Issue #85: Seventh Jet Balloon
Discussing the new 7th Jet Balloon album, J Soul Brothers's "R.Y.U.S.E.I." and Sasuke Haraguchi's brain-sizzling DJ sets
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The comment section on Twitch took the words right out of my mouth to describe my favorite DJ sets by Sasuke Haraguchi. “This is the internet gone sentient.” “Is this what happens when you’re online too much?” Check out the live chat feed during the artist’s set at Mogra’s countdown party last New Year's Eve, and you can observe viewers being blown away song after song as if they’ve lost separation between IRL and URL. If you spent a good amount of 2023 logged on in a certain corner of the Japanese internet, it’s also hard not to feel a similar kind of mental collapse as the mix piles on meme songs in between Vtuber singles, anison remixes and ‘00s J-pop throwbacks.
The set from Haraguchi that first caught my attention was actually from another club event. But when I watched TikTok clips from his set at NIGHT HIKE 2024, hosted at Shibuya club WOMB, it also evoked that feel of being too online. Hajime Tsunoda’s accompanying visuals exaggerated that sensation with the rhythm of the edits akin to the overwhelm from media playing on multiple browser tabs at once: when Machita Chima’s “Haigo Ni Chuui” got mixed with cut-up audio from, I kid you not, the often-meme’d video of choreographer Shigeki Majima teaching his legendary “Matsuken Samba II” dance, a glitch-y collage of their respective video clips screened behind Haraguchi.
Haraguchi frequently tosses in non-music audio like YouTube snippets or TV show banter in his mixes. With the Mogra set being for a NYE event, the mix begins with a news announcement for the Kohaku Utagassen artist line-up laid atop a bass track. The busy cross-feed of these media dispatches in between zany hyperpop beats or actual Vtuber hits recreate web-browsing on some post-vaporwave way. But it also simply displays Haraguchi’s knack for voices as musical tools to use at his disposal. It’s an impulse I hear in how he manipulates Kasane Teto1 for his TikTok mega-hit “Igaku.” He’s fond of gasps and chatter to fill an already-busy production, and that yu! ad lib in particular in “Igaku” is a contender for lyric of the year from how sticks to the mind despite bearing no meaning at all. If you don’t believe me, see how many people in the comments section are relieved to finally find “the yu! song.”
Sasuke Haraguchi live DJ at MOGRA COUNTDOWN PARTY 23/24
As much as the flow and presentation, Haraguchi’s curation plays crucial in bringing such a uncanny feel in his sets. As with many things in today’s algorithm-driven world, his selections represent maybe not the internet but most certainly my internet. Here’s some of the stuff he played at Mogra on New Year’s Eve: Pasocom Music Club; Skrillex’s “Rumble”; Towa Tei’s UKG hat-tip, “Mars”; the flute riff from Vocaloid meme “Kyofuu Allback” with dubstep wobbles; a Sophie-fied take on NewJeans’ Coca-Cola jingle “Zero”; and Haraguchi’s own fucked-up remix of “Umapyoi Densetsu” from of course Uma Musume Pretty Derby. It’s a whiplash-inducing look back into 2023 in music—my 2023 in music, anyway—with all its key songs all thrown to spin cycle in a bass-music blender.
If the Mogra set encapsulated 2023 in Japanese Music Internet, his mix at NIGHT HIKE provides a crash course for this year’s online music. It’s a bummer that, unlike the Twitch stream rip of the Mogra set, I can’t watch the NIGHT HIKE performance in full or in better quality than what I can gather on TikTok. But you can find clips of him playing Genshin’s “Comi Comi Dance,” Suisei Hoshimachi’s “Bibbidiba,” and HIMEHINA’s “Heart Pie Dancehall.” Vtuber Tsukino Mito comes by to perform Haraguchi’s viral anthem “Hito Mania.”
In my favorite clip from NIGHT HIKE, you can enjoy “Igaku” be unleashed in an IRL space. While the set took place only a little over a month since Haraguchi uploaded the track, it already had exploded on TikTok with everyone doing this neck isolation move to it. Now it’s finally stepped out of the Smartphone screen to terrorize an actual club. Though, the track quickly moves on to segue into Haraguchi’s collaboration with MAISONDes and Hello Kitty. Once the crowd sees the latter character’s name on the overhead visual, the people go wild. This was maybe a couple weeks after that song was released, and since then the producer has only gone more pop, putting out new tracks with other people left and right. I can’t wait for this year’s NYE set from him as 2024 has already been a year in music warped and twisted by Haraguchi beyond my imagination.
Please excuse the delay with this issue. I thought I could put something together during the free time I did have after my little vacation, but I just could not get myself to write—maybe I couldn’t turn vacation mode completely off. I did manage to finish, and I do hope you all like this one. That said, after this, I’ll be taking a scheduled break until September to recharge for the last stretch of the calendar year.
Enjoy!
Album of the Week
7th Jet Balloon by 7th Jet Balloon [ungulates]
*Recommended track: “7” | Listen to it on Spotify/Bandcamp
7th Jet Balloon don’t hesitate to get honest. In their self-titled debut, the emo duo hardly take their time to share exactly how well they’ve been coping these days. “Selfish, heavy paranoia / fucking bitch, a piece of shit,” they sing in the subtly titled “Fuck Summer” about an ex in between a chug-a-chugged hardcore-punk riff and math-rock finger-pickings. The band let the ink splatter on the page as they lay their heart bare throughout the album. And their spiky guitars respond in kind, shredding as bold and naked with feeling as the words on the page.
For all the sour anger hurled on record, “Fuck Summer” serves more as a rock elegy than grudge emo, like a promise made to himself not to be fooled by love again. Leaving its protagonist solo but now with a broken heart, the song neatly concludes a loose cycle that kicks off with “I'm Yamcha, Be Always Requited.” There, 7JB suffer from their crippling shyness while desperately wanting to say a word to their crush. And it's bittersweet following someone so madly in love grow to despise the very same person they were initially obsessed with.
It tells all you need to know about 7JB that they name a Dragon Ball character as someone who they find kinship in their intense anxiety of talking to who they pine for. When they want to speak in metaphors to express their feelings, the duo lean on teenage references almost like an inside joke shared among boyish cohorts like them: they did it a few years back in “This Town Needs Jiro,” likening the romantic hole in their lives to their neighborhood’s lack of the ramen chain. Their lyrical choices reveal their local world view but also their life perspective steeped more in adolescence, with matters often dwelled as black-or-white.
7JB, though, mostly like to tell it how it is without much care for the eloquence of their words. When they wax poetic, it reads like their internal monologue: the rambles on relationship fights roll out in “I'm the Worst, You're the Worst, So Fuck” like emo stream of consciousness. The bluntness pays out when they spill out emotions like anger and frustration, and results like “A Gloomy Spring” and “Fuck Summer” sound even more like a punch to the gut as their confessionals sync with punk music that plays with abandon.
As spiteful as their charged songs can read, 7JB don’t seem as interested in plotting revenge than they are more concerned about the act of putting all their feelings down on the page as honest as they feel them. It’s not the toxicity but instead the sheer rawness that fuels these exuberant emo songs. As the duo safekeep the failures, desires and, yes, the barbed anger they once harbored in these records, the album invigorates with freshness as it offers a snapshot of a teen spirit who wears their heart boldly on their sleeve.
Backed with the gassed-up self-conviction of youth, 7JB’s punk music sounds the most invincible when they sing about their own growth and self-potential. “We can do it / it's VenJeBa,” they shout in “7,” the latter lyric in self-reference to their moniker in contraction. “The ideals will turn into reality.” They tried to wear this kind of confidence on stage at their first-ever show by covering “24 Hr Drive-Thru” by one of their favorite bands, Origami Angel, whose same song is also covered on this debut. “Watch it, you son of a bitch / we're gonna give it our all,” the duo bow out, blazing, in their album-opener. As they spill out all they have to spill in their self-titled debut, 7JB manage to become an inspiration of their own.
Singles Club
“Yo No Shitataru Namimae” by postmodernhippie & hana miketa [self-released]
Postmodernhippie arrives at this volcanic post-rock partly to meet their collaborator halfway. While they like to bang out knotty math-rock and bruised shoegaze on their own stuff, the solo rocker dials down the heavy a bit to suit the hushed tones of singer-songwriter hana miketa. But the resulting song from the duo also asks for music of tranquility as miketa invites the listener in to a space free from fear and anxiety: “You’re finally free from suffering here / even from the loner’s prayer,” she sighs over gently picked acoustic-guitar while a shoegaze riff moans in the distance like a whale song. And when the song bursts open with a soothing blast of reverb, it rushes with the feeling of total freedom.
Listen to it on Spotify.
See also: “Kirei Na Hone” by Hammer Head Shark; “Saturdays Youth” by umi no sanpo
“Super Generation” by RYUSENKEI [Alfa]
More than ever, this current decade has been RYUSENKEI’s time to shine with the popularity of city pop yet to wane. For those who’ve known of their output from the ‘00s, the lushness behind the band’s pristine jazz-funk in “Super Generation” should come as no surprise. That said, it’s impressive their music has kept this much lust for life after pushing two decades in the game. “Cross over the bridge to the future / When the new era comes / please don’t let go,” the band’s new vocalist Sincere sings in the chorus. They may embrace the sounds of a past era, but RYUSENKEI celebrate how no moment is richer than the one they’re experiencing now.
ILLUSIONS is out July 24. Listen to the single on Spotify.
See also: “Long Distance Love” by Kindan No Tasuketsu; “drip” by She Her Her Hers
“High Vision” by safmusic [Sony]
Safmusic’s past work teetered between porch-side indie-rock and bedroom future-bass. Twangy emo riffs wiggled around bashful yet intricate synth-pop. Here in his new track, the producer doubles down on his beat-making chops. He has yet to fully shed that indie-rocker in him with soft guitar strums and his yearning sighs clearing the flight path. But once he flips the switches, the track soars with velocity. The drum ‘n’ bass breaks start to wind the turbines and the guitars soon blast out a punchy electro-punk riff. With “High Vision,” safmusic craft his most starry-eyed production yet.
Listen to it on Spotify.
See also: “new world” by Aiobahn ft. Isekaijoucho; “Fuwa Fuwa Sonic” by METRO MEW
This Week in 2014…
“R.Y.U.S.E.I.” by Sandaime J Soul Brothers [Avex Trax]
No. 1 during the week of July 7, 2014 | Listen to it on Spotify/YouTube
It’s been nearly 15 years since EDM’s first wave crashed into the mainstream and altered the pop-production compound. In the catalog of many artists, their brushes with the boom might scan now as a remember when..., singles from the period sounding even nostalgic. But not for Sandaime J Soul Brothers, or 3JSB for short, and their 2014 hit, “R.Y.U.S.E.I.” While they casually dipped into the style years before, the R&B group took a full plunge in their second number-one and scored a record that has remained their biggest crowd-pleaser a decade on.
Out of all of the hits of this time from the U.S., the hub for this massive dance-pop boom, it seems as though the group looked to none other than LMFAO’s “Party Rock Anthem” for inspiration behind “R.Y.U.S.E.I.” The fuzzy trance synths, the sweeping crescendo and that wub-wub bass line in the chorus all seems beamed in from the subgenre’s peak year of 2011. The glitz of the production brought a bit of party-scene sleaze not unlike the spirit embodied by the other duo responsible for the I’m in Miami, bitch! hook. And, of course, the shuffling.
“R.Y.U.S.E.I.” can sound like 3JSB trying to make up for lost time. Hindsight can help us appreciate “Party Rock Anthem” as a record representing this whole pop era in the U.S. But the single had been at that point almost 3 years old, which was ancient in EDM years at local time. Music from 3JSB built for the proverbial parties and dance floors didn't appear until the wake of 2013. By the time they decided to get fully on board, other pop stars both in the U.S. as well as K-pop were soon ready to move on to trap, tropical house and moombahton: just a year after this, Skrillex and Diplo as Jack U would release the much more subdued “Where Are U Now” with Justin Bieber.
Though the group missed out on riding the sound at its hottest, 3JSB understood how to make the sound work to enhance what they've already been doing. Launched in 2011 as the third generation of the act that brought the EXILE name into prominence during the early ‘00s, 3JSB carried on tradition with the male-group R&B sound that's been their foundation since: a back-to-basics R&B contemporaneous with say, the Japanese singles by Toho Shinki. While they flirted with party tracks in the spirit of the rowdy boys in BIGBANG, what stuck for them as they tried out this electronic pop were the emotional tributes in the lineage of their predecessors. As if their trained vocals wasn’t already skilled in bringing passion while raising the stakes, the big-room production elevated the drama even more so.
This sentimentality does wonders for “R.Y.U.S.E.I.” as the group indulge in the sincerity that informs the EDM-pop ethos. Their earnest lyrics can’t help but also wear some of the club glitz found in the gaudy beats: the twinkle of the synths can make an opaque lyric like “I don’t know where this path will end / but I know where it goes back to” into something evocative and romantic in the moment. But their desire to show us the greatness that life has to offer is so pure, Colored by the euphoric club music, every word here about them wanting to show us the greatness that life has to offer rings pure and deeply wholesome, regardless of how deep it might actually be.
The more the production sounds of its time in “R.Y.U.S.E.I.,” the more unabashed the gestures by 3JSB resonate. With an EDM production or not, they got to be committed to their own song that bears such a wide-eyed chorus: “You only live once / I want to reach for dream, now,” they ruminate as they witness a shooting star; and here is where they literally point up to the sky and begin to shuffle in place as part of the choreography. Perhaps only Chris Martin competes in delivering the existential beauty of staring into the night sky as tearfully sentimental as they do here. But like how Coldplay did with AVICII, 3JSB wholeheartedly believe in the magic behind an EDM beat and its potential to blow up big feelings into a splendid firework show.
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Teto seems to be his favorite Vocaloid. Not only has he crafted multiple great tracks with it, including his first viral hit “Hito Mania,” he has also done a DJ set for Tetokura, a club event dedicated to playing only tracks made with Kasane Teto.