用户Wiki:Demobanker/2023 listening log and recommendations

As usual, check the 2021 list and 2022 list for what this is about, and here for an uncommented list of music from this year I liked. I started rating music on the website this year but the basics are the same - I like everything with a 3* or higher rating, as well as anything I have marked wishlisted or owned.

2022 <-- | 2023 | --> 2024

The List

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Touhou Traque Demo （2023-03-20） 社团：The Rondokure Project jazz fusion, progressive rock, djent (influence) 🇮🇩 Energetic and groovy jazz-prog combo with playful interpretations on the original melodies and polyrhythmic, djent-influenced grooves comparable to Kenta Shimakawa or Merkabah. Highly recommended to fans of H.J.Freaks and 東京アクティブNEETs's early albums that are influenced by prog rock.
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Ancient Sediments （2023-03-03） 社团：⚔SO-BI⚔ dungeon synth 🇯🇵 First release from 2023 that I've listened to woohoo I don't have much to say about this since dungeon synth isn't something I personally seek out, but it's an enjoyable listen. It's fairly accessible thanks to the soft flute synths on the tracks, and the overall lo-fi, warped sound is a good introduction to the surreal and psychedelic side of the genre.
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Dreams from the World of Spirits （2023-11-11） 社团：Akane post-rock (with progressive rock influences) 🇷🇸 Really pretty and has a moving story to boot (it's timed to the album, so I recommend watching the full album stream on Youtube instead of reading it through Bandcamp track notes). As you'd expect from a story about a dream, the music sounds dreamy in a fantastical way, with delicate instruments and light airy reverb. But the album doesn't just coast along on its dreamy prettiness - clean guitars cut through that dreamy atmosphere at intense moments, which really adds to the storytelling.
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The Devil （2023-03-14） 社团：Medoi nu metalcore/djentcore/deathcore with trap parts 🇷🇺 (single) I say this as a nu metal hater (piss off ya 90s kids and your revivals!) but sometimes you gotta admit that this genre can go hard. As much as I disliked the music by the artist's previous alias, I could tell that they're aiming to make some of the most heavy and catastrophically noisy Touhou metal possible. They've dialed it back a bit here with the trap influences and the relatively clean production, but the noisiness is still present, and that combined with the disorienting rhythmic shifts make this track as heavy as rawer nu metalcore bands like Omerta or Tallah. Plus that breakdown 1:45 in has some otherworldly vocals.
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Combi De Touhou （2023-06-13） 社团：Someone 45356 various cumbia styles, mostly cumbia psicodélica and cumbia norteña peruana, plus a few salsa tracks 🇵🇪 Psychedelic grooves abound that manages to feel energetic and laidback at the same time. I'm about as versed on cumbia as your average white person, but this is a joy to listen to. South & Latin American music are fairly overlooked by the Touhou music scene outside of like bossa nova and reggaeton, so if you enjoyed this you definitely should dig more into this area of music. My recommended tracks are the fun disco cumbia fusion of 3rd Eye and the jammy salsa arrangement of Pure Furies ~ Whereabouts of the heart. idk what the latter track is sampling but it's a neat addition to a good arrangement. And while you're at it, listen to their vgm-cumbia fusion arrangement of Point of No Return from the shmup Eschatos (2011).
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The case is a lie. （2023-06-23） 社团：深夜放送 experimental punk 🇯🇵 Hits you right in the face with two tracks of disorienting and dissonant guitar freakouts and unintelligible vocal chatters. Once you go through that, 虚言癖 is pretty much a breather. Standard fare for 深夜放送, but it does cement them in my mind as the go-to circle for people that like the Squid/Black Country, New Road/Sprain area of experimental punk bands. Minus the long song prog/post-rock aspirations of course - but this also makes me wonder about how a 10+ minute イコ song would be like (hopefully it's not boring drone/post-rock shit).
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Interstellar Voyager （2023-10-29） 社团：Kommisar chiptune, chip dance, chip-metal-dance-fusion-idk-but-it's-awesome 🇨🇦 Man, reading that shoutouts list and realizing how many names I recognize is such a feeling. That's the kind of thing that happens when you've been listening to tons of music for years. Consider this my official recommendation to Also Check Those Artists Out. I don't have much to say about this besides that it's full of bangers. Kommisar's beefed up the production a lot since Reimu Plays LSDJ, with plenty of dense complextro awesomeness and speedy psytrance-meets-thrash-metal rolling basslines.
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Retro Reveries of Mysticism （2023-12-17） 社团：Pegmode chiptune, chip dance 🇨🇦 I'm liking how every the other two Touhou LSDJ artists shouted out in Interstellar Voyager are also releasing Touhou albums this year lmao. They're all similarly good so I'm just going by the order I listened to them. As with their previous album, the maximalist production makes this really fun. The punky drums on Forgotten Phantasm goes hard.
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Perfect Red （2023-12-01） 社团：Zahran Worrell chiptune, chip dance 🇺🇸 A lot more hardcore-influenced than Danmaku Matrix Generation with hard kicks and chunky breakbeats, though the latter is used strictly for transitions, which did trip me up as a chipbreak fan. Still, this is the most varied of the three albums with a mix of hardcore and non-hardcore tracks (and the relatively chill Koukyoukyoku Koukyoukyoku). The tracks that arrange multiple songs in particular are highlights.
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Dimension （2023-06-12） 社团：Chiircle bass music 🇮🇩 Banger EDM that also features gamelan and Touhou sound effects. Heck yeah. I like U.N. Owen in particular since it has that cYsmix styled "mystical" sounding sound design. Also recommend Danmaku Chimera for having an interesting take on phonk (a genre that I turned on really fast due to oversaturation and also because a certain major EDM label started shitting it out en masse) that has a repetitive techno sound while still having a trappy drift phonk base. (on a side note, all the phonk producers on this wiki as of now are Indonesian. is there a phonk scene there that people outside the country don't know about?)
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Scarlet EP （2023-05-06） 社团：The Rondokure Project progressive rock, jazz fusion 🇮🇩 gud jazz and prog. Admittedly I'm not as into this as Touhou Traque Demo because it aims for variety and doesn't have the distinct style of the demo. Still, the performance is undeniable and more Touhou prog is always a plus.
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Incantation Towards Youkai Mountain （2023-01-31） 社团：Iunehkal atmospheric black metal, doom metal 🇺🇸 Iunehkal is a solo black metal project by The Shepherdess Iseult, who goes by a lot of other names and is quite prolific according to their Metal Archives artist page with many projects in the black metal area, and apparently also makes unconventional trap and hardcore EDM. I like this more than their other release on here, for one because it's way shorter and less repetitive. Plus, the production isn't as lo-fi and raw. Don't have much to say beyond that other than riffs good and also that you know some shit's going down when the synths come in at the end of Part III: Phantasmagorick Misanthropy.
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The Tales from G.S.K （2023-02-24） 社团：The Cynphetic Collective hardcore EDM Don't know much about this music collective but they seem to be one of the few Western doujin collab circles that are heavily influenced by the styles of J-doujin and rhythm game music. Fun because of its J-core eclectic maximalism, and the fact that it's willing to have be hardcore (vs hard dance which I don't like much) helps.
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ERROR （2023-05-07） 社团：UNKNOWN BEATS trap, drill 🇯🇵 Pre-listening impressions - click to toggle -> To quote what I said in the wiki server: On some level Touhou hip hop still sucks in 2023. The Japanese scene is either Tamaonsen, people trying to ape Tamaonsen's style of EDM rap, or 90s throwbacks. The Chinese scene is basically just uber autotuned melodic rap. In this context, it's very funny that the person who can potentially bring something new to the table is a "x type beat" producer [8コロッケ8], which would normally be considered derivative by people I don't think the preview quite sells how versatile 8コロッケ8 is, so check out their Youtube page. I'm not a big fan of trap but I think it's amazing that there's just an entire universe of specific yet distinct trap subgenres like Detroit trap, Afro drill and rage. so I pretty much listened to this through the circle's sporadic youtube track uploads lmao. But overall it's a good start to things. On fire is by far the standout with a very fun beat (even if the English words sprinkled throughout feel out of place. Mokou would not say "haters" or "shut the fuck up bitch" like a crappy metalcore vocalist with criminal records!!!). Legit need one of them to make a funny phone video with that song while cosplaying as Mokou. On the flipside 少女風神 is more chill, and I like the folky UK garagey instrumental. The last two songs did trigger my dislike of autotune-heavy pop rap songs, which I would have blamed on the autotune a decade ago, but nah it's just the melody writing I don't like.
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東方侵略盤 ~Barrage for the Floor~ （2023-10-29） 社团：Invaders bass music, first half is house 🇯🇵 Doesn't have the oomph to be great EDM but bangs nonetheless. Hearing that Joyryde-esque bass house tune Get in Underground gets me really pumped up.
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Unidentified Satanick Object （2023-02-28） 社团：Iunehkal raw/atmospheric black metal 🇺🇸 Quite a long and repetitive album. As someone whose black metal tastes leans towards prog and tech, and given that it isn't an arrangement album, I'm surprised that I enjoyed this as much as I did. It begins with a sorrowful yet triumphant sounding riff that is quite enjoyable, and is the most accessible track on the album. Anti-Nomian Gensokyo Metal is an endurance test that repeats a 4-note descending chromatic riff for 13 minutes, with another riff coming on top of it that is slightly longer yet still oppressive sounding, punctuated by the harsh vocals. The following track is also an endurance test, this time with more outwardly dissonant and clashing riffs on display. Blasphemous Sacred Place returns to a more melodic place with a classical-sounding progression that never resolves. But before you get settled into the monotony, one of the guitar lines cuts out around 3 minutes in, transforming it into a different form of monotony. The last two tracks have more developed song structures, with Finale/Into Great Trichiliocosm even having a brief keyboard section 4 minutes in and ending with a doom metal turn.
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東方超核破壊祭 （2023-04-30） 社团：CXR Record hardcore EDM, uptempo hardcore 🇯🇵 Not as exciting as the 2022 album but I do have to appreciate RIZARDI for making IVMVLIEN an utterly exhilarating hardcore/hip hop trip, 前澤 for making BR funk (because Brazilian Touhou fans are apparently too weeb to make cool local music or some shit), and, as much as I loathe to say it, 7_7 for making 100 gecs not sound like 00s radio pop nostalgia for washed-up millennials.
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Tougenkyo （2023-04-01） 社团：Lossoka Records various EDM, with a notable amount of drum and bass, hard dance and hardcore 🌐 Lossoka Records is a French Bandcamp netlabel specializing in hardcore EDM. The label is probably most notable for the compilation Genocide Party (2021) which featured many notable artists on the internet breakcore and -adjacent scenes of the late 2010s/early 2020s, and the follow-up compilation Genocide Afterparty (2022) which includes more ambient and experimental selections while still having a hardcore base. Here, the label tries its hand at Touhou which is fairly surprising to me, and to their credit the label does showcase of artists from around the world, with a few that have participated in the comps I mentioned above. It's a solid offering of various EDM styles, with a few surprises like Nstryder's grandiose celtic rock Cirno's Tale, LYCANDOPE's dark atmospheric techno technokami, necroveronica's nocturnal, more-atmosphere-than-bass atmopsheric drum and bass Mary Thee Mage, and yuijkl's IOSYS-sampling bonus track marisaalicehomosex. People who are expecting something more like the Genocide compilations would be better off looking elsewhere, but people who are looking for a variety EDM Touhou comp should give this a listen.
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Touhou Garbage （2023-06-17） 社团：FridaFritters EDM variety pack (with fair amount of dnb) 🇺🇸 Enjoyable videogamey EDM. I recommend you check out her other 2023 albums if you liked this - kinda baffling that people mostly just listen to this one Touhou album and none of her other stuff, which is equally fun to listen to.
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Snowflake Desire （2023-03-17） 社团：Releska chamber jazz/nu jazz/orchestral/electronic (idk don't quote me on this one) 🇦🇺 Still in awe about how he can effortlessly arrange multiple songs together and have it flow without making them medleys. And that's not to mention the weird stylistic twists that's been in the few Releska albums I've listened to. Desert Reign, for instance, is an imaginative VST orchestral journey over multiple types of desert-y music that feels right at home on one of those excellent Homestuck mega fan albums. Then you have something like Lead On, which sounds like cheap FL Studio aerobic music but also has a fun Ronald Jenkees-esque jammy feel that makes it fun. The Mountains Call to Me and REM features complicated rhythms that feels both inspired by ZUN and off-kilter trap music that borders on microscopic IDM, and the latter even uses percussions taken from the PC-98 Touhou games.
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恋色桜牙 （2023-06-25） 社团：幻妖雛 folk metal (幻妖雛 side), black noise/raw black metal (bonus material / Faith ov Gestalgt side) 🇯🇵 For background context, 幻妖雛 and Faith ov Gestalgt have the same members. I was gonna include this on the list as a note that Touhou raw black metal other than Iunehkal exists, but honestly? 夜鳴き鳥 is great. I can appreciate amateur-sounding metal sometimes and the black metal -> power/folk metal -> black metal progression is very well crafted. Specifically, the song builds to center this moment when the vocalist sings the melody from Night Bird over blastbeats, which transitions into the final black metal part. That buildup is intense and satisfying, and and manages to make me like folky power metal for once.
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Love-Colored MASTER SPARC700 （2023-02-11） 社团：Hooded Edge SNES music, digital fusion 🇺🇸 (This is at the end of the list cuz it only has one track related to Touhou plus a reference, its position isn't indicative of how much I like it) Admittedly I have no idea what's going on with the SMW hacking scene outside the stuff raocow plays and things adjacent to that, so my first reaction to listening to their songs was "woah, you can do this in SMW now?" Go listen to a Touhou arrangement from their channel, then for comparison, listen to this arrangement from 2009 by Anikiti, who's notable for making the challenging Luigi's Adventure hacks. The difference is night and day. How much you'll like their music will depend on how much you want your SNES music to have beefy Sega Genesis-esque synths, and how stuffed you want the BGM to be while playing an uber hard romhack. The closer, Return To Y.O.S.H.I, is a good indicator. It packs up Sega-esque synths, multiple sections, key changes, and a Super Marisa Land reference in 3 minutes. It's fun to listen to by itself, but I'll definitely find it distracting if I were playing a Mario level. The other tracks (including the Touhou arrangement) are relatively more subdued, but still fun to listen to or to game to.
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Metempsychosis to Gensokyo is Possible （2023-02-24） 社团：Fensalir Project death industrial (?), ambient 🇺🇸 Came across this one through RYM user zombieregime's a touhou album for every genre list. According to Metal Archives, Fensalir Project is another project by Iseult. idk much about death industrial so I won't weign in on if it's actually in that genre. With that said, I found this one boring. There's nothing going on and it's not at all harsh like I expected from industrial music. The occult chanting on Philosophem is neat and has a black metal ambient sense to it, and the album ending on a slow piano rendition of Hartmann's Youkai girl after a long drone section is very welcome. Overall though I think it's not my thing and I'm just recommending it here as an example of concept that people should explore. (recommended)

Writing something for these

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Touhou Colours： Sapphire （2023-07-01） 社团：Chroma Sounds colour bass, future riddim 🇨🇳 holy shit (I listened to this because the circle members were generous enough to upload their tracks to Bilibili)
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Gensokyo 199X Vol.3： One More 90's Touhou Album （2023-10-14） 社团：Nocti 90s EDM 🇫🇷 more period-accurate samples. less vsts. more retro. if this trend continues she's gonna start distributing tracker modules by volume 5 or so. france's most powerful touhou musician???
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Pharaoh： The Standard （2023-12-31） 社团：fractanisharmonicoo jazz fusion, avant-garde jazz (?) 🇯🇵 a lot more active compared to their previous albums.

Haven't listened to, but have some interests in

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Mist of Scarlet （2023-05-02） 社团：Structure Sound metalstep, future riddim, djent (influence) 🇨🇳 As a fan of of metal-EDM fusions like A.I.(d) (from the metal side), Phuture Doom (from the EDM side), or whatever this Jogger track is, it's good that an album like this exists. It's like the full-length version EDM×METAL EP!! in a sense. The preview sounds pretty good, though I'd prefer if the mainstream festival EDM-isms were dropped in exchange for more ass-kicking metal fusions. Still, this is pretty interesting as far as Touhou EDM goes, and it could be a stepping stone to more esoteric fusion styles like metallic breakcore or blackened speedcore.
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柊野文庫 ～ Crypto-porticus in Memory （2023-05-07） 社团：Yurihaka ZUNstyle 🇯🇵 You know, when I started this project I was considering not adding ZUNstyle to this list, as I find them mostly hit-or-miss in terms of melody. It also doesn't help that the scene in the past 2-3 years have become sort of a technical excercise in nostalgia, with more people who just translate music from one game's style to the other, and more art that's trying to look like ZUN drew it. It's not a new thing, but what drew me to Wanwan's work and albums like Sound＿E＿scapes or 望界星象镜 ~ Dissociated Cosmic Miracle is how they build on ZUN's ideas to create something that feels new, as opposed to tedious ZUN-worship. Like, I don't care about people who do faithful recreations of 60s or 70s rock music down to the mastering process, and same to other types of those technical retro-recreations, and not even Touhou can make me care. This isn't an album that will shake the scene up, but it did drew me in with the un-ZUNstyle cover art style. Plus, it's got good melodies and neat touches in the instrumentation - that accordion in ヴワル魔法図書館 and ガス燈の明かりに導かれて brings the music to another level, and I like the attempt at making the jazz instrumentations on 煌びやかな腐敗 sound realistic.
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noct （2023-05-07） 社团：少年ヴィヴィッド indie rock, r&b 🇯🇵 I was not expecting them to become 発熱巫女～ず for half the EP! (admins can we have an R&B tag now, you can just name it RnB so the & sign doesn't break autocomplete) The first and third tracks are good songs in the circle's energetic indie style, so fans of the circle like me still have something to look forward to. While イチ's vocals is still in that indie rock zone and lacks the sensuality and flexibility needed for r&b, I'm also basing this on just the preview, and even then the instrumentals are nicely made. インビジブル is a fun disco tune with welcoming horns and bass guitar, and that IDM microbeats sound on Ambient is the type of 2010s alt-R&B production that I'd be all over back in 2019.
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CAGE AND CAPTIVE （2023-05-07） 社团：ついったー東方部 post-bop, cool jazz (maybe? idk my jazz that well) 🇯🇵
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L2 （2023-05-07） 社团：fractanisharmonicoo avant-garde jazz 🇯🇵
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Touhou pianoforteⅣ-Gothical Catharsis- （2023-08-13） 社团：光と闇の協奏曲 solo piano 🇯🇵 Another comeback I'm actually looking forward to (the previous one being the schwarzwald album from last year). The circle members' arrangements are quite high quality and the preview doesn't disappoint.
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TOHO Latin Dance （2023-08-19） 社团：大柚子 South American/Latin music 🇨🇳 yeah you know the drill. also lmao @ the Eurobeat-esque lyrics and vocal delivery on Into Fire.
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TOHO BOOTLEGS 6 （2023-05-07） 社团：IOSYS various EDM 🇯🇵 blah blah see my comment on last year's list about this series you know the drill
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TOHO BOOTLEGS 7 （2023-10-15） 社团：IOSYS various EDM 🇯🇵 you know the drill okay except for uno's 90s breakbeat hardcore throwback track. should have saved that for Digital Wing's next Toho Rave Party album.
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Zauberwald （2023-10-15） 社团：ごんばこんなか dungeon synth 🇯🇵 No way I'm gonna have Ancient Sediments but not this on the list. The preview tracks on Bandcamp are good and full of Torash's sound design choices. Another thing to look forward to are the guest tracks by liquid1224, who does Susumu Hirasawa styled artsy synthpop as 華力発電所 (links to his Youtube channel, not a specific album) .
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Ambiens Mafia ＃160 （2023-10-15） 社团：Tengu Corp trap, atmospheric drum and bass, Jersey club 🇯🇵 some very icy, spacious beats on display here.
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Galaxy Dream （2023-11-12） 社团：和を以て貴しと為ing various EDM + jazz (?) on track 3 🇯🇵 yeah yeah variety edm release, but I do like the delightful instrumentation.
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Gensokyo Party Vol. 4 DJ Koishi （2023-11-12） 社团：KodamaSounds various EDM 🌐 Not sure why I haven't checked out this circle much. Like yeah, the idea of an international doujin circle is already pretty cool, but one that put on every release artist commentary and lists all the credits with links??? That's something I've been wanting in the fandom for years.
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No continue （2023-11-12） 社团：UNKNOWN BEATS trap, drill 🇯🇵
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YoYo Jazz （2023-11-12） 社团：幼術使い jazz 🇯🇵 I like the preview, and it'd be nice to have more jazz for these lists.
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the cherry blossom tree （2023-12-30） 社团：magic red kids half noisy shoegaze and half pop rock 🇯🇵 I'll admit I'm here for the shoegaze, which surprised me in just how noisy it is. Then I saw the circle's only member wearing a certain raw black metal band with a distinctly unrecognizable logo shirt and that's when I knew they're a real one.
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鏡廻セレナーデ （2023-05-07） 社团：mochi season r&b, funk 🇯🇵

Bonus

Maybe you, the reader, are kinda like me where you're tired of how samey this scene has become, and how people aren't interested in pushing the envelope anymore. If that's the case, I hope these lists are introducing you to some interesting and maybe even boundary-pushing people in this scene. But also, I think part of the reason why this happens is because the Touhou music scene in Japan has become more insular in recent years. Combine that with weeb culture being generally disinterested in international arts, and you end up with overseas circles whose goal is to have a booth at Reitaisai and makes music that's indistinguishable from what a lot of the JP scene already make.

But it doesn't have to be this way - and you don't have to cultivate an interest in international music to change things (though it would help more). Japanese netlabels are a good example. The good thing about netlabels is that unlike normal labels, artists aren't bound by contracts and don't have to worry about the label taking a huge cut of the sales. There are a number of J-netlabels in the list below that are involved in or considered adjacent to doujin music, and they're releasing some of the most fascinating Japanese music I've heard in recent years.

• Bandcamp Daily: Exploring Japanese Netlabel Deep Cuts

Best of all, these labels aren't interested in the type of "major label aspiration grindset" that leads circles to do shit like limited event CDs. (and I can't emphasize this enough: calling yourself indie or doujin is not an antidote for this mindset. see: Yuuhei and their dozens of EXsample limited CDs, or how big name indie rock bands in the 2000s eventually turned into making music for commercials).

And heck, I'm not even a pop guy but I can still recognize when people are doing interesting things with it:

• Bandcamp Daily: The Boundless Possibilities of Modern J-Pop

This bit has somehow took me 2 hours to write, and it's late night so it'll read like crap, but this is something I've been trying to express for years now. I think it's better if I actually put it down somewhere instead of spending more years trying to come up with a near-perfect formulation of these ideas. Hope you enjoyed digging through the stuff I mention on these lists.