The Birthday Massacre - Violet (2004). I'd like to quote from one of the top Youtube comments on this album:

"i don't know what it is about this band, or this album, but every time i listen to it its like i'm given memories from a life i don't remember having. growing up as a little girl... haunted house... arcades... pizza parties... drawing in a notebook at a hospital waiting room..."

I'd inherited my dad's CDs whenever it was I first expressed any interest at all in rock music. Being the most boring 12 year old ever, the first CDs I bought were just filling in holes in my dad's collection. He had all the Led Zeppelin albums except Houses of the Holy, so I bought that. I bought Beatles albums and Ramones albums. I was aware of music my brother liked and I'd listened to some of it, but I worried I'd get in trouble if my dad saw me listening to it.

By the time I was 13 I'd started reading dumb sprite comics on the internet. The one I got most into, about an insufferable guy hanging around his apartment trying to write his own sprite comic, featured a revolving selection of band posters on the main character's bedroom wall. The music was mostly 80s goth bands. Though one time there was a poster for The Birthday Massacre. The name was more enticing than the more classic goth bands and I felt like a loser with poppy watered down taste for finding them more exciting when I looked them. Violet was the first CD I bought that was something my dad most certainly hadn't heard of. It wasn't necessarily the first that my dad wouldn't approve of -- I'd bought Galore, a collection of The Cure's singles from the 90s. When my dad saw that he immediately started talking about how dopey Robert Smith looks. I think because of that I made sure to make sure no one saw me buying Violet. It was the first of many secret purchases in my life.

Violet is also a train of thought that never really went anywhere for me. It was a shard of another man's world -- the musical taste of a guy on the internet writing sprite comics. I didn't really know what it meant to be goth. I figured maybe being goth would be a lot like listening to The Birthday Massacre.

I think all good music evokes a feeling like that expressed in the above Youtube comment. Listening to a lot of different types of musics without really feeling like I understand it, I often find myself remembering another me, for instance the me still wandering the streets of Beijing illegally without a visa trying to become a noise guitarist like Li Jianhong. I don't want to be most of those people I remember being, and I have a feeling of nausea thinking about them too much. That's why I sometimes feel convinced I hate music. Sometimes I wish the only sound on this planet was the rain, so that I could remove myself of any memories injected into my brain by others.

ドリーミン京浜東北ライン (2015). In 2015 I met someone who would go on to be very important to me, someone between acquaintance, girlfriend and feared enemy, though whom I never really got to talk to that much. I still didn't really know how to communicate with people except through big long unreadable emails. Real life face to face relationships where I had to rely on the sound of my own voice to express my feelings and to stimulate others to tell me their own dark secrets -- that was still too hard for me to navigate, and ended in horrible and embarassing failure. The first time I went to her house I asked her what kind of music she likes. She opened up Soundcloud and played this song for me. This is another one of those songs I listen to once a year or so to contemplate old feelings I still don't really know what to do with. It's one of the only reasons I ever have to log into Soundcloud. There was a period where I hoped I could use Soundcloud to find more music that sounded like this, but I never really figured it out. I continue to only know how to find music via Youtube, Soulseek, or simply just reading credits on Discogs.

Kirinji - 3 (2000). Other than their contribution to We Love Katamari, I must have first listened to Kirinji in 2016. By a combination of being born too late and just not being good at finding things, I'm late to everything.

Once every two or three years when I listen to them again, I have a few moments where I wish I could be a guy really into Kirinji — or perhaps moreso I wish I knew someone else really into Kirinji. That way I wouldn't have to put the work into being a megafan. Kirinji is one of those bands I feel I can only ever be semi-into — yet I crave a certain proximity to them — a proximity best attained by hanging out with a guy who’s devoted some non-insignificant percentage of his life to their music.

Falling deep into the pit of a certain musician or band always evokes an intense ambivalence in me. Doors are being opened, new musical possibilities are introduced as I work through a discography. Yet at the same time I feel like I’m limiting myself. Every moment I spend on a single band, I feel like I’m spending some limited currency I have in my brain, that I could be using on listening to other music. Though the opposite is also true. If I go through a period of jumping from musician to musician without feeling like I’ve truly understood any of them, that feels limiting too.

The trouble is that to actually appreciate a musician, you can’t just listen through their discography then move on. You have to listen to each of their albums over and over — find the albums that you like most, associate certain songs with certain moments of your life — turn the music into something more than consumption or building mental maps of a genre. All of that takes time.

Perhaps this has to do with the nature of pop music and how we listen to music. In the olden days when music was a live event, maybe you could see Beethoven’s new symphony just once and feel like you’ve got a decent grasp of it, the same way you can feel like a fan of a movie after watching it just once. But when all music is short and designed to be listened to in a variety of situations while doing other things — for instance driving, studying, or talking to other people — then one’s relationship with music changes, and repetition ends up being more important.

The song I linked, Akudama, is my favorite from that album. When I first heard it I read something in the comments about it being about a masked wrestler, a heel, who has finally decided for this last match of his to win. I heard English phrases like "last stand", connected them with this vague ideal of a heel, and somehow felt some connection to the song's narrator without any real basis in reality. Small elements of jazziness push the chord progression beyond typical Rock 'n' Roll. Quirks of the production add a distant ethereality. Then someone in the comments says it sounds like Steely Dan.

One of the symptoms of mostly listening to Japanese music is that I see comparisons to bands of the Anglophonic universe that make zero sense to me. I know the Beach Boys and the Beatles, and that's it. When Kirinji gets compared to Steely Dan or Number Girl gets compared to Shellac, my first reaction is "These sound nothing like how I imagined those bands sounding." My second reaction is "Maybe I should listen to Steely Dan/Shellac/King Crimson/whatever else is brought up in comparison." Usually I don't do this. I look up Steely Dan and just see a bunch of balding old men holding keyboards in their mouth then ask myself if this is really what I want to be listening to.

Well maybe one day I'll get over this prejudice I have towards old men. I'll even add them to my list of things I want to listen to, just to be charitable.

• Zapp - Dance Floor (1982). Last night I had to bike from Yangpu to Changning around 1am, which took an hour and a half. My phone's been having problems with its cellular service. Sometimes I just won't have any service for a day or two randomly. So I stopped at a McDonald's next to the bar Yuyintang beneath the West Yanan Road subway station. I must have gotten there right when this song started, which blasted out of the speakers loud enough for me to hear across the street. I stayed the entire 11 minutes of the song, fascinated by those electronic vocals melding in and out of the guitars. I know so little about American funk and RnB, when half the music I like was made by people who listened to everything from that world religiously. I should probably start trying more systematically to learn about it.

• PICKY PICNIC - KURU KURU WORLD (1989). My girlfriend had recommended me another album by Picky Picnic before, though this is my first time listening to their other stuff. It's interesting that I use the word "recommend" in this context, since it's not like she found this music by some totally different life experience from mine that can only be summarized to me. She found it by browsing the same Youtube channels that collect old obsure Japanese music that I browse. She just happened to click on and listen to a slightly different assortment of albums than I did. There's enough of these channels that neither of us can keep with all of them, so we have to digest them for each other -- just as the channels are themselves digesting 80s underground Japan for us. The whole pipeline that starts in Japanese used record stores and ends in DJ mixes of this stuff, with some intermediate stops in Soulseek and Full Album youtube channels is one of those things I am very used to and accept exists, but frankly find slightly bizarre. Every form of underground or obscure music has its own dynamics of popularization, so it's not like Japanese music is unusual in this regard. I guess it's just when I was a kid certain musicians were regarded as important and had been seen that way for many years. There was a canon that seemed static. I assumed that new music would be created and new artists would be added to that canon -- but what I've realized listening to old Japanese music and seeing its gradual popularization in the west, which in turn leads to rediscovery in Japan, is that changes in the canon, changes in what we regard as important, doesn't really happen with the new so much as diffusion of new varieties of the old. I don't really have anything profound to say about it. It's just one of the many examples of culture and society not functioning how I would have a priori imagined it to.
• ( ^ω^ ). I clicked on this drum 'n' bass album because of the dumb cover, and I ended up listening to the whole thing. It feels like the kind of stuff my girlfriend's rival DJ Ikke plays.

• Nobukazu Takemura (竹村延和) — Animate, 2002. I particularly like the second track, with its weird voice synthesizers. Now that we have AI voice synthesis that sounds way too much like real human, old-fashioned robotic-accented voice synthesizers feel realer -- more sincere -- than any human being to me. Of course voice synthesizers -- real and fake -- have fascinated artists since the days of their birth -- see the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey's second act. I don't really have the energy to muse at length on whatever lies on the otherside of that voice, the artificiality of sincerity, or technological advancement feeling like decay -- though I can't help but at least bring these themes up after listening to that track. The other tracks on the album are pretty good too. This is my first time listening to Takemura, but it looks like he did a bunch of work with eye from Boredoms, which is interesting to see, as these feel like two wildly different genres of music. (Related: see the Teenage Engineering PO-35 Speak, which is a speech synthesizer intended to be used like a sampler, allowing for all sorts of weird sounds.)

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