Studio Is An Instrument' songwriter, but they really do stress their live shows. They are really fun, charismatic performers - and their staging is often incredible to look at. They have even more live albums, and in particular live videos (often 1 or even 2 live videos per tour) than studio albums and they have 24 studio albums at this point.

Live version of Taiyou ni Korosareta from Climax Together shows it all coming together - Hisashi with his MIDI guitar, Atsushi's emotive vocals, the use of space and sparseness to highlight tension (this is where they really parted ways with Visual Kei, which was all about cramming as many notes as possible into every bar). Their rhythm section is 2 brothers, much like Bauhaus. They have such an incredible sense of when to pull back and play in a really restrained manner, and when to go all-in. Their drummer, Toll, is an underrated powerhouse though he's best known for having the same mohawk hairstyle for 40 years.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhFmx8CnMnw

Tolling funeral bells? That's Hisashi's guitar. Floating synth pads? Also Hisashi's guitar. Jazz piano solo in the middle? Hisashi again!

Sorry, I promise I won't go this deep for every album. Just trying to explain their major eras. There will be a misshapen jazz album, then a shoegaze album, then they kick off their Cyberpunk Era in earnest.

Given up trying to write about this stuff in order. I just went down a YouTube rabbithole trying to find videos of Imai's guitars in action because they are so absurdly cool. I was looking for Theremin Guitar but I could only find footage of him playing his theremin WITH his guitar. Which is very difficult to start with, keeping a theremin in tune with an object that isn't you rhand. But doing it WHILE playing the main riff on guitar at the same time? Incredible.

Instead I found Stabilizer Guitar in action.

CHECK UP demonstrates the technique of how it's triggered. Though he's not using it to do the warped, floating tone here - he's using it to reproduce the stop/start turntablist effect that he does on the album version. (Solo starts about 3:38)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nl_T0gu2Te8

THINKING TIME LISTEN TO THE MUSIC!

The visuals on this one are a bit fuzzy but he shows a lot more how he switches the sustainer on to get that floating feedback tone, then uses the tremolo arm to manipulate the pitch.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nor5HK1T-Qk

He's a brave man to do those high kicks in a pencil skirt, let me tell you.

They called it 'self-covering'

From my own explorations of Japanese pop music I've found that "Self-Cover" records are not an uncommon thing.

Sorry, I promise I won't go this deep for every album.

Again, these posts are excellent.

Having watched a few B-T live videos: respect to the drummer who has kept going with the high hair.

Learned about this thread from the Circuit Des Yeux thread, not disappointed. This is the first I've heard any of these names even other than X Japan.

Thank you for being so patient with my absurd hyperlexia.

I've sent this thread to another friend who knows a lot more about Soft Ballet and Endo Ryoichi and his solo project, Ends. Hopefully they will register and join in with more Soft Ballet facts. Please be as kind to them as you've been to me!

So much of the online fandom around these bands seems to revolve around this kind of extreme parasocial focus on the members. I understand that comes from Idol culture and is quite deliberate. That fans having these imaginary relationships with a musician (one's preferred member is called one's 'Honmei') is natural and a very crucial part of the industry.

But it is harder to get people excited about the actual music. Like, yeah. I love Yagami Toll's mohawk! It's amazing! But I'm more excited about 'this drummer has just done the best krautrock Afrobeat this side of Jaki Liebezeit'.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDpQE_drQfY

IS2G there is a sped-up sample of YMO's Firecracker in the background of this song. That would make sense given that the band's name is pronounced Bakuchiku in Japanese - which is the word for firecracker. Given what a huge YMO fanboy Hisashi was, I'm sure it's deliberate.

I intend to follow up with all the song links here. So far, this:

These compilations also featured ISSAY's new project, Hamletmaschine (you may notice a bit of a German Industrial theme here)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KGJx0dRClSE

was really nice. The bassline!

ISSAY is unfortunately the artist I know the least about. I think I responded to Hamletmaschine the most because it was the most dance oriented.

His other stuff tends to be a bit more 'alien glam rock god from a parallel universe'. The recording quality of this is apalling. (I'm sure you're aware that if you're into J-rock, you end up watching a lot of very low quality rips from ancient VHS tapes.) But gives you some idea.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqwMRc44uGw

Φ Phi and Der Zibet are on Spotify now. For a long time they weren't! But I think Malice Mizer is the only big anti-streaming holdout from this scene now.

I feel like I am neglecting Soft Ballet somewhat here. Perhaps because I discovered them after B-T, mainly through Schaft, the solo project where Imai Hisashi eloped to London with Fujii Maki to work on their weird industrial side project. There's a running joke in the B-T fandom that if you get obsessed with B-T, you will eventually get a secondary obsession with either Soft Ballet or Der Zibet, depending on who your Honmei is. (Atsushi and Issay appeared on one another's records for many years in the same way that Imai Hisashi and members of Soft Ballet did.)

I find that I tend to discover music through a process a friend calls 'spiderwebbing'. A chance encounter will start the obsession with one artist. In the desire to find out everything I possibly can about that central artist, I start exploring the other related artists. Then these related artists all start connecting with one another. I think that's a sign you've found a really good, dynamic set of musicians when they are all cross-pollinating one another. Dense webs of collaborations tend to spread good ideas around.

When I first started exploring the solo project, Schaft, I found that they connected to so many artists I already appreciated. That first Schaft album featured collaborations with Coil, Autechre, Meat Beat Manifesto, Raymond Watts of Pig/KMFDM/Neubauten - even Julianne Regan. But it seems like many of these links came through Fujii Maki. He worked as a music journalist in Tokyo, so he came into contact with far more foreign musicians. So Soft Ballet's remix albums (I believe there are 3 of them though only 2 are on Spotify) are wonderfully adventurous as well as a great introduction to the band.

Unusually for a synthpop band of that era, their live shows were more highly regarded than their recordings. They substatially remixed (often live remixing) their songs for performance. And featured a range of guest musicians, as discussed on the Japanese New Wave thread. Endo and Moriken were enthusiastic performers. Moriken's elaborate drag costumes and performing antics often outshine the actual frontman. Fujii, on the other hand, apparently hated live performances. So I think for him, remixing the backing tracks, or playing live drums or guitar was a way of livening up touring, which he otherwise found a chore. I wish SB had done as many live albums as B-T, because the arrangements were often significantly better, but there's only one that I know of: Reiz(raits)

So we're up to Soft Ballet's second album, DOCUMENT. There's only one note perfect Depeche Mode rip on this album but it really is shameless! Escaoe - lost track from Speak and Spell?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XgoJgAyfM68

Surprisingly restrained performance for this era. Watching this, I do wonder if the element they were missing was a more diplomatic Fletch-type character in the background to hold the extreme personalities of the three songwriters together. The combination being so volatile was good for dynamic performances, but terrible for them personally. They broke up and reformed multiple times through their career.

NO PLEASURE is more what I'd expect from a SB performance. Everyone is dressed as a different villain from Dune. Skin-tight stillsuits, velvet samurai robes and Moriken 'serving' as the kids say. The line of televisions performing the samples is fantastic! This feels like a time machine to 1990.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=POdzlz1SOLU

Both of these are Maki's tracks. But their range was really expanding. Here's one of Moriken's more gentle ambient type works, Believe In A Blue World. Moriken was more known for the big, dramatic Stock Aitken Waterman pop anthems, but this is genuinely sublime.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_HGLAELQ_s

There's a lush Orbital remix of that track, too. The best of both worlds, one of those remixes where the remixer's own aesthetic was perfect for the original artist, and the remixer was also sensitive enough to bring out and heighten exactly what was most evocative about the original track. If you like Orbital, this is a real treat.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VhdxCaoTDsg

Orbital remix, you say?

"Believe In A Blue World" is gorgeous.

It is really lovely, isn't it?

And yes! Orbital remix! I think the remix albums were originally intended to entice Western listeners but I'm not sure they ever got released outside Japan.

I've been trying to persuade my friend who knows a lot more than I do about these bands to come and share some info. They sent me some links which might help. (This is not the friend, this is a Japanese music blogger.) Obviously, in Japanese, but google translate can get the gist, even if it can't always handle the slang. (I spent ages trying to chase down a kanji before realising the writer was making a pun on Maki's 'glaring eyes' and the name of the solo project Schaft.) I love that their hairstyles are considered just as worthy of documentation and discussion as their music; that amuses me.

Here's a wonderful overview of Soft Ballet, describing the shape of their career and a brief overview of the studio albums:

https://note.com/balzax/n/nf7d3f6f2bc83

This really captures their essence: Sofuba is always a band where "three giants are constantly asserting themselves," and the struggle on the verge of a fight is what makes them Sofuba-like.

Overviews of the three giants and what they brought to the table:
Endo: https://note.com/balzax/n/n93194920174c
Fujii "destruction is my life" Maki: https://note.com/balzax/n/n45e50f6448df
Morioka "the wriggling blond" Ken: https://note.com/balzax/n/ndbf4394aa080

I'll try to dig out some of their solo stuff which shows off the personality of each member. But I feel I am definitely more drawn to Maki's solo work because "he likes female voices more than Endo's live voice, and even more than that, the sound of machines." is a pretty good description of my own taste LOL

This is one of my favourite Moriken solo songs. From the ILM archives, I believe the vocalist on this track is rather well known in these parts? ;) Mono no Aware (the Sadness of Things) - genuinely give me chills. The beauty of the arrangement, the unexpected warmth of the vocals.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrawGBc7jnM

Fujii Maki, our metal-banging Coil fanboy. I know this isn't actually a Coil song. But I very much think of this as a Coil cover:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2hqz2GBn7Wo

This, on the other hand is one of the tracks Maki and Hisashi actually recorded with Coil during their honeymoon in London. Perfect mix of Hisashi's goth tendencies and Maki's electronic sound sculptures. With all the creepy atmosphere you would expect of Coil.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0kZb80BCCQ

It's clear that the experience of being dragged to London and introduced to artists like Coil and Autechre and the like completely changed Imai Hisashi's musical outlook. I read a cute translation of Imai's fan club diary of the trip. Apparently he spent over £700 on CDs on Berwick Street! (He was particularly enamoured by a shop reported as 'Mister Rain'. I think this might be a Japanglish mangling of 'Sister Ray' because I can't think of a 'Mister Rain' on Berwick St in the 90s?) His assistant had to buy an additional heavy duty suitcase to drag them all back to Tokyo. But Imai came back from his affair completely invigorated because the next B-T album, Six/Nine was a real career highlight.

Ends is the hardest solo project to get around because none of it is on Spotify. (Or if it is, it is region locked to Japan.) It's also the least like Soft Ballet, because Endo was really trying to distance himself from his gothic prince of darkness image in favour of a more folksy, down to earth image.

This was the album I vibed with the most because he got some remixers to work on it for a more SB-like feel:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abjVrlf9WfI

It's just frustrating when you have a singer with a voice like *that* who decides that he doesn't actually want to sing, he wants to do Yakuza Rap.

His career abruptly ended and he famously disappeared around 15 years ago. But since 2023, there have been persistent rumours of a supposed comeback, which were confirmed by his former bandmate.

Ken Morioka unfortunately died very suddenly in 2016, scuppering any plans for any futher SB reunions. Ken and Maki had recconciled earlier and released some material as Minus(-) but Endo was still holding out. I do hope that he can pull it together, as it seems a shame to hide a voice like *that*.

I know I'm skipping forward a lot here, but 2023 was a brutal, brutal year for Japanese music. So many deaths of artists who were pillars of modern Japanese music. ISSAY died abruptly in the late summer. Then a few months later, Sakurai Atsushi collapsed onstage and died in hospital. Endo was spotted in public for the first time in a decade at Sakurai's funeral, as they had all been close and grown up together. After the deaths of two of the classic gothic prince frontmen in Japanese rock, I think there was a resurgance of public interest in the youngest and last surviving one of the three influential singers. I think there was a real sense of 'your time is short, don't waste it'. Maybe there will be more Ends! I hope so.

I think this might be a Japanglish mangling of 'Sister Ray' because I can't think of a 'Mister Rain' on Berwick St in the 90s?

Yes, iirc there was no "Mister Rain" store.

In Katakana it was ミスターレーン - could be Mister Lane or Mister Rain? I immediately thought it must be Sister Ray because they're both Velvet Underground references.

It's a cute story. Made me very nostalgic for 90s London

http://nopperabou.net/bt-interviews/bt-inter/btclub26-london.htm

But looking at the dates, I realised they must have squeezed in and recorded the whole album in between Suede's Dog Man Star sessions. It was all done at Master Rock in Kilburn in June 1994. Right around the time that Bernard Butler was stropping out of the band. Odd to think that was happening at the same time!

Well! That was fortuitous timing. I commented yesterday that I hoped Endo Ryoichi would release new material.

Today he apparently announced his musical comeback for August of this year!

Through a new message on his official fan club, Endo Ryoichi revealed that his comeback will be this year in August, he said to wait for him and that there will be a lot of news soon, stay tuned! pic.twitter.com/gbJYRRS4po

— ☆ (@SOFT_BALL3T) April 1, 2025

You willed it into existence

I'm waiting for him to declare it an April Fool!

Honestly, if I could manifest things into existence I would be manifesting Fujii Maki doing production on it, but I'm not sure even Imai Hisashi could smooth over the feud between those two!

Anyway. I'm just going to keep adding to this thread until someone tells me to shut up.

Today I'm going to talk about the mid-90s, which was an interesting period for Buck-Tick. I have seen Japanese fans endlessly debate when the different eras of B-T begin and end. For a lot of people, the dividing point was Atsushi cutting off his hair. He said he just got sick of how much of a hassle it was. One night he got very drunk and hacked it all off himself with a pair of scissors. (I'd love to show photos but I can't see how to upload images here.) But this was the moment when the 'face fans' of their teen idol years finally gave up. Many of them had been put off by the jazz epics and freeform experimental secret tracks on Darker Than Darkness. Believing their CDs were broken, some tried to return them. But SIX/NINE was where the serious music fans really started to get onboard. And it was their last Number 1 album for quite some time.

SIX/NINE was a concept album, themed around the idea of Duality/Non-Duality. Hisashi swears up and down that the title was not a sex thing, it was a reference to polarities, S-N as in South-North, (or Somehwere/Nowhere, Science/Nature or a host of other S-N themed dualities) and 69 itself was about the yin-yang symbol. However, the orgasm noises in the background of the infamous album track Kimi no Vanilla (it's a pun in Japanese for something a bit naughty) tell another tale. Can't post that video here as it's 18 and over, but look it up on YouTube if you're curious.

As a concept album, it is bookended by two ambient / spoken word pieces as intro and outro. This is a trick Imai will return to many times. (In fact, on later albums, the first & last tracks may even be comprised of elements from the intro/outro pieces of the previous album to make them flow into one another.) Like Aka no Hana, there was a video made for every song on the album, and it was also released as a 'visual album'.

Japanese fans put this album in their 'cyberpunk' era, but despite the world's first song about a Flame War (Living On The Net from 1996's COSMOS album) I don't think the Cyberpunk era arrives properly until Imai obtains his theremin and a sequencer on SEXY STREAM LINER. What SIX/NINE and COSMOS are is psychedelic AF. COSMOS, as you can probably guess from the name, was particularly inspired by Kosmische and Krautrock.

Anyway, Hisashi came back from the UK with two suitcases full of CDs for inspiration, so it's stylistically diverse. And after his solo project, he has more confidence to sing lead. From now on, most albums will feature duets between Hisashi and Atsushi, which are some of the more interesting songs lyrically. Often singing 'against' one another, thesis and antithesis. (Angel and devil, as they often put it - but you'd be hard pressed to guess who is which one.) There's a duet with ISSAY as well, Itoshi no Rock Star (Beloved Rock Star) - probably one of the most snide songs Acchan has ever written. About how he is completely failing to deal with the pressures of fame. Issay came along on that tour, as well. Apparently the onstage performances between Acchan and Issay on the duet were quite steamy, according to photo stills. But unlike other albums, this one did not get a live video so we'll never know.

On the tongue-twisting 'Aikawarazu no "Are" no Katamari ga Nosabaru Hedo no Soko no Fukidamari' you can hear that Imai has been absorbing trip hop (the sung-spoken lead with angelic backing were inspired by Massive Attack / Tricky) and IDM in the snare rushes. Yagami Toll is one of those few drummers who can actually play breakbeats live. Though on coming records in the cyberpunk era, Imai will be sampling Toll and processing him to make his drumming style more extreme. Video is still showing the influence of Bauhaus, particularly around the swinging lightbulbs:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rJV00Ke5MY

Kodou is a gorgeous slab of psychedelic shoegaze. The tremolo guitars that shiver and purr their way around the stereo field will become a real hallmark of Imai's style in the future. To this day, I have no idea how Acchan kept his eyes open for that long without blinking in the video. (It might be all one take? I can't remember. No - not quite. There are some closeups because it's not a B-T video unless Acchan molests Hisashi.) And yes, the drummer really did cut the top off his fedora in order to fit his two foot mohawk through it. That is dedication to a look!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IsBL40ZCvHI

For Hide's ballad, we have the unearthly Misshitsu. A 'fake dub' psychedelic masterpiece of echoing guitars and vocals so impassioned as to truly transcend the language barrier.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GF1o-IJXl1w

But after a sprawing, 15-song epic album which went months over its due date and massively over budget, the next album COSMOS was a far tighter and focused album.

Candy is worth seeking out - like an out-take from Clouds Taste Metallic era Flaming Lips in its loopy psychedelic pop groove. But I think I prefer the B-side, Chocolate. It sounds like it should end with a wig-out locked groove on that itchy, mechanical-sounding little guitar riff.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRoHbRamE_8

ASH-RA (yes, like in Tempel) features driving Jaki Liebezeit drums, floating Michael Rother guitar tones (I think this might be where the Stabilizer Guitar makes its first appearance for that attack-less seagull sound) and yes, recordings of a pneumatic drill to drive home the 'we really love German Industrial!' message. Live performances apparently featured Hisashi in shoulder-length dreadlocks and some truly terrifying white shorts that left little the imagination.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRfr21QXRFE

Tightrope is another of their haunting ballads - again, Hisashi cannot resist that flickering, tremolo buzz insect sound fluttering about the stereo field. Apart from his ineffable sense of pop melody, Imai has such a fantastic attention to the tiny details of arrangement and texture.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nsg_4NSa9Ig

The paired tracks, IN and SANE show Imai and Hide tackling the same theme from different angles. And the final track - COSMOS. As in both the universe - quite sure that science geek Hisashi was a Carl Sagan fan - and the flower. Something very William Blake there, seeing the heavens in a wild flower. THe chorus has been used as an audience singalong for decades now - 'Love's the only thing out there, and it looks like you'.

Today he apparently announced his musical comeback for August of this year!

So this was apparently an April Fools but everyone fucking fell for it including me ;_;

Moving very slowly, not to mention haphazardly, through the songs you've linked, but -- Tight Rope is really pretty! Their love for Yukihiro Takahashi is clear -- it sounds 80% of the way to a YT ballad. Which I say with gladness rather than pique, since that level of soul and smoothness isn't easy to approximate, and I can always do with more of it.

It's lovely, isn't it? They're known best for being hard rockers, but I often find their more gentle, atmospheric songs so much more interesting. Since Sakurai died, Imai has been pushing the band to be far more experimental and ecclectic. I think he's really deeply immersed in the soundworlds of songs and enjoys creating rhythmic textures in a similar way to Takahashi. (But their record company wants rockers that will sell well.)

I'm going to be really annoying since you said you were struggling to keep up - and throw three more songs at you in a similar style, mostly from the late 90s / early 00s Cyberpunk period when they were working at blending programming with live band.

Kanji fun with this one. 螺旋 虫 should be Rasen Mushi but they insist it's Rasen Chuu. Spiral Insects, anyway. There's an effect in the background of synth pads run through echo and volume swells that make it sound like the whole song is somehow *breathing*. On headphones, you can really hear the fluttering insect noises in the background.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2wjBlWCo_w

Another one with ambiguous kanji. 月世界 - Gessekai or as they have it Getsusekai (Moon World). Sakurai nearly died of Peritonitis while on a photo shoot in Nepal and was airlifted home almost in a coma. This is a song he wrote about hanging in the dreamworld between life and death. It's such an odd, tumbling, theremin-driven track. The hesitant stop-start bittiness to the rhythm shouldn't really work. But the bits of interlocking clockwork sounds somehow make it all hang together. It's worth watching the video to see Hisashi playing the solo on a homemade theremin while dressed as a virus, while Sakurai floats around upsidedown like a bat.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0rr978E1KE

But this far more recent single, Mugen Loop, is the only track where Imai has copped in an interview to consciously trying to write YMO-inflected City Pop. There's something so incredibly light and breezy and southern wind about it! That combination of sophisticated smoothness and soul that you mention

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gq1mhG9RQa8

Also a nice nod to Castrovalva at the end, Doctor Who fans (Imai is huge scifi geek so it's probably quite deliberate)

Still working my way through the Soft Ballet side projects. This was the band Maki and Ken were working on until Ken's unfortunate early death. Honestly this track makes me feel like I'm floating in an underwater kelp forest!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uppD11BYD_I

Whoops, sorry about the stray kanji!

I thought Maki had done another song about a lucky charm. But 魅 (Charm) was actually a Hisashi song.

i know what you mean about “sophistipop” haha

mari album really is lovely and strongly recommend nav katze _gentle & elegance_ if you haven't heard that one yet!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7LrgVEsEZw

It's nice. Gentle and drifty. Getting a real Music For 18 Musicians vibe from the backing.

I'm looking for something with a bit more bite? Here's Mokiken and Maki getting glitchy with Plaid / The Black Dog:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zx19f0F-e1E

On the album version that lovely kokyu solo is doubled with a sitar which pushes all my buttons at once.

Oh god I just found yet ANOTHER Soft Ballet remix album - and this one has a Global Communication remix on it? (It's on Spotify yay)

https://www.discogs.com/release/74232-Softballet-Forms?srsltid=AfmBOoqEmxFB-GnhDgR-aOHy2hNshE5qGqW-K7MjEYCUmMcmYXS9JW81

LOL at people on Autechre polls saying SKF10047 is just Second Bad Vilbel

re: Second Bad Vilbel and SKF10047. They use a very similar sound in both tracks. (That kind of squishy machine sound.) Which gives them very similar vibes. But if you listen to them back to back, the beats aren't much like each other. But I find that's often the case with Imai's work - that he's very good at lifting a sound or a vibe, so you think 'oh this sounds like...' but when you go to listen to the thing you think is the original, you can hear it's just the sound / vibe and not the exact beats or notes.

Update: Oops, SKF10047 is Maki not Hisashi. LOL I can definitely tell apart Maki's songwriting from Moriken's in SB. And Hisashi's from Hide's in B-T. But I really struggle to tell Maki's songs from Hisashi's in Schaft!

The whole of Buck-Ticks' シェイプレス (SHAPELESS) is great but this one particular pleases me. (Hardfloor's 303-abusing remix of HYPER LOVE, posted above during their French Fry Hair Era)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4R9MqUWHmk

And here's Maki Soft Ballet having fun with more 303 abuse:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UE12R9PvXlE

Does anyone know anything about Nu Idol? The only other prominent remix I could find was a late period Shamen track. I think Transamazonia but I might be wrong. SB were fans of The Shamen. (They did a Make It Mine-sampling tribute track called White Shaman.) So that could be the connection, but I've no idea who this remixer is.

I wish I lived anywhere near Japan ;_;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hBm8Wf3Wbc

On the other hand, I can see Michael Rother every year. Swings and Roundabouts I guess.

In 'everything is connected' links, guess who just turned up on a Nav Katze track

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lvap1uirt04

(Spoiler: Fujii Maki)

I just received a huge data dump of magazine scans and articles and photos about Soft Ballet from a friend in Japan. I've been trying to read something called 'Maki's Angry Corner' but it's so full of slang and colourful colloquialisms that machine translation is just not working on it. But the gist of it seems to be a running joke that Maki is kind of a weirdo. There was a bit about how he was collecting CRT monitors for a while because he liked recording the sound they made when he smashed them.

There was a bit about how he was collecting CRT monitors for a while because he liked recording the sound they made when he smashed them.

Awesome.

By the way, Ether -- maybe there were precedents, but the earliest I've heard of musicians traveling to construction sites to record audio for sampling purposes was Yellow Magic Orchestra when they were making Technodelic, their second record of 1981. I'm glad future musicians realized there was more to to be mined from that vein.

Hang on, I actually know this one from debates in industrial music forums! The first pop recording artist (as opposed to avant-guard or music concrete etc.) to record construction sounds for a pop single was Spike Jones in 1956:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinner_Music_for_People_Who_Aren%27t_Very_Hungry

Quotes an article from the Chicago Daily News of August 30, 1956: "Spike Jones got into the Michigan Boulevard repair act Wednesday. Turned up on a curbstone at 7:00 A.M. with Bill Putnam of Universal Recording, plus one tape recorder; gravely recorded the noise of a pneumatic drill to be added to a Spike Jones Dinner Music Album."

But surely Yellow Magic Orchestra themselves were emulating Kraftwerk dutifully recording the sound of trains and banging metal on Trans Europe Express back in 1977?

(I'm not actually sure if Maki came by his metals fetish via YMO or via European industrial bands like Neubauten, SPK, and Test Dept. Because he was so well known as an expert on the genre that he was drafted to write the Japanese liner notes for the releases.)

Apparently, this one is NOT an April Fools (and I had to go and check that today was not 'Day of the Clowns' or some such similar holiday in Japan for trying to get people to believe unbelievable things)

Hello everyone! Through direct contact with official sources (ENDS), we are delighted to give the update that Ryoichi Endo is still working on new music and a single in the near future is very much foreseeable. KEEP YOUR EYES ON #ENDS!#EndoRyoichi #RyoichiEndo

— Soft Ballet Archive (@SB_archive) May 8, 2025

According to his management, Endo Riyuichi is currently working on new music and there will be an Ends single on the way at some point. (Whether this will be available outside Japan is another story.)

But yes! We have somehow manifested this into existence. Yay!

Today I got started listening through your links, Ether, from the top -- skipping Dress:

Hyper Love and In Heaven - remarkable how these sound like Group Sound songs copy-&-pasted onto a new wave backing track! Like you note at the end of that first post, there's no obvious hint of the band they would become later. But the songs are catchy. Hyper Love especially. So catchy. And good synth tone on the break. Sounds like they'd been studying Ryuichi.

Iconoclasm - oh no kidding, *that's* different. Still fun and aggressively catchy, but now in an abrasive instead of poppy way. The guitar, drums, and noisy riff could come from an early P-Model song, but not the bass and vocals.

And then my VPN crapped out. More responses to come.

I woke up this morning with Iconoclasm in my head, even though I only played it once. Always a good sign

FIVE FOR JAPANESE BABIES!!!

They are so absurdly catchy. Imai in particular has a knack for crafting melodies that just stick to your brain like chewing gum. I think the constant struggle in Imai's head between super catchy pop and really abrasive noise is a big part of what makes the music so moreish for me.

But haha, Hisashi-kun has changed his mind yet again about what his favourite YMO / solo albums are:

「B-2 UNIT」が坂本龍一さんのソロでは一番好きです。高橋幸宏さんは「ニウロマンティック」が一番で、YMOとしては「BGM」ですね。確か、高校の合格発表か何か、記念すべき日に発売されて、すぐ買って聴いて(笑)。１曲目の「バレエ」が一番好き。

— 今井寿名言bot (@bt_imaibot) May 9, 2025

I change my mind about my YMO family favorites constantly too.

But, no Hosono pick?!

Sorry, Gunma's biggest YMO fanatic is a Sakamoto stan!

From elsethread:

Paradise Lost you say?

Not a cover, but I'm increasingly wondering if this was some kind of homage from Hoshino Hidehiko:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=llN9BV9K-EM

This was terrific. It's ska, and it's vaguely ethereally folky too, both of which point to the song of the same name on Ongaku Zukan. But also, the hell?! This is Buck-Tick? It's on their channel but I can't believe it -- it sounds like nothing else of theirs I've listened to so far.

(Sorry I will stop trying to drag Gunma's biggest YMO fanboys into everything.)

What's that thing people always scrawled in yearbooks, "never change" ?

Not to be 'there's always been a ska element to Buck-Tick' but in their early days, ska was a huge element of Positive Punk, the movement they were initially part of (and later outgrew). Paradise Lost is from a single recorded specifically for a recent film that became a tribute to the departed Sakurai. So I think there was a deliberate nostalgic approach of hearkening back to the earliest days of the band.

This is FOR DANGEROUS KIDS from the debut album, HURRY UP MODE:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czn0kjzt370

Also Paradise Lost has words by Imai (who is almost certainly deliberately invoking his favourite band). The music is Hoshino Hidehiko. Hide is the big fan of ska, reggae, dub in the band. 密室 (Misshitsu) from SIX/NINE is more typical of Hide's style of dense, layered shoegaze-dub

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihR3Lmbrvbk

This song marks a real turning point in Sakurai's vocal style. These early 90s albums were where the music press started to notice that Sakurai had transcended his earlier shouty punk jester and actually become something deeper, more emotional and powerful. It's an incredible performance.

The lyrics have been the subject of some controversy, particularly in the Western fandom. One of those cases where a little knowledge of Japanese is a dangerous thing. Sakurai's lyrics around this period became dense, evocative, symbolic, allegorical, not meant to be read literally, but figuratively and emotionally. I've seen it translated variously as Secret Room, Locked Room, Behind Closed Doors. The Japanese fandom generally explains this song as being about unrequited love, depression, insecurity, emotional torment, references to Sakurai's history as the victim of childhood domestic abuse. The Western fandom has had some, shall we say, more interesting and colourful interpretations. (Revolving around ideas of 'sexy psychopath' which is one of those 'ok, if you think so?' interpretations.)

But yeah, there is a huge slice of ska and vaguely ethereal dub in B-T's music. They've always been huge stylistic magpies but that's been a recurrent thread.

They started mocking Japanese conformity and basically comparing their detractors to nazis on National Media Boys:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ranxc-M3SPg

But there were also the first signs of musical ripening, the hazy proto-shoegaze psychedelia of PLEASURE LAND, the acid-fried Love and Rockets homage, LOVE ME, experimenting with more jazzy rhythms on Misty Blue, dragging in marimba on Kiss Me Goodbye

The dark-bright goth sound of these Aku no hana selections made me think of the Swans record from the same year, White Light from the Mouth of Infinity.

The vocals and lead guitar are constant highlights. And the influence Buck-Tick has had on J-rock is getting clearer: I can remember (if indistinctly; been, er, decades) lots of L'arc~en~Ciel songs that were circling this same sound, albeit with glossier '90s / '00s production. The seed of the Takahashi-esque balladry is sprouting. And the band is sounding a lot more confident: it does feel like they're still exploring / playing around, but now with the assurance that whatever they attempt will bear their band's own mark.

Ether's write-ups make me expect better things up ahead so I'll press on, but if Aku no hana were a 7gp assignment I can imagine enjoying the hell out of it, and I'll probably circle back around -- unless the tracks that went unmentioned are less good?

(And re: Ongaku Zukan thread, I'm happy to find myself prodded back toward stuff I've been wanting to check out anyway!)

Oops, I see there's another post but I have already written this one:

Trying to see where I got up to with the chronological story, and I realise why I stopped. I didn't quite know how to do justice to the cyberpunk 'twins'.

極東 I LOVE YOU (Far East I Love You) and MONA LISA OVERDRIVE were originally conceived as a double album. The last track of each album is comprised of samples of / elements and themes of the first track on the other. They blend into one another and were intended to be played as a loop. So I think of them as one album. They were written as responses to 9/11. Kyokutou has more of the grief and sadness. Mona Lisa has more of the rage and defiance and rebellion. Mona Lisa Overdrive (Imai Hisashi says it is not a reference to the William Gibson novel, he claims he conflated the Gibson novel with the Robert Longo artwork, Samurai Overdrive. Hisashi is also known for being a bit of a liar!) is probably my favourite full album of theirs. Which makes it hard to write about. I just want to kick my legs in the air and scream 'it's SO GOOD!!!'

王国 KINGDOM COME -MOON SET- (slightly different from the Kyokutou album version called MOON RISE) is probably the most extreme tour de force of the absurd and improbable things that Imai Hisashi can do with guitar processing effects. (Before I deleted my twitter, I wrote a very long thread about all of the different effects he must be using to get some of these sounds, barely recognisable as a guitar in places.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gX3NsR3EhU4

I don't know if it's digital editing or a backwards reverb or a seriously heavily gated delay. There are places on this track where he builds up this huge, nasty, liquid-sounding heavier-than-heavy sludge of a guitar tone. Then throws the guitar against a plate glass window so that the sound SHATTERS. I don't want to get too technical but there are places where I just want to know HOW DOES HE DO THAT?

Mona Lisa Overdrive, I would have to poll to figure out what my favourite track is. The whole thing is just a rush. There's ナカユビ (Nakayui - Middle Finger) which is just three and a half minutes of swearing and noize guitar. There's 残骸 (Zangai - Ruins) which is the industrial sound of cities falling down. This is the Buck-Tick cyberpunk sound just taken to its logical extreme. Yet in the middle of that squall of sound there's the simple, ethereal beauty of a song like GIRL

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ojAiugKrek

But immediately after my favourite album, there is my least favourite album, 十三階は月光 (Juusankai wa Gekkou - 13th Floor With Moonlight) where they aim at Goth but veer instead into Emo. It's a cult classic with people whose favourite album is The Black Parade. No shade to MCR or their fans at all! I'm queer enough that I'm usually very into bands that are traditionally sneered at as 'girl's bands' like Suede and Duran Duran and Buck-Tick. MCR just never clicked with me. But that's the vibe on 13th Floor and it leaves me cold. After that, there's a couple of 'back to basics' plain rock'n'roll albums which leave me longing for the cyberpunk excesses. It will take a few albums for B-T to find their feet again.

Honestly, this is the nub of it:

And the influence Buck-Tick has had on J-rock is getting clearer: I can remember (if indistinctly; been, er, decades) lots of L'arc~en~Ciel songs that were circling this same sound, albeit with glossier '90s / '00s production.

This cannot be overstated. The influence of B-T on J-Rock and visual kei - honestly I don't think that any of those bands would exist without B-T. Many of them have been very honest that they formed as a direct result of seeing B-T live or reading about them in magazines. The entirety of J-Rock would have taken a very different direction had it not been for the seismic impact of Buck-Tick in the late 80s / early 90s. This isn't hyperbole, this is what those musicians themselves have said. They also championed younger Japanese bands and took many of them, from Luna Sea to Mad Capsule Markets with them on tour. Personally, I'm not as taken with the bands they influenced, as with the bands that influenced them. I prefer YMO and Ippu-Do to Dir en Grey and Plastic Tree.

Aku no Hana is great - it's a reason it's still their best-selling record. Had they split up after their record, their place in the J-Rock pantheon would still be assured. But honestly it really is just the beginning of where they started to get really good.

Completely off topic, but I do wonder if our beloved 寿 would ever have been allowed to be named ひさし with that kanji had these rules been in effect in the 60s!

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/may/27/japan-baby-name-ban-kirakira-flashy-names

(It was a very creative spelling at the time. He spent much of the 80s being mistakenly called Kotobuki. Which is the more common reading of that kanji. Of course now he is so famous, he has redefined the character.)

In order to stop me derailing the Yukihire Takahashi thread!

I played I-Kasu! for a B-T friend, noting how much FOR DANGEROUS KIDS sounded like it.

They sent me back Masami Tsuchiya. Night In The Babylon off Tokyo Ballet is so clearly where Hisashi lifted the verse's vocal melody for HURRY UP MODE (the song). Sakurai sings 'NIGHTLESS BABYLON' is the exact same inflection and tune as Tsuchiya sings 'Night in the Babylon' in the chorus around 1:30.

I also really have to wonder if Hisashi's 殺シノ調ベ was a play on Takahashi's 音楽殺人?

(My Japanese is just not good enough to catch most of B-T's wordplay without having a native speaker explain it)

Moving forward: FOR DANGEROUS KIDS we've discussed. 密室 is awesome. You know what else is awesome? Speed, Soft Ballet's KO KA GE NI, and that live version of Body to Body. I seem to have reached the point in Ether's historical survey in which everything is just really, really good.

I was just reading (trying to translate) an interview about SPEED! (Imai said it was inspired by Jesus Jones of all people)

But yeah! It's awesome, isn't it? Opinions are always divided among fans about what the 'best era' is, but there's a general consensus that the early 90s was a high point for both bands.

Just going to leave some resources here if anyone actually wants to attempt a full chronological listen to the albums in order.

Buck-Tick Zone is the most comprehensive site in English. She has a chronology here, by decade or by year, which can help put some context to the overwhelming onslaught of 40 years of music:

https://www.bucktickzone.com/history.shtml

Last year, she lead a chronological series of listening parties for every release. It's going to be in backwards order due to Twitter's search function being even worse than ILM, but you might get some interesting context and stories:

https://x.com/search?q=%23buckticklisteningparty&src=typed_query&f=live

And last is the archived site of Cayce's English translations of the lyrics. They had a blog, too, which I will try to find. Cayce was one of the most gifted music writers I've ever read, a polymath with a range of cultural and esoteric references wide enough to catch most of B-T's often multimedia reference points.

https://web.archive.org/web/20230203151717/https://sites.google.com/site/lyricsyndrome/lyrics/buck-tick/albums

Handy, thanks!

Sorry, my head just exploded.

I knew that Soft Ballet had worked with PWL, but seeing a photo of Maki playing ping pong with Mike Stock of SAW is just 'worlds colliding'

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1385872728963289220/1386540919922098287/FzOJcv9akAAoDBT.jpg?ex=685a145b&is=6858c2db&hm=5d84e3466dfe4407255099043fdb5cd9f3a36c189349fd87f124dd711badfbd8&

Oh! Oh! Ooohhhhhhhhh!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SARjrY1ea0

I was shown this video due to 'Fujii Maki demonstrates state of the art Yamaha sampling tools circa 1992' nostalgia but YMO nerds may want to watch the clip just after Maki-san because L@@K L@@K who appears after him?

What has this forum done to me? I saw him, and thought 'that's not...' and then his name flashed up on the screen and I honest to god let out a little squeal of excitement.

My source says this was the album Maki was working on in the clip, if you want some real 1992 Japanese Cyberpunk nostalgia:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=amT5Egrf-BA

Sorry, my brain takeover is now complete. I am completely obsessed with the serious production skills of Fujii Maki ex-Soft Ballet and all of his myriad solo projects.

This track (Drop by minus(-) which is the band he formed with Moriken from Soft Ballet after a disappearance of several years) marries the kind of deep breathing-in-and-out underwater synth tones I was raving about upthread with feathery whispery girl vocals similar to Mari Hamada, just breathtakingly beautiful

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uppD11BYD_I

There is also a live version that he played with the two drummers who I finally ID'd on the other thread - who come in during the second half of the track with incredibly funky almost-jungle breakbeats that just totally attain transcendance. From a bootleg that a friend found in the depths of a quasi-legal Chinese video site. But I'm not sure how to link that with a timestamp. And I don't think that anyone who has not reached the level of obsession that I have would sit through 24 minutes of badly compressed Chinese bootleg to get to it.

Finally gave Aku no Hana my first full listen. Yeah, this is awesome. What a great guitar record

It is a great record! And still their best known, highest selling and most loved record in Japan. (But for me, just the start.)

What's your favourite track on it?

I'll get back to you on that. Kneejerk favorite appeared towards the end. (Most of my music-listening happens on a walkman with a broken screen, so I don't usually get acquainted with song titles until fairly late) (and now the "repeat all" switch has been toggled somehow, so in the early stages of album acquaintance it isn't even clear to me where an album ends and when it begins to repeat) (it feels disorienting and weird but actually kind of nice)

It's like getting dropped into a bowl of soup

The broken-walkman shenanigans, that is, not Aku no Hana itself. No, the Buck-Tick album is like being serenaded by a crooner who believes rock and roll *will* save your soul!

(And yes, it's increasingly Hisashi was absolutely 100% as much influenced by this [Susumu Hirasawa] track as by Inagaki Taruho during his steampunk era)

What's this now?

My beloved Morio Agata led me to Inagaki Taruho. Now I adore Taruho. Please tell me more, Ether

Sorry I should stop derailing the other thread with my Hisashiposting:

It's funny because so many Japanese fans of Imai told me to check out Hirasawa, but when I asked for examples, the only thing I was ever linked was Parade (probably because of the name). They should have pointed me at this song! Sorry for multiple Hisashi-posting here but I feel I've got to make clear what I'm hearing. The songs don't really sound alike, but the *atmosphere* is so similar. Obscure scientific terms used to obfuscate and create a sense of awe and mystery. (Imai even has 'use words that are unfathomable' as one of his instructions in the song.) The way both songs switch back and forth between machine-like narration (Imai in the B-T song) and soaring heroic chants (Sakurai's parts in the B-T song). The staging of B-T's song also feels like a tribute to Hirasawa, though they are using sparking Pantographs suspended above the stage rather than a sparking tesla coil. Someone please watch this and tell me I'm not dreaming when I say this feels like a tribute to Dreaming Machine?

Also always wondered about the meaning of 'ダイナモが可動する' - the dynamo moves, the dynamo is moveable - if this was a reference to the machine having animacy. But now I'm wondering if it's a reference to 世界タービン.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zq3O9nHIrLo

Buck-Tick's Nostalgia -Vita Mechanicalis- was supposedly a tribute to Inagaki Taruho - the whole album No. 0 is very, very steampunk Taruho inspired. I'll try to find the blog where Cayce went through all the Taruho references on it

Here's the blog, detailing Hisashi's obsession with Taruho and steampunk in general (he was at the time reportedly obsessed with an iPhone steampunk game, too)

https://blog-tick.blogspot.com/2018/04/viva-la-vita-mechanicalis.html

No. 0 is one of their greatest late-period albums. The live album, Tour No. 0 is also fantastic - it captures some of Imai's steampunk circus music incidental music (a lot of the pre- and post-show intros and outros are very very Hirasawa-influenced)

I always love when this thread gets revived, it’s like a new episode of a good history podcast.

Aw, I'm glad that someone is reading it!

So bored at work this afternoon I might just tackle the mid-00s and B-T's problematic Goth emo phase -> their 'back to our roots just 5 guys in a room' revival phase if anyone is interested?

(But I realise that in order to explain the sudden jump from Cyberpunk to Problematic Emo Goth I'd have to explain the flotilla of solo projects that took place in 2004)

In 2004 everyone in Buck-Tick did a solo project except for Hide (Hoshino). Even the bass player and the drummer (details here)

Imai did a solo project called Lucy with a guitarist named Kiyoshi, who used to be the guitarist for hide's (Hideto Matsumoto, of X Japan - yes there are far, far too many guitarists named Hide in Tokyo) backing band, Spread Beaver. Imai had been friends with hide X since the 80s. Hilarious interview here about how they met. Apparently hide passed out drunk in the back of Yoshiki's car after going drinking in Roppongi. Imai, who lived nearby, took him home, physically carried him upstairs and put him to bed to sleep it off. They were friends ever after. At one point, Imai and Fujii Maki were talking about hide joining Schaft for a super-super group, but either the three bands' schedules never aligned, or they were too busy drinking to bother recording anything.

After hide died tragically very young, Imai and Kiyoshi became close and decided to start a rock'n'roll band, initially as a tribute to hide. They ended up doing two albums together. (Imai still occasionally plays with Kiyoshi at birthday gigs and the like.)

Tokyo gossip time! Apparently Fujii Maki of Soft Ballet / Schaft haaaated Lucy, he thought the music was dreadful, and Imai's vocals in particular were a weak point. I'm inclined to agree, though Sweet Baby Sweet is quite a fun Jesus and Mary Chain/ Raveonettes fake girl group rave-up with rather lewd lyrics using botanical metaphors. My favourite fan story claimed that Maki was out drinking with Acchan when Imai and Kiyoshi walked in and sat at another table. Apparently, Maki leapt up and started shouting 'Cheater! Adulter!!!' at Imai, who just sat in the corner and giggled.

Rather than staying home with his cats, waiting for his straying songwriting partner to come home, Acchan was persuaded to work on his own solo project, an album called Ai no Wakusei (Planet of Love). (In a nice symmetry, the similarly jilted Maki ended up doing some programming and arrangements on Acchan's solo record.) As an incentive to get Acchan into the studio, their management asked Sakurai for a list of musicians he would like to collaborate with, and to their credit, they did manage to assemble a fairly impressive list of Acchan's goth influences: Wayne Hussey, Robin Guthrie, Clan of Xymox, Masami Tsuchiya, J. G. Thirwell, etc. Sacrifice is well worth a listen, Sakurai's soaring baritone really brings out the grandeur in Wayne Hussey's sweeping epic soundscape.

Sakurai assembled a group of young, cool musicians and toured the album, appeared on TV with a beautiful cover of (his hero Bowie's) Space Oddity. Also mirroring his hero, Bowie, he starred in a vampire movie. (Only half an hour long, Longinus is on YT with subtitles. It's not a great movie, but Sakurai is so clearly the best thing about it, I feel it's a shame he never did any other acting)

Anyway, Lucy charted at number 16 on the Japanese charts. Ai no Wakusei charted at 15. Imai was JEALOUS.

This is not Tokyo gossip, this is something Imai copped to in an interview. He described going to see Sakurai's solo show, and standing in the audience with his appreciation for Sakurai's talents reignited, and his competitive spirit piqued, apparently listening to the songs and muttering 'I could have written that better' and 'I would have arranged that differently and made it so much better.'

So Imai went home determined to write THE MOST GOTHIC BUCK-TICK ALBUM OF ALL TIME in an attempt to win Sakurai back. The result is Juusankai wa Gekkou (13th Floor With Moonlight - oooooh, GOTHICK!!! are you spoopy yet?). It was hugely popular, it went top 5 for the first time in nearly a decade. In the West, particularly in Latin America, the Weimar-themed Romance is probably one of their best-known and most-loved songs. (There is some back story to the video and tour staging with the mime, the clown and the ballerina - some literary reference I can't be bothered to look up because I hate this song so much. It's so mid-tempo, draggy and is completely lacking in the dynamic tunes, electronic backing and WOW! guitar effects that I love B-T for. Instead, it's full of really basic orchestral soundbank samples and sounds like an Interpol B-side.)

Honestly, if you're going to go GOTHIC go big with it - 夢魔/Muma -The Nightmare is way better. It's completely over the top and gothic to the point of absurdity, but actually has the pummelling drums and guitar pyrotechnics that I would expect from a B-T song. The whole 13th Floor album is pure marmite - fans either adore it or cannot stand it. But to me, it sounds like Imai suppressing his own interests to write a Sakurai solo record. (If you like 13th Floor, Sakura's later solo project, THE MORTAL, would dial the goth up to 11 with covers of Siouxsie, Bauhaus and I think The Damned? I am not a fan.)

However, Imai had the last laugh. As after wooing Sakurai back with THE MOST GOTHICK RECORD OF ALL TIME, he immediately pivoted and did two more albums of straight-ahead rock'n'roll of the sort he did with Lucy. And another Lucy album, to boot.

Imai even has 'use words that are unfathomable' as one of his instructions in the song.

Awesome.

Like Ned, I always enjoy your write-ups, Ether! Can't say as much for the blog you linked, the writing style is too goofy -- or maybe I'm not far enough on the inside yet -- if those were all YMO references, I might be cracking up. In any case, though, yes, some good Taruhoian images!

Re: what YouTube marks as "Nostalgia - Vita Mechanicalis (TOUR No.0 (2018.07.26)" -- killer performance. That stage set is a piece of art in itself.

Their staging is amazing, isn't it? This is what I mean when I say B-T are all about the Gesamtkunstwerk! The music is fantastic in and of itself. But they put so much thought into packaging and staging, too. They have such a sense of the theatrical, there's a real sense of creating magical worlds within the venue to invite fans into.

Imai in particular keeps a close eye on the art scene in Tokyo, and often invites the artists he's obsessed with to collaborate - album covers, tour pamphlets, T-shirts, the backing videos for their stage performances. For SUBROSA (the most recent album) they commissioned 12 different contemporary visual artists to create art videos for the tracks for fan club only pre-listening parties in theatres. The stage videos often mix kanji/kana and graphic imagery to highlight their wordplay as both Sakurai and particularly Imai love swapping out unexpected Kanji (Imai is a massive comic book nerd because he grew up in a cornershop and was always the first to get every new manga. He originally moved to Tokyo to study art and become a Mangaka, so he's still very interested in that combination of letters and drawing in artwork)

Another example of wonderful staging, here's DADA Disco, from ...Arui wa Anarchy (...Or Anarchy) their Taishō themed record exploring Dada, surrealism and the madness of post-WWI culture. ('...or Anarchy' is just the subtitle, as the actual title is a blank space, representing the sheer inexpressible.) The song uses so many contemporary references to the time period Imai wanted to make sure the Romanji were all displayed!

Ah, I love Cayce's blog because they were not afraid to be *irreverent* about the band. I guess there are a lot of in-jokes and references that might be indecipherable to someone who's not knee-deep in the Fandom. But B-T themselves are artists who are rich with layers of resonance and cross-referenced meaning and in-jokes. That's part of the fun, working out all the reference points!

I don't want to get too much into Acafandom (does ILM even have an Acafandom thread? I often feel like ILM slants Critic rather than Fandom, which is both good and bad in some ways). But Cayce was very much of the old school of fandom, which I deeply miss. When it was still OK to treat idols with irreverence as well as adoration. To be goofy, to take the piss. But that's a problem of *all* online Fandom within the past 5, 10 years; not just B-T fandom.

But because ILM slants so overwhelming *not* Fandom-Space, me trying to discuss the subtle differences between old school 'Smash Hits' type irreverent Fandom and new school Stanning Fandom would just sound like 'Old Man Shouts At Clouds' rather than an Acafan trying to comprehend what's changed, how and why.

New single! New Single!!?!!!?!

Shibuya Hurry Up (nice reference to their debut there)

◥◣発売決定！◢◤
New Single「渋谷ハリアッパ！」
2025年10月15日発売
+++++++
■完全生産限定盤 ￥2,750(税込)
■通常盤 ￥1,320(税込)
+++++++

44枚目のシングルとなる今作は、
今井寿 作詞・作曲による表題曲の「渋谷ハリアッパ！」、
カップリングには星野英彦… pic.twitter.com/vkkz6YvLWw

— BUCK∞TICK OFFICIAL (@BUCKTICK_INFO) August 19, 2025

Hi Etherwave, I'm here as per your invitation in the MBV thread about a month ago. I like BT but don't know enough to say I'm a huge fan. I've been going down all the videos you've posted here and listening. I'm not even 1/3rd of the way through but so far what I enjoyed most is the video you posted of Soft Ballet, that shit really really hit with me. I'll be going through and gradually reading all the comments in this thread.

Ha! There’s a joke in the fandom that depending on what style of fan you are, you will be assigned a secondary obsession with either Der Zibet or Soft Ballet

Given your preference for big MBV soundscapes and weird noise textures, I’m thinking Fujii Maki will be your man