Lately, I’m into Citypop. As everyone else.
It’s familiar. It’s groovy. It’s soothing. It connects with a lot of people and gives you a very positive feeling.
I follow the YouTube Channel Music Radar Clan which is an excellent channel where the creator does small documentaries on a variety of topics related to music and musicians. If you understand Spanish, I highly recommend it.
In his video on Citypop he showed how this genre was the portrait of a growing economy and positivism that Japan lived in the 80s. Consumerism was everywhere, all was good as there was money and things to do with it. It was a golden age for the people living there apparently.
After the boom of citypop in the 80s, another interesting genre was born in the same country as a kind of response in the 90s, as shown in the video. That’s why we’re here today.
I have actually found Japanoise music during my university days, but I found groups like Solmania which are the representation of full chaos and noise with their modified guitars and bass guitars and an incredible amount of pedals to produce that… noise. Pure noise. Like a scream of the other side of the society.
But from that Citypop video I discovered Ryoji Ikeda. His noise is not chaotic. It’s a computerized one. Structured. But instead of describing it and making you read it, here’s his album Dataplex:
(Kudos to Vallesaab for his oscilloscope visualization of this album).
I understand it’s not music that everyone can appreciate, but if you’re able to bear it try to listen to it from start to end and see how all the noise starts to get into order.
Edit(02/01/2025): Corrected inaccuracies on when Japanoise raised.