Ballsack’s J-Pop Midlife Crisis, pt. 20: ・・・・・・・・・

Starting sometime last year, I started really getting into Japanese music. This came as a bit of a surprise to me, because I had always thought I hated singing in Japanese. Turns out I don’t! In the night threads for the following week, I’ll write a little about each of my favorite artists that I’ve discovered, and share a streaming album for you to dutifully ignore.

Now here’s something really rather odd. Besides the fact that their name is just a series of dots, and their debut album is simply named 『 』, ・・・・・・・・・ carved a number of other unique feats in the idol space. They were produced by members of For Tracy Hyde, a Japanese shoegaze band, and they very much have that hazy shoegaze sound. Oddly enough, there’s a number of shoegaze idol groups, Ray being one of the notable examples. But most bizarre of all is their debut ‘single’, CD. It only has one track, Tokyo, but it’s 72 minutes long. It’s really more of a medley, though, featuring three songs that would later show up on 『 』. Those songs, 「スライド」, 「トリニティダイブ」, and 「ねぇ」 are all great, and are worth listening to the thing for. Interspersed with those songs are some found sounds, presumably from Tokyo. And then the last 50 minutes is harsh noise. The album is labeled as ‘harsh noise’ on Rate Your Music, and for the first twenty minutes or so, I was like, oh come on, this isn’t harsh. But, no. It’s harsh noise.

Unfortunately, it’s not very interesting harsh noise, especially after 50 minutes, but there you go.

Okay, I’m actually going to give you two albums here, because although the one above is an interesting oddity, it’s not a very good complete listen.『 』is better