CARPAINTER – SUMMER LETTER

My bias towards things named after things from videogames continues with this one right here from a Yokohama-based DJ and musicmaker called Carpainter (real name Taimei Kawai, he also heads up label Trekkie Trax). If you know Earthbound (a game for SNES that was last year re-released on the Wii U eShop) you'll know that this is a reference to Mr. Carpainter, the leader of "the Happy Happyist" cult that appears at one point in the game. It's not my first encounter with Carpainter, but every time I re-encounter him and his music I can't help but feel warm and fuzzy thanks to the reference.

If indeed it is a reference. If it isn't and I'm just being stupid then I dunno, I might cry. Hey, it's Christmas Eve. I'll give myself the benefit of the doubt.

I don't know if it was released earlier in the year or it was just an unreleased gem that was kicking about in the ether – either way I'm just glad it's here. Kind of moving on from the footwork that seems to have characterised his music in previous months and years, Carpainter's sound moves onto one more inspired or at least influenced by UKG.

The skiffly beat in this track 'Summer Letter' is nothing but garage, with its kinetic hi-hats and pulsing kick, as are the the chipmunked pitch-shifted vocals, singing out with unintelligible yet catchy energy – and the occasional chops of these vocals seem tiny, but this is garage through and through.

Add to this a constant background bustle of summer insects chirruping, misty synth chords that add a kind of dreaminess to it all, heavenly synthetic harp noises, and you have a unique, subtly-dance-oriented foray by Carpainter into a genre that previously soundtracked the oft melodramatic lives of British teenagers 10 years or more ago, one that is joyful and wholly refreshing.

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• This appeared on European label/club entity Top Billin Music's compilation Premium Crates 4, which aims to "look back on what happened in the past 12 months, and also what the future holds for club music."

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CARPAINTER – FROZEN SKY

As juke continues to take over the world like the pungent smell of a freshly opened can of peach halves (gotta love em) or anything else fresh 'n' packaged that has literally just been opened, we are being taken along with it like a carpet ride in aromatic clouds. I mean you can call it ghetto house or footwork or whatever, but it is what it is and what it is is a fresh sound.

I once heard DJ legend Annie Nightingale talking about how pop music is always inflected with a particular overriding rhythm of the time – what you could call a kind of zeitgeistical beat I guess, like house, hip hop, drum & bass, garage/2-step, dubstep: all have had, are still or currently having, their allotted influence on the sphere of widely known pop music and now it is certainly set to happen with juke. It's still an underground sound, but these things end up surfacing some time or another and well, it could well be happening soon. I wish I could find the direct Annie Nightingale quote, but... alas and alack it ain't nowhere.

So it is with this that I introduce the heady bassosity and rhythmic delirium of Tokyo's very own Carpainter and his track 'Frozen Sky'. Ironically, this quite hard dance song comes from a place where a no dancing law is strictly enforced – establishments must have licenses to allow this very simple act.

Ridiculous and weird, yet it hasn't stopped dance music producers making music to dance to. The Yokohama-based Carpainter, taking his name I guess from Mr. Carpainter, the leader of "the Happy Happyist" cult in the game EarthBound, mixes a ghetto house rhythm with the syncopated intricacy of garage, percussion urgent and insectoid, introducing frenetic bleeping melodies that play their craziness over whirling stabs of synth chords heavy on the phaser – at other times, the chords play continuously, icy and textured, before dropping into these footwork-flavoured moments where the snare seems to be battling the very air for space.

This clearly-made-for-dancing track comes from a recent compilation, Trekkie Trax Japan Vol. 1 – curated by TREKKIE TRAX, a Tokyo netlabel run by Futatsuki, Andrew/Eiji Ando, DJ Bank, Saba (aka MSTNG), and brothers Seimei & Taimei Kawai (Carpainter himself) – released & promoted via Top Billin – the guys who "discovered and introduced" Club Cheval to the rest of the world. Label boss Semiei had these words to say in the description of the compilation: "In all honesty, club scene in Japan is getting worse, we think, cause of the strict enforcement of the 'no dance law'. So the circumstances ironically motivate us to try to improve Japanese scene with our music." And by spreading it across the world, countries where no laws impede any footwork of any kind will open up to Japanese musicmakers, feel their awesomeness, and help bridge the (to many) daunting gap between West and East in the music world.

• Go stream or EVEN purchase Trekkie Trax Japan Vol. 1 over here (click dis)

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