Slushwave?

Slushwave is a sub-genre of vaporwave based around the works of t e l e p a t h テレパシー能力者. The style generally uses samples of music from the 80s and 90s with excessive amounts of looping, reverb, flangers, and delays to give it that classic slushy sound. While for the most part being identical to classic vaporwave, slushwave is distinguished by embodying the onomatopoeia of its namesake.

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Memoirs of a Gaijin II: Teacup of Melancholy

I often lay on my bed at dusk, looking up in my dimly lit room to watch the fading light stream through my curtains while listening to city pop. It's like therapy in a way. It teaches me that no matter what happens during the day, the sun is sure to set again, and I'm forever bound to this celestial movement that governs the cycles of night and day. I find some kind of comfort in this trivial yet profound phenomenon.

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Why Tatsuro Yamashita’s Vinyl Represses Are The Most Important Of The Year

2023 is set to be a record year for City Pop. From Anri getting a feature on CNN, to the huge news that a certain king of City Pop is having his entire RCA/AIR years discography repressed. Ofcorse, we’re talking about Tatsuro Yamashita. The significance of this repress event cannot be understated due to how crazed city pop vinyl collectors are when it comes to Tatsuro vinyl. The cream of any collection almost always includes a copy of For You, Spacy, or Ride on Time.

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Beginner's Guide to Understanding City Pop: Part I

City Pop. It’s a contentious term at times. What does it really mean? Why should you care? Do you have to know Japanese to really enjoy it? These are all questions that merit at least some entertaining, and entertaining they shall receive. There is a rich cultural history to the music that is still being charted and put together by people in both Japan and overseas. The complete picture is something that is being explored on many levels and is still evolving even today.

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5 Rare City Pop Vinyl Records That Need To Be Re-Released

Okay, so maybe these 5 records don’t need to be re-released but they sure are on my radar for some of the most sought after records in the City Pop style. Maybe this is more like a wish-list than a blog post, so sorry in advance. Some records I haven’t included are Anri’s discography and Tatsuro’s because it seems they are determined to never make more of their music available on vinyl ever again, or some reason I can’t understand.

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The Terrifying Rise of Post-Vaporwave

In the year 2022, a post-vaporwave internet emerged in an increasingly de-centralized, de-stabilized, and hyper-globalized world. Despite rapidly increasing technological progress, many people within the post-vaporwave sphere have created a metaphorical bubble of accepted norms where fetishized aesthetics of 80s, 90s, and an incoherent amalgam of the two, allows for a faux-authentic lifestyle that aggressively glorifies memes, corporate machinations, obsolete products, and gaudy iconography.

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Why We Like Collecting City Pop Vinyl in 2022

City Pop vinyl is extremely collectable because of certain factors, mainly that LPs have always been sought after collector’s items, and also fans of Japanese culture are usually innately collectors of things like figurines, cards, and manga among other things. The tendency was already there, it just needed a shove in the right direction. Humans like to collect things, this much is definitely true. Anything that can be collected, will be collected.

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What Happened to Takako Mamiya? [Mystery Solved]

Takako Mamiya has captured millions of listeners’ hearts with her iconic City Pop album; Love Trip. Everyone who knows City Pop knows of this record. It’s an illustrious example of Japanese Jazz Pop Fusion that has a very late night vibe to it, and Takako’s voice adds a very husky, sultry creme on top of it that would make anyone swoon. Love Trip, the record, has been repressed several times now since her popularity caught on, and the album almost always sells out.

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Another Top 10 City Pop Songs List

City Pop, the sound of metropolitan Japan in the 80s has now become more widely known than a few years back. Its magical melodies and sincerely funky rhythms have already captivated millions of people, creating a surge in popularity for many iconic Japanese artists. Even though the world has already become enamored with the most notable of City Pop artists, there exists a plethora of Japanese musicians in the genre that are catching their second wind now that Japanese record labels are starting to re-press

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10 City Pop Songs About Summer

Ah, feel that Yokohama breeze! The azure horizon sparkles in the distance as the ocean whispers its crescent waves coalescing onto the sandy shore to meet your toes. The crystal blue waters look like glass and as you breathe in deeply you feel the kiss of the sun peaking through a perfectly white cloud atlas as you exhale deeply, finally. Summer is here…

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Memoirs of a Gaijin

For the past 5 years I spent much of my life trying very hard to promote Japanese City Pop music, often neglecting all other facets of my life. I wanted so much to help spread this music that had been left in a state of neglect when I found it. I found a purpose in playing the music and making mixes to spread awareness of these Japanese artists who deserved a bigger audience than they had. Discovering Japanese artists brought a sense of meaning to my life after years of floating around in the Vaporwave scene searching for a deeper understanding of the world we live in.

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The Rise & Fall of Vaporwave

Vaporwave in 2021 is a bit of a quagmire. Almost everything that can be said about it has already been written or blogged about somewhere online since its early inception around 2010. Countless articles will flood your search pages all theorizing on either the intense faux-philosophical undertones of the music or some pseudo-intellectual analysis of the artwork that permeates the genre like a parasitic neon haze that suffocates your eyes.

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Is Cryptowave the next Vaporwave?

Everyone has heard of Vaporwave by now, so I won’t go into an extended exegesis about its themes of dystopian futuristic pseudo-philosophical meanderings, but since it started appearing online around 2010 there has been a slight decline in interest from the denizens on the fringe internet. Once a sonic oddity that created a mystique so aesthetic that it sliced through the web like a blade running through neon butter, this genre of reverbed slowings has somewhat diminished in intrigue in the last few years.

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