"J-METAPHYSIQUE"

This is DJ Tony aka Alt-Jpop here, I have made a very cool Jpop mix. Since I'm not some random sc account who just makes bedroom beatz I have decided to give more voice to Alt-Jpop and 1898music, since what we do is not aleatory, not a single second of our acts and beatz are 100% blind. I have managed to make a commentary of each track. This is not your typical mix.

Alt-Jpop - LIL INTRO 

This is a 20sec little intro I made very fast (maybe like in 20mins) in order to keep an Alt-Jpop seal, I want to make you feel this is a product, that this is not your ordinary mix, you are entering to a dimension of music you never thought it existed but it has always been there. Alt-Jpop is not your ordinary beatmaker, Alt-Jpop is a Jpop Philanthropist.

Regarding the technical aspect, it is a fairly simple intro, it has a binauralized riser that peaks near 0.0db then goes to a pluck synth stomp, an arpeggiated chord to a stomp to a voice that says Alt-Jpop. It has a low 808 in one section in order to give the impact more depth. But in general, 1898 nor Alt-Jpop uses any type of sampling, you can find samples in earlier Alt-Jpop tracks but me and 1898music have decided to not use any type of sampling, we make exceptions when using vocals, but only vocal samples. There are no presets, no drum samples during the last year, it's also better when mixing since you can manipulate the sound the way you want by going to the Synth Mod. 

Love The Candy's - In The Box

One of the most important elements in music for me is Isolationism, music today tends to focus to much in the present, in the organic, in the tribal, using samples from nature, to intensify reality, to hear birds chirping, to feel african drums, organic drums, the sound of the street, very bright colors aka the world producers such as Mura Masa and Iglooghost represent, etc., musicians want to get rid of fantasy, fantasy is important, future bassism, Post-Coachella feel goodism and hedonistic music ironically eliminate fantasy! This is why I appreciate the music of Love The Candy's a lot, it is quite conventional but this conventionality gives it a lot of strength, it feels new, the alien elements of its conventionality gives it strength. This track feels like an Tranced up Asobi Seksu (important shoegaze band from the 2000s). The beautiful vocals keep you involved throughout the song and some unexpected Turntablism appears almost at the end, an element that crucially intensifies the fantasmatic feel of the track. Music like Love The Candy's motivate me to keep making Pop and Experimental Music. 1898music, my more experimental collective, has always been a way of resurrecting fantasy through Noise, I tend to call it Fantasy Noise, but 1898music is often far from ethereal, we don't make Noise to take you to the present, it is music that alienates you by being hyperpresent but it's structured in a way that you can't enjoy it through unveiling/magnifying the reality of the way things are, you can either find it impenetrable (a form of fantasy) or have Messianic Thoughts in this sense we are very musical since music is about maintaining fantasy. Isolationist Lost gems like Love The Candy's unveil the problem of the century, the obsession with the present. The past is more important, but of course, reaffirming the past doesn't always imply being retro.

Ayumi Hamasaki - TO BE (Eurobeat mix)


I'm a very big fan of Ayumi Hamasaki, she has been very supportive of Eurobeat Musicians, by releasing albums remixed by Eurobeat Musicians, it gives you another hyper side of Ayumi Hamasaki. Lately, I'm starting to like shred guitar in electronic music, I know it can be lame for some, but don't know, I sometimes accidentally enjoy acts like Duran Duran, there is something about the guitar that is very sinful but at the same very pure, very poetic. Why is Jimi Hendrix often considered the best guitarist? He made guitar all about shredding and bending. Each time you make a bend in the guitar you write a Haiku, you feel like a Messiah, but what I like about the guitar is this ridiculous automasturbatory element.

I'm very big fan of both TO BE versions. I actually feel I like more Ayumi Hamasaki than Namie Amuro, there is a more poetic vulnerable feel in Ayumi's work.

Asobi Seksu - I'm Happy but You don't Like Me

I was a very big fan Asobi Seksu when I was in High School. There isn't much to say but I truly think Asobi Seksu is a good staple for making Jpop today.

Sunmi-Siren



I'm going to be honest, I just like this song because I like the album cover. Nah, jokes aside, it's a very good pop song. The song has a very retro type of bass that suits the Pop factor of the track, it follows Carly Rae Jepsen's EMOTION Stadium pop aesthetic. I like the wonkish-Horny synths that can be heard in the chorus, sounds a little bit fantasmatic neoY2K in a good way. I find her voice quite peculiar, in a very strange way it reminds me of JLo a lil bit. The track adds a very a very distorted and militaristic industrial breakdown that reminds of DJ Melania 666 a lot.






Yunomi - 守護霊 (feat. nicamoq) REMIX by Alt-Jpop

 I'm going to be honest here, maybe I have some mixed feelings about Yunomi's approach to Jpop since I'm not a really big fan of Future Bass but I like the challenge he presents to pop producers, his intense layering, his very syncopated vocals to the beat, his hyperactive pop rhythms, his peculiar ultra loud mastering that feels more pop than a pop song, extremely melodic tracks that almost sound the same (in a good way) but this sameness is the requirement to keep the spirit of pop litness alive. There are lots of Soundcloud producers that follow a similar approach to Yunomi, I kind of get the enjoyment of composing these type of beats, they seem to be very competitive, very layered, this competitiveness can be very good at first but it feels a little bit counterproductive and the intensification of something I call the Splice Sample Collage Fest. I respect these producers nonetheless but I feel they are wasting their energy in trying to be more maximal, loud, hypermelodic and they leave other important elements unnoticed that can make Jpop unique again.


In this remix, I try to give the singer a spotlight in the most unusual manner by keeping it very minimal but at the same very brutal. I like this idea of cuteness in grime, this is why I put a very distorted and compressed synth near clipping(without clipping though), I try to take it easy when adding elements that excessively cut through the mix, it is somewhat a trend, I constantly see this in producers such as Umru, Iglooghost, Sophie and a lot of Future Bass. It's an interesting concept, it makes tracks more Tridimensional, but I feel one has to self-control a little bit with this idea of adding elements that cut through the mix, it can be very lit at the moment but sometimes you are feeding to an everlasting vice of the listener wanting to have more elements cutting through the mix, and from an engagement perspective it can be more deteriorating and exhausting for the listener in the longterm, this why I think the wisest thing to do is to keep the mix as uniform as possible and evade the recurrent trend of what I call loud but cryptodynamic. But it's cool to do it every now and then but if you want to make traditional pop maybe the best thing to do is to evade this trend in mixing. Also, another thing I see in mixing nowadays is that, people want a lot of bass, and sometimes people add bass boosters, boost the bass to the max in the EQ, some can have a desired gritty aesthetic but most people do it because they truly want that "commercial" bass. There is no correct way of mixing in my honest opinion but my tip is that less bass equals more bass, this is why your guide shouldn't be your headphones or Studio Monitors but your Phone's Speaker! You should aim at frequencies that can cut through crappy speakers! So maybe the smartest thing to do is to distort your bass a lil bit and cut the frequencies between 20 and 50hz. And my other tip, if you make Trap, and use 808s, don't put your 808 too loud! Try to keep it between -6.0 and -8.0db! I also see that most people cut mid frequencies in order to get higher and lower frequencies, this can work in some occasions but it can make some mixes undesirably dipped and compressed, since the ear mostly responds to mid frequencies, so maybe if you make an instrumental track you shouldn't cut the mid frequencies that much, if you have a vocalist maybe it's better to cut the mids and leave it for the vocals, since you want to evade that the vocals lie buried in the mix, if this is your aesthetic It's ok to bury your vocals, Shoegaze mixes do this.  You can notice that 1898music's mixes can be very anarchic and does things intentionally wrong most of the time (do it for the aesthetics), this why I highly doubt we would release an album (with the exception of Alt-Jpop, I publish Alt-Jpop's tracks in mixing approach blocks making it easier when making a more uniformly mixed EP), most of our mixes in 1898music have very different approaches, so don't overthink the mix that much but it's always good to know how to get things done when there are professionals and millions of dollars that depend on you.

Twice - BDZ

 Everything about this track is great, it's very banger, like the military feel of this track, makes me wanna stomp my feet. And I also like Tzuyu's protagonism here, her voice is quite expressive compared to her other performances. The addition of expressiveness is very subtle. But yeah this is one of my favorite things about Kpop and Jpop girl bands, their militaristic attitude, from AKB48 to Kyary Pamyu Pamyu to Girl's Generation, this is a recurrent theme. I wonder why? One of my favorite values today is discipline, I feel discipline is very important, this why I think Kpop and Jpop is fairly superior than Western pop, I like the fact that it's very limited to a very determined group of singers, they see elements that are overlooked in the West. The West depends too much on clout and rebellion while Kpop is all about discipline and getting the job done. I have the impression that Kpop doesn't fall that much in the trap of one hit wonder since it manages to keep their fans engaged in different ways. Kpop is the opposite of the gig economy. Kpop Business model is a more pink and reasonable type of Feudalism. I highly doubt that Kpop artists are unhappier than Western Pop Artists, this demonization of Kpop is not very objective at times, and most of the time is Asiaphobic. I don't deny the fact that the East has less psychological issues than the West but I think they are quite different, I feel the West is the region of anxiety while the East is the region of depression. Depression seems to be more productive than anxiety. Since depression is more passive while anxiety is more aggressive and hysteric and it's more difficult to keep control of it. It's easier to control a population who is depressed since we all know that depression is a term invented/supported by Psychologists, Psychiatrists and Psychoanalysts in order to veil their clinical incompetence. Depression is a type of jouissance, this jouissance can be destructive, this is why depression can often lead to suicide if not regulated. Kpop secretly knows this, this is why in a very coldly-calculated way, Kpop feeds this market of jouissance, the depressive market. 

Haruko Tajima - 変なダンスを泣きながら

Haruko Tajima is one of my favorite sc Jpop singers/producers, I like her humor, it's very banal in a good way and this banality is reflected in her unique beatz. It feels like an old Trap track, it has this very Supersawy leads that make me grin, it takes me back to Nadia Oh's ultra nihilistic Hypersublime Trancy proto PC Music Messianity times, it has a dubstep section that truly makes me laugh, it is as if Haruko Tajima gets the point when making an esoterically humorous composition. Yasutaka Nakata does this dubstep breakdown thing in Kyary Pamyu Pamyu's tracks, for example, in Invader! Invader!, I wouldn't consider this dubstep breakdown thing as ironic, it's simply a gateway to the esoteric and the occult. DJ Melania 666 started this dubstep esoteric humor thing in her recent Moldbuggian Dubstep Tracks, this esoteric trend has even reached Alt-Jpop. Haruko Tajima's imperfect vocals stand out when compared to other pretty girls that make banal kawaii music I somewhat find brainless, in Haruko Tajima's voice you feel an idea, a personality, a superstar. I truly believe Haruko Tajima can be the greatest Jpop star of our time.

Namie Amuro - Aishite Muscat (GROOVY MIX)

I always spam this, Dance Tracks Vol. 1 is probably one of my favorite Jpop albums, every track is amazing. Still, I feel quite sad about the fetishization of this type of Jpop, many people who like Future Funk seem to appropriate this in the most vulgar way possible. It's very cliché to criticize retrofetishism but if I'm truly honest I really dislike most retrofetishism, but not because I'm one of those people who say "we need be modern and embrace the future" but because retrofetishism doesn't do this music justice, it only appropriates the most irrelevant factor of the work. Regarding the track, one of things I love about this tracks is the bass, the bass is very good, it almost feels like a trap 808 rhythm but without being proto Trap, something that reminds me of what I want to emphasize in the tracks I make. Swing is a very important factor for me, I like to take swing to the most extreme limit, it is a type of jouissance, a little bit BDSM in ethics. Ultra triplets are all about being a lil bit Dominatrix, it declares its superiority to the kick. Armin Van Buuren in one video says that dance music revolves around the kick, I agree but things are changing, especially with the predominance of trap, popular music no longer oscillates around a 4/4 metronomic kick, now we are exposed to the tripleted flow, still this floaty tripleted swing can only be found in popular music in subgenres such as Trap. I feel triplets have a relationship with The Real, repetition and sadism. When a track is lit or "messianic" it's simply sadist, you simply don't stomp your feet, you just simply use your hands or your fingers. This tripleted sadism cannot be expressed as a drummers, as guitar players, but only in a highly mechanical bass, the triplet doesn't deconstruct, it makes everything else irrelevant. This why I find AG Cook an interesting phenomenon, I'm fascinated by his Boiler Room, not necessarily because of the music he plays but his body language, isn't his body language an expression of the this jouissance in the Real? How he schizophrenically moves from side to side, when he steps back and starts playing the knobs when the repetitive repetition commences. I may be very critical of them right now but in early to mid PC Music times, they were a very protoVitalist Metaphysical phenomenon, they weren't your ordinary electronic music project. PC Music, at its moment of conception, was a new blind but calculated ontology that attempted to access the Real of Being through sadism, not through thought or contemplation. 

Perfume - Night Flight

Everyone who knows me, knows that I'm a very big fan of Perfume. I really like the concept and the strange duality that Yasutaka Nakata has between Kyary Pamyu Pamyu and Perfume. Most Jpop isn't innocent enough, regardless of what people think. Most kawaii Jpop artists tend to have something explicitly macabre and even hypersexual regardless of their cuteness, Kyary Pamyu Pamyu popularized this by engagin in a philosophy of "making things more traumatic through cuteness." Now it has extended to other realms, to cute girls with guns, to prepubescent looking girls smoking cigarettes in their school uniform. I still find this shock value pretty amusing, but Perfume does not follow this logic, they do everything possible to repress any sexuality, anything macabre and even the possibility of maternity, Perfume's obsession with purity is almost pure insanity and on point! They are probably the most conservative Jpop band of all time! When the Perfume members become mothers it will be the ultimate shock value-Passion for The Real event. 

Tentenko - Robot 

I truly like Tentenko's voice, it's pretty unique, there are lots of babylike/high pitched Japanese vocalists lately but I have the impression that Tentenko's voice stands out, it has a lot of style. You can detect Tentenko's voice from a million miles away! I feel the Tentenko team could work a little bit harder, Tentenko could be more popular but I think the musical part could be riskier. Tentenko appears to have this risky impulse, if you go to her Soundcloud you will notice she makes Noise Music. It's pretty cool to see an ex-BiS girl band Idol to make tabletop Noise. But Jpop has always been like that, Jpop has always had some sort of relationship with Noise Music. What makes Jpop Jpop is that compared to most pop from all countries they add more non-musical aspects to their music. Kpop may have managed to become an international success but I do think Jpop is fairly superior in many aspects, they have a sense of Isolationism or Edo Ethics in everything they do, they are very closed, they don't aim at the West, they are not very strategic, it aims at more esoteric enjoyment which can be impenetrable for most. Compared to Jpop, Kpop tends to have more Western pop approaches to singing but they manage to give them their own twist, it's true that Kpop often sins of appropriating R&B a little bit too much, but it's a very Kitsch type of R&B that can be very unique. But, Kpop and Jpop have a lot of things in common, the music is very baroque and saturated but very ascetic, Jpop and Kpop is harder to enjoy than normal pop music, even though ordinary people listen to Jpop, they enjoy the music a little bit more conceptually rather than a primitive and carnal enjoyment. Girl Band Kpop is a little bit less carnal than Jpop though. 

Hyperjuice - City Lights feat. EVO+, Jinmenusagi (Alt-Jpop remix)

I started making this remix a very longtime ago, I had the acapella in my computer, it was very dusty already! One day I decided to delete everything I had made in the Logic Pro X file and start a new remix. I don't remember how loud was the 808 but I remember I cut some frequencies in order to prevent distortion in crappy speakers. I rarely load the samples I design in a sampler, I rarely export them, I always use them from the synth were it was designed. This can be very bad at times, because it takes a lot of CPU power. I never export them because in the end I always make some edits in the patch. I don't like people that add mysterious bass, like "feelish bass", I like my bass to be extremely audible, this is why I sometimes don't like to play my notes very low, or use 808s that aren't saturated. I don't always use Sine Waves for 808s, I don't want my 808s to sound like an 808 kit. But there is an 1898 secret that makes 808s sound subtly different than normal trap 808s. My main focus when making sounds is to sound extremely digital this why I try to be very careful when adding Unison. There are some patches that DJ Melania has used other songs that use here, I actually have designed some, the clicky stomp you here. This was made with FM synths, FM synths can be very useful when trying to sound digital since the waves aren't crystal cut, it's great for making sloppyish but futuristic noises. A lot of Modern synths have FM filters that can emulate this such as Logic's Alchemy and Spire but I feel these filters don't always help you to be more direct but they work for lots of cool sounds, my main issue with Alchemy is that it's a little bit crashy and CPU intensive, Logic's engineers could work on these bugs a little bit more, but overall it's a great Stock Synth and even better than Spire. I sometimes find the sound of Spire a little bit digital and ringy in a bad way, I have used Spire in 10% of my tracks and now I evade using it. For some reason Spire always makes my project laggy when using two or more Third Party Vst plugins, maybe Spire isn't very well desgined. Regarding the structure of the track, I would like to emphasize that 1898 and Alt-Jpop are all about structure rather than sound design, most of the time, when I make a remix, I radically change the structure of the track, you can be very anarchic, when I worked in a collab with Sima Kim, I feel he was low key triggered by this because he recorded vocals in the instrumental track I sent him, I actually abused my liberty and changed the structure of the acapella, the intro was 8 bars and then I headed for the verse, he doesn't rap in the first bars of the intro. I actually slid the verse to the intro and when I passed him the mixed version he was like hmm, can you pass me the acapella and the new backing track, and the he sent me the other version and I was like lol It was supposed to sound like that, but in the end I preferred his edit rather than mine. But going back to the Hyperjuice remix, I like to make it climatic all the time, I like my beatz to have movement but without falling in the Iglooghost evasion of repetition, for me repetition is very important it is the most effective way of intensifying sadism and the death drive, a lot of listeners compulsively repeat sections with their mp3s this is why experiment with repetition here, especially at the end where I cut the original acapella's chorus and stack it at least 4 times, it's a way to intensify the City full of lights fantasy romanticism, triplet haiku. I decided to make the ending a little bit footwork but at the same conventional pop. 

I remember I read a review of a Helen review(Grouper's shoegaze band) and it said something like this: 

But part of The Original Faces’ triumph is that she never actually does space out that far. These pop structures, Harris seems to say, can only really last in brief flashes. After years of studying and outlining the mountainous crevasses of a cloudy sky, when the sun peeks through it’s blinding — stare too long and the darkness is eternal. Fortunately, Helen realized this obvious pitfall and set themselves up accordingly, allowing tracks to slip into interstitial gloom and shutting the shades when the time is right. Maybe not tomorrow, but someday the sun’ll come out again, and it’ll be worth it. The warmth feels sweeter the longer you’ve spent inside.

I like this idea of pop flashes, it is basically what I intended in this remix and proof Jpop, 1898 and Alt-Jpop aspire an ascetic ideal. Sometimes in order to enjoy one has to sacrifice jouissance of all the senses. This is why you cannot give the spectator exactly what his head wants, pop should tame the spectator. So the structure of this track tames the author, the transition from grit to pop flash is an intensification of fantasy, in other words an intensification of the Real and the City Lights. 



In an interview, Iglooghost once said that he didn't want to use repetition, he didn't want to copy paste a bar (aka Stacking). I personally think this is very naive. Iglooghost sounds a little bit like a millennial. Everyday that passes I conclude that Iglooghost is a symptom of the current situation of millennials, this desire to go beyond, to fill every hole, to be the first, to be an enfant terrible, to compete in an unproductive way. Iglooghost's jouissance is a jouissance I have tried to evade at all costs, many people consider Iglooghost as an evolution of PC Music (they don't even know what they are saying!) and an expression of Jpop according to Bandcamp XD. There are some impressive things of Iglooghost, I don't want to be one of those people that completely dismisses an artist they don't side conceptually but Iglooghost's fantasy is flawed. As I've said earlier, music nowadays tends to be a Splice Collage Fest or a Zoo. This Future Bass hypermusicalism creates a new fantasy that dismantles fantasy, it is ironic because this music is highly fantasmatic and quirky. But this fantasy replaces fantasy with vice. Iglooghost was premeditated by subgenre's such as Cloud Rap, Future Bass, Deconstructed Club, PC Music, Orange Milk Records, Noumenal Loom, Oneohtrix Point Never and the so called Flying Lotus Wonky thing. I never digged Orange Milk the much because of its unproductive competitiveness, I call it the Enfant Terrible ontology. It is music that is very well layered, eclectic and technical but there is an emotional attachment and intuition to it that inevitably leads to a certain type of jouissance, I call it the binaural vicious, quirky & neurotic enfant fairy jouissance. For me music shouldn't be an unveiling of jouissance but a repression of jouissance, this is why I think AG Cook, Spinee and DJ Warlord have made some of the most unique music of the last few years, if you listen to DJ Warlord's most extreme music, you won't see a mega baroque binaural Zoo fantasy, it's simply blank, the triplet misses each point of reference, the beat becomes ballistic, unilateral, hyperpresent but hyperfantasmatic and synthetic. It's extreme abstraction deactivates multiple routes of jouissance, it leads to only one form of jouissance, it is the opposite of the intensification of different senses, to enjoy like a Body without Organs, to enjoy it like a Queer Starfish. PC Music knows very well binaural neurotic jouissance is deceiving, so it delivers you one form of Ontologically blank, sadist, repetitive and abstract jouissance that represses the rest of the senses. No wonder DJ Warlord's 12 Wars of Christmas Mix contains a pic of a character from Tekken with a blank background, it's no accident, it's an ontological compromise. 


Alt-Jpop - 一目ぼれ ♥ ♥ ♥ 100000,000km) ==== (love at first sight)

This track took me a while to make, two to three sessions I think, I moved a lot of things, the original version is somewhat different. I try to make the vocals more important in terms of volume. I actually have Vocaloid in my Windows PC but now they have it available for Mac, you just have to pay an update, money I don't have at the moment! So in the meantime I all I can do is make the Vocaloid in Windows to then pass it to Mac, it's truly a hassle but I can endure difficult stuff when producing, I have a lot of resistance, I always finish every track I start. I'm not a very big fan of very loud drums, it's a little bit the ideology right now, so I added some kick but I try not to abuse with the kick since it can make these type of epileptically layered compositions mixes sound bad, so I eq the kick a little bit, the kick I used was made in Kick 2(I think, don't remember that much, maybe I made it in a normal Synth). Kick 2 is ok, it is handy, but I feel you could do the same with a normal synth, it has one noise oscillator and one sub. These oscillators contain clicks you can use for the transients of the kick but you could perfectly emulate this in any commercial vst synth. As I've said, repetition is important, but I always like to add variation but not too much variation because you could lose track of the beat, so I add some counter harmonies and melodies in each repetition. I designed a very metallic synth, it sounds literally like steel, DJ Melania 666 influenced me a lot to embrace this melodic steel synthesis, I like the leads to be very rhythmic, so steel is a great compliment. Also something that I've learnt throughout the years that the most succesful music is extremely binary, you have to give and receive, swing is binary, this binarism/Sequentialism can be taken to the limit. The acceleration of binarism is basically an acceleration of ontological sadism. This is why pop is more Noise than Ambient. Ambient dreams of exceeding binarism by being a wanting to affect senses rhizomatically. The PC Music/footwork triplet is inherently binary. The triplet pattern always repeats, the more binary you have in a beat the more messianism and sadism you have. The music works in a neuro-decodifying manner, the music isn't speculative but it simply a gateway to the Self, it is the jouissance necessary to be an ontological sadist, to embrace being unilaterally. AG Cookism is the most abstract form of thought, since it gives you the jouissance of the ascetic.

泉まくら - 幻 (Qrion Remix)

Qrion's vocal chopping has influenced me a lot. She also makes really funny tweets.

I hope you guys like the mix, I'll be posting more content in this blog, covering many musical topics.